The Cynic Says……

Well, I splurged and bought the new Verizon XV6700. I must say it’s by far the best phone I’ve owned. I owned a Treo600 on Sprint and this blows it away by far. After having this phone for a few days, I feel like I can say that there are a LOT of things about it I absolutely love and probably a few things I’d change.

I got the phone on the 16th from the local Verizon store for $299 + tax after getting the Advanced Device Discount which gives an extra $100 off the price of any smartphone if you activate the $45/mo unlimited data plan along with your qualifying voice plan. Pretty good deal, if you ask me. In the box, you’ll receive the phone, USB sync cable, sync cradle, AC power adapter with mini-USB end, stereo headphones (they suck horribly, buy the Jabras), fairly thick owner’s manual, “getting started” CD from Verizon and a CD for installing ActiveSync 4.0 (4.1 is available on the MS website) and Outlook 2002. If you wish to sync contacts from your phone to your PC, you have to install Outlook. You don’t have to use it as your default email client but activesync can only sync contacts with Outlook. Shame, since I much prefer Thunderbird to Outlook. Also you get a soft slip cover that’s more or less useless and two styli (one for the phone, one spare).
First off, some quick specs:

• 416MHz Intel PXA270 Processor
• Windows Mobile 5.0 OS
• miniSD Secure Digital Slot
• Bluetooth 1.2
• 802.11b Wi-Fi
• Integrated QWERTY Keyboard
• 240×320 16-bit color TFT LCD
• 1.3MP Digital Camera
• 6.5oz; 5.2″H x 2.32″W x 0.93″D
• 1350 mAh battery (4.7hrs talktime, 200hrs standby)

So here’s the rundown as I see things…. Obviously, my usage may differ from yours so my opinions are just that, opinions.
EV-DO — I generally get anywhere from 200kbps (west knox) to 650kbps (a few areas around town) in speed tests. Plenty of speed to talk online on AIM, Yahoo, MSN and browse the web at a decent speed while still streaming 128kbps audio. Pretty impressive if you ask me. EVDO, by nature, is “bursty” so don’t expect a constant 600kbps over long periods of time. It fluctuates up and down a fair bit but overall it’s fast enough to do most of the things that any normal person would want to do on a smartphone.

Expandable Memory — I can add up to a 1GB miniSD expansion card to hold mp3’s, videos, applications, etc… thus saving precious internal memory. I haven’t bothered to get one yet as I don’t really have enough installed on the phone to cause a memory crunch. Not to mention I own an mp3 player so there’s not really any reason for me to cart around mp3’s on my phone. I’ll get one eventually, just not a huge rush to get one. I’d prefer that they used regular SD since it’s now available in capacities up to 4GB instead of the 2GB miniSD is available in. The phone’s big enough to handle a full-sized SD card, so going with miniSD is rather puzzling.
QVGA Screen – mmm.. purdy! The Treo 700w only has a 240×240 square screen, whereas the XV6700 is 320×240. Basically that means more pixels on screen and a more useful landscape feature. It’s bright enough for my tastes and the colors look pretty good overall. It’s not perfect, though. It’s only 16-bit colors so 24bit jpegs get dithered down and display rather obvious banding. My Moto E815 had an 18-bit display and the colors looked MUCH better than they do on this particular screen. OK, it’s not horrible and the Treo700w’s screen isn’t any better but still. Why not put an 18 bit display on a phone that retails for $519? Don’t get me wrong, it’s not a dealbreaker… just a mild disappointment
QWERTY Keyboard – Perfect for us text whores out there. Slide the keyboard out and just start typing. None of that tapping one key 3 times to get a letter and all that horseshit. No stupid T9 either that doesn’t know all the words in the English language or happens to guess the wrong one (types “of” instead of “me”, for example). Just slide it out type what you want. My only real complaint about the keyboard is that the alternate characters (symbols and numbers) aren’t lit up by the backlight at all so when it’s dark you might as well forget about typing any symbols unless you just happen to know where they are. Also, for those of you with fat fingers the upper row of keys might pose a small problem since they are very very close to the bottom half of the top slide. It’s not a problem for me since I have skinny fingers, though.
Connectivity – Bluetooth & wifi both! Bluetooth for headsets, car kits, etc. Wifi for when you have access to it and don’t want to or can’t use EVDO. I just use EVDO all the time since it’s available everywhere I go. However, wifi is oftentimes faster than even EVDO if the connection on the other side of the access point is fast. Surprisingly, wifi range is really good despite it being a smartphone. I was able to pick up a neighbor’s access point over at my friend’s house. The same access point that his laptop only gets a 12% signal on and barely use. I was able to surf the web and logon to AIM with it. The flip side of all this is that Verizon for some reason loves to castrate their phones. Basically, in its stock form with a registry edit you cannot enable wifi and keep the phone turned on. It’s one or the other. Turn on wifi, no phone calls. Turn on the phone, no wifi. How fucking retarded is that? Shame on you, Verizon! My other issue? The only Bluetooth profile exposed is the handsfree/headset profile. That means no activesync or file transfers over bluetooth out of the box. I’m guessing they might be able to be enabled somehow but I haven’t tried yet.
Windows Mobile 5.0 — I’ve never used WM2003 or 2003SE (which the Samsung i730 has) but I’m pretty pleased with WM5 so far. Pocket Outlook is functional, though it doesn’t appear to do HTML mail. I don’t use Pocket Word or Excel so I can’t report on how they work. Pocket IE does an acceptable job of rendering most pages, though it completely fouls up on Apache directory listings for some reason. Anyone needing a more robust browser may wish to try Opera 8.5 beta, though it’s only free for 45 days. Performance is acceptable with a slight lag when switching from Portrait to Landscape when you slide the keyboard out (even after doing the hack to speed it up). WMP10 leaves a lot to be desired out of the box, so I’ve been using an alternate media player. I’d go so far as to say WMP10 isn’t really even worth bothering with. It won’t open .pls or .m3u files so no streaming audio… You can’t create playlists on the device, which is even dumber. Basically just go download GSPlayer and be done with it.

