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Productivity on the way up here!

Photo by Pablo Vieira

My new phone came Monday. It’s a smartphone running Windows Mobile. It seems to be one of the more highly rated models (HTC Fuze) and it has both a touchscreen and a slide out keyboard. It can run excel and word. Now the question is – what am I going to do with it.

I got it synced with my desktop at work and now have all my contacts and appointments but I am leaving my work emails off. There is nothing in the emails that I need to take care of when I am not at my desk.

I was hoping to set up personal contacts and appointments on my home desktop but I don’t run the expensive Microsoft tools there and it appears to be a challenge to link to other contact and calendar programs to Windows Mobile.

My first assignment is to get comfortable with the device. Right now, everything is twice as hard as it was on the old phone, but only because I have to think about it. I expect that to improve rapidly. I also will be reading the manual to discover all the things that never occurred to me that I can do with the device.

I am sure that many are experienced with using a PDA/Smartphone. Are there good places to find out productivity tricks for these devices? What do you like – or not like about them. I am pretty sure that I am not going back but I do want to get the biggest value for my investment.

{ 4 comments… add one }
  • Margaret May 7, 2009, 3:05 pm

    Ralph — I’m not 100% sure but you may be able to download Open Office and synch it up with that. It seems to recognize Office documents pretty easily from what I could tell in the test of the software I just did for my company.

    It’s free and open source, so would be worth your time to download and test it yourself. http://www.openoffice.org

  • Ralph May 7, 2009, 5:11 pm

    Thanks so much for the tip. I use Open Office and it suffices for my spreadsheet and work processing needs but I never thought to check for a calendar. Oops, I just visited the site. No calendar. Someone at work was telling me about something called intellilink, or something like that that will sync a Windos mobile client with googles calendar. More research to do.

  • wrthofnino May 7, 2009, 7:40 pm

    Nice phone! Have to admit I would love one, but I’m as poor as dirt right now 😉

  • Ralph May 8, 2009, 9:15 am

    I am still torn with the idea that all the phone really needs to do is make calls and the rest is fluff.

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