windows mobile 5 – spv c600

There has been so much talk about Windows Mobile 5 and how it can push email to your phone in a similar way to Blackberrys. It all sounds brilliant and on top of that people I know who have been using the last few versions of the SPV (C500 and C550) have been singing its praises – minimal crashing, works brilliantly with a PC and it can make phone calls 🙂 (I had the first 2 SPVs which were appalling..)

So I plumped for the C600 thinking this is the perfect phone. Sure enough, the phone itself is a decent size – the OS seems to have a good feel to it and it doesnt seem to have crashed at all yet! But getting support and email to work is impossible. All I want to do is connect to the VPN and download my email (forget about push – I just want POP3 to work!) – can Orange help me? No, they do not know anything other than how to activate the vpn access rights at their end – anything else is my problem – their data teams did try to help further but did not understand the phone enough to figure it out). Can Microsoft help? No, to give Microsoft credit they tried for 3 days to help but in the end came back with no one here knows about Windows Mobile 5 – there is not any documentation and the operator changes how the phone works anyhow. I am sure all this is true but that does not really help me..

So no idea where this leaves me – heading back to Palm or Nokia if I do not fix it by the end of this week – after that its going to prove hard work to persuade Orange to give me a replacement!

[update] look at that post on Monday, fixed by Tuesday! Orange enabled an extra service and give that a try – suddenly it all started working 🙂 Not sure why they did not know about this service in the first place but we got there in the end 🙂

Riaz Kanani

Founder of Radiate B2B, which helps companies target advertising at specific companies usually as part of an account based marketing programme.

I have spent almost two decades building startups or expanding fast growth companies in a variety of functions - from tech to operations to marketing, with a little corp dev on the side.

Always up for a discussion on building tech businesses and the latest tech trends. Tweet me.