Battery life – Here’s where we have our only real problem so far. Granted, because o its power I don’t really expect insane battery life but jeez. 1350 mAh just isn’t enough, that’s for sure. I did about 45 mins of streaming audio and AIM chatting over EVDO, 30-45 minutes of web surfing and such over wifi and just some random playing around with the device to show a co-worker. No phone calls and maybe 3 text messages received. I sent 3 emails and downloaded my IMAP inbox (50 messages or so) over wifi. Also, I took about 8 pics with the camera and the flash was enabled for 3 of them. End result? 50% battery remaining. Ouch. Granted I probably haven’t conditioned this battery yet so perhaps battery life will get better as I go along but as of right now it leaves a bit to be desired. I carry my charger with me so it’s not a huge deal, thankfully.

Size – It’s not as big as you might think. It’s only slightly thicker than a Treo and not a whole lot larger than my E815 was. It’s hardly a hulking behemoth that won’t fit in a pocket, that’s for sure. It fits nicely in my front jeans pockets or my inside jacket pocket. The biggest issue with the form factor is the fact that it’s blocky. Outside of that, I find the size to be perfectly manageable, especially given how many features they’ve packed into this sucker.

Camera – Well, it’s 1.3MP with a flash and a macro feature as well. It’s hardly as good as a cheap digital camera but for taking pics on the go, it works perfectly fine. Pics do tend to suffer from fuzzy edges and over-bright whites and such. Typical cameraphone stuff. It certainly does its job but there’s no way I’d use it in place of a real digicam.

Phone — Yes, believe it or not this thing makes phone calls too. This is where most of the past “convergence devices” have more or less fallen flat on their faces. While this is a little bit more difficult than just a standard phone, it’s not completely horrible. I’ll be the first to admit that the Treo still owns everything else when it comes to one-handed operation and phone features. Other devices still seem to lag behind the Treo in that respect, but the 6700 has made great strides in that respect. Contrary to what one might think, dialing one-handed on the 6700 is utterly simple. I can do it no problem by simply pressing the green button on the front of the phone to launch the phone dialer and then pressing the on-screen keys to dial the number. Also, if the number you wish to dial is in your contacts, the smartdial feature of the 6700 will make suggestions as to what you may be trying to dial. If I want to dial “Sam” I can just hit the “7″ key since his name starts with S and smartdial will automatically pop his name up along with any others that are partial matches. I can then select the one I want with the joystick and press it to dial. No need to even dial the whole number. You can even dial by initials… If you have George Smith in your contacts, you can dial 47 (for GS) and it’ll pop him up and you can dial. Works great. Sound quality during calls is excellent as usual on Verizon, however there’s a small issue with the phone earpiece itself. You can’t hear jack shit! Well, to be fair, you can hear but not as well as I’d like. You’re not exactly going to suffer hearing loss from the earpiece blasting your eardrum out. Ditto the speakerphone. I’d definitely suggest getting a headset to plug in. Watch out, though… the headset jack produces insanely loud audio to the point of having to reduce the volume by 75% just to not cause your eardrums to rupture. That leads me to a small quibble I have with the phone. Why in the heck is the headset jack on the BOTTOM of the phone? Seriously it makes no sense. The headset jack is covered up by the cradle should you decide to leave the phone cradled while not in use. Thus you’ll have to either uncradle the phone to talk on it or just get a bluetooth headset. Kinda annoying but again, not a dealbreaker for me.

Overall, I consider this thing to be as good as it gets right now. While the Treo has a few customizations that might make it a somewhat better phone, its lower resolution screen, less memory, lack of wifi and higher price tag make it much less desireable for myself personally. I would wholeheartedly suggest buying a 6700 if you have the $300 to blow on a phone & PDA. It’s cheaper than buying two devices separately… hell, three if you count the mp3 player capabilities. If you don’t activate with a data plan, it’s $399. $519 is full retail if you’re not eligible for an upgrade. It’s not perfect, but I’d still give it a solid 8.5 out of 10. Definitely recommended for anyone who considers themselves even slightly a geek… or anyone who wants a device that’ll check email, surf the web, IM, play mp3’s & videos, store tons of contacts and various other information.

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