I finally settled on a new cell phone after the fiasco with the LG Voyager.  Last weekend I picked up the HTC Kaiser, rebranded as the AT&T Tilt.  Calling it a simple cell phone is a great injustice.  It’s a hand held computer with a cell phone built in.  It’s major down-side is it’s Windows Mobile based.  I simply couldn’t find a non-Windows smartphone that I liked. 

It does pretty much everything I wanted.  It talks to my IMAP mail server.  It can browse the internet (I hate Internet Exploder so I installed Opera Mobile).  Handles Yahoo IM and the more typical SMS.  I even installed PocketPutty so I can log into a Linux server with a secure connection.  The GPS works perfectly with Google Maps and has already proven to be handy when I took a wrong turn and needed to find the best route to my destination.  It includes the usual contact lists, appointment planner, notepad, etc.  The touchscreen works rather well with the stylus, but the small keyboard is taking a bit to get used to it. 

The sound quality with the Plantronics bluetooth headset is excellent and connection quality is much better than my previous phone.  The built in voice dialer gave me some trouble, so I installed “Voice Commander” which is better, though rather slow to load after pressing the bluetooth button.

An online community is very active for this phone and they’ve managed to get a beta of Google’s Android to run on it (sort of).  I’m hoping I’ll be able to dump Windows entirely and go entirely Linux in the near future.

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 15th, 2008 at 9:57 pm and is filed under Gadgets, Geek Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.