Stress-Testing the Verizon G'zOne Cellphone

abkaiser writes "You can dunk it under water. Put it in the oven and crank up the heat. Drop it, smack it, treat it like the hunk of plastic that it is. And yet this is a cellphone. I got my hands on the Verizon G'zOne (pronounced 'G-Z-One'), a phone designed for high-abuse environments. Come for the test methodology, stay for the photo of a cellphone cooking in an oven."

Comments

Dotted already

[Anonymous Coward]

mirrordot

Lost in translation

[Zadaz]

The -one- cool phone they bring over from Japan and they uglify it.

And strip half the features and change twice at much. Guess that's what took two years.

(Link to original phone.)

Re:I wonder how resistant the LCD is to cracking

[Odiumjunkie]

I dropped my Treo in a parking lot after taking some hefty back-pain meds... When returned the next day, the LCD was cracked but the left side worked. I have to cut-and-paste text messages then add carriage feed returns so I can read the text... $100 for new screen $200 for new (replacement) treo $300 for new treo version Too cheap and lazy to upgrade or fix it now...

When I broke the screen on my sony ericsson T610 about a year ago, I was given a quote of about $200 for a new branded screen - I went to my local asian-run backstreet electronics store and got a new generic screen installed for $30 including labour (although labour is nothing, I could have installed it myself). Anyways, it was hugely cheaper than a branded part, and brighter than the original to boot! It's been working flawlessly since then.

I will never buy another Verizon-brand phone...

[terrahertz]

...because Verizon has made it their policy to lock down the filesystem of every device they get their greedy mitts on. My first phone with their service was a Samsung a670, which worked great, allowed me to read and write to the filesystem for free (so I could get fancy with ringers, wallpaper, pull pics off quickly and for free, etc) using BitPim and QPST.

Then the time came to pick a "free" phone for work, and unfortunately I chose the Pantech PN-215, a "Verizon brand" phone. While it was more or less similar in features compared to the Samsung, the best I can do so far is just look at the filesystem, no writing allowed (to the device or to anything connected). I've tried out a few different workarounds (Verizon even went so far as to tell me there was no data cable for that model, a blatant lie I quickly disproved by doing some research and trying out an Audiovox cable), but so far no dice.

This means that if I want to transfer pics, ringers, etc I have to do that over the air, lining the pockets of the greed-machine that is Verizon.

My personal plan is coming up for renewal, and when I add my wife to it, you can be sure we will not be purchasing any phone that is locked down in this way.

Thanks a million, "Can you rip me off now?!"

Re:So they're building things like they used to.

[flimflam]

Agreed - most things suck. But for the record, I spilled an entire pint of Guinness into my brand new (at the time) 12" Powerbook a couple of years ago (well, actually my two-year-old daughter did it. Please don't ask what she was doing with a pint of Guinness). I quickly pulled the battery, drained the computer and let it dry for a couple days, and except for some stickiness in a few keys (that went away after a couple months) and a distinct smell of burnt beer (that lasted about six) it's been fine ever since. I've also dropped it 3 times -- once hard enough to bend the case enough that I can no longer eject the DVD that's inside. I seem to have good luck with these things.

On the other hand my mom has had a succession of Macs that she's had nothing but problems with. (Though it may be related to the fact that she always goes for the cheap models - starting with the god-awful Performa 6360 and leading to a 12" iBook).