Hanging on the telephone

[venta]

My mobile phone is beginning to disintegrate - if you ring me up, and you can hear me but I don't be able to hear you, then don't worry. This is currently one of its normal modes of operation. Some of the keys stick, and it crashes occasionally.

Yesterday I ran Vodafone to see what they might offer me as an upgrade. I can have another Motorola (no thanks, I'd rather use some tin cans and a bit of string), a Sharp (plausible) or the one I'm currently favouring, a Sony Ericsson V800.

Has anyone out there got a V800, or used one in anger ? Got anything to say about it ?

It seems to satisfy my major requirements, ie it's clamshell, it should function as a modem, it has an infrared port (woo, wasn't expecting that one), and it appears to make calls and send messages. I might like the buttons to be bigger (there's all that space, why make them so damn small!?) and I've heard reports from one user that the camera isn't nearly as good as you'd expect for 1.3 megapixel. The phone itself is pretty ugly, but then I think that about most phones - I have no idea why phone designers can't make a sensible, nice-looking unit any more.

I'd like to know if the V800's PC synchronisation stuff is any cop. And indeed whether it would actually do what it says (unlike my current phone, which doesn't do what it says.)

My memories of my last Sony Ericsson phone suggest that the predictive text should be competent (unlike the prediction on my current Motorola which sucks donkeys). The games stuff, downloadable ringtones, blah de blah de blah I don't give a flying stuff about.

Comments

[uitlander]

Interesting. I've ordered a 'free' upgrade on my el cheap< vodafone tariff for a [wait for it]..... Motorola V550.... so what was wrong with yours?

I had a sharp GX10, which was a bit too big, and had a very nasty, buggy OS (for example, you can't fully delete entries from the phone book, and a 'marketing' MMS message vodafone sent me 3 months ago refues to be deleted and permanently indicates I have a new message waiting. My advice is avoid Sharp.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Hmm. The only Sharp I've ever met (a GX30, I think) seems rather nice, and I've never heard its human complain of bugginess.

so what was wrong with yours?

OK, I have to concede I have a historical (and hysterical) distrust of Motorola after encountering my Dad's first phone. It was a no-features calls-and-sms-only affair, and I accused my Dad of being dim for not being able to work out how to send an sms. Turned out he was right, and it was bloody hard to find, and the interface a real pain when you did find it.

So I was predisposed not to like the Motorola I got. It's a V525, so any comments may not apply to yours. (I think leathellin had a V550 at some point if she's listening).

Firstly, the predictive text is terrible. I type reasonably fast, and it just can't keep up with me. The pattern matching on longer words is also dreadful - it decides early on what it thinks your beginning of your word is, then if it turns out to be wrong sticks with the beginning and just adds on random letters at the end. It also seems to prefer words that don't exist to words that do.

I also have random odd messages - a few sent or received sms's have refused to display (you can delete them), and it handles blank messages badly. It features a strange "SMS chat" protocol which gets hopelessly confused and stuffs up messages if anyone sends you an sms with pointy-bracket characters in it.

The call volume is unreliable. The camera isn't very good (it's only a fraction of a megapixel, which is fair enough for its time, but it's worse than other comparable cameras I've used).

To access the address book you can only jump to the first entry for that letter, and scroll down. I'm used to the idea that it you type in U-I-T... it'll get you there quite quickly, but no, I have to jump to the first U entry and scroll through. My previous phone would also have had an entry for Uitlander, and when I got there I could choose whether I wanted your mobile, your landline, etc. This phone displays each as a separate entry (with a symbol to identify them) meaning that there are even more entries to scroll through.

The phone has two menu buttons (one on the right, one on the left). The right one is something positive, depending on context - send/ok/yes - and the left one is something negative - cancel/delete/no. Most of the time. For a very few functions they swap round, and this is infuriating.

And it has a very sticky-out arial which digs in your leg if you keep your phone in your jeans pocket.

[(Anonymous)]

*nods* I'll see how it goes - it arrived today and is now fully charged... so its time to experiment with ring tones and see if the nice not-particularly-obtrusive sounds I'd like to use work as MP3s (and also whether I can transfer stuff by bluetooth onto it. I only really use my phone for SMS & voice, so the cameras and stuff are just unecessary gubbins. The phone book sounds much like the one on the GX10, so I'm used to that, although I've already established that I can actually delete entries now - which seems like a minor miracle ATM. I'm sure I'll grow to dislike it soon enough, and as it will be living in my jeans pocket I'll see how much damage the aerial does to my leg.