The good:
Wi-Fi
Bluetooth
Quad-band
Nice display
Slide-out QWERTY keyboard
SD/MMC card slot
Cheap depending on contract
It’s black and grey
The bad:
It’s heavy
It’s the size of a house
You look stupid using it as a phone
You’ll need to recharge it every night
Windows Mobile 2003 is a pain in the arse sometimes
The camera is rubbish
There’s no easy way to switch user profiles
O2’s user interface sucks
Comments
0 responses to “Quick hardware review: the O2 XDA IIs”
>>Wi-Fi
Except it *eats* batteries.
>>Quad-band
Not all that useful. Yay – you can use *both* american network standard rather than just the one. Like that is useful. ;-)
>>SD/MMC card slot
Remember it is also an SDIO slot (can take cards other than memory. Currently mainly Wifi cards but that’ll change.
>>Cheap depending on contract
Depends on your definitioin of cheap. Cheaper than an iPaq though.
>>It’s heavy
>>It’s the size of a house
>>You look stupid using it as a phone
I warned you! The only way round the looking like a dick holding a housebrick to your ear is to look like a dick with a handsfree headset.
>>You’ll need to recharge it every night
Really? I didn’t think the battery life was that bad. You leaving wireless on or leaving apps running?
>>Windows Mobile 2003 is a pain in the arse sometimes
Yeah.
>>The camera is rubbish
That’s honestly never bothered me. First cameraphone I had I thought “Woo – cameraphone. That’ll be handy”. Barely use it.
>>There’s no easy way to switch user profiles
There probably is. Check on Modaco.com or handango.com
>>O2’s User interface sucks
There is probably a way round that too. With some footering you should be able to put a non-network specific ROM on it (I think it is the HTC blue angel) so you could force a Qtek or I-mate ROM onto it. Should work OK (although you’d have to manually enter SMS/GPRS settings). I think you can hard reset then soft reset (in a weird timing thing) and manually reinstall the O2 apps that you want. Frees some memory too.
I still want the smaller one – the Orange M500 or the M600 (M500 with keyboard if they ever release it)
> You leaving wireless on or leaving apps running?
It has Solitaire :)
> There is probably a way round that too.
Yeah, I’ve disabled it.
What’s annoying about the profiles thing is that on an SPV, a half-press of the off button brings up the profiles menu. On the XDA it just puts the phone on standby, so if you’re going somewhere and want to put the phone off you need to dig out the stylus, click the connectivity icon (which is small and fiddly) and turn on flight mode. It takes about ten seconds, which isn’t very elegant.
Don’t really fancy changing the ROM, at least not until a WinMobile 2005 upgrade is out. An official one :)
The is a program called PocketZenPhone (http://zendrui.free.fr/) It costs 5 euro but it might do what you want – configurable preset profiles that appear as big icons on the today screen. Might be worth a look. (There are various reviews on the net)
Looks perfect. I’ve ordered it.
I’m useful sometimes. ;-)
Yeah. Sometimes :-P