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Microsoft Orange SPV Phone Review
Ian Bell writes "HowardChui.com just posted a review on Microsoft's new Orange SPV which is the first commercially available Smartphone. The SPV stands for Sound, Pictures, Video and you can download games like Doom or listen to MP3s on the speaker or even chat to your friends using the built-in MSN Messenger. But for all that the SPV features, there is no Bluetooth support. It still looks like a killer phone and I like that it is smaller than the PocketPC phones currently on the market."
I was deriding the Yopy a couple days ago for having a chiclet keyboard. This thing's got a chiclet keypad. Make it bigger!
Add to that the fact that you're going to get face-grease all over the screen every time you talk on the phone. I don't see any reason to get one of these yet.
I have been pwned because my
I believe, as an Apple fan, that Apple should make a really good phone for all us geeks wishing we had big wallets. They could get Jonathan Ive to do it, and put a *scaled-down* version of OS X on it. Plus, they could call it the iPhone! (It has a *ring* to it, yuk yuk...) I would definitely buy one (if I had said big wallet).
Why the hell is it taking PDA/Cell Phone/MP3 Player/Keyboard/Mouse manufacturers so DAMN long to get bluetooth implemented as a standard across the board for syncing devices, which is what it's particulary good at - close distance, high bandwidth traffic. It's beginning to really piss me off since it has the implications to be so useful.
I urge for the day i can use my iPod as a clicker device to go to the next slide in a presentation, or when i can set my iPod next to my laptop and automatically sync it. I urge for the day i can walk into a room with a bluetooth keychain and have my pre-programmed computer automatically turn the lights on and start playing music ala Minority report. We *HAVE* the technology to do all this, why the hell are hardware manufacturers kicking their damn heals so much?
ok i'm done ranting
</RANT>
- tristan
So why would anyone buy this phone at all?
How am I supposed to fit a pithy, relevant quote into 120 characters?
From ZDNet UK....slightly amusing...but a valid point, none the less.
I want someone to realise that I always carry around my wallet, my keys and my phone.
Why is it, therefore, that we don't see a combination smartphone/pda/wallet? An average wallet is large enough to put a decent-sized LCD screen and a keypad in (after all, many wallets are quite similar in design to a clamshell-type 'phone).
This would be a kick-ass device because it'd have a big screen *and* reduce the amount of space everything takes up in my pockets. Surely it's the obvious thing to do?
Hang on - given it's obvious, I'll just off and patent it...
These things have been out in the UK for so long that version 2 is being released!
Granted, this is because version 1 was so poor that no one brought one - less than 100k units were shipped (which considering that there are about 10m sales/yr of high end phones in the UK is terrible). And that number was _after_ they started giving them away for free with a £25/mnth contract.
Microsoft fucked up by making a bad phone - not really a surprise - and the only people who brought them were the XBox-modder wannabe-techie types who wouldn't know the different between C and Cobol.
The most amusing part is that the only reason these phones sold _at all_ was because the DRM functions (you can only run executables signed by Orange and Microsoft) were broken by hackers very quickly - in fact for the French version it only required a reboot to execute. Now thats great security!
Annoying never fixed bugs include numbers stored in a different way from Outlook/OE so that when you sync your phonebook you can't dial the numbers it downloaded, text messaging that randomly doesn't work, out-of-memory errors, and a phone so large and butt ugly it belongs in 1980.
Another stunning victory then - Nokia must be quaking in their boots.
Beep beep.