After a full week with my new XV6700, I’ve noticed a few more things that I forgot to mention in my initial review of the phone.
First, the signal meter in the top bar is more or less useless. Not because of its size (or lack thereof) but the fact that it doesn’t accurately reflect any sort of dBm readings it seems. Now, I realize that this is more or less typical but this stupid thing seems almost random. Running “fieldtrial.exe” from the \windows folder on the phone gives you a nice in-depth look at what kind of signal strength you really have. At the moment, I’m showing -74dB and 3 bars out of 4 on the phone. That seems fairly appropriate… However, I’ve had several occasions where the phone is showing -80dB or so and will show 1 bar on the signal meter. I’m still able to make a call and everything but given the signal meter, it looks as though I have no signal since 1 bar is basically just a little dot under the representation of a tower in the signal meter. Annoying, but I’m more or less used to it. As long as I don’t see a little X there, I’m fine.
Now for the good part. I was toying around with the wifi and trying to get it to connect to my friend’s wifi router. I’m happy to say it worked perfectly well. He’s using a Linksys WAP54g with SSID broadcast turned off and WPA-PSK for security. The phone supports both perfectly fine. Granted, I had to manually add the network into my list but it worked great. Just type in the SSID (it’s case sensitive!) and select the encryption method (WPA-PSK in this case) and enter the passphrase. Bang, connected just fine! Also, signal strength is every bit as good as what he gets with his linksys wifi card on his laptop.
More bad stuff now… MMS messaging has one annoying trait. From what I can tell, there’s no way to reply to a pix message with a standard text msg. You go into the MMS inbox and “reply” and it gives you two options: pix or flix… no text msg option. So if someone sends you a pic and you just want to reply with something like “haha, cool” and no picture in return, you have to go into the regular “text messages” inbox (they’re separate entries in pocket outlook) and create a new message to the person that initially sent you the pix msg. I think it has a lot to do with MS’s insistence on using Pocket Outlook for everything messaging related. Jerkoffs. 
I also bought a Motorola H700 Bluetooth headset. I must say it probably has the most pathetic range of any headset I’ve owned so far. I’m lucky to get 10ft from either my PM-325 or my XV-6700. Even worse, the phone and headset have to be on the same side of my body or I get quite a bit of static. It does have the advantage of being extremely small and you can turn it on and off just by flipping the boom in and out. I’ll deal with it for now until I can find another headset that really catches my eye.
Technorati Tags: xv6700, pda, cellphone, phone, reviews, geek