I had one of these a few months back when they first came out, and I'm the sort of guy who buys into ALL the new gadgets and lives with the bugs. Heck, I buy into the BETAs of all the latest gadgets and live with the bugs.
This phone had 2 good points: The Screen (its gorgeous) and The Keypad (really solid and positive).
Everything else about this phone is junk.
The user interface is almost impossible to figure out - as the reviewer says the thing is like some crazy puzzle with the Select button changing randomly all the time. The interface looks like something from the 80s - except for the Main Menu, pretty much everything is in black and white and text-based, and its obvious to see the Japanese i-Mode roots in this handset.
The SMS was unusable. You had to press a whole series of buttons everytime you wanted to write a message just to switch the T9 input on - it wasn't on by default and there was no way of setting this, that I could find. It doesn't even support receiving concatenated messages (i.e. longer than 160 characters)!! Every phone I've owned in the last 6 years has had this basic feature!
The battery life... ah, the 2 batteries and 2 chargers gave it away when I opened the box. Make a call on this phone and it won't last the day. Most of the battery is probably eaten lighting up the gloriously bright screen!
The "3" services were pretty poor too - nothing you'd actually want to use on a phone as they were mostly too fiddly. The videos were adequate quality once you'd downloaded them, but they would typically take about 1 minute to download a 3 minute clip. You tend to look a fool standing around for a minute waiting to download the video whilst flapping around trying to get a 3G signal.
Most of the UK is NOT covered by a 3G signal. The centre of my city was meant to have complete coverage. Yeah, right. I live and work in the centre and I could only get a signal in one corner of my office tower block - one of the highest points in the city. If it did think there was a 3G signal to be had it would spend minutes flapping about trying to lock on, at which point you couldn't do anything that required the network - i.e. make a call. And there was no way of locking it to 2G, only to 3G.
No real Bluetooth on this phone either - so no hands-free in the car, which means I can't make or receive any calls while I'm driving.
I took mine back within 2 weeks and bought a wonderful Nokia 3650 (well, except for its daft keypad). Upgraded it with a 128Mb MMC, downloaded my favourite apps, videos etc and have been very happy since.
I'll wait for the SonyEricsson Z1010 and then have another go - the calling plans on the 3 network are a great price at the moment because no-one is buying into it.
I totally agree. It is getting pretty hard to find a mobo without sound now.
Most of the time it is impossible to completely disable it, so when I do put a different (better or more feature rich) card in the system it makes getting things like making digital audio output go out of the right SP/DIF a total nightmare.
And I don't want/need sound on any of my servers either, so why should I pay extra, even if it's 20 cents to have something that eats an IRQ?
Sealand almost counts as a nation under International Law because it is a fixed structure and is more than 1 metre above sea-level at all times. The only issue is that it actually now exists inside the borders of the UK and is no longer in International waters as it was when it was first constructed (the rules changed on how far your borders extend).
But no, an aircraft carrier doesn't count. Nor does an oil rig for instance.
Unless everyone manages to standardise on MPEG4 (the main player in the codec battles), then I suspect we'll end up with loads of proprietary standards being used, depending on which set-top box you have. The only issue with this is storage for the content aggregators who will have to store the movies in all the possible formats to farm out to all the different set-tops.
Microsoft will make a massive push with Windows Media, and rightly-so too - their codec is probably the best right now and includes it's own multi-channel audio codec too. At least they've finally opened it up so that it can be made available on other platforms - before this happened I would have been wary.
And anyway, they've already encoded Terminator 2 which will be available as a WMV file in the new T2 DVD release!
The phone is awesome. I had one of the horrid NEC E606 3G phones for 2 weeks before taking it back and getting this 2.5G device (I upgraded from the 7650).
The screen is nice, the Series 60 user interface is very easy to use - you can easily and quickly get to any function you want. I've fitted a 128Mb MMC into the back and I can now fit full-length movies onto the phone for those moments when you are stuck waiting somewhere with nothing to do. There are also hundreds of apps and games available to download.
The bad things about this phone are the keypad and the "joystick". The joystick isn't as accurate as on other phones I've used (a lot!) and as someone mentioned - sometimes it hits the wrong direction or it hits the centre-click by accident - annoying, but you can learn to be more careful with it. The round keypad is a joke though - it's taken me 2 weeks of use to try and remotely get used to texting on this - if you are a hard-core text user then you need to steer clear of this phone. The keypad + joystick are also crap for playing most gmaes.
I broke into a rarely-used airstrip on Xmas day and spent the morning churning around in my Mazda RX-7 - so they do have a great use for crazy stunts in your car away from the roads:)
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Maybe it's you that shouldn't have skipped school, then you could have learnt the basics of grammar and spelling! :)
- Chaz
I had one of these a few months back when they first came out, and I'm the sort of guy who buys into ALL the new gadgets and lives with the bugs. Heck, I buy into the BETAs of all the latest gadgets and live with the bugs.
This phone had 2 good points: The Screen (its gorgeous) and The Keypad (really solid and positive).
Everything else about this phone is junk.
The user interface is almost impossible to figure out - as the reviewer says the thing is like some crazy puzzle with the Select button changing randomly all the time. The interface looks like something from the 80s - except for the Main Menu, pretty much everything is in black and white and text-based, and its obvious to see the Japanese i-Mode roots in this handset.
The SMS was unusable. You had to press a whole series of buttons everytime you wanted to write a message just to switch the T9 input on - it wasn't on by default and there was no way of setting this, that I could find. It doesn't even support receiving concatenated messages (i.e. longer than 160 characters)!! Every phone I've owned in the last 6 years has had this basic feature!
The battery life... ah, the 2 batteries and 2 chargers gave it away when I opened the box. Make a call on this phone and it won't last the day. Most of the battery is probably eaten lighting up the gloriously bright screen!
The "3" services were pretty poor too - nothing you'd actually want to use on a phone as they were mostly too fiddly. The videos were adequate quality once you'd downloaded them, but they would typically take about 1 minute to download a 3 minute clip. You tend to look a fool standing around for a minute waiting to download the video whilst flapping around trying to get a 3G signal.
Most of the UK is NOT covered by a 3G signal. The centre of my city was meant to have complete coverage. Yeah, right. I live and work in the centre and I could only get a signal in one corner of my office tower block - one of the highest points in the city. If it did think there was a 3G signal to be had it would spend minutes flapping about trying to lock on, at which point you couldn't do anything that required the network - i.e. make a call. And there was no way of locking it to 2G, only to 3G.
No real Bluetooth on this phone either - so no hands-free in the car, which means I can't make or receive any calls while I'm driving.
I took mine back within 2 weeks and bought a wonderful Nokia 3650 (well, except for its daft keypad). Upgraded it with a 128Mb MMC, downloaded my favourite apps, videos etc and have been very happy since.
I'll wait for the SonyEricsson Z1010 and then have another go - the calling plans on the 3 network are a great price at the moment because no-one is buying into it.
> Chaz
I totally agree. It is getting pretty hard to find a mobo without sound now.
Most of the time it is impossible to completely disable it, so when I do put a different (better or more feature rich) card in the system it makes getting things like making digital audio output go out of the right SP/DIF a total nightmare.
And I don't want/need sound on any of my servers either, so why should I pay extra, even if it's 20 cents to have something that eats an IRQ?
> ChaZ
Sealand almost counts as a nation under International Law because it is a fixed structure and is more than 1 metre above sea-level at all times. The only issue is that it actually now exists inside the borders of the UK and is no longer in International waters as it was when it was first constructed (the rules changed on how far your borders extend).
But no, an aircraft carrier doesn't count. Nor does an oil rig for instance.
Unless everyone manages to standardise on MPEG4 (the main player in the codec battles), then I suspect we'll end up with loads of proprietary standards being used, depending on which set-top box you have. The only issue with this is storage for the content aggregators who will have to store the movies in all the possible formats to farm out to all the different set-tops.
Microsoft will make a massive push with Windows Media, and rightly-so too - their codec is probably the best right now and includes it's own multi-channel audio codec too. At least they've finally opened it up so that it can be made available on other platforms - before this happened I would have been wary.
And anyway, they've already encoded Terminator 2 which will be available as a WMV file in the new T2 DVD release!
> Chaz
The phone is awesome. I had one of the horrid NEC E606 3G phones for 2 weeks before taking it back and getting this 2.5G device (I upgraded from the 7650).
The screen is nice, the Series 60 user interface is very easy to use - you can easily and quickly get to any function you want. I've fitted a 128Mb MMC into the back and I can now fit full-length movies onto the phone for those moments when you are stuck waiting somewhere with nothing to do. There are also hundreds of apps and games available to download.
The bad things about this phone are the keypad and the "joystick". The joystick isn't as accurate as on other phones I've used (a lot!) and as someone mentioned - sometimes it hits the wrong direction or it hits the centre-click by accident - annoying, but you can learn to be more careful with it. The round keypad is a joke though - it's taken me 2 weeks of use to try and remotely get used to texting on this - if you are a hard-core text user then you need to steer clear of this phone. The keypad + joystick are also crap for playing most gmaes.
I broke into a rarely-used airstrip on Xmas day and spent the morning churning around in my Mazda RX-7 - so they do have a great use for crazy stunts in your car away from the roads :)
(as long as they're "paved", not grass!)
> Chaz
Haha! That's SO funny!
No, it isn't.
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