So far so good, It hooked up both in USB and BlueTooth with no hassle whatsoever.
It's a little bigger than pocket size, but it will fit comfortably in a man purse, or maybe even a largish organizer.
First very quick impression; I like it!
It's not worth $500, but it's definately worth $200; just for the browser. I tried all the ordinarily troublesome sites I use like my webmail, bank, HMO Yahoo and Google personal portals and everything works except Gmail. And I'm just about done using that anyway!
The software/firmware is still not ready for prime time. When I run anything that appropriates the top (icon) bar, it doesn't give it back, and it disables the mouse clicks on the icons. That means that I have to revert to hotkeys to do simple things like close a program. I've read that this might be due to the today screen plugin not always being compatible. I use the standard HTC plugin, so to my way of thinking, If they are advertising compatibility with an
HTC Touch the HTC plugin should work.
I generally don't like running beta software, but I downloaded the
HTC Touch WinMo 6.1 beta driver anyway. The tested driver is for WinMo 6.0.
The REDFLY works better now.
The icon bar issue seems to be fixed, but the today screen still wasn't rendering properly. The Time/Date item at the top and the Calendar at the bottom were only showing a grey screen and "A picture is supposed to be here" icon. I changed the Theme to the ugly green WinMo 6.1 default screen, and those came back.
I ran it both in USB and BlueTooth mode, and that all worked as before, and I brought up BeJeweled II which takes over the whole screen. Everything came back to normal when I closed it.
The advantages:
1. Browser: PIE sux, but then what else is new? That’s just PIE! Opera 8.65 is WONDERFUL! It’s at least as good as my Nokia N800, and I don’t have to put up with Linux or being tied to a wifi hotspot. There are a few websites that don’t work as advertised, most notably most things Google. But most of the others work fine. More than on the Nokia. One of the things I like about the Nokia is the absolutely gorgeous screen. The REDFLY is at least as good, and bigger. For my OLD eyeballs, that’s important.
2. Ebooks: Better than Kindle at half the price.
3. Email: Can read the WHOLE thing.
4. Office, Within the limits of Office Mobile, everything works great!
5. Boots up in less time than recovering from standby on my FlipStart UMPC, and has a better form factor. For a while I thought the FS was going to be my answer, but short battery life and extremely long bootup times prevented that.
6. Battery lasts ALL DAY! Even when keeping the phone charged.
This thing REALLY NEEDS a touchscreen. I can’t count the number of times I poked the screen with my finger expecting something to happen, only to remember that I needed to use the curser/touchpad and swearing at myself for forgetting.
Hmmmmm I wonder ... the things got a USB hub ... I wonder about a hardware hack to add a touchscreen??? I need to check out the Asus EEE forums and see how they're hacking those!
Anybody know where I can get an 8” USB touchscreen overlay?
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