I highly recommend the T-Mobile shop in Bonn. They were kind enough to let me play around with the Ameo for a good half an hour. The Ameo is a re-badged HTC Advantage 7500 so it doesn’t have WM6 and doesn’t have the tip-to-scroll feature.
I don’t like it and I doubt that wm6 and the tip-scroll feature would make me change my mind. It seems clunky, slow and somehow incomplete. Its not nearly as satisfying as the E90 I tried in Helsinki. The browser was especially slow and the first two things I tried – YouTube and a WMV playback, didn’t work out of the box. OK, Opera would be a much better browser to try it out on but I’m thinking of the out-of-the box experience here. Another problem with the Advantage is that you can not use it in two handed thumb typing mode. If you hold the device by the keyboard you are asking for trouble as the main unit can fall off very easily. 640×480 browsing was good but not fantastic and given the limitations of Windows Mobile and the slow typing rate of the keyboard (I estimate 40% normal typing rate) I don’t think its worth the 900 Euros I was quoted. The E90 is winning in my mind and now I have a little problem…
Unfortunately, the E90 is proving a bit of a problem to try out here in Bonn. Not 100 Meters from me (I’m in Starbucks) is a Nokia shop that have just received two E90’s. (Unboxed before my very eyes!) They would not take the units out of the box and would not offer me a try-out period but they did offer to buy the unit back as a second-hand unit though which leaves me with a minimum 100 Euro decision. Should I go back and buy it? I think so don’t you?
At least me and James Kendrick can do some good comparisons together and help other people decide. Update: Matt Miller has one too. He likes it a lot! Is WM6 really that good or is it the package thats impressing Matt and James?
I’ll be back in Starbucks in about 20 minutes…hopefully with an E90.
Update: Yup, I got one. Intro video here.
