Toshiba Portege G710

I purchased a new Toshiba Portege 710 under VDA GPS(Vodafone) branding in Germany for about 100 Euro, and I must say that in my opinion the device has few, if any, competitors for the price, but I discovered a few drawbacks which I found more or less disappointing:

1) The battery life is really poor compared to a budget-class mobile phone I previously had. I've been using the phone for 3 weeks only, but the battery runs from fully charged ...
...minutes of talking. One of my intentions was to use the phone as a pocket e-book reader, but as I see reading at "bright" highlight level discharges the battery completely very quickly.
Strangely enough to me, the phone is losing datetime settings when the battery runs flat, so unless you charge it regularly you'll have to reset system time over and over again... :((

2) Windows Mobile 6 is OK- but because it is a Standard ... more

I purchased a new Toshiba Portege 710 under VDA GPS(Vodafone) branding in Germany for about 100 Euro, and I must say that in my opinion the device has few, if any, competitors for the price, but I discovered a few drawbacks which I found more or less disappointing:

1) The battery life is really poor compared to a budget-class mobile phone I previously had. I've been using the phone for 3 weeks only, but the battery runs from fully charged to flat after 2 days of stand-by mode plus 15-20 minutes of talking. One of my intentions was to use the phone as a pocket e-book reader, but as I see reading at "bright" highlight level discharges the battery completely very quickly.
Strangely enough to me, the phone is losing datetime settings when the battery runs flat, so unless you charge it regularly you'll have to reset system time over and over again... :((

2) Windows Mobile 6 is OK- but because it is a Standard edition and there is no touch-screen, you cannot use touchscreen keyboard software as in Pro version, and it might take some time and $$$ to find software for additional language support(In my case, I need Russian while my Windows version does not support it). I am thinking of finding a localized Windows Mobile version and reflashing the smartphone.

3) My Portege 710 has got a good polyphonic speaker, but unfortunately the headphone sound is quite unpleasant because of a background buzz, similar to one that you might have heard on your desktop speakers when you have microphone plugged into sound card. The buzz is really irritating, especially at low sound level.
Also, the audio jack is mini-USB one, and the accessory headphones quite poor in output, so I'd have to consider buying a miniUSB-to-3,5 adapter+regular headphones or Bluetooth headset for a decent sound quality. Luckily, I don't mind poor headphone sound as I use an MP3 player instead.

4) GPS is working with Google Maps and Route 66 v.7 at least. The sad thing is that Google Maps are not working on my phone after I use Route 66 and exit it. The only way to fix it is a phone restart.

5) Pay attention that there is NO WiFi support. If you do not need WiFi capability, it's OK, otherwise keep in mind that Skype calls for example will hardly work via EDGE connection(at least this is my case for Vodafone EDGE in Prague)

6) Good news is that 2+ GB SDHC cards are supported. But you'll need to install a standalone driver for SDHC card support (I found one under SDHC.777.cab.zip via Google)

All in all, most of the things mentioned above are not crucial- I was longing for a stylish design, GPS, a convenient QWERTY keyboard and some Windows Mobile applications for a fair price, and I got it. But the battery life is falling far beyond phone specifications, and that is truly upsetting. Hopingly it's just a defect of my phone, not a general model flaw- but I would recommend to pay special attention to battery life issue upon purchase.
 

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