Review: Motorola Backflip

Just recently my beloved Nokia e66 passed away in a freak water related accident (read: it fell in the loo). I was far enough through my contract that I was able to update to the Backflip. I'd been looking at Android mobile phones for a while now to see if I could find one that would be suitable for what I do and the Backflip looked like it fit the bill. I want a phone that does the following:

• email
• texting
• simple games
• WiFi
• good application support

The Backflip specs didn't fill me with excitement initially but it does have something I really like - a full QWERTY keyboard. Although the onscreen keyboard of the device is pretty good and the screen is big enough I can drive it easily, I like the tactile feedback of real keys. My iPhone drives me crazy periodically with typing difficulties and so the Backflip came into it's own with this.

Prior to purchasing the Backflip I noted that there were quite a few reviews out there that paid out on the phone for it's lack of application support - that it wasn't able to deploy 3rd party apps and you were restricted to Motorola applications that work with it's specialised user interface called MotoBlur. I found this to be inaccurate and that you are able to install 3rd party apps, without any fancy hacking or anything else. The number of apps available is immense and certainly as large as the Apple iTunes store. Motoblur is a specialised interface designed by Motorola and it is this which is currently holding the Backflip at Android 1.5. Apparently in the next quarter it's designed to be upgraded to Android 2.1.

The phone is very usable - as both a phone (!) and as a mobile email/texting device. I don't use Facebook or Twitter or MySpace so I don't have all the feeds coming in - but that's what this device is geared for. It's supposed to be able to keep you up to date with all the trivia of your friends' lives and so forth. For me, that just makes life more complex and kills your battery! After a full days use of email/text and voice calls, I still have 70% battery life at the end of the day. Given that the Backflip as a USB port it's easy to charge it from laptop or desktop PCs. I like the flip of the keyboard too - it's a nice little keyboard to use and provides reasonable tactile feedback. The screen flip works well too and the screen itself is bright and easy to read.

Although the phone is sometimes a bit slow to do things this is generally because I'll leave a lot of apps open. The memory management is pretty good though and sorts itself out relatively quickly. I use a task management app to clean the RAM up periodically and get it working happily again.

As a phone, the speaker is clear and it generally has good reception. It's a light phone and it's comfortable on the ear when I'm in a call. Even one call lasting 45 minutes didn't leave me with a numb ear as sometimes happens with my iPhone.

All in all I find the Backflip to be a good phone and I'm happy to have it. I'm very much looking forward to the upgrade to Android 2.1 which should be soon.

Review: Palm Treo Pro

As I mentioned in my previous post, I use a Palm Treo Pro for work purposes. I chose this phone for a very specific reason: we use an Alcatel/Lucent phone system and there are various integration technologies available (for both Windows Mobile and the Nokia Symbian OS) that I want to test and use in a production environment.

Having used the Treo 750 to great effect in my previous job, I hoped the new iteration would prove just as useful. Unfortunately I find this phone to be cumbersome and annoying at times - I will elaborate of course.

Visually the Treo Pro is slimmer and slightly smaller than the Treo 750 which is nice - the 750 was a pocketful by itself, whereas the Pro is slim enough to squeeze in with my keys. The screen is large and well lit and accuracy with the stylus has not been an issue. The touch screen is sensitive but not overly so and is quite responsive to the fingernail tap. Palm have added a wireless on/off switch on the side which I find to be redundant (you may not). I don't use the phone on our wireless network enough yet to find it to be wonderfully handy.

