Substandard Phone Value

I am about to end my relationship with my SPV phone. I came late to the world of mobile phones but I found my first one so useful that I eventually upgraded on a freebie lock-in contract and wound up with a Nokia 7110. By the time I got it they were old hat, everyone had bought into the "buy the Matrix phone" hype and nearly everyone in the office already had one. What I liked about it was the ease of use of the features and I was suprisingly taken by Wap - especially once I found that you could see most basic sites via Google's wap website.

The pleasure didn't last. I was sorry to find that although the phone has a lot of features most of them are performed only adequately while others are really a bit useless.

As a phone the SPV performs in a perfectly adequate manner. It makes calls, it takes calls, it sends and receives texts and it has a good built in contacts manager that can be synced with outlook on your home computer. Only, the battery life is atrocious. It's flat after a couple of days on standby and flat is something you don't want this phone to be because that's the point where it loses its memory and needs resync to fix it. In terms of phones these days it's chunky and heavy. Fair enough given the features that are packed into it, but it is a consideration. The screen is large, but lengthwise more than widthwise. A flatter, wider phone design would probably have been better.

Another feature the phone boasts is an IR port. When I got the phone I spent a very irritating couple of hours painstakingly porting my numbers from my 7110 to the SPV. The SPV was not very co-operative. I know it was the SPV at fault rather than the 7110 because I often used to go online using a PDA and the 7110 as a modem through its IR port. When someone else tried to beam contact details to me it took a few goes as well.

One feature I really did like on the phone is the ringtones - it will play any wav file at all as a ringtone or a text message alert. I found this a lot of fun to play around with and it made my own phone's ringing very obvious as nobody else was going to have the same sounds. The speaker volume was great as well, no complaints there. On the other hand, the phone ploughs a lot of power into this as a necessity while it throws a lot of the remaining power at the screen's backlight needlessly. It's no wonder the battery life was so poor!

I was aware when I bought it that my phone didn't have a built in camera. I was a little disappointed by this but didn't think too much of it at that point. The camera comes as a separate little module that clips onto the bottom of the phone. Unfortunately it seems like it was something of an afterthough as it required far too many clicks to take a snap after you attached the camera. It was too much hassle. In all the time I had the phone I took about five pictures and sent about 3 of them - one of those was an accidental picture of the inside of my pocket and I still wonder how I managed to navigate through all those screens by pocket alone!

The phone syncs with your computer via a cradle connected to a USB slot. It does this quickly and efficiently once you manage to get the darned thing into the cradle. It would sometimes slip in effortlessly and other times it would jam awkwardly and take a few attempts. On a more positive note, it would charge and sync at the same time rather than requiring a separate connection. It's not all bad news...

Initially the phones were supplied locked not only to Orange as a network provider, but also locked to prevent any non-approved software being installed. There are a few apps out there for sale, but the list isn't exactly vast. There are also some third party add ons but again, not that many of them. In order to install these it was necessary to hack around and unlock the phone yourself. Eventually Orange relented to some degree and let people do this in a more official way, claiming that it was a "developer" feature and the people unlocking their phones were doing it in order to test software they had written. I'm rather dubious as to how many of those unlocking it ever did anything of the sort. Among the software available there are Spectrum and Gameboy emulators but the keys required to use the game ROMs these require were too unfriendly for my tastes and although I downloaded things for novelty value I never used them.

The SPV has been updated - people buying now will be purchasing an SPV E100 or SPV E200. I can't speak to what improvements these bring, I've never seen one. I imagine they are faster, sleeker, generally better, but I don't trust Microsoft in this arena any more. Performing adequately isn't good enough when you promise so much more. I want a gadget that lives up to the hype better than this and I'd recommend anyone hold off on purchasing one until they can have a play and see it in action.