My Latest Toy - AT&T Tilt

I finally found a sufficient convergence device to entice me to make the leap and integrate my PDA, GPS, camera, and phone. The AT&T Tilt 9825 (htc Kaiser) is an incredible device that embodies all of these in a similar (smaller) form factor of my aging Palm M130 PDA. It's far smaller than my aging Kodak DC camera (1.2mp) with a 3mp auto-focus and 10x digital zoom sensor. It has a bult-in GPS receiver and with Window Mobile 6 it runs MapTech mobile to give me all my marine and land navigational maps and features of a GPS device. The 2.8" display is clear and sufficient size to interact with applications. It has a touch-screen keypad for use of a phone or you can slide and tilt out the keypad with large buttons. When you do, the screen rotates and you can use it in your hands with thumbs or set it on a surface and use multiple fingers. The phone sounds great as a handheld, works with my bluetooth headset, and has a speakerphone (although the speakerphone in my old Nextel Motorola still sounded better in the middle of a conference room table).

I can use this as an mp3 player and can get streaming video that works quite well. Although I'm paying $40 per month for broadband instead of the $15 media access, the convenience is great. It support 802.11b/g WiFi and world-ready broadband. It synchronizes with Outlook contacts as my prior phone, but has a richer integration. I get email on this device from my earthlink account (leaving the email on the server), and then suck down the email on my notebook. I am able to IM in my MSN, AIM, or Yahoo accounts with ease, although I wish I had Trillian mobile to aggregate them.

It has a push-to-talk feature that I miss from my Nextel phone, but until I have other members of my family or friends with that feature it is shelf-ware for me for now.

My biggest fear I had was windows crashing in a call. Friends of mine have had this happen to them on the Treo and other devices. I bought this on October 5th (first day released in the US) and I am happy to say that this has not happened to me (yet).