WinMo phone

Just got a new phone this weekend. It was an HTC Imagio on the Verizon network.

I was really looking to upgrade from my 2 year old Samsung "dumb"phone with a cracked LCD over. I don't use cell phones very much, but I do travel for work a fair amount and the ability to get on the internet from anywhere appealed to me. I spent about a weekend researching, the iPhone is the cool gadget still, lots of my friends and colleagues have them, but I didn't want to switch to AT&T, not that I am a huge fan of Verizon, at least their service is reliable and consistent.

Verizon basically markets the new Motorola Droid and HTC Imagio, along with Crackberries as the top "smart phones" currently with the HTC Droid Eris being the cheaper Android OS offering. I was drawn to the Imagio solely because of it's "Global-Ready" capabilities. Like I said I travel for work, and recently have been assigned European and African accounts. A single phone i could use while traveling would be helpful.

The Verizon sales people initially pushed the Droid, then switched when I mentioned the global travel needs. I wasn't sure about Imagio because it is WinMo, I've never used it before, in general it seems to have a not-as-good-as iPhone or Android vibe. The Imagio has what appears to be better screen-resolution though they claimed it was the same. My wife and I did a simultaneous test of playing the same youtube clip on each phone side by side. The Droid was more pixilated, and the actual video size on the screen was a smaller square. Both took quite a while to load the clip. Actually a nice touch on the Imagio was it showed a % complete while waiting.

In the end, due to these factors I settled on the Imagio and WinMo over Droid and Google. If there were a global ready android phone it probably would have been a different story.

So far my experience has been fairly good. Call quality, what little I've tried has been much better than previous phone. The touch screen is good, I love the stylus, even though the on-screen keyboard has given me no problems. The app-store "Windows Marketplace" is somewhat limited, but I can't really compare it to anything else.

Big disappointment was no native support for Asian fonts/languages, especially Korean. I was surpised by this. I figured given how fairly easy it is to install Korean IME/fonts on Windows it would be similar on Windows Mobile. Apparently not. Also the WinMo apps may not even by internationalized even if the fonts were there. Fairly bush league for 2010 on a "global-ready" phone.