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9 out of 9 people found this review helpful
4.5 stars
"perfect for consolidating your devices"
Pros: just about everything, mainly, it is the small form factor, with full qwerty keyboard, windows mobile 6, excellent call quality and battery life
Cons: few cons, but no wifi is a bummer. also, no built-in jack for earphones.
Summary: One day, I found myself carrying around a cell phone, a personal PDA, a blackberry from work, and still thinking about buying an mp3 player. The thought of carrying around 4 different gadgets became nauseating, and I realized that, for me, fewer is better (not less, just fewer). This smartphone has done just that for me. I still have my work blackberry, but other than that, it is just this smartphone, and I couldn't be happier.
The cell phone part-- this is probably the most important part to me, since a cell phone is only as good as how well you can talk to and hear other people. The cell phone part works excellently. Others can hear me clearly, and vice versa. Sound volume can go pretty loud if you want, as well as the speaker volume.
The PDA part-- this part also works great. windows mobile 6 comes with everything I need. I can sync outlook calendar, tasks, contacts, and e-mail quite easily. (it does not sync your outlook notes, though). Also, it is easy to transfer files between the smartphone and your computer using activesync. In doing so, some of your files will be slightly modified to work with windows mobile 6's word, excel, powerpoint, and pdf. But almost all features stay intact, and I've had no problems worth noting. The qwerty keyboard is easy to use for me, except for the two soft-keys near the screen-they're a bit too close to the edge. My gripe is that the phone has no WiFi (my previous PDF did). But that's not a huge deal for me, since I get internet access through my work blackberry. A mildly annoying thing I noticed is that, over the time of 1-2 weeks, available program memory will slowly leak / decrease. Turning off and on the phone gets available program memory back to full. I'll probably do this once every 1-2 weeks, so it's not too bad. I suspect this happens to most windows mobile phones, though (I haven't compared).
The mp3 player -- well, this is just windows mobile 6's media player in action. I have to admit, I haven't tried out this feature too much. But windows media player plays recognized video formats and mp3s just fine. Windows media player doesn't recognize many video formats you may be used to, though, such as divx or avi. My big gripe is that the phone has no built-in jack for earphones. You need to connect an adapter to the mini-USB port (comes with the phone), and then plug the earphone into the adapter jack (also, it is a 2.5mm back, not the usual 3.5mm). But fortunately, the phone supports the A2DP bluetooth profile, which lets you use bluetooth headphones with the phone (I haven't tried this feature yet, though).
Battery life works really well for me. On light day--a few phone calls, text messages, listen to a few songs--I still have 50% battery at the end of the day. Even with more heavy use, I still have no problems making it through the day on one charge.
All in all, I now have 3 devices in one, and each part works excellently. My pockets are much lighter-- literally, that is, all at a very reasonable price.
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