Besides big projects eating up all my time, I did have one fun side pastime: a brand new T-Mobile Dash smartphone. The device, which is the same as the XTC Excalibur, runs Windows Mobile 5 (or 2005 as it's also called), has a full qwerty keyboard, and WiFi so it's pretty serious little thing. I spent a lot of time fiddling with it, and with associated tools. Here is a quick summary:

Pros:

• This is well covered in other places, but it just looks cool. It's got a soft textured rubber exterior on the back and it's easy to grip, and a brushed metal look on the front.
• Lots of useful built in applications, stuff for viewing word docs, windows media player (more on that in a second), an IM client, and mobile outlook.
• I bought it as a replacement music player after the untimely demise of my iPod, so I went out and bought a big (2GB) microSD card which, quite frankly, I could easily inhale if I weren't careful. It's about the size of a quarter of a postage stamp. Anyway, it comes with earphones that plug into the "micro USB" port on the bottom, and I have been totally shocked (in a good way) at the quality of the audio. I'm not exactly an audiophile, but compared to my old iPod, the bass is much better, and it just has a nice clear, rich sound. That really surprised me. I have been using the built-in music player, but I'm going to try out some of the other players and compare. Overall, I would highly recommend it as an ipod replacement thus far.
• It's a little slow switching between applications, but the applications themselves run without a hitch.

Cons:

• There don't seem to be that many applications available for the Windows Smartphone platform. For anyone who has tried to produce an application for the mobile world, you know that each platform has it's own set of capabilities and quirks, and so it's time-consuming and often not worth the trouble to develop for multiple platforms. Windows Mobile itself is actually divided into two branches: the smartphone branch and the PocketPC branch. The main philosophical difference is that the smartphone branch does not use a touchscreen, but there are other subtle differences. Therefore, you can't just grab from the huge slate of existing PocketPC applications, there has to be a smartphone version.
• Windows Mobile, like its big brother on the PC, is kind of uptight. I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out where it wants me to put things and how to get things installed. Part of this is probably because I refuse to use the standard Windows tools and want to make everything work on Linux (more on this tomorrow), so Windows users may have less trouble with this. There is talk that some people have gotten Linux to run on these phones, but I'm not quite that brave yet.
• I got my email set up on it, which is very cool, but I have it check every 15 minutes or so for new mail and it insists on using the EDGE connection rather than the WiFi, and I have absolutely no idea how to change that. Overall the whole connectivity thing works, but mostly I just end up having the data service up all the time, and I only turn on the Wifi when I am browsing the web.

Tomorrow: Linux Tools for Windows Mobile