I managed to lose my employer’s Nokia N82 and as punishment by my boss he stuck me with an HTC Touch Cruise Windows Phone Classic 6.1 phone that nobody had wanted to use since 2008. I have tweeted about my findings with the hashtag #punishmentphone.

In short, the experience has been mixed. Synchronization with Google Apps works like a charm with e-mail, contacts and calendar and the messaging function is quite OK in the way e-mail works and the SMS part has conversations just like the iPhone. Sadly, though, the Windows Mobile general feel remains with very bad tactile feedback from the touch interface and a borderline unusable virtual keyboard and having a Windows interace on a phone means that user stories like “Create new SMS” or “Make a phone call” be at least a few clicks too far away for comfort. Oh, and another pet peeve: When the phone boots, it throws the SIM-card PIN-code dialog at me first, but that gets hidden by the WinMo desktop and I have to go in to the comm manager and disable the phone and reenable it to get the PIN dialog to a place where I can actually punch the numbers in. WinMo has improved since before, though as the phone has only died on me once so far for no reason, which is vastly better than a QTek S100 I wrestled with years before.