A Year with the iMate Jam (or MDA Compact)

My MDA Compact (iMate Jam) is beaten, bashed, scratched and dog-eared. The reflective surface of the self-portrait mirror and the flawless shiny paint have faded away through 18 months of constant use. This has been a brilliant PDA phone.

I'm now on the market for a new one, so I thought I'd share my opinion of this thing before it get's retired.

The Good
Small Size - It's just about small enough to go anywhere. I routinely take it to the pub in my jeans pocket, and have never felt like it's a real burdon. However, as I mention in "The Bad", I'd love em to shave .5 cm off it's dimenions.

Runs Great Applications - I've installed all sorts on it over the last year, from Guitar Tuning software to Tom Tom GPS software. The fact that I can use it with a GPS receive and Tom Tom is simply fantastic. This is one of my primary uses for the phone. I've even got the Lanzarote maps so I could get to my dads house from the airport.

Touch Screen - Love it, wish that all phones had one.

Synchronises with Exchange - I host my email with 1and1.co.uk, using their £5 a month Exchange hosting that means all my contacts and calendar are backed up constantly. The fact that my Jam connects to this is great. The other day I dropped my Jam and the battery disconnected. By the time I'd put it back in, the memory was totally reset meaning all my contacts and stuff had been lost. No problemo. I just turned the phone on, entered the Exchange server details, and it was all synced back up in no time.


The Bad
Size - It needs to be a tiny tiny bit smaller. 0.5 cm would do of width, height and length. I find that my jeans pockets are slightly full when going out with a packet of ciggies, some keys, card wallet and the Jam. That said, the sensible thing to do would be to give up the smokes to make more room for technology.

Small Screen - I think that the screen size needs to be bigger to make it better or reading documents and stuff. One day they'll be able to lose the "border" around the screen and give it an extra 1cm in width and height, that would be great. An improved screen res would also solve this problem.

Camera - Ask anyone, the Jam camera is a bit sucky, and there's no flash.

Failed Trials
When I first bought the phone I also bought some accessories. None of them got used for more than a month.

The first was one of those skins to protect the phone. Despite being very snug, it just attracted pocket fuzz and kept falling off. I decided the phone was gonna get beaten up in the long run, therefore gave in to it and threw the skin away.

The 2nd was the Sandisk WiFi card. It was too much of a faff carrying it around, mainly because it protrueded out of the top of the phone. And besides, the phone didn't make a great web browser in my opinion.

Conclusion
This phone is 5 things to me, in this order. It does all of them very well.

#1 - A phone
#2 - A contact & calendar database
#3 - A list of reference material (I keep all my reference data in Outlook/Exchange Notes)
#4 - A GPS navigator

I occassionaly use the other features, such as web browser and document reader, but I still find the thing to small to be or real use in these areas.

I think that I'll replace it with 3 devices. The first will be a nice small smart phone with Exchange capabilities, possibly the Orange SPV C600 (another HTC model), and I'll get one that comes with a free NavMan or something to get the GPS functionality. The 2nd will be an UltraMobile Tablet PC such as Samsung Q1 or the Sony UX180P. Ideally there'd be a cheap one of these that I could use simply as a portable web browser/document reader for under £200, we'll see what I find...

Note that I had considered the Jamin and the Orange SPV M3600i, however, having looked at how I've used the Jam over the last year, the features that I like the most are available on a smartphone (except the touch screen :-( )