Had mine for nearly 4 weeks now. After I'd got the fuss out of the way (complaining to Phones4u until they dropped my contract from £40 to £30 a month, with the phone still free), it's been pretty good.
The GPS is fairly abysmal. You'll be pleased to hear TomTom 6 works on it, although I've not managed to get TT6 to use the onboard GPS successfully yet - only the TT dongle. It takes a /long/ time for a cold start, although it seems to track your position fairly well once you're moving.
For the love of god, though, don't press a button whilst it's in use. The backlight likes to turn off, so you hit a button to turn it on, and your position stops being central to the screen - so after a few moments you're looking at where you were a minute ago. Then comes the mad rush, whilst trying to steer one-handed and look away from the road, to find the 'GPS Position' button and hit it with a chubby finger on the first attempt.
Moving on, the camera is bloody good. Great macro, although it doesn't like to focus too closely. I know it can - you see a live preview of what it's focusing on screen as it does it, and it hits a spot of perfect sharpness. However, the actual picture taken is always focused on something behind. You really do need to stick to their distance recommendations.
Sometimes the edge sharpening / colour balance works beautifully (sun behind you, bright day), other times it lacks clarity and gives a nasty purple haze to lots of stuff. However, as long as you don't mind smaller pictures, photos taken at 5mp, and scaled down (with some auto-levels in Photoshop) look absolutely great.
The animated menu thing looks great. Wow. It's slow as hell. You tend to use it a few times, then relegate it for the near-instant traditional menu.
Texting.. takes a fair while to bring up the menu for a new message etc, but strangely opening a received text is perfectly quick. Perhaps the messaging application is already active after receiving an interrupt from the GSM stack?
Mine's with Vodafone. Yes, the VOIP is buggered. No, you're not stuck - get "fring" (which I found out about through el reg), works brilliantly, although you need a strong WiFi signal to get decent clarity. It has its ups and downs though - sometimes everything's robotic.
Pleased to hear from another commenter about the debrand/etc firmware/patches that re-enable the VOIP - be nice to see how it's meant to be!
Yes, biggest blow on this one is the battery life. But a free phone, a cheaper contract than I was on with Orange (and with 4x the texts and 5x the number of minutes, with all voda's passport/stoptheclock etc).. can't complain.
If you're getting this for mobile browsing though, and can't use WiFi (thecloud, etc) leave vodafone alone. Vodafone Live! is absolutely crap. And their video calling? One 4-minute call to a friend cost me £2!
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Good enough
Had mine for nearly 4 weeks now. After I'd got the fuss out of the way (complaining to Phones4u until they dropped my contract from £40 to £30 a month, with the phone still free), it's been pretty good.
The GPS is fairly abysmal. You'll be pleased to hear TomTom 6 works on it, although I've not managed to get TT6 to use the onboard GPS successfully yet - only the TT dongle. It takes a /long/ time for a cold start, although it seems to track your position fairly well once you're moving.
For the love of god, though, don't press a button whilst it's in use. The backlight likes to turn off, so you hit a button to turn it on, and your position stops being central to the screen - so after a few moments you're looking at where you were a minute ago. Then comes the mad rush, whilst trying to steer one-handed and look away from the road, to find the 'GPS Position' button and hit it with a chubby finger on the first attempt.
Moving on, the camera is bloody good. Great macro, although it doesn't like to focus too closely. I know it can - you see a live preview of what it's focusing on screen as it does it, and it hits a spot of perfect sharpness. However, the actual picture taken is always focused on something behind. You really do need to stick to their distance recommendations.
Sometimes the edge sharpening / colour balance works beautifully (sun behind you, bright day), other times it lacks clarity and gives a nasty purple haze to lots of stuff. However, as long as you don't mind smaller pictures, photos taken at 5mp, and scaled down (with some auto-levels in Photoshop) look absolutely great.
The animated menu thing looks great. Wow. It's slow as hell. You tend to use it a few times, then relegate it for the near-instant traditional menu.
Texting.. takes a fair while to bring up the menu for a new message etc, but strangely opening a received text is perfectly quick. Perhaps the messaging application is already active after receiving an interrupt from the GSM stack?
Mine's with Vodafone. Yes, the VOIP is buggered. No, you're not stuck - get "fring" (which I found out about through el reg), works brilliantly, although you need a strong WiFi signal to get decent clarity. It has its ups and downs though - sometimes everything's robotic.
Pleased to hear from another commenter about the debrand/etc firmware/patches that re-enable the VOIP - be nice to see how it's meant to be!
Yes, biggest blow on this one is the battery life. But a free phone, a cheaper contract than I was on with Orange (and with 4x the texts and 5x the number of minutes, with all voda's passport/stoptheclock etc).. can't complain.
If you're getting this for mobile browsing though, and can't use WiFi (thecloud, etc) leave vodafone alone. Vodafone Live! is absolutely crap. And their video calling? One 4-minute call to a friend cost me £2!