Kevin L from MTekk gives us his take on a different offering in the mobile arena ...As an IT Manager, I was always looking for a way to make life easier for myself. And I get to play with all the cool toys. Somehow, I missed the whole PDA craze – no Palm, no iPaq, nothing. However, I have always had the latest mobile phones – 5110 in 1997, 7110 in 1999, 6110 in 2001. I also carry two phones at all times – one for personal and another for work, being the 24-hour contact.

Inconsistencies

The phone does have its flaws, most in they way you expect things to be done (Nokia conditioning, I like to call it).

With a large 16k colour touch screen rather than traditional buttons, you have to get used to pressing with a fingernail or the stylus rather than memory mapping the keys to “type” on a button phone. This makes typing nigh on impossible in the car – a Good Thing. There is a standard roman keyboard switchable to a remarkably good software handwriting recognition block, but unfortunately the keyboard/block doesn’t come up by default when a field is selected – you have to press tiny a little symbol at the bottom of the screen. There is little clutter of the main screen, with icons at both the top and bottom of the main area, but sometimes this is a bad point, as a slight tap miscalculation can send you to a different app or bring up useless information.

Phone numbers are eneterd by a virtual keypad, again a conditioning thing, but is actually very accurate and resiliant to “smeared numbers”. There is also predictive text in every field, which alleviates the need for pinpoint navigation, a great feature. On the physical button side, there is a directional pad and select button, which the more you use, the easier the phone is to handle. It takes a while to remember what they do in each apps context though. Conditioning. Standard hang up and answer buttons do much the same as Nokias, including bringing up last calls and the keypad, and make the phone side of thing VERY easy to get used to. Also, there is a dedicated voice recognition dialing button, master volume and speakerphone buttons, a default menu button, a useless second button only used in games, and a fairly useless “default browser page” button that will only be useful if they release more relevant content or make browsing unlimited.

The signal strength leaves a little to be desired in some situations. Being 3G, it switches intelligently between 2G (just voice, rarely seen), 2.5G (email and MMS work, common in “non-3G” areas) and 3G (video calls can be made. Each “band” is higher than the ones below – e.g. 1 coverage bar of 3G is the same as “6/5” of 2.5G. However, as the phone drops from 3G to 2.5G, you do experience dropped calls. I work in a bad building for mobile phones generally (all 4 networks suck there) and I’d say I get maybe 10% more dropped calls. Remember, I have used all networks and it is NOT much worse, but still noticeable.

There have been technical issues. Random rebooting, odd clicking noises if a battery goes totally flat, a single SMS not being able to be sent to a single number at seemingly random intervals. Their tech support is totally outsourced to India – “Michael” or “Andrew” will answer your call and he will have a noticably thick accent. That means that they have great understanding of your phone and the devices sitting in front of them, but if you stump them, as I did on a number of occasions, they ask you to reboot your phone, and you have to wait for them to escalate it to a more Australian Level 2 support team – at least ½ an hour wait. Annoying, but bearable.

Battery life is quite short. I have read horror stories of <2 days for the A920, but mine is a solid 3 days unless I am emailing like a bandit. YMMV, but I am actually quite happy – the 2nd battery and multiple chargers really help.

Finally, there are few people on 3. Big promotion, and more and more people will move to it, but unless you physically force people to join, DO NOT buy this phone expecting to video chat hot babes every day. They just don’t have the customer base – yet. Buy it for the pricing and features.