Made the switch from Mogul to Touch - got questions?

[diomark]

I just made the switch from the Mogul to the Touch - and though it'd be good to answer people's questions re: the change. I'm posting in this thread to answer questions for people that are considering the switch.

What do I miss the most about the Mogul? It may sound weird, but I miss the 'ok' key (next to the joystick) the most.. (having to hit the x on the top-right of the screen will take a little getting used to... EDIT - found a workaround for this AE Button plus mapped to the left/right directional keys (long press) - http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=11346

Do I miss the scroll wheel? Not really.. the joystick on this thing is so much better then the mogul's that it makes up for it.. EDIT - smartskey (search xda) makes life easier here in that the volume up/down keys can be mapped to page up/down... In my experience, the page down works pretty well.. volume up is harder to hit while using the device in one hand (for me anyways) - so not as useful. But most of the time you're scrolling down on a webpage anyways.

How's the virtual keyboard? it's definitely better then the average keyboard, but I'm still faster on pcmkeyboard - probably because I've gotten used to it.. plus it's nice to not have to worry about the phone/today screens being delayed while converting from portrait <--> landscape

How's the form factor? I didn't think it'd be that much of a difference. But it feels so much smaller! the screen if flush with the surface which helps when finger-touching the scroll bars/etc (I haven't used the stylus yet on this except to reset it..). The case has a really nice rubbery feel to it.

How's the bluetooth? only did one test - but so far, so good.. My girlfriend actually complained about me being too loud! I've never heard that complaint on the old phone.. (which was usually too soft...) EDIT - did a much longer test today w/ my new Sennheiser BW900 and my old jawbone.. Both sounded fine, the jawbone actually sounded louder and better! I couldn't believe that a 100$ headset was clearly outperforming a $300 headset!

Did I get the phone from Sprint Ecare? Sort of.. The ecare specialist that helped me said that they didn't have access to this phone, and asked me to purchase it from a store, get a store credit.. I found one in San Francisco and got it today (bought at full price..).. They're supposedly sending me a box to return the old phone in. Hopefully they'll give the right credit on the Mogul exchange.

How's the battery life? I was concerned about the battery life since this has an 1100mah battery (vs. the 1500mah on the Mogul) - but the battery on this thing rocks so far... I haven't had it long enough to give any hard numbers, but it feels better then the mogul w/ 2.09 rom, and maybe as good if not better then the mogul w/ 2.16 rom.

How's the camera? Same camera (I think), no flash.. I'll miss having a flashlight in my pocket... (although the flash for pictures was a joke..). It does come w/ a i-phone like photo viewer (which I'm not really using since I use resco photo viewer..)


The screen looks better then the mogul's when looked at straight on - but if you look at it at an angle (up/down), it's whiter or darker (looks washed out if looking at it while it's flat on the table..) (right/left is ok..) this means that in landscape mode (which you'd want for sprint tv or slingmobile player), viewing is awesome..

I have had a few lockups while installing software.. But I'm blaming those on doing too much at once... I'll keep an eye on it during regular usage...

I'm currently having problems w/ spb backup.. it starts the backup but never updates the status bar.. after ~10 mins or so I get a message saying 'backup process has not been responding for a long time. do you want to cancel backup?' Too bad as I wanted to do a full backup before monkeying around w/ Microsoft VC 1.6... Trying to do a restore of my ringtones from an old backup worked - sort of.. it took over an hour to restore ~5mb's worth of files.. so there's definately something wrong w/ SPB backup (as of 1.6.2) EDIT - another user had the same issue and recommended that I turn off 'turn off processors prior to backup' - doing so meant that I was able to get a almost-complete backup in a small amount of time. Some files (such as t9* in windows.. most likely in ROM) didn't get backed up, but I don't think that would effect restoring the backup.

