See, folks? This blog works two ways. If you know something I don’t, then for god’s sake tell me! And to HTC Shift Owner, big thanks, once again!

The Shift “is” amazing. I have been using mine for a week, and it has ticked almost all of my boxes for what I needed in such a device. The portability is excellent – the keyboard useable but one does need to get used to it – battery life in Vista is around 2hrs so a little limiting – SnapVue from the box is very limited, but this can be “rectified” by liberating the full WinMo o/s. There are limitations though, like the SD card cannot be accessed (at this time) and wireless and Bluetooth also do not work under WinMo. And if you want to link your Vista to your SnapVue to sync contacts and calendars, forget it (well, unless you Liberate it or have Exchange Server set up – yes that’s right, you have to go through to the outside world via networks to sync your device mechanically connected). If I had not known that I could liberate my WinMo side I probably would not have bought this device.

So in short some rather serious dumb functionality issues out of the box, but a) almost all of them can be addressed, and b) it’s shear portability and usability makes up for it. I love it.

I would have preferred XP as an OS…Vista is indeed a pile of junk for this sort of device (and most others). No wonder Linux is appearing on smaller machines. I believe that is the future of these seeing how Microsoft has made it clear it is entrenched on making each OS bigger, hungrier and less responsive. What it really should be doing is making something like “Vista Lite” for UMPC’s or something…you could even use XP and just add the Vista logo and we’d all be happier. Vista in its native state reminds me of where Ford went with the Thunderbird. From it’s sleek good performing 50’s design to something that required more fuel and bigger motor yet was slower and performed worse in the 60’s. It seems to be a path so many US corporates take with product development. More is more, but we all know less is more….

By the way, the Office is only a trial and one must purchase it at the end or it stops working. Frankly, attempting to run clumsy waddling and resource hogging Outlook 2007 on this device gives me the creeps and the first thing I did was put Office 2003 on it. It runs that very well indeed and with M/Softs new compatibility options you can open 07 documents no issue.

Good luck with your decision to buy one!