Josey Puliyenthuruthel: Oxygen for the multi-taskers

GIZMO GALLERY

The advent of personal technology gizmos have meant that a lot more "dead time" "" traffic snarls, delayed flights, overnight bus rides and, even, long review meetings "" can be suddenly turned productive or just less boring.

The cell phone, for instance. Look around you and you will see strangers and colleagues engrossed with keying in short messages on their cellphones to pay bills online, animatedly conversing on seemingly critical business decisions or just ruining their palm muscles thumbing excitedly at a game on their phone.

The mobile phone is the most ubiquitous example that everyone will identify with, but there are several other interesting devices in the marketplace that too help kill dead time.

Occasionally, you will see someone surfing the Net on a precariously balanced notebook computer on his lap in an autorickshaw braving the racket around and trying to concentrate on emails.

That may not be an attractive proposition for most readers of this column. They, instead, gravitate more towards "smart phones", smaller devices that allow them to surf the Internet or transact emails on a wireless "" CDMA or a GSM GPRS "" connection.

Enamoured by advertisements of Research in Motion (RIM)'s BlackBerry devices or Nokia's 9300, they write in to this personal technology columnist for advice.

In the past few months, I've reviewed the BlackBerry in these columns and more than two years ago, looked at an earlier version of the Nokia 9300 (this new version, I'm told has a lot more by way of bells and whistles).

Today, let's look at a new smart phone that's been introduced in the Indian market "" the O2 XDA IIi, also called the iMate in west Asian markets (and some shops at Heera Panna at Haji Ali in Mumbai.)

The XDA IIi, priced at a little less than Rs 46,000, retains the design (or, "form factor", as they say in the labs) of the Pocket PC and has a 3.5 inch screen (measured diagonally), 240-by-320 pixel resolution and 16-bit colour.

The product is fired by a reasonably powerful 520 MHz Intel PXA 272 processor, 128 MB RAM and a flash memory card slot to ratchet up that memory eight times, if you like to carry clunky data and games wherever you go.

The phone is packed with some cool and latest features considering that it weights in at about 200 gm. It has a 1.3 megapixel digital camera shooting at over 960 by 1280 pixels.

Bluetooth and WiFi connectivity have been neatly shoe-horned in making data synchronisation with a computer easy as also a broadband surfing under a WiFi hotspot.

The XDA IIi piece I reviewed came fully loaded with nifty software (make sure, though, of the pricing of some of these extras). It has ClearVue's PDF and PowerPoint reader, Pocket Word and Pocket Excel, besides MSN Messenger, Internet Explorer and Windows Media Player.

So, here we go. Is the XDA IIi the best smart phone in the market? Before picking up a smart phone that does everything, you need to answer the following question: which of the following applications do you want to access the most: voice, data processing, email or the Net? Depending on your answer, you can choose from a BlackBerry, Nokia 9300, XDAIIi or a Treo 650.

Ninety-nine times out of 100, voice will be most important application, right? No one will want a smart phone, if you can't, well, talk on it. On this score, both the BlackBerry and XDAIIi "" and, to some extent, the Nokia "" fail given their clunky design, unless you have the fingers of a gorilla.

Yes, a Bluetooth wireless headset could lessen this pain a bit but that takes some getting used to.

On email and Net surfing, the ranking is BlackBerry and then XDAIIi. The BlackBerry is the best gadget I've used to date to access email and surf the Internet.

I used Airtel's service on the BlackBerry some months back and found email reception and delivery smooth as warm chocolate. But, for data processing "" read: using word processors like MS-Word or spreadsheets such as MS-Excel "" XDAIIi scores much better.

The BlackBerry is not quite there. I haven't reviewed the Treo 650 yet, but like what I saw in a previous primarily for its design. It's a little clunkier than, say, Nokia's 6600 and can be easily carried in a trouser pocket.

That's again not a good product if you want a relatively-biggish screen for editing documents and XDA IIi is the best of the lot.

(Comments to Josey Puliyenthuruthel can be sent to josey@vsnl.net)