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*raises hand reluctantly*

I've used it. It's one of the few things on WM 5.0 that actually works more or less as you'd expect it to. That said, it's really not terribly useful. I can't see any situation where it would be more useful than, say, an automatic Word-to-txt converter on the phone.

begin sort-of on-topic rant:

WM 5.0 has one of the worst interfaces I've ever seen on any computing device. Inconsistent from things like the "dismiss" button which swaps sides depending on the app you're dismissing, to the utterly abitrary selection of which functions have buttons on the bottom bar and which have nice big buttons in the main screen, to the random way you quit various applications - do I click the "OK" button, or the "X" in the top right, or the "close" text on the bottom bar - the answer is different with nearly every app. Or the fact it takes 7 clicks on tiny little menu items and icons with the stylus to find the task manager to switch between running applications. Some of our more impatient and less technical users were just rebooting their phones when they ran out of memory rather than navigating that maze each time.

Then there's the flat out bugs and glitches (some of which I'm told will be fixed in some subsequent release... on a thousand dollar phone... which is a crucial business tool in my job... great, thanks, let me just bend over a bit more for you) like the way the hard buttons just stop working every so often (sometimes all of them, sometimes just one or two, like the "answer call" button). Or the screen which sometimes randomly fades to white. i.e., when you're on a call to a client and want to hang up, but the buttons don't work and the screen has gone white so you can't see where to click, the only way to hang up is to take the battery out. Prior to this I'd never seen a telephone handset that crashes and has to be rebooted.

These are the barest tip of the iceburg of the problems with these phones. They're totally unsuitable for business use or any other use where the phone needs to be relied upon. The idea of the makers of this toy dissing the as yet unreleased iPhone as irrelevant for business is hilarious.

If you need a phone to impress your friends at the bar or to play solitare on the train home from work, a WM 5.0 device is perfect for you. If you actually need to rely on it as a phone, mobile data connection, and PDA, i.e., as a business tool... I'm not sure what your other options are, but loads of phones do PDA stuff now, and plenty can do email, and although admittedly Exchange calendering integration is well-implemented and handy in WM 5, if you can give that one feature up it is well worth doing so.

These bloody things were pushed on us geeks by management and have been an unmitigated disaster from day 1. My immediate manager, not a particularly technical guy, implied I was some kind of Luddite when I expressed some doubts (fairly mild ones, as it turned out) prior to the rollout. We previously all had Nokia 8210i handsets and iBurst PCMCIA cards for our laptops, which worked reliably and quickly about 95% of the time.

I am *not* a blind MS hater. I use and deploy their products at work, and they're much better than they once were. But WM is simply crap in the very worst traditions of half-assed marketing-department-driven Microsoft dross.

Apple would have to try pretty hard with the iPhone to make it any less relevant than Windows Mobile.

*sigh* end rant. Sorry about that, WM 5.0 has made me quite bitter.

Unwired - http://www.unwired.com.au/index.php already have a rollout with plenty of coverage around Sydney. http://www.unwired.com.au/availability/index.php
iBurst (flash warning) - http://www.iburst.com.au/ are implementing rollout now.

Discussion form for wireless isps here:
http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-threads.cfm?f =18

This is kind of old news, Unwired have talked about this for a while. I'm an Unwired user in Sydney and I get awesome results, i've been able to use it across the span of 30km's.

I heard about this a while ago I can't recite the source, but when I spoke to the Unwired consultants they said they were looking into this for sometime next year.

The only benefit this will provide me as an existing customer of Unwired is hopefully better pricing, coverage in trouble spots and I would be able to use the service while roaming as opposed to having to log in everytime I change to a different suburb.

That said we also have http://www.iburst.com.au/ (iburst) who provide true roaming, but their plans are ridiculously expensive.

What's more interesting news for me is the announcement Unwired recently made of a partnership with an Australian company called Engin http://www.engin.com.au/ who are an awesome VoIP provider (I also use).

That does remind me, the only place I had trouble with reception using Unwired was in an apartment block 30+ floors up.

-Sj53

I have been using wireless broadband from iBurst http://www.iburst.com.au/ for the last few months in Australia. Works great on the train or while driving down the freeway. Only drawback is that the coverage is a bit patchy at the moment.

http://www.arraycomm.com/gpm/australia.htm

http://www.arraycomm.com/news/pr_detail.htm?id=82

http://www.iburst.com.au/site/news/newsview.php?id =27

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%2Barraycomm+ %2B%22crown+castle%22

Disclaimer: I'm a former employee of Arraycomm who worked on iBurst hardware. I own stock in Arraycomm.

It's also available in limited areas at 1Mbps (and I mean real 1Mbps) via http://www.iburst.com.au/.

I was involved in the trial in Sydney at the start of the year, and it rocked... That said, their expansion is really slow, and I'm back in Melbourne, so it's out of the question now...

I have a PCMCIA that connects via a Wireless CellBased technology (like cellphone/3G but a different technology) that gets me 1Mbps down.

Why on earth would I want your 3G at marginally better than one third that speed?