I recently had the opportunity to test drive the rather impressive clunk of hardware that is the PDA/Smartphone Toshiba Portégé G900 on a sort of a self-imposed service gig for our CEO. To make a long story short, his G900 had crashed so badly that it only showed the “pills and rainbows” welcome screen and wouldn’t even respond to the power button. So my job as a good service desk engineer was to order a fix, and while waiting for my boss’s boss not to pick the device up, i gave it a spin. With his blessing, of course.

The G900 is Microsoft’s answer to the Nokia Communicator. It is a bit too big to be sexy, it has an impressive arsenal of features, and it costs a lot. Both are at least initially targeted the executive business type who wants their office on the run [0]. Both have keyboards hidden within (the Communicator is a clamshell, the G900 is a slider). The difference of course is that the Communicator runs on Nokia’s software while the Portégé runs Windows Mobile. It shouldn’t come as a surprise then that the synchronization between the G900 and our company’s Exchange server was seamless and smooth like a baby’s butt [1].

There are things both nice and … constructive to say about the G900. As mentioned, the synchronization went without a hitch, combining my Exchange contacts with my Messenger contacts without difficulties. The screen is wonderful. Direct manipulation – i.e. poking stuff with a pen – is heavens compared to selecting stuff with a navigation keyboard, like i do on my phone normally. The Wi-Fi connection works, most of the time. And it crashes nearly each day. And that is the biggest gripe i had with it. Also it is probably the biggest gripe anyone can have with a business telephone. If you have a business tool, it should stay up no matter what. And that goes for any business.

I chalk it to software that can be improved; the hardware is nice – except for the sheer amount of it. The G900 certainly could be slimmer. And look just a bit edgier. It’s just too round, too grey, too… dull. Just look at the Nokia Communicator E90 and you should get what i mean (at the same time i admit that compared to the newer models, the original Communicator did look like a cheese bun — an old cheese bun). A bizphone doesn’t need to be dull.

Given my use patterns, there are a few other things that could be improved. First of all, i’m not all work. Heck, even Nokia has slowly realized that even business phones aren’t always at work. But when i’m at work, i tend most of the day to be the “business” me whereas i’m in other roles elsewhere. I would suppose the same applies for many others too. I therefore would appreciate that the phone supported the fact that i have personal contacts, calendars, mails and documents as well as work-related ones (i also have contacts that are both personal and work-related but that are a more complicated story). But then again, my N76 isn’t any better. I guess it’s just the old Palm devices that supported multiple calendars.

The design feature that bugged me the most though was the dichotomy of phone and PDA. When you boot the machine and get past the Windows Mobile welcome screen, you’re greeted with a PIN-on screen that in a near-german voice states that you now have three attempts to enter your Personal Idenfication Number before we lock up this phone (you might be allowed to make an emergency call but we’re not making promises to you at this stage). So much for user friendlyness. No Windows Mobile “Home” screen, even though you can access it if you know what buttons to push. Just “enter this or we’ll zap you”. Loser. Once you get past the rectal probe state, the split personality fades and the device starts behaving like a slightly calmer specimen.

Another feature which probably could be improved upon is the keyboard. It feels cheap. And for a device that probably costs in the 1k€ region, cheap is not what a keyboard should feel. The buttons feel like those plastic domes that go “pop” in cheap remote controls — and frankly, most telephones. Also, there were no buttons for the scandinavic characters åäö, so those had to be entered through the rather awkward “soft” keyboard that could be popped up from a menu. Not that great, but then again, this PDA wasn’t customized for the Nordic market so it’s excused.

So to concentrate: the G900 is nice if you need a flashy (albeit clunky) has-it-all device that you can impress your business pals with in an everyday fashion. The phone really has it all. But it is a bit too big for my taste and it crashes a lot.

[0] These days you’ll find the Communicator has lost its business flair and stigma and even my mother in law has one. But then, this is Finland…

[1] OK, the seamless analogy may not be the most appropriate here, but you should be getting the point unless you’re as smarty pants-y as me.