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Testing an Orange SPV 'Smartphone'
theolein writes "The register has an article discussing the first major phone company's implementation -Orange SPV- of MS Smartphone as well as a common user's experiences with it. More or less confirms what quite a few expected."
I went in to my local Orange shop to get a demo of one of these phones last week as I was tempted to get one.
Fortunately I decided against getting one when the salesman tried to make me believe it was normal for a mobile phone to take 60 seconds to start up and log on to the network!
My overall impressions of the device was that it was incredibly slow, not slow as in running Doze 98 on a P75, but slow as in Doze XP on a 286. It was also incredibly heavy and long for a mobile phone.
I can't see Orange shifting many. Me, I'm waiting for the SonyEricsson P800.
Next time you upgrade with orange, ask the assistant to quote 'return / failure rates' on all the handsets available....
I was thinking of upgrading - It would be cool to have a camera or the ability to run my own applications on my phone. Despite the cool new products available, I have decided not to buy for at least 6 more months because all of the phones currently available are even less reliable than my t68 (which is only just tolerable).
According to Orange, there are problems with all the new generation of Camera / Organiser phones. Aparantly, the worst offender is the new Nokia camera phone - that had a more than 90% return rate due to hardware faults. I am sure this MS phone could be worse! My Ericsson T68 had to be swaped 4 times this year - I'm astonished that anything could be worse!
As all the mobile phone companies seem to be rushing out new models in time for xmas - it seems the idea of waiting untill the product is right has been completely forgotten.
By the way, if you ARE thinking of upgrading - a heavy user on Orange can usually blag a free handset. Rather than go through the upgrades line, go to the disconnection line and tell them you want to end your contract with orange because O2 or Vodaphone has offered your chouice of handset as a joining incentive.
Orange will usually offer you a decent handset for free as an incentive to keep you to another year's contract. A heavy user should never have to pay for upgrades!
... so bad in fact I started writing exactly what that dude wrote about his SPV. Unfortunately, I wanted to write too much and never finished the damn thing. There's two great features of the Philips I love - the "egg timer of death" (every now and then an egg timer just appears - the only way you get rid of it is to pull the battery) and the complete inability to remember the time and date if it crashes (see previous) and you have to pull the battery. Oh, and the THIRD thing I hate about it is that although it has xxx kb for storing background images, it can only store around 10 SMSs. Go figure that, eh ? Oh AND you just can't redial easily. AND it's got a really unfriendly keyboard lock / unlock feature. It's time for bed. I can't start this whinge now.
Two wrongs may not make a right, but three
The Nokia 7650, the Nokia 7210, the Nokia 6310 and just about every other Java based mobile phone that I've used are all end-user programmable and not only that provide application suites to download the applications without doing OTA.
You are confusing the phone capabilities with network capabilites.
Yell at your moronic telco, not at the phone companies.
I've used a Motorola i85s here in Australia as a Java "JVM" despite it not being able to be connected to the mobile network due to incompatibilities and lack of a SIM card. I've used a Siemens, an N7650, 6310 and 7210 all downloading applications via OTA and Infrared.
Clearly you need to do some research before your particular rant, as you are quite wrong.