Comments on: QOTD: the big let down?

By: Soul_Est

Soul_Est — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 11:30:45 +0000

My current smartphone the HTC Touch. Loved it when I first got it but then I saw it’s limitations which mainly the lack of buttons, the small low-res 2.8″ QVGA touchscreen and the UI for Windows CE 5.2.xxxxx (Windows Mobile 6.x) which should have been replaced by CE 6.2 (and a better shell) by now. Will wait for next year’s phones…

By: Joel

Joel — Sun, 05 Jul 2009 04:04:37 +0000

HTC phones of late… Diamond in particular.. WHY oh WHY can’t HTC make a phone with a decent battery life… They can’t really blaim WinMo as Samsung with the i780 and Omnia seem to be able to do OK… not as good as the e71, but still FAR better than HTC can manage…

By: Donald

Donald — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:20:49 +0000

The T-Mobile Wing. So-So phone, acceptable PDA, but so memory constrained as to be frustrating. Screen totally unreadable outside. Keyboard was okay but some keys too close to each other and always pressing soft keys by mistake. But the screen and memory were the biggest flaws.

By: Andrew

Andrew — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:21:02 +0000

I agree with Philippa – I got a Palm Centro off ebay for a really good price (because the owner had listed it badly) and I was totally gutted when I discovered that they keyboard was too small for me to use effectively.

I also got a Treo Pro through work – looks as sexy as hell but Windows Mobile is such a pile of rubbish. It’s like Windows 3.0 (3.1 if I’m generous).

Andrew

By: vboelema

vboelema — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:46:36 +0000

My biggest dissapointment was probably when I temporarily moved from my Psion 5mx to a Palm 505 whilst it was being fixed. Being used to a mini computer in my hands, suddenly I was faced with something which couldn’t even make a document, you had to sync them via Documents To Go, which was pathetic at the time (compared to what I was used to!) But it did grow on me.

I was happy as Larry with my Treo 600. But before long I started having reception problems, and in the end it became useless as a phone, but good for as a pda with a data connection. It ended up being quite a dissapointment in the long run!

By: Philippa

Philippa — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 11:56:53 +0000

The lifedrive should have been the forerunner of the ipod touch. Instead it was a disaster unless modded. Such a shame Palm couldn’t get it right.

By: murrayalex

murrayalex — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:50:08 +0000

T-Mobile Vario 3, the small one with no keyboard. Dreadful. Sony P1 was beyond poor. LifeDrive, which I have modded by replacing HD with a CF Card and assigning 256mb to internal RAM (ROM?), is quick and reliable and is now the best Palm PDA I have ever used….honest!!

By: gavinfabl

gavinfabl — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:46:59 +0000

Every smartphone I have owned to date apart from the Nokia e71. Quite simply none of the other phones had a battery life, whereas the e71 is smart as it last no matter how hard you use it has 2 days use, and upto a week with moderate use. I never need to charge it overnight, just a quick 10 min charge every other day!

By: lazyboy

lazyboy — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:36:17 +0000

Treo line in general.

By: jah

jah — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:24:26 +0000

Only the Nokia 9300, as it was much smaller than I expected. Otherwise I have been lucky in that most of my purchases have been good. On the PDA front, the Lifedrive was a disappointment.

By: Mike

Mike — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:11:57 +0000

Toshiba G900. OK PDA. Rubbish phone.

By: Statto

Statto — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:40:04 +0000

To recap, my smartphones have been (in order of purchase) Treo 650, Treo 689, HTC S710, Centro and iPhone.

None of them have been diappointing overall, they all met my expecations (and often exceeded them), each doing a lot well, and each having their own chinks in their armour. It would be hard to judge any one the most disappointing, as I generally don’t buy on impulse, so have researched (via excellent sites like this) real user experiences of devices before I get them.

But if I have to , the S710 would have to be the one that’s “more disappointing than the others” and that’s almost entirely down to the WM interface which is far less intuitive (to me) than either Palm’s OS or the iPhone and perhaps the slide out keyboard which I found far harder to use comfortably than a front mounted or virtual keyboard.

Having said that, if I wasn’t a seasoned smartphone user and someone had given me an S710, or even if it had been my first SM, I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have been diappointed with it.

By: Philippa

Philippa — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:17:23 +0000

Palm Centro, just can’t type on the thing.

By: DavidGreen

DavidGreen — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:57:01 +0000

On a side note, in regards to Peter’s, I remember when I had just bought my Palm T5, and the Lifedrive was announced, I was so disappointed that I had missed the new model. And then soon after, I began to read about the problems, and realised that the Palm T5 had been a better investment after all.

But for me, when I finally retired my T5, and decided to go the WinMob route, I acquired an HTC Touch, and I was so disappointed in the unit’s performance when compared to the T5, although hardly surprising given the CPU clock speed was less than half, and running Windoze to boot.

Luckily after a year, I was able to dump that and return to Palm, but only a Centro at this stage, Pre is a little out of reach right now. Maybe a Pre 2…

By: Peter

Peter — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:21:27 +0000

Lifedrive.
Slow, screen problems galore, and only 4gb HDD, when 2GB SD cards already existed (and more to the point, so did much larger HDD’s of the same form factor.
I still think they could have had a winner there, if they’d just made a bit more effort, it could have been a business man’s ipod of choice?