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Originally Posted by cervezas
Interesting. What are your experiences so far?
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Well, I returned it when the two weeks were up.
I posted lots of observations at treocentral.com and pdaphonehome.com. But here are a few things...
- The phone app didn't allow for looking up contacts via first letter of first name and first few letters of last name which is something I do all the time on my Treo 650. The voice dialing app worked well but cost extra and isn't something I'd much prefer to do the quick name lookup I just described by hand versus talking to my phone. And voice dialing isn't any special advantage that it has, since you can buy 3rd party apps for that for the Treo as well.
- Switching from portrait to landscape (and back again) felt too slow. You could watch it redraw. Because the phone would automagically do this switch every time you opened and closed the slider, it was a regular annoyance that felt like it was slowing me down in trying to do whatever I needed to do. I'm hearing that this may be improved by a patch to be released soon.
- Screen wasn't as bright as the 650 (few things are). This was a definite problem for in-car usage when you've got a good deal of sunlight. This was compounded by the poor contrast in MS' choice of font/background colors in the phone app (white on royal blue, if memory serves).
- Integration of the joystick into the OS/apps wasn't as good as it could/should be. Some of this was bugs that should get fixed. Other things were poor design decisions that you'd just have to live with.
- The UI felt like it was the typical 240x320 PPC UI on a physically smaller screen. Things you wanted to quickly check at a glance were harder to spot at arms length as compared to the Treo. This was due to the last couple of things I mentioned as well as the use of fonts that were too small in certain scenarios, important status icons that were small and monochrome (e.g., battery meter), pop-up dialogs that weren't finger-friendly for tapping on, and on-screen buttons where determining which button had the focus required squinting your eyes (rather than the bold blue focus ring of the Treo, you had one extra black pixel of border thickness on the button). In short, it still felt too much like a PDA and not enough like a smartphone.
- Horrible method of turning the ringer off/on. I guess I'm spoiled by the Treo's simple switch and I use it often. The PPC-6700 had an awful slider switch which adjusted the volume incrementally on-screen until you eventually got to the silent position.
- No on-screen indication of caps lock or alt mode. I believe this bug is to be fixed soon, but how did that make its way past testing?
- Backwards compatibility with other apps was bad. Lots of apps seemed to have problems with WM5. I wasn't happy with the built-in browser and none of the 3rd party apps worked well with WM5. I'd expect this to be resolved fairly soon, though.
- The mini (micro?) SD format is a definite disadvantage. I already owned a few SD cards, including one 2GB SD card, so I didn't relish the thought of having to scrap those. Plus, the biggest size miniSD card you could get was 1GB (I think a 2GB is now out or coming out, but there's also now 4GB SD cards widely available).
I'm sure I've left out several things. To be sure, it has tons of features and lots of potential, but for day-in day-out usability, it would have been a step backwards for me compared to my Treo.