Sunday, April 29, 2012

New Cellphone Comparison

Am inclined to start this out with.... yeah right.
My Nokia 5800 Express phone has given great service last 3-4 years, 1000's of pics on 2 trips round America and another to Europe, small size, robust enough to survive everyday work and a couple of drops, good reception out here in the sticks, relative. Ahead of its time somewhat given new smart-phones now on the scene, but lately the screen has lost some of its touch response, and now and again erratic behaviour.
Last year I picked up a Huawei Ideos X5, Android o/s, and more recently, a Nokia Lumia 800 touted at the business market.
Have to say I'm disappointed in both.
The X5, despite being 5 mp camera'd takes lousy pics, theyre blurry. The on-screen shutter only contributes to camera shake, and the on-screen zoom is rat-shit when youre in a hurry to capture a scene. As well as the pics, it also stores thumbnails of the same, but FFS, what for? When you copy to your desktop pic file you get 2 of each, and then the confusion starts which ones to delete.
The button on the side controlling ring volume annoyingly lends itself nicely to accidental adjustment.
A fault common to both phones is the frustratingly small size of text font. In Android you can get an app to get round this, but FFS, for the price, why cant the phones just do it.
The X5 dosent have carriage return either, well it does in calendar, just not in texting, but like the 5800, the Lumia does. I got round the font size thing with the old 5800 permitting setting text to bold. The Lumia has a slightly better keyboard for my fat blokes fingers, both it and the X5 utilise heat recognition, the old 5800, bless it, had a very positive stylus, or you could tap the keyboard with the edge of your thumbnail.
I think the Android calendar is better than the Windows one.
Neither of these phones connect automatic with my desktop wifi, and vice versa. Neither can they do a simple world clock like the 5800 can. Theyre both unco-operative when trying to access the internet, the 5800 never had this problem.
However, the Who-are-we Idiot X5 is the lesser of my problems, its my main phone for the time being.
Now for the Lumia.
It runs on Windows, which should have been enough to put anyone off, but I thought it would be neat if I could copy my Excel files across and skip off to work with a useful interchange of data in prospect.
No such luck, its not as simple as plugging in your USