Well, I'd hate to sum up the review in the title section, but it does serve well as an indication of what I would like to say about this phone.
Firstly it does everything under the sun. It lies somewhere between a PDA and mobile phone, with (maybe unfortunately) the emphasis higher on the PDA functions. To be brief in the disection of it's features (which you can peruse at length on the Orange website...) the SPV incorporates:
Well, there you are! But a list of features gets you no closer to discovering if the thing's actually any good. Luckily, I've had one for quite a while now, so I'm going to tell you that it is an excellent toy, if quirky and also an OK phone.
Firstly, the speakerphone has only ever worked once and that was as a result of me dropping the handset off the side of my bed while making a call. In my clumsy efforts to recover it before I was connected, I stood on it and activated the elusive speakerphone feature. Having rechecked the manual, there is no mention of having to jump on the handset or bounce it off the wall in the course of normal usage, and I would put my success down to good fortune rather than excessive body mass.
Then we have the camera feature... If you are going to buy this phone, then I am sure that this is one of the built-in toys that would bring you to do so. In short, I have two digital cameras. One is on the Orange SPV and the other cost me £39 from Amazon. It's rather unfotunate, but the cheap, nasty 640 x 480 Espion is the superior product in terms of ease of use, speed of deployment and stealth (maximum annoyance for the unwary victim). The orange takes an age to set up. You have to meandour at tedious length through menu after menu until as last you reach the holy grail: the picture editor. Of course you will at this point be required to wait patiently as Bill's invisible army of computer gremlins then bring the whole thing to a dead stop while all the previous photos you have ever taken are opened in thumb-nail form. In short, I think it's a massive oversight that a direct camera function is not included right from the first menu level.
The next con is the involvment of Microsoft in the creation of the software, even though I believe I read somewhere that they stole most of it from the long-suffering near-bankrupt company 'Sendo' who are to say the least Mighty Peaved with the software Big Daddy that is Microsoft and more recently they've taken a legal pot-shot at Orange directly. Anyhoo, where was I? Oh, yeah. Microsoft. Computers. You know where I'm going with this. The sodding thing keeps crashing all the time. It's a bit of a pain to have to do the old Turn off, Turn on thing, but in my long experience in the electronics industry, next to sticking your boot into the offending device, this is the only course of action.
So, this is starting to sound decidedly aweful. Why would you want one at all? Good question, but I think I can field that one... It does work as a phone (a humble start but it has have many little extras that set it aside from the competition). The address book is suberb: in my opinion far superior to any of the competitors. I use mine to keep all my friend's contact details, including all their contact numbers, email addresses, postal addresses and any other notes I might feel the need to save. I don't have to worry about losing the information as on old phones because of the most groovey active Sync feature discussed below. The call history is more reminiscent of a PC feature than a list of the last ten calls made offerd by some phones.
Moving on, Active Sync is a fantastic tool for anyone who wants to save the contents of their address book, emails, messages, etc etc onto a desktop computer. Plug and play! I was genuinely impressed. The cradle for connection to the computer is particularly good. You can charge your phone while you syncronise your stuff. If you don't have a PC (you poor deprived thing), you can Sync with the orange website directly from you phone! Whatdeya think of them apples?
Secure Digital expansion and stereo sound for your MP3 listening pleasure. This is particularly cool since you can pick up a 128M card for buttons now. That'll see you good for about 2 hours of music!
The games are excellent, though I couldn't really be bothered to play them. Not my bag. But for any affictionados, the screen is (as you may have clocked) absolutely huge! For gaming, the powerful processor combined with the huge high resolution screen is really remarkable. These same two features make it possible to save not only video clips, but to download videos from the net and even save them on an SD card to allow them to flow smoothly!
It acts as a voice recorder (useful for recording calls with your mates when they're drunk and playing back to them the next day).
Conclusion. The SPV suffers from a few bugs, hopefully some of which have been ironed out in the recently released SPV E100. Nonetheless, it's damn fine toy and worth a squiz if you can get it for free which I did.
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Advantages: Digital camera/Video Camera, Windows Smartphone 2003 operating system, Bluetooth Disadvantages: Very poor battery life, have to buy SD/MMC card
gangstavince 03.03.2004 (03.03.2004)
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Aug 1st, 2003
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