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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."
Smartphones have been available in one form or another for a while. While reviews are (nearly) unanimous that the Stinger isn't it, what's been the best smartphone so far? I love my Zaurus, and I might be interested in a GSM module for it, but I'm not sure that a huge screen on a phone is what I really want. I'm thinking that maybe the Ericsonn T68 is a good compromise. It does a lot, and it offers easy connectivity to just about any computer/pda if you prefer to use a dedicated device for surfing the web/etc.
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.
Looks like the convicted monopolist is up to their old tricks again: "For reasons best known to itself (and possibly whoever devised the Ts & Cs of its Microsoft licence) Orange has crippled the SPV so that it will only run Microsoft certified software. According to developer Paul O'Brien (who also runs MoDaCo), prerelease versions of the phone had the Microsoft Root Digital Certificate, which trusted certificates produced with the Smartphone 2002 SDK, but this was removed from the shipping device. How to win developer hearts and minds - let them get their apps running fine on the prototypes, then break them when the product ships."
"This is a phone that has shipped before it's finished."
That review really was just as bad as everyone expected. I was waiting for the guy to say it blue screened on him.
Has anyone realized that if you allow the device to run unsigned code, you can effectively steal their access, cause them large phone bills, etc. It's VERY dangerous, much more than your typical virus.
FWIW, I would never trust any 1st generation/iteration of Microsoft software. Remember Windows 95? NT 3? Ugg. I have a sinking feeling that this MS Smartphone has the same destiny...
;-)
Besides... who wants some script kiddie hacking into their phone and delivering an Outlook virus?
I can see it now...
"If you'd like to make a call, please hang up and try agai... Fatal Exception 0F in module mscphone.dll"
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
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!
The smartest phone would be one that allows people to actually know how to drive while talking
I think the reviewer says it all:
This is a phone that has shipped before it's finished. Microsoft see their Smartphone OS as a way of stopping Symbian getting a hold of a platform that they don't yet control and for this reason they've rushed it out.
Everything he says and I've heard from other points to this. It's actually nice to see M$ so scared that they're using their clout to scare companies into making bad moves like an early release of something so flawed. If they keep that up it will be all the more easy to watch the monopoly meltdown. not that I want to see them fail completely, but some real competition (read: some real reasons for quality user focused software) would be nice.
we speak the way we breathe --Fugazi
I never really believed sendo dropped their phone when it was ready for launch. May be it's a combination of crappy speed, horrible UI that really ticked off the company. It also explains why not that many phone makers are signing up to MS's smartphone platform either.
Also, have you noticed that most of the problems that the guy found in the MS smartphone DID NOT occur in symbian based phones (the SE T800, Nokia 7xxx (don't remember the model name))
At the beginning, I thought MS's smartphone is an excellent idea, but then again, heavy, buggy, slow, horrible UI cannot be possibilly good for something that they have been designing for so damn long.
kawai
I won't talk trash about people who are the first to rush out and buy the next, newest thing, for a couple of reasons: 1. The "First Buyers" reduce my cost later because they've paid for all the R&D, product launch, executive sweat (hoping that the product/service will fly), etc. etc. and... 2. The product/service will be greatly improved, or perhaps recalled or discarded (think "Beta v. VHS"). I appreciate all those who endure the hardships to bring me a better product/service. And before you whine, believe me brothers and sisters I have been (and still am from time to time) a beta-testor for software, and I feel your pains.
For some reason, companies seem to think that they have a right to control the phone you paid for. Think of it as "Palladium Light" and a bad sign of things to come.
Your best bet: don't waste time or money on such phones. If it comes with such features, don't use them. If customers send a signal now that they want control of the digital devices they paid for, maybe this insanity can be nipped in the bud.
(And if you know of any end-user programmable Java phones, please let me know.)
One word - treo. I have had one since they were introduced. Everyting works as advertised including GPRS. They got it right.
Sporange almost rhymes.
Silver, purple, and month remain intractable problems for poets.
But if you're rapping about cellphones, you have far more serious problems. Like an income.
What I was wondering, though, is whether there are any phone form-factor Java-based phones that allow end-user programming.
the motorolla i90c is.
it's a nextel phone.
-eek
-- sigs suck --
... 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
Sound, Picture, Video sounds nice on paper but I can't imagine it would be too useful in practice.
