Kevin L from MTekk gives us his take on a different offering in the mobile arena ...As an IT Manager, I was always looking for a way to make life easier for myself. And I get to play with all the cool toys. Somehow, I missed the whole PDA craze – no Palm, no iPaq, nothing. However, I have always had the latest mobile phones – 5110 in 1997, 7110 in 1999, 6110 in 2001. I also carry two phones at all times – one for personal and another for work, being the 24-hour contact.

The OS, expansion and compatibility

These need their own section. The Symbian OS unfortunately does NOT take standard Symbian apps. 3 have decided in their infinite wisdom to limit the phone to “signed” apps, which they can thus charge you for. Games initially are free to download, but they hit you for play-by-play activation, which sucks if you accidentally bump a key and quit automatically. Also, the phone does NOT support Word or Excel apps, so to take notes, you are best off using the scratch pad and better be able to read your bad handwriting!

Also the mystery “GPS” slot IS meant to take a GPS module, for Assisted GPS (AGPS) applications, but 3 is not going to support them, so are not going to allow modules in Australia. You MIGHT be able to get one on eBay, but there is no easy way of getting your coordinates, because 3 won’t sign an app to display them. Work in progress, I say. Some hacker, please come to our aid!

Compatibility is excellent. Load the CD with the drivers in to your computer, plug in the USB cable, tell the phone to connect via the app “Desktop Suite” and you can instantly browse through the custom “My A920” desktop icon. You get access to both the internal and expansion SD-card memory, so it doubles as an SD reader. You can then set up remote email/calendar/to-do. We use Lotus Notes through Citrix and I STILL managed to get it to work. Very impressive.