OK, here's the roundup:

Pros:

• Windows Mobile operating system allows for excellent integration with Microsoft products
• Browser is excellent
• Many different methods of connectivity - bluetooth, 802.11 etc
• Good call quality
• Multimedia playback is pretty good
• Threaded SMS/MMS - I loved this feature on the 750 and continue to love it on this device

Cons:

• Crappy message tones (this can be fixed I know)
• Phone has locked up several times and requires the battery to be removed to get it to work again
• Keys on the QWERTY keyboard are hard to use quickly and easily
• Unlocking the phone during a call to use handsfree is something I'm yet to master
• Battery life is not impressive
• Black case gets grubby looking quite quickly
• Ringtones are soft, even when turned up to maximum value

All in all, it's quite reasonable, apart from my gripes above. I use it quite extensively to log work, fiddle with my calendar and email and it is adequate for all of those things. I think that some of the issues are to be placed at the operating system's door rather than the Palm hardware. It does seem to be reasonable hardware and the phone is much more compact than it's predecessor. I look forward to updating this review once I play with more of the features it has and the capabilities it has with the excellent Alcatel/Lucent phone system we have. Stay tuned!

Review: Nokia e66

Recently my beloved e61i perished in an unfortunate washing basin related accident. I was upset, more so because it was an expensive phone and only 15 months into a 24 month contract. Fortunately my SD card was undamaged and my photos and assorted other junk was safe - whew!

On to the topic of buying a new phone - firstly I had a list of requirements that it needed to match. The e61i provided email, wireless G networking and many other very nice features. I looked, therefore, at either the e71 - of which I've had one, or the e66 - the slide feature of which put me off a little bit. Having had an e71 for a short while as a work phone, I knew how lovely they were and enjoyed using one immensely. The full QWERTY keyboard was very nice and I liked it a lot. I was thinking of a smaller phone though - the e71, like it's predecessor was quite wide and hard to slip into a narrow pocket. So I investigated the e66. Here is a list of things I liked and don't like about the phone:

Likes:

• The screen is large and lovely - the back light is bright and very easy to read. The swivel is excellent, although I note sometimes when I pick it up if I grab it on a funny angle it swivels on me and takes a second to adjust
• keys are much better to use than on other slide models I've had before (N80 and the 6120).
• The slide has an excellent feel
• Aesthetically it's a nice looking phone - the grey steel look is very nice and the phone is quite compact and neat with the screen taking up nearly all the available acreage on the front. The keys on the upper part of the phone are back lit when in use and dark when idle and this is nice too.
• Good call quality
• Reasonable battery life - better than the e61i but not quite as impressive as the e71 (although that could be my faulty memory)
• video / music replay is very good, the swivel feature is excellent for watching the various MMS clips I get
• connection to the GSM/3G network is quite reasonable
• 802.11 wireless connection works quickly and easily
• Email set up is an absolute dream - I put in my Gmail address, user name and password and it did the rest for me! It set it up as an IMAP connection and even recognised my Google Application based domain for email as similar to my Gmail account. Excellent!
• Speaker is quite good, even when on hands free

The bad:

• Battery life, while good, is not as good as I expected
• I have an unfortunate tendency to answer/hang up on people when I pull it out of the leather pouch it comes with - I'm not sure if this is bad design of where the lanyard connects or my clumsiness, or a combination of the two but it has happened on several occasions
• The swivel is occasionally touchier than I would like.

Overall I'm finding this to be an excellent phone after a month of usage and recommend it to Enterprise users if the e71 is too bulky. I read a lot of email on this phone, but reply to very little so the lack of a QWERTY keyboard is not too much of a worry for me. I can still send emails / texts on it very quickly and find that doing it one handed is a *lot* easier than when doing it on the e61i/e71. It's compact, the slide feels firm and solid unlike the N80 I once had and it hasn't crashed on my yet. 

And it's also interesting to note that the price for the e61i was very expensive - about $1000 when I bought it, and the e66 (and the e71 for that matter) are around the $550 mark. Phones have certainly gotten cheaper.

I also use a Palm Treo Pro for work and the comparison between the phone is quite marked. I'll review the Pro in another post, but I will touch on a few points here that are worthy of note. Both phones are capable of email/802.11 wireless/viewing lots of things etc. The e66 is smaller, has a much more solid feel to it and is more reliable than the Pro has proven to be thus far. Not only that, I think the only thing that makes the Pro more useful to me is the touch screen and the integration I have with various Microsoft products that Nokia still needs to do some work on. At any rate, stay tuned for the review of the Pro!

