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

[j4.livejournal.com]

FWIW (possibly not much, as this is a different model) I have a Sony Ericsson P900 -- its camera is rubbish and the synchronisation doesn't work at all with a Mac. It's entirely possible that they've sorted some of that out by now, but next time I upgrade I will be unlikely to go for another Sony Ericsson unless they can really convince me.

[broadmeadow.livejournal.com]

I have no idea why phone designers can't make a sensible, nice-looking unit any more.

How about getting one of these add-ons?

[elethiomel.livejournal.com]

I have a V800 and I rather like it. It does everything you could reasonably expect of a phone and lots of other stuff too, is not so tiny that you can lose it behind a packet of fags and has a certain retro stylishness (to my mind).

The camera seems okay. It's only 1.3 Megapixels but it seems pretty okay. I haven't tried video calling yet (I only know one other person with a 3G phone, so haven't had the opportunity) but the general video / audio quality is pretty good.

Positive things: It has the standard Ericsson menu structure / texting etc. which is pretty intuitive and which I like. And yes, the predictive text is about 500 years ahead of Motorola's. I find
Bluetooth is useful, too. Finally, the camera also has an extremely powerful halogen lamp, which is pretty funky.

The only negative thing I can think to say about it is that I don't think it has anywhere near the 270 hours standby time the literature claims - not if you do anything other than leave it on a shelf and don't touch it, anyway. The camera seems to drain the battery pretty fast, too. Even so, you can reasonably expected to get four or five days out of it, so it isn't too bad.

I managed to get the phone free and get 500 anytime any network minutes, 100 texts and 50 mins video calls for £40 per month, so it's well worth it, in my opinion.

[drdoug.livejournal.com]

A good mate of mine has an SE V800 and loves it. I've played around with it and it seems a pretty decent phone. It's probably what I'd get if I was getting a new phone today.

I currently have an SE Z600 which is good. Nokia's interface is better IMO, but the Sony Ericsson one is perfectly usable. Predictive text is good.

The V800 isn't terribly beautiful, but it's less hideous and chunky than most 3G models. If I was going on looks alone I'd get a Motorola V3 Razr.

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

Are you using the most recent version of iSync? I've not had problems syncing with any of a succession of SEs (a t68i, a t610 or my shiny nu s700i), and yours is listed on the compatible devices page..

Oh, aside from all-day events only getting support relatively recently.

btw, Blondie of course :)

[j4.livejournal.com]

AFAIK I'm using the most recent version (I just do the updates when they come through), though to be fair I haven't kept trying to sync the phone every time an update comes through...

I tried following the "how to make your p900 sync with a mac" instructions [PDF] too, and no success, but that's geared towards a slightly earlier version of OS X than I was running by that time.

Maybe will try again, but the phone's falling to bits anyway by now (there's only about 1 square cm of space on the screen where the stylus will still work) so I may well be upgrading soon anyway. Tempted to go all retro & go back to a phone that just makes phone calls. 8-)

[stegzy.livejournal.com]

I was thinking of upgrading to one of these spiffy looking camera phones....

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

Poo. Sorry to hear that.

As for 'just making phone calls' - I was tempted for a while after my t610 died, as I felt I'd made very little use of the features it had beyond those of the t68i. I already had a T105 that came almost for free with the sim card I got when deemigrating back to Australia, but after a month of that as my only phone I was really missing the addressbook and calendar syncing, and missed having a camera all the time too.

I was also getting bored of having to ask Jeanette for addresses - her Siemens S55 had them and none of my phones ever had .. until now :)

[uitlander]

The P900 and the P910 are both Symbian OS phones. The sync problem is because Symbian doesn't currently support use with a mac. I don;t recall whether it was on the release roadmap, but I do remember talking about someone in the SyncML dept about 2 months ago, whose attitude was 'well they dshould go and buy a proper PC is they want to sync' - so I'd guess not anytime soon. Don't think the one venta is considering is a Symbian one.

[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.

[j4.livejournal.com]

Ah okay. Thanks for the clarification! (Though now wondering how shrydar gets it to work...?)

Annoying that they're not planning to fix it, though. Seems particularly foot-shooting of Symbian, too, given that Mac users are probably more likely than most to spend shedloads of money on shiny tech...

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

Seems particularly foot-shooting of Symbian, too

Dunno - what's the increase in development cost in supporting Mac, if Mac were supported, what proportion of total sales would be to Mac users who don't also have a PC, do the math. Symbian have never claimed to be in it other than for the money...

[onebyone.livejournal.com]

The camera seems to drain the battery pretty fast, too.

It's probably writing the images to memory that's drawing a lot of power - flash is quite greedy compared with most other things a phone does. Although, "halogen lamp"?

[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.

[venta.livejournal.com]

btw, Blondie of course :)

Of course :)

[venta.livejournal.com]

Though now wondering how [info]shrydar gets it to work...?

Shydar is a black-belt in geek-fu, and can write machine code with his teeth. Before breakfast.

I suspect his mobile devices are far too scared of him to do anything but sync perfectly.

[venta.livejournal.com]

Well, given that we have a history of liking the same phones, I'll take that as a positive sign :)

[shrydar.livejournal.com]

While it is true that I often write machine code before breakfast (6502 to be specific), I must admit that my phone (the S700i) runs SE's proprietary OS, and thus suffers not from Symbiassitude.

I do seem to have had a particularly good run with sync good behaviour though :)

*thanks venta for the compliment*

[(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.