The Smartphone Round Robin is nearly done, everybody, as each site works on its final round 'away from home.' This week, Kevin at CrackBerry.com throws some hate down on the HTC Fuze. Apparently, like Rene at TiPb, he's not a fan of the reponsiveness of the touchscreen, which appears to be causing the majority of his problems with the UI.

That's actually a complaint I've heard elsewhere as well and I've also heard that the Euro-version, the Touch Pro, is better in this regard. For me, the trick for 'getting' how the Fuze's touchscreen works is that there seems to be a significant different between how it deals with flat-finger swiping and fingertip tapping. If you use the flat of your finger and swipe, it almost always registers correctly as a swipe. To tap/select, you use the tip of your finger and press just a little harder. To be sure, neither is as responsive as a capacitive touchscreen would be, but it is a pretty elegant way of dealing with the resistive limitation -- once you know about it, that is.

What say you, did we mess up going with the Fuze for this year's Round Robin? Would a BlackJack II have gotten a better reception? Comment here on that or any other Round Robin subject to be entered to win a Fuze and a Redfly C8N.

Speaking of Fuze giveaways, our Fuze Sweepstakes Extravaganza ended on Friday and we've randomly chosen a winner: dlevymd! dlevymd looks to be currently using a Tilt, so this will be a nice upgrade:

Hands down, the thing that attracks me the most to the Fuze is the out of the box memory. I run my medical practice from my device and have very large databases. I also use NotifyLink and I have UpToDate mobile loaded in. Even with everything loaded on my storage card, my ATT Tilt gets into low memory states.

Congrats dlevymd, expect an email from us very soon!

This week's Around SPE is sponsored by the the TiPb iPhone Accessory Store, which has long been your best source for iPhone accessories. A lot of iPhone 3G upgraders were left out in the cold when their car chargers turned out to not be compatible, but they've got plenty that are, not to mention plenty of headphones that are a step up compared to the standard white buds

Last week both CrackBerry.com and WMExperts found themselves on the cusp of major releases -- the BlackBerry Storm, BlackBerry Bold on AT&T, the HTC Fuze on AT&T, not to mention a few others on the Windows Mobile side. So while everybody has been anticipating new devices, all of the editors at SPE are anticipating something else that will be starting on November 17th. The hint is right up there in the picture!

Read on for the full skinny on what's been happening around SPE!

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Update: Looks like BGR received yet another one of those mysterious Q9s with WiFi. This one has what appears to be a finalized version of Windows Mobile 6.1 with a few new features. Go check it out.

...That's the prediction from Pocket Lint [via Gizmodo]. Sounds pretty good to us. We would normally be a little gun shy about this sort of prediction, especially since we whiffed our prediction it would be unveiled at MWC2008. However, CTIA just happens to start on April first. And Head-of-The-Division-That-Contains-Windows Mobile Robbie Bach just happens to be giving the keynote. And WMExperts just happens to be planning on heading over to Las Vegas for the show.

So file this one under “Very Likely.”

Speaking of CTIA: expect wall-to-wall coverage. We'll live-blog Bach's keynote, we started up a Twitter feed for WMExperts, and heck, we will even post up direct from the show floor via our trusty Motorola Q9h.

Windows Mobile 6.1, if you'll recall from the many leaks, features a much-improved Today screen experience and (FINALLY) native threaded SMS, among other improvements.

We took the briefest of looks at SyncMate back in November and found it promising, though perhaps not as full featured as the reigning king of Mac and Windows Mobile sync - the Missing Sync. SyncMate is out of Beta (version 1.1) and now and the nice bit is that there's a free version and an “Expert Version” (for #39.95). The free version does the basics - Contacts, iCal, and Internet Sharing (!), while the Expert version adds on media, bookmark, and folder sync.

If you're already on Missing Sync, I'm not sure if SyncMate is worth the purchase, but if you're considering moving to a Mac + Windows Mobile setup (I like it myself quite a bit), a free sync option might ease your pain just a bit.