Review: Treo 750

Recently my JasJam decided (after it's 5th graceless crash to the ground) that it would only work under certain conditions. These include the 4th blue moon of the year, only on days starting with X and the like. You get the picture. Adios JasJam.

So being phoneless is no fun (although very quiet :-) ) Being a geek and needing email access and the like, but refusing to have a crackberry, I opted to have a bit of a look at the Treo 750. Compact, nice weight, nice screen and the keys feel good. Okey dokey. So being a high powered manager I demand and receive one immediately (ahh sweet sweet power). I've been using it for a couple of months now and here are my thoughts:

Windows Mobile 6 - much nicer than 5. Speedy and hangs up in a quick manner. I like that. Interface is nice, the green is very pretty and it has some useful functions. These things I like. Very easy to set up mail and stuff and I like the way it handles text messages using threading. Aye, that's pretty. I *still* don't like that you can't have an MP3 for the alarm tone. Come on! It's 2008 - catch up Microsoft!

Stylus - cunningly placed, nice weight, unlikely to get lost in the pocket and works well. I like it.

Keypad - I like the keypad too, although the buttons are small and I sometimes hit the wrong ones when I'm not paying enough attention they have a lovely tactile response to them.

Generally it's a good device. It hasn't crashed yet on me and it holds a good charge given I use it extensively throughout the workday. I can get probably 3 days of battery life out of it which is great. It's weight, shape and size are pleasing also. In general I feel this device to be a better one than the JasJam was. It has mini-SD memory (bit of a change from micro like everything else). I promptly put a 2GB card in there and it works great.

It lacks a front camera for video calls (but I never make video calls so who cares). Also, the camera that's built in has poor resolution and the like but again, that isn't why I got it. It does a reasonable job and that's really all I care about. Sound and voice quality are fine, dialling easy.

So I'm quite happy with it. It's not quite as good as my e61 though on calls and the like, but is smaller and easier to deal with than the e61. So in conclusion - not a bad bit of kit at all.

Windows Mobile 6 Review

I've just updated my i-Mate JasJam to Windows Mobile 6. Although I was initially skeptical about this, I had to do it, basically. My JasJam checks my email continuously throughout the day, and when I'm on a call, the data check drops the sound for the call which is a major inconvenience. So I looked into some updates - via the Telstra JasJam site and found that Windows Mobile 6 was a free upgrade.

Being an early adopter of technology I decided to give it a whirl (even though it's been out for a while). During the update things went slowly. At one point I thought I'd fried my JasJam, a moment that made me decidedly uneasy. It came back to life however, and things progressed from there. I've been using it for about 14 days now and here are my impressions:

• wireless connectivity (802.11) is much better and setting up connections is easy and relatively fool proof.
• bluetooth seems more reliable
• no more sound drop outs during calls and while phone is checking email (yay!)
• I like the look of the new interface - pretty!
• Speed of dialling is faster. Previously the onscreen keys took a moment to register a press - now it's very quick.
• hanging up happens immediately. Previously, I had to press the "End" or red phone key several times until the phone would drop the call. Annoying if you say things after a call you don't want the caller to hear (oops!)
• Email interaction with the server is smoother and runs without any errors.

Overall, I'm quite happy with the improved interface. I note that it has it's own "Windows Update" built in. It also has updated versions of the various mobile office applications - Outlook, Word, Excel for example.

Most importantly it still has the block breaker game - my usual boredom killer.

OK, so here are my gripes:

• the alarm tone still has to be a wav file - large, unwieldy files that rarely seem to work
• the phone has hung a couple of times
• battery life seems to have decreased

All in all, not a bad update and fairly straightforward to implement. Works well with both Vista and XP. I should also note that the use of the phone as a modem is much improved. Well worth the time and effort to do.