PCMKeyboard required a registry hack to work right. ( http://forum.xda-developers.com/show...&postcount=632 ) basically it would put in spaces instead of what you were typing. I usually used sktools to set this as the default SIP - that didn't work for some reason.. sipchange 1.0 worked fine..

How's touchflo? Maybe I just need to customize it.. but I'm not seeing myself using it.. SPB Mobile Shell goes a long way on this phone. (I replaced the HTC Home plugin with it...) EDIT - I'm liking this more and more.. but not out of the box.. I have the cube mapped to the various pieces of SPB Mobile Shell - and it's a fast way to navigate.

Multimedia -

A2dp performance is much better then it was on the HTC Mogul. I had came to an agreement with my Mogul. As long as I kept it in my back pocket (as opposed to a side pocket where it belonged), it worked.. As soon as I put it in my side pocket I'd start to get cuts in the music... During a one hour test with the Touch in my side pocket, the music only cut out once - for a phone call.. btw - I still recommend that you run the bluetooth a2dp hacks on this as the quality is poor out of the box.. The registry hacks I use are below -

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Bluetooth\A2DP\Settings]
"Bitpool"=dword:00000080
"MaxSupportedBitPool"=dword:00000080
"UseJointStereo"=dword:00000002
"SampleRate"=dword:0000BB80

One weird thing.. I use coreplayer to play music.. On the mogul, my mp3's and wma's played fine.. On this phone, for some reason the mp3's don't play in coreplayer. (They play fine in windows media player...)

Slingmobile performs about the same as it did on the Mogul.. Good, and doesn't get the 'low on memory' messages anymore, but still not as good as it was on the ppc-6700. EDIT - slingplayer performance is much improved with the tcp size registry hack that I've talked about here - http://forum.ppcgeeks.com/showthread.php?t=11336 there's still a very slight lag between audio and video though - not as noticeable as it was for me on the mogul.

My current Today screen -
SPB Mobile Shell
Ultimate Search
SBSH pocket breeze
SBSH Phone Weaver
Octrotalk

My setup -
Touch cube mapped to SPB Menu / SPB Menu start menu / opera / java (for gmail) / spb mobile shell now screen (easy access to emails) / today
S2U2 for locking http://forum.xda-developers.com/showthread.php?t=343256 - this has a bug that's helping me out actually.. the cube works over s2u2 - so I can slide my finger up on it to bring up the cube/ navigate to a program, or unlock the phone/end up wherever I was...
ae button plus w/ right/left keys long press mapped to ok/start menu


Got questions? Ask...

Originally Posted by Cicatrize

1. How is the lag when you hit Reply for an e-mail or SMS? My Mogul takes forever to do this.
2. How are the IM programs? I will be using them a lot.
3. How does the 20-key compare to TouchPal? (I like TouchPal, but think it could be better.)
4. Is SprintTV good on it? I'm unimpressed with it on the Mogul.
5. How long did it take you to get used to the on-screen keyboard?

1. In my experience the lag was mainly from switching to landscape to pull out the keyboard. it's fairly instant to reply on this.. (1-2 seconds?)
2. It comes with OZ Messenger which looks pretty decent, but it doesn't support Google chat - so I'm not using it for now.. It has a big warning at the beginning saying that you would need a data plan as well as a "messaging" plan - not sure what that is and sprint didn't when I called either..
3. I haven't used touchpal - but the 20key on here allows for abc input (i.e. as key - press once for a, twice for s), or t9 similar input (i.e. press ui as for 'is' ) - seems to work pretty well.. and it makes it so that you can type fast even in the abc input (as the delay before recognizing the key is very short..) I still prefer pcmkeyboard though as I'm personally faster on it.
4. bleh.. it's ok.. I'm using slingmobile so no reason for it.. I did a quick test w/ cnn though and it was fast enough.. (took ~5 seconds to start the picture and picture was 'ok' - nothing to write home about..)
5. I started getting used to pcmkeyboard last week in anticipation of getting the touch this week - sticking to it.. so far, so good and I don't really miss the hardware keyboard that much.

Originally Posted by LotekJunky

Yes, I have a question. Why? The Titan keyboard too convenient? The cube too tempting?

Why the switch? two main reasons -

1) Bluetooth. I was really tired of waiting for it to work right
2) memory. That device really needed another 32/64mb memory to start with..

The touch is great with both of these... (the cube's a gimmick.. but you can't ignore Touch's 128mb ram.. it makes it extremely fast...)

-mark

[veblen64]

I'm at a bit of a crossroads.

I had finally given up on the Mogul, so I e-mail Sprint and got them to agree to send me a Touch as a replacement. Then i happened to try Sampson's WM5 ROM on the Mogul, and it has been working great. So when the Touch arrives, I'm not sure what I'm going to do.

Two things the Touch doesn't have that I think I would miss:

- variety of programmable hard buttons
- camera flash / flashlight

I don't see myself using Touchflo at all. Seems like a gimmick that is actually less efficient than the interfaces that it is trying to replace.

I don't use the hard keyboard much on the Mogul. I use SPB Fullscreen Keyboard in portrait, mapped to a hard button. (It works very well.) Thus, ironically, the Touch's dearth of hard buttons would make it harder for me to launch my preferred on-screen keyboard on the device that absolutely needs an on-screen keyboard.

diomark:
You mentioned the lack of an OK button. What about the other buttons? Do you miss them also?

[diomark]

The phone could use another button or two - but the OK is the main one that I miss.. You do have the shutter button (hidden.. I didn't even realize it was there initially) which can act as a single or double press (or probably as 1, 2, 3, or long press using ae button plus..) Also holding down the end key gives you the option or lock, today screen, or flight mode.. (or it can pop up a menu asking which option to use..)

-mark

[Tenny]

what about the tcpmp lag / sling box lag? Does it fix any of those... i am trying to get ecare to let me swap for a touch... no luck yet though.

[diomark]

My home network's been really busy (uploading several GB's to a work server..) - so can't do a real sling test.. I'll test this later tomorrow.

-mark

[Cicatrize]

I'm getting my Touch in the mail in a few days, but still have questions.

1. How is the lag when you hit Reply for an e-mail or SMS? My Mogul takes forever to do this.
2. How are the IM programs? I will be using them a lot.
3. How does the 20-key compare to TouchPal? (I like TouchPal, but think it could be better.)
4. Is SprintTV good on it? I'm unimpressed with it on the Mogul.
5. How long did it take you to get used to the on-screen keyboard?

Thanks

[clayfu]

how fast can you type on the on screen keyboard. I know its not as sensitive as the iphone keyboard and i have enough trouble as it is typing on that even with its great predictive text.

[vkewalra]

I was curious about this until I found the WM5 rom and I can't express how much better the phone runs. It's amazing. Anyway to my point. I'd miss the hard keys, of course the keyboard, and I've really gotten attach to the scroll wheel.

To the OP, I also have mobile shell, octrotalk, and ultimatesearch on my home screen, with egress (rss reader) being the other occupant.

Good luck with your touch, but to veblen64's point the Mogul is damn near perfect running WM5. After all the troubles I've been having, I occasionally check the phone and am shocked to find it still have plenty of memory and no freezing apps, see it actually working in the morning, etc. Hopefully there's a way to keep WM5 and get the next revision of EVDO and GPS (if that really is coming).

[scotbotmosh]

No flash..that sucks. It does help to keep pictures from getting blurry, also for the obvious picture where there isn't ample light...

[willysp]

Originally Posted by diomark

.....What do I miss the most about the Mogul? It may sound weird, but I miss the 'ok' key (next to the joystick) the most.. (having to hit the x on the top-right of the screen will take a little getting used to...

The right button is sort of a substitute for the OK key for me. It basically minimizes all open windows, not just the current one like OK. Close enough for me, I guess.