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First thoughts on my new HTC Kaiser/MDA Vario III

I’ve just taken the plunge and upgraded my HTC Wizard/O2 XDA MiniS to an HTC Kaiser/T-Mobile MDA Vario III.  I changed to T-mobile mainly beacuse of the ‘web n walk’ deals with their overall offer a better option than the competition, plus the added bonus that they don’t mind if the phone is used as a laptop modem (not tested yet).

There are hundreds of reviews around the web so I won’t bother doing that but will note some of my own thoughts, I find bullet point lists for this sort of thing work well:

•  The phone itself is a bit smaller than the previous one,  a testement if ever there was one to the fast moving world of modern technology, the new one packs in 3G,  GPS, faster processor and a tilting screen to boot where as the old one managed GPRS  at a push.
• The GPS is very fast to lock on, even inside buildings! It works very well with Google Maps although occasionally the software seems to forget to ask the GPS to update.  I’m awaiting a memory card before testing TomTom.
• The keyboard is actually slightly smaller than the  old one which is odd beacuse there appears to be space for it to be bigger. Its still perfectly usable although symbols have been moved around quite a bit, having had the Wizard for 23 months I was able to touchtype on it (thumbs only of course!) so this is quite an annoyance although I’m sure I’ll get used to it.
• The phone feels more solidly built, the mechanism for the tilt is metal so should be pretty hard wearing.
• The comms manager button is gone, this is a little annoying, I’m going to consider re-mapping the voice dialling button to do this. I’ve never quite understood the point in these voice dialling buttons, if I want hands free then I’ll use the button on my bluetooth headset to activate it, or else I’ll just use the keypad and dial the number normally.

The XDA Developer forums are as ever a fountain of useful knowledge for Windows Mobile smartphones and very much recommended. One of the forum members has produced a program called TrackMe, this is now being contributed to by other forums members. Its essentially a GPS Logger, it can record to either a local file or send data to a web application as a KML file.

I’m thinking of using this when I go to Cape Town in December to record my track and then use this to geotag my photos when I return. Obviously I’ll use the local file option as otherwise I’ll end up with horrendous roaming data charges! Hopefully the version with support for GPX will be released soon otherwise I’ll write a little converter myself. Then I need to tie this in with the photo exif data from my camera by matching the most recent gps log entry to the exif time stamp.