SyncMate - Sync Mac OS X with Windows Mobile: iTunes, contacts, folders synchronization*

You may have heard the news. Here's our live color commentary of the iPhone SDK event. There's a lot of information to parse out with regards to how this will shake out with Windows Mobile -- including how the applications on the iPhone looked stunning compared to most WM apps. More on that later. For now, let's talk about this: Apple licensed Exchange Active Sync.

What's it mean? Read on!

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Until recently if we wanted to watch YouTube on a Windows Mobile device, we had to to hack our Windows Mobile device to do it. Not anymore. Now YouTube improved its site so that Windows Mobile users can access it without a hassle. Again not all videos play perfectly but it’s a start for now.

My first couple of runs worked flawlessly and all 4 videos played without a hitch. Then I tried to watch an episode of High Stakes Poker and it couldn’t read the file. One of the things that bugged me is that it goes into landscape mode when I hit full screen. Being that I have a Treo 750 it doesn’t make that big of an improvement, but if you have an HTC 8525 it might help. Other cool features inclued the ability to search, see your own account, check featured videos, and my favorites.

Now you can enjoy all the laughter of rabbits racing cars and the presidential debate without having to worry about cab files or registry hacks. Simply point your mobile browser to m.youtube.com and get to watching. Keep in mind you will want to have an unlimited data plan due to the fact that large amounts of data will be streamed.

During the Mobile World Congress The Unwired View sat down with Microsoft's corporate vice president of the Mobile Communications Group, Todd Warren. They discussed the XPERIA and also, somewhat excitingly, the multimedia and usability updates we can expect to come to Windows Mobile.

Warren:

we are also working on improving the base of media and picture experiences as part of Windows Mobile. You can expect, I would say, pretty dramatic changes to those in future versions of the product.

Really, though, head over and read the article. Good stuff on Zune integration, improvements to the Touch interface, and collaboration with HTC on making WM integrate better with HTC's TouchFLO

What'd we tell you earlier? Stay Tuned, right? Here's what's for: the WMExperts Podcast! Here's the deal: we'll be on every week, usually on Thursdays. We'll alternate every week between a short, 5-minute device focus / review (next week: Sprint Touch) and a longer, news and tips-focused podcast. The shorter podcasts will be hosted by Dieter Bohn, the longer ones will feature Malatasta (and also some guests, later on, if they'll lower themselves to talk to us).

Alright, so how do you get the sucker?

• Download it directly with this link
• Subscribe via iTunes (Update: here it is!)
• Subscribe directly to the Podcast feed with your favorite Podcatcher here
• Check out Microsoft's Getting Started with Podcasts article
• Just listen to it here with this flash player:

Be sure to email us -- podcast@wmexperts.com -- we want to talk about what you want to hear about.

What's the news on this podcast? Read on for the show notes

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You may have heard that there was a serious BlackBerry outage this week, millions of people were unable to get email or browse the web [corrected] on their CrackBerrys for several hours, causing some consternation amongst the addicts:

For Blackberry users, Monday left us feeling like a toddler with no Spongebob. Thought of “Why! Why?” and “What in the world is going on!” flowed through our heads. We cried to each other, and to those who could have cared less, and waited it out (as we had no other choice) and hoped for the best.

The worst part was twofold - as the above article claims, RIM wasn't immediately forthcoming about the problem. When they did let us in on what happened, it was the same thing that happened last April, a software upgrade gone wrong, a problem they promise would never happen again.

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My, but it has been a big day here at WMExperts. Our review of the Motorola Q9h -- normally the sort of article that sits at the top as a shining achievement -- has been lost on the front page amidst a flurry of great news coming out of the Mobile World Congress. We're seeing great news like Microsoft is beefing up WinMo's consumer chops by purchasing Sidekick creator Danger; like Sony Ericsson joining the Windows Mobile Team; like HTC releasing/announcing one, two, three new devices.

What better way to cap off such a great day for Windows Mobile than to provide a bit of perspective to the recent iPhone sales numbers. In the past 6 months, 14.3 million Windows Mobile devices have been sold worldwide. That number has been driven by the surprising success of the HTC Touch (2 million devices) and the Samsung BlackJack (over a million). It's a heapin' helpin' of smartphones, and the number is only going to get bigger in the next 6 months with new devices and new OS updates to add more enterprise and consumer features.

[via Pocket-lint]