/.'er generally have a terminal case of gadgetitis, the PDA will need to do
having grainy little pictures on 2 inch screens is just unbearable for any kind of useful application.
The only reason I can think of to put a camera on a phone and email, is to get evidence when you get
in a car crash. It's useless to view on PDA and horrible to be subjected to on a decent computer
screen. Video is just a lame gimmick. Now, sound would seem to be promising.. but given I'm fairly
used to decent quality of sound from cheapo discmans and ok quality from the current
generation of mp3 players, listening to AM/FM quality mp3 on my phone gets less and less
appealing. The only real use I've got out of wireless web at this point is checking short email
messages, and checking movie times for a particular theatre if I overran on time and need
to catch the next showing. It's simply too unpleasant to do too much websurfing on a phone
simply because of the dimensions of the screen.
Don't even get me started on web surfing on your phone savages the battery life.. And if you really
feel the need to drool over porn on the 2" screen, I'd recommend putting yourself out of your misery.
so my new list is down to:
1. smaller dimension (anything bigger than my 270 will be junked, in fact, I wish it was 30% smaller)
2. better sound quality for the phone
3. longer battery life
everything else would be treated like the damn hairclip help in office.. I'll ignore it until
it gets in my way. once it does, it's gone.
Given the average
everything including cleaning the kitchen sink and run a solar power fusion generator. But I'm
starting to wonder now that if we actually did get everything we wished for in a PDA, would we end up
regretting it.. it's time to realize why the early Palm succeeded and the old Newton failed.
simplicity, usability at a price we're willing to pay..
-- I have enough stupid gadgets to know that I can do without -- http://www.modestneeds.org
Working for a mobile telecoms company, I had a chance to try one of these out last week.
What can I say? The reviewer is correct, even the simplest task (i.e. making a call) is next to impossible and fraught with frustration.
Wait for Symbian, only a sucker would pay for one of these.
it looks like MS FUD has evolved...past empty announcements to empty releases.
Note: I just set up a doctor on a Treo phone and everything works great. Even syncing to a Mac.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
this is actually quite sad. a once decent company has sunk to making devices that behave poorly. how much cash do you think they sunk into this? i'm sure it was a bundle. it really is a loss to the world, of course, today, m$ views that as a gain. oh well.
think i'll find a miamiLuG and get a party together. . . . .
"You never want a serious crisis to go to waste." - Rahm Emanuel
http://economist.com/printedition/displayStory.cfm ?Story_ID=1454300
Very insightful article, happily one of their free ones. Microsoft is in for a tough fight. They've gotten little licensing from major players, and are using alternate, less effective channels to gain a foothold.
As this is Microsoft we're talking about. And although the review sounds pretty awful, I have to say the picture didn't look *that* bad. Out of focus, to be sure, but it sounded as if he tried to get in real close to make the most of the low resolution. Probably operator error, although they probably could have designed in a better minimum focusing distance.
Now the issues with the slow refresh and the delay between the shutter sound and the actual image capture, that would be extremely
annoying, and it doesn't sound like a software update is going to fix the serious lack of processing power.
But how does a product like this even get released? Is it the post-dot-com-bust competition, the "business at the speed of thought" mentality that is responsible for pushing out a product that can't even be a good phone first, and secondly has all these garbage features tacked on? Being a visionary is one thing, and there's a place for that (show us at Comdex or whatever) but delivering on the vision is completely another.
I'm stumped as to how this thing made it out the door. Is it the market researchers? Did they ever put one of these phones in someone's hands? Or did they ask questions like "What would you like in a phone" and then screw up the consumer vision by sacrificing the most fundamental (and implicitly necessary) features?
And does rushing this SPV phone out the door REALLY help them compete against Symbian?
I've never encountered a Java-based phone that didn't allow people to install their own apps for free.
Here are some Java-based phones that I know allow developers to install their own apps:
There is a technical reason why Windows should not be used for phones. The version of Windows used in the phones doesn't support full memory protection, making it easy to corrupt and use the phone hardware in any way you might like.
Symbian for mobile devices on the other hand does protect memory using the hardware and as far as I can tell Symbian is not open to such great abuses as Windows.
Symiab also operates faster than Windows as it does not have the huge amount of over engineering that Windows has.
Martin Piper
Owner - ReplicaNet and RNLobby
This is very typical of Microsoft-based products--particularly when they see threatening competition on the horizon or must play catch-up(which is almost always). What is important for the Palm/Symbian camps is that they MUST NOT write off Microsoft because their offering is a big steaming pile of crap, or lose focus on their own products by fighting Microsoft's tactics.
History has shown that as long as MS can limp along until the third major release of any given product, it has a much better than even chance of squishing the competition. Where are Go Computing and Netscape today? They were leaders/innovators and now they essentially don't exist--killed off because MS stepped up the FUD machine (like with the Win3.1 based PenWindows 10 years ago) and/or taking a loss financially (taking IE off the extra-cost "plus pack" and giving it away in the Win95 install CDs, selling XBboxes for less than they cost to make, etc).
MS will be at the height of desperation if they start giving away the Smartphone OS to the phone makers (if they can get away with it--I think they'd acually pay phone makers to use Smartphone if the US DOJ lets them). There is little MS won't stoop to do if they really want a piece of the action in a given market--especially considering the scads of cash they are sitting on right now. If Smartphone isn't killed off quickly, look for MS to do something that drastic.
It'll happen in other markets that MS plays in too. Remember MS only makes money off its OS and Office licenses--it uses that money and influence to leverage other products. Watch for it--MS might find Linux becoming more of a threat than it is comfortable with in the corporate server and workstation space. Biggest reason? Huge up-front costs in purchasing licenses (look at Content Management Server - US$43,000 per processor!? OS NOT included? Holy Crap! Think I'll just use Slashcode, Scoop, OpenACS etc to manage my site). Solution? MS can use bags of cash to set up their own leasing program a la GE capital to spread out the big $ hurt, or otherwise accelerate their move towards selling their "software as a service". It'll be ammunition against the argument that Linux has a lower implementation costs. Anything to make it easier to "invest" in Microsoft rather than any competition.
If it all goes "right", MS will have it made--from the cellphone up to the big racks of servers, consumers and businesses will just get a monthly bill from Bill for anywhere from $100 or so up to thousands for corporations--just like the electric bill. Then Bill takes care (and control) of your gagets and computers to make sure all the ugrades and bugfixes are done, and that you aren't using any pesky little "non-authorised" apps and files. And the rest of us will have the honor and privlege to turn said devices on and "use as directed".
This is a typical Microsoft-bashing Register article, written by someone who hasn't even tried the phone. I have. I like it a lot - the phone can do full Internet browsing, and also has MSN Messenger. Synchronisation with Outlook has been perfect, and I nor any other users I've talked to have had any problems whatsoever with dialling or receiving messages.
Of course you can't see everything on a web page, the screen is only 176x220 resolution; but if you visit pages optimised for mobile devices (and there are a lot of them) then there's no problem.
The phone hasn't crashed for me yet. I've had it for two weeks and use it quite a lot. I guess YMMV, but others I've talked to have had similar crash-free experiences. It crashes about as much as any other new unpatched phone, such as the T68m (which you'll remember received a whole load of bugfixes before it worked well).
I had no problems in using the camera - I don't know what this 'ten presses to take a picture' nonsense is. Plus, the camera quality is significantly better or at least as good as any other mobile camera out now; a simple comparison of photos, e.g. SPV vs. GX-10 will show this. And sheesh, it's only supposed to be a mobile camera, not a professional one!
As for lag, yes, there is some. Certainly not '30 second lag times', I don't think I've ever had any more than 5 second lag. Most of the time it is on the scale of 1-2 seconds.
There's a lot of talk about, 'Oh, I'll just wait until the Sony Ericsson P800 comes out'. Well, you can wait if you like, it's only been delayed for several months now. Plus, the P800 will cost at least £200 more than the SPV, so what use is there in comparing two products whose prices differ so greatly? (The SPV costs from free - with contract - to £100 for upgrade).
Instead of basing your opinion on a single review, I suggest that you check out this forum about the Smartphone: http://modaco.com/smartphone/viewforum.php?f=2. The reports aren't all positive, by any means. The phone seems to provoke a love-hate relationship, but there are a lot of people who love the phone. Compared to my old Sony J70 phone, the SPV is incredibly better and lightyears ahead of my old Visor Deluxe PDA.