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- Average user rating: 3.0 stars out of 43 reviews Back to product review
- My rating: 0 stars
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2 out of 2 people found this review helpful
4.0 stars
""Smart" Phone for the average Joe"
Pros: Fit and Finish are sturdy and excellent. Looks great and feels great. Very few hiccups or lags in the software. Good selection of freeware (including GPS!). Clear screen and positive feedback on touch screen. Easy to navigate. Easy to master.
Cons: Battery life is not great. The reception bars read little to no bars in places I usually get 3-4 bars. (but no signal loss or dropped calls) The HTML web browser doesnt fit the screen. It is annoying to have to slide back and forth. Not an iPhone
Summary: I have had it for a day, so this is my initial observation but I have read hundreds of reviews on this product prior to my purchase. I had narrowed my search down to the HTC Touch Pro and the Delve. What finally made my decision was the fact that the Touch has too much that I dont need. My reason for getting a touch screen, because they are cool. All I need to do is check some emails, the weather, and do some casual browsing at work. I dont need word, excell, outlook, and all the other baggage on a Win mobile phone. My wallet doesnt need all that baggage either. Once I got past that, the Delve was the only logical choice (at Alltel). I have already run it through the mill messing with various settings and widgets.
THE SCREEN- its bright and easily readable indoors and out. The touch interface is crisp and very responsive. There are lots of settings for brightness, back light, contrast, and sensitivity. Turning the sensitivity down some makes it much smoother. It flows through screens and is fun to use.
THE SOFTWARE- Everything was easy to set up and install. If you are tech savvy, its a breeze to pic up the gist of this phone. Even if you arent that savvy, it wont be long before youve mastered the Delve.
CALLS- Calls are easy to make with the on screen buttons. You can flick your may through your contacts or type in a name using the on screen keypad.
TEXTING- This is where it gets interesting. There are several different entry methods. The classic dial pad, a QWERTY keyboard, and two types of hand witting applications. I have never liked the dial pad text input even a regular phone so I havent messed with the Delves. The QWERTY is my favorite. The buttons are small, but with some practice ans patience its not hard to text at all. The vibrating feedback helps a lot to know you have actually pushed a button. I like that a lot. If you do master it, you will find that you are texting faster than the Delve can keep up. I have outrun the text on the screen several times. The delve has yet to disappoint though. It takes a second, but it slaps down all the letters and words it was behind on. I wish there was a back button that didnt delete as it went. when you see that mistake in the middle of the text its hard to touch the curor in the exact right spot. As for the handwriting recognition. You can have it. It drove me nuts. It works, but I dont care for it.
WEB BROWSER-- Full HTML pages. Loads up pretty fast and is clear and crisp. Sometimes you have to magnify the screen to be able to click on the areas you want to select, but overall not a bad navigation experience. I dont like having to swipe back and forth to read a sentence or view the whole page, but it beats that stupid mobile web page hands down. My Yahoo takes several page loads to settle down so that I can navigate it, but it shows everything I need and works flawlessly.
MUSIC PLAYER- It looks like a Win 95 media player skin but works reasonably well. It aint no iPod but it plays the music and is manageable. I like the nuTsie widget. Its basically a free online radio station that allows you to stream in your own playlists from your iTunes. Speaker quality is....ehhhhh. Its a phone, not an iPod. However, if you plug in the 3.5mm(regular headphones!!) headphone jack you can bob along with decent playback quality. Again, its not an iPod. The provided headphones also double as a hands free microphone.
BOTTOM LINE-- Its 330 in the morning and im tired. The bottom line is this. If you dont need all the microsft headache of sync'ing and the huge software packages that come with typical touchscreen/smart phones then this may be for you. The software is not designed for the office worker. Its meant to be a fun phone to play with and enjoy, and to look cool. It does everything its designed to do and does it well. If you dont want the the Win mobile phone, your gonna have to take some sacrifices in whats available on this phone. For me, the ability to own a touch screen phone for 40 bucks after rebate is worth a few lags and backspaces. Keep a charger or spare battery handy, and go have fun. Thats what Im doing!
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