December 11, 2004
Orange SPV C500 / HTC Typhoon
Shockingly poor phone. Is this the best that the most successful company in the history of the world can do? Maybe it's just because I spent a few years in the land of the mobile phone where design is so superior it's not even funny. Leave out that they sent emails not SMS or MMS, even the texting software I used to have, which wasn't predictive, was better than the turd that some developer crouched down and dropped into my phone.
Hard to use joystick
Menus and options are selected and navigated using a flat four-way joystick, with a centre-click for select. Centre-clicking isn't difficult, but when my hands are cold (and it is December, which means cold in London) it's easy to hit slightly in the wrong place and go up before clicking. With a phone as slow as this one, this can be incredibly frustrating. It leads to putting the wrong word in when writing texts, it leads to choosing the wrong program to start, and it leads to a whole world of related pain. Stylus! Please!
Inconsistent UI
The phone has two pointless buttons: Home and Back. They probably thought it was a really good idea to have one click to go home, but it's not. You can press the Back button a few times, or if they had been clever tie it holding down the back button in order to do that. Or at least you could have done that if the UI was consistent. In fact it seems that it's up to the apps what they do with the buttons on the phone. The camera application will only quit if you press the Hangup button! You can't even cancel though the menu!
Slow boot
This is simply wrong: it takes over a minute between me pressing the power button and my phone being usable as a sort of rubbish PDA, and then an arbitrarily long time to recognise the network it's on and be actually ready to use as a phone. A minute never seemed so long before I spent one staring at Windows Mobile
.
Crashes
Another one that's simply wrong: it's a phone. It crashes. I'm pretty sure that my parents' phone doesn't crash, possibly because it's made of bakelite and fixed to the wall with rusty iron screws, but the idea is there. Make a phone which doesn't crash. If it crashes, fix it and then sell it. A phone that periodically requires me to take the battery out and wait that painful minute before I can use it again doesn't deserve an owner.
Slow software
Actually, I don't know if this is the software's fault or the phone's, but the experience is slow. My friend has a Palm Treo 600 (he loves it) and his mapping software flies around. He uses his stylus and just drags the map around. I have to click up, down, left or right on the stupid little joystick in order to move around the map. And whereas the mapping software he uses is an image of a streetmap, mine is a bloody vector image, with only the major roads on it, and only some of them labelled with names. It's basically fucking useless. I tried to use it to find somewhere in Soho, in the cold December rain. In less than the time it takes to boot I called my friend with an A-Z and he told me where to go.
Button placement
This is another simple, simple, simple cock-up. There are two buttons for adjusting the earpiece volume. Never mind that they don't work very well and that the earpiece volume goes up in about 4 steps and so could be easily managed with one button, the problem here is that you have to press them hard, which means bracing against the opposite side of the phone, where the camera is. So, while you are in a noisy call, you adjust the earpiece volume and nine times out of ten start the camera. If you recall, you can't stop the camera app in order to check your calendar or contacts without pressing the hangup button, with the predictable effect of hanging up.
Texting software
I have so many complaints about the texting software, I'll see if I can remember them all.
- The built-in dictionary doesn't include capitalised words. When would I ever want to write
elizabeth
? If you can answer that, how about how frequently? How often would I write i
vs. I
?
- The user dictionary does remember capitalised words, so if I add a word at the start of a sentence which shouldn't always be capitalised, I have to either
- add it uncapitalised, delete the subsequently inserted word, reset the initial-caps in the texting software and type the word again, but at least this time predictively, or
- add the word capitalised, and then live with it capitalised in my dictionary forever (I haven't found out how to edit the user dictionary if it's possible) which is a pain because you can't even then add a non-capitalised version of the same word!
- When you finish a sentence with a period, it switches to initial-caps for the next word. Great! If you write a word and delete it, it doesn't remember the initial-caps. Not so great!
- If you use
...
it thinks for some reason that you want initial caps on the next word. That would be 4 periods, if you don't have an ellipsis character. Bizarrely it has some words in the built-in dictionary for 3 presses of the punctuation key, such as :-) and :-* and so on, but you can't add any new ones for 4 or more punctuation key presses.
- Let's say you're sending a text to multiple recipients, but you decide after entering a few contacts that you don't want the first one after all. You naturally scroll back to the end of the first contact and hold down the back button (which should take you back to where you were before, but has been repurposed into a delete key here) because holding down the back button should delete to the beginning of the line. Except here it deletes the whole set of contacts! Undo? No such luck. You can't expect undo on a phone which doesn't even have text selection, copy and paste!
- If you insert a word in the text, it adds a space after the word irrespective of whether one already exists or not, leaving me with two spaces. I thought it was supposed to be a
Smartphone
.
- The phone, while managing to separately store useless meta-data like the name and phone number of the person who sent you a message, keeps no record of whether you've replied or not! There's no idea of a conversation or thread in the texting software either - you have to remember everything. I thought it was the PDA that was supposed to remember stuff for you...
Old phone numbers in texts/calls
This is clearly a design decision, but a total misfeature. When the phone logs a call, it stores the caller and number independently of your contacts list. This means if someone calls you and you save the number, the number still shows up without the name in your Call History. Why didn't they attach it to the Contacts database?
Finish
OK, maybe not such a massive problem, but I've had my phone only a few months and the silver is worn off every protruding edge. It just looks shabby now.
Camera
Oh, and the camera is absolutely useless for anything other than pretending to take photographs. And it has no digital zoom unless you first set the resolution lower! So if you are in 640x480, which is your only hope of capturing any detail whatsover, you can't just zoom the middle of the picture. First you've got to work out how to change the resolution (hint - it's multiple non-obvious clicks) and then you can zoom. But don't forget to switch the resolution back when you've finished, or next time you whip out your camera phone to capture some featureless blob you'll end up with a featureless blob at a resolution so low even your mum knows it sucks.
Can't send contacts
Hello?! Mat texts me to ask about dinner, and also asks me to send him Clare's contact details so he can phone her if he's going to be late. Guess what? I can't! There is no function to insert data from your contact list into the SMS! Or even into an email! It's pretty basic functionality that my 1 yen phone from 3 years ago had! Convert to vcard and make an attachment! Should be even easier to just copy someone's phone number or email address or birthday or whatever piece of data you like into an SMS!
Deleting files
Sooner of later you are going to run out of space, and the phone will, from this point on, repeatedly and annoyingly remind you of this. God help you if you're writing a text message at the time because you can't postpone your message until you've deleted some of your files. Luckily, due to the appalling industrial design you've probably got a whole boatload of completely black camera images you didn't even know you had taken. I had about 30. What's the best place to free up space? The File Manager! You can decide exactly what to delete, rather than be stuck deleting only images or only sounds. Except to delete an image in File Manager, you need to press the following:
- Start
- 9
- 9
- 9
- 4
- 3
- <Navigate to the My Documents/My Photos folder> (several more clicks)
- <Choose image and click. Be careful not to press up accidentally!>
- [Internet Explorer loads and displays the photo] Back
- Menu
- 7
- OK
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