darkness

What I like about the XV-6700 from Verizon Wireless:

1. I can get on the web pretty fast from anywhere; especially fast with built-in 802.11b. EV-DO (rev. 0) isn’t anything to sneeze at, either.
2. Slide out QWERTY keyboard.
3. Pretty decent screen, including a flip to landscape when you slide out the keyboard.
4. Windows Live Search (and maybe Google Maps Mobile).
5. Microsoft Voice Command.
6. USB Mini-B connector built in. Good for charging, good for tethering.
7. USB and Bluetooth tethering is possible. (Supposedly. I enabled it as stated but I haven’t actually tried it yet.)
8. Windows Mobile (henceforth WM) is widespread enough that there’s a good bit of software available for it.

What I don’t like about the XV-6700:

1. No EV-DO rev. A. (The XV-6800 should be “soon” with rev. A however.)
2. Slow to turn on. Two seconds minimum to turn the device on. My Palm turns on almost instantly. My v710, which was a decent phone, was always on. My friend’s HTC TyTN on AT&T supposedly turns on within 0.5s (i.e. 4x faster).
3. Slow to use. Hit the start menu. Wait a bit. Wait for the browser to load. Wait for the phone to lock and turn the display off. Wait for the phone application to pop up. On a PC, I’m used to waiting. On a phone, I’m not, and I don’t really think I want to. All of this talking about slowness is based on my use of “dumbphones,” like my v710, and my Palm. My (several years old) Palm Tungsten C is practically instantaneous for launching any application.
4. The WM interface and I don’t really get along. Why does the “OK” button close applications? Moving around with the 4-way switch also screws me up sometimes; it seems inconsistent. (Granted, within Microsoft applications it’s probably pretty consistent. But this phone, from Verizon at least, seems to come with its share of third-party software already installed, not counting what else you’ll want to install (see below).) Also, why is it, when I think I’m closing an application, I’m not really closing it?
5. Lots of features that should probably be standard, but you end up having to pay extra for.
   • Microsoft Voice Command, which allows you to voice dial (built in to the v710, and really very usable): $40.
   • If I go to the bathroom and leave my phone on my desk, and I get a text message while I’m in the bathroom, WM doesn’t go out of its way to notify me that I have an unread message: you only get the notice when it comes in. Similar sorts of things may or may not happen with missed calls, e-mails, etc. (it’s not totally clear to me how all the notifications work). So you need Spb Phone Suite. $20. My v710 would beep or vibrate (depending on the mode you have it in) forever until you cleared it (with a hard button on the side while it’s still in the holster, even). You’ll also want Spb Phone Suite for the ease of changing ringer profiles from the Today screen. (You could change these on my v710 with hard buttons on the side, without flipping the phone open. If you’re minimally flexible, you can do it while it’s still in the holster.) (There may be a free application called something like “DontForget” that does this for you. Still, why isn’t this built in?)
   • Want applications to actually exit when you tap in the upper right? Want to easily switch between running applications? You need Spb Pocket Plus. $25. (There may be cheaper/free fixes for this too.)
   • Pocket IE (PIE) is supposedly deficient sometimes. Maybe you want Opera Mobile: $24. I don’t see much point in Opera, myself, except maybe that it works in a couple places where PIE doesn’t. (PIE seems pretty peppy to me.) What you really need, though, is Picsel Browser, a browser that’s actually useful for reading whole pages. I’d give you a price, but I don’t even think you can buy this; I think this is a browser made available to OEMs, like Samsung, to ship on their phones. (Note: Microsoft does have Deepfish in the pipeline, I guess. But you and I can’t use it right now, so who cares?)
   • You’re going to run out of hardware buttons, so you’re going to need (AE Button Plus)[http://ae.inc.ru/aebplusbuy.php], which I haven’t actually tried yet. $7.
6. I’ve soft reset the device several times. Powering on and off is sometimes a crap shoot: I press the power button, wait for a bit to see if it turns on. Oh, it didn’t, I hit it again. Whoops, maybe it was turning on slowly, because now it turned back off. My v710 was rebooting somewhat frequently before I got this phone, probably because I tended to be pretty rough with it (for example, I once tried to close a car door on it), but it still rebooted faster than this phone. I’ve had applications here and there seem to lock up too. (And did I mention the device is kind of slow?)
7. This may not be valid, but so far battery life seems kind of poor, compared to regular phone. I set it not to turn off automatically when on battery yesterday and I was in extreme low battery warning territory by the time I went to bed. If you set the phone not to turn off automatically, the good news is that the phone “turns on” [the backlight] rather rapidly; the bad news is that your battery won’t last. If you set it to turn off automatically, you have that painful delay to turn it back on.
8. Dialing on screen kind of sucks.
9. The speaker does not strike me as sounding very good at all, nor very loud. Turning it all the way up just makes sound go all to shit, whether using it as a speakerphone or for the OS sounds.
10. When using BT, the incoming voice is not very loud at all, and I can’t see to turn it up.
11. What is probably the last straw: when I lock the phone (by the way, sane locking—i.e., from a hardware button—seems to require third-party software) the “end call” button still ends the call. So I pop on my BT headset, start a call, lock the phone, stuff it into my holster, and I just hung up on the other person. I seem to do this with 100% accuracy. Yesterday I was on the phone with my dad. As I was getting out of the car, I said to him, “Yeah, I just got this new phone.” I then slid the phone into the holster and then we were disconnected. Perfect.
12. The screen is kind of small, and hard to browse with, frankly. (What are you going to do? It’s a phone, it still needs to be small enough to be practical. I don’t want to hold an 8” LCD up to the side of my head.)
13. No Bluetooth 2.0 EDR, so tethering with BT is supposedly pretty slow, especially relative to tethering with USB. (Again, I haven’t tried this.) In its defense, almost nothing has BT 2.0, and I think the only Verizon device that might have EDR is a Blackberry.
14. (Added) Sometimes the backlight goes to zero. For example, I’ll be trying to turn the phone on (see previous comments about how it doesn’t always seem to work, or work quickly at least) and somehow I’ll manage to turn the backlight off totally, and it won’t come back on until I find a decent light source where I can use the stylus to navigate to the backlight control panel and turn it up. (Why is there a backlight setting that has the backlight turn all the way off in the first place? Is that something people want, for the backlight to never be on?)

Now, there are two things to note about the way I’m trying to use this device that might lead some people to consider it “unfair”:

1. I don’t use Exchange. I’m not even sure I want e-mail on my phone; it’s not set up right now on this 6700. I hear that this phone’s Exchange integration is the bee’s knees, if you’re in to that kind of thing. So maybe I’m missing a big piece of what makes this phone so awesome for other people.
2. It’s a phone. At least, I think it’s supposed to be used as a phone. As a PDA, it might be alright. As a mobile browsing device (as long as you get your hands on some things like Live Search and Picsel Browser) it’s not bad. But I want a phone, and for that I think this device isn’t very good at all. (Seriously, why not lock the hard buttons! Totally unacceptable.) Part of this is due to physical considerations (i.e. hard button for numbers on the front) and some is software (no notifications of unread text messages). All the comparisons to my v710 are due to this fact: I wanted a phone that also has a good browser and fast Internet access, not a PDA that happens to occasionally make calls.

I don’t really want to convince people that love these HTC phones and Windows Mobile that their phone sucks. If you like it, and you can use it, that’s great for you. There are even more features this phone phone has that I didn’t mention and don’t take advantage of, perhaps; playing MP3s or gaming comes to mind.

For my tastes, though, I think the XV-6700 is going back in favor of a simple, fast, reliable, usable phone. Probably a Motorola, since I’m used to the interface (oh wait, Verizon fucked that up!), or maybe one of the LG models. (I probably need to stick with Verizon, at least for now.) For mobile browsing I think I’m going to be happier with something like an N800 running Linux kept in my bag, and maybe something insane like a FrogPad for more serious typing. Then I can tether it to… a dumbphone.