Mobile Development Coolness and Smartphone Envy

So those of you paying attention may have noticed that the subtitle for my little piece o' the blogsphere is ".NET All Day.. .NET All Night..."  This would be one of those "All Night" posts as it's currently 2:32 am and I just finished going through some content for TheServerSide.NET that we'll be posting tomorrow afternoon which is generally in the realm of .NET Mobile Development.  Forgive the subterfuge, but I can't say what it is just yet but keep an eye on the site later this afternoon and you'll be sure to see it.

What I did see however was some of the new tools for Mobile .NET Development that make me question my decision to drop my way cool Audiovox SMT 5600 phone for the even cooler (if not Windows) Treo 650. 

I've always been a fan of Windows mobile platforms.  I've owned four different Windows CE PDAs starting with the first Cassiopeia 11-A clamshell all the way up to an IPaq 4150.  After spending months watching Microsofties of the world expound the virtues of the Audiovox phone I decided I just had to have one.  I loved the form factor of the Audiovox, it was as small as an older model Nokia but had a decent sized screen with good color.  The rectangular navigation control was a bit awkward to use but I got used to it after a while.  And of course having my Exchange email, contacts and calendar at my fingertips was a great feature.  Applications for the device were scarce though which meant anything I wanted to run on it I'd have to develop myself.  But of course the ability to do development for the phone in .NET was part of why I wanted to have it.

Unfortunately though, the Audiovox came with a fairly sizable flaw.  Cingular Wireless.  Actually it was AT&T for about three weeks before Cingular bought AT&T and the service went into the toilet.  I travel quite a bit and the reception was terrible.  It's a digital only phone and so there were some parts of the country where I had no service at all.  The final straw in this camel's back was when my phone failed to boot while traveling in California.  I took it to a local Cingular dealer where I was told that there was nothing they could do because "It's an AT&T phone".  "But you bought AT&T" I replied still they kept repeating that it was an AT&T phone like some sort of demented cockatoo.  So then I asked if they have any loaner phones I could use to get me home, to which they said no.  I then asked if they had a phone I could buy and put my AT&T Sim card into to limp myself home.  No, AT&T sims don't work in their phones.  Finally I ended up getting a cheap prepaid phone and forwarding my number to that account until I could get home and get rid of Cingular.

I then went on a hunt for the next great PDA phone and I'm pretty confident that I've found it.  The Treo 650 is a bit bigger than the Audiovox which makes it a tad less convenient for carrying in my pocket.  The screen is great though and the full QWERTY keyboard makes sending email a breeze.  I was concerned about losing the features of having my Exchange Server info available on my phone but the Treo 650 comes with Exchange ActiveSync and will connect to my server in the same way that the Audiovox did.  So I basically had parity in a slightly larger form factor.  Then I looked at software.  Wow, is there a lot of software for this phone.  I've added a Trillian like instant messaging client that allows me to use AOL, MSN, and Yahoo services.  I've added an RSS news reader that automatically keeps this and MSDN blogs downloaded.  And I've even added VPN and Terminal Services software so I can remotely connect to my servers from anywhere.  Add to that some nice games and Sprint's much better network and service and this phone is officially "The Bomb".

But alas, all is not well in Treo Land.  You see, I am first and foremost a Windows developer.  And after looking at the awesome new tools available in Visual Studio 2005 including SQL Server Mobile, the designer that uses highly detailed device images, and managed support for features like digital cameras and other devices, I'm having a hard time seeing my Treo in quite the same way.  Perhaps later this week at MEDC somebody will announce a slick new Windows Smartphone on a real network like Verizon or Sprint.