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… it’s the thing that used to be used as a phone. I’ve been working on getting more productivity out of my Smart Phone in the last few weeks. Trying to get the thing set up so I can automate more of my life and collaborate with my business colleagues and friends better. It’s a lesson in how fragmented the web actually is. I do love the convenience of consolidating communication media, i.e., phone, multiple email accounts, MSN IM, SMS. That’s great. Obviously, access to contacts is great. It’s also great that you can work Excel spreadsheets, view PPTs, read and edit Word docs. Heck, I can even install Acrobat and view PDFs. Photos and videos are gravy to me.

What’s hard is that it’s still a very Microsoft-oriented device. I’m ok with that, but even within its Microsoft orientation, I have trouble getting the Microsoft products to integrate. Windows Media Mobile has been great for MP3s and WMAs, but it’s very difficult with video and impossible with other audio formats. There are just no options for plugins, etc., to get access to these other audio formats. While the camera is a nice feature that seems to be important for consumers, quality’s a challenge and you have to do a conversion to get them to work outside of Windows Media Mobile. What drove me crazy today is that I can’t seem to find any upgrades or patches to account for Office 2007 file format changes.

I’m sure there’s more to come, e.g., longer battery life, compatibility issues addressed, and form factor, which I didn’t mention.. This thing just doesn’t drop into a shirt pocket. More to come.

I’ve had a multi-year road to my new belief that unstructured search has changed my life. Long ago… like three years ago… I used a simple Outlook add-on called Lookout. It allowed me to search all my email and caused me to stop worrying so much about the granular filing of my emails so I could retrieve my ’stuff’. (My highly organized wife is now cringing.) I used this, and still do on my home PC, and early on, could amaze my colleagues with the ease I could put my fingers on any email I hadn’t deleted… and, depending on my indexing options, some I had deleted. Soon, I could search for attachments within those emails, and the oohs and aahs continued.

Here we are at the end of ‘06. Desktop search tools are so prevalent that, at some point in the past 12 months, I’ve had one or more of the search tools from Google, Yahoo, and Microsoft on my laptop. For a long time, I had settled on Google until I upgraded to Office 2007 this past Summer. When the update for the new Microsoft search came out this Fall, I upgraded, fell head over heels, and I’m not looking back. When I recently rebuilt my laptop, I only installed the Microsoft search, but not because of the XP/Office 2007 search capabilities. I was sold on Microsoft search on one of my recent visits with my buddy Rick at Microsoft. He showed off the new OS integrated search that’s in Vista and the new enterprise search that’s rolling out with the new Microsoft Office server products. Awesome. The indexing is more efficient than Google. It integrates natively to SharePoint and Exchange. Awesome. For my clients, it’s a fraction of the cost at scale of the Google solution.

I’m going to keep watching the Google solution because it’s very good on the desktop, but Microsoft has close the gap so fast and at a scale that accelerates past Google’s enterprise search, you can’t help, even if think Microsoft is the evil empire, but be impressed by. Check out what they’re doing and let me know what you think.