HTC TyTN

The company I work for gave me a HTC TyTN mobile phone. A mobile phone with Windows Mobile 5.0 and WLAN sounded interesting, so I decided to give it a shot. After one week of struggle I decided to return the device and get back to my Samsung SGH-E730. Here I list some of my experiences with TyTN.

The beginning

When I started the phone it took a while to boot Windows Mobile. Then I was asked the PIN number of my SIM card. The F-Secure Anti-Virus popped up asking do I want to enable virus protection. I selected "no". Nothing happened. After waiting a couple of minutes I realized that the clock of the phone is not progressing either. Time to remove the battery pack and start over.

Calling

When phone mode is enabled, you'll get the normal phone dialing keys to the screen. Pretty quickly I learned that even though the keys are big, it is quite frustrating to try to push the keys with your fingers and you'll end up picking the pen. With some phones G2 <-> G3 network roaming works quite fine in Helsinki, Finland, but TyTN mostly managed to get disconnected while roaming. The annoying thing is that you can not easily disable UMTS and use only GSM. I heard it could be done somehow, but I wonder why it was not placed into the band selection sheet. When disconnect button (the one with red receiver) is pushed the phone seems to "think" for a while and you'll end up pushing it several times.

WLAN

The major disappointment was the usability of the WLAN. Occasionally I was able to associate, browse the web and download some applications. The most of the time I was wondering why association to access point is lost. I tried using WLAN in the most power consuming "Best Performance" mode, but that did not change a thing. At home I get really good signal in every room with my WLAN devices but with TyTN I learned that I have to be within 4 meter range to AP to be able to browse web at all. PocketPutty is a nice piece of software, but the most of the time I was just waiting something to happen. I tested TyTN's WLAN with APs from D-Link, Symbol, Proxim, Cisco and Linksys and WEP 40bit, open encryption and WPA-PSK was tried as encrption method. A friend with TyTN had same kinds of experiences with WLAN. During the test period there was no update available for this WLAN driver.

Camera

The 2 megapixel camera was pretty useless. The most of the pictures I took inside were underexposed. If I added some light and/or tuned exposure parameters the pictures got overexposed. I though my Samsung had a bad camera (well, it does, as white balance is screwed), but still you can at least use it. I am not a fan of phone camera, but still I have taken over hundred pictures during the last year. If the mobile phone is equiped with a camera, at least the camera should be usable.

E-mail

The e-mail client seems to be ok. With TyTN's keyboard you can type your messages quite quickly and conveniently. The problem was that I wanted to use WLAN to send and receive my e-mails. Usually the phone was able to download just a few headers and then it stopped because of lost WLAN association. If I'll go to a coffee shop to have a cup of dark roast, I'll rather get my Powerbook from the backpack to check my e-mail, than get mad with my telephone.

Aftermath

Ok, you propably noticed that I had bad experiences with TyTN and Windows Mobile. There are several nice applications that will make Windows Mobile nicer to use, but why bother, when the hardware is not good enough. Anyways, this is quite a promising device if it was just more finished (the ROM version of my TyTN was 1.18). Maybe in a year there will be more ready devices available. Currently I'll rather stay with regular mobile phones, when the most important feature of the mobile phone is to make and receive phone calls. If the device does not provide easy, intuitive, and reliable way to make phone calls, it is not a device you want to use as your mobile phone. And then we'll get to the size issue. In my opinion TyTN does not provide really good quality/quantity ratio. If the quality is good, then I would not mind carrying a little bit of extra size and weight.

Pros

  • QWERTY Keyboard is nice
  • People are interested "what is this phone?!"
  • E-mail client
  • MS Office tools
  • Solitaire
  • You got a handy brick available (a melee weapon?), if you just have your phone with you

Cons

  • Calling is pretty complicated when compared to regular mobile phones
  • WLAN is mostly useless
  • Camera is mostly useless
  • Size:Usability

Contact author

tytn.10.grimskijj /AT/ spamgourmet.com (yes, this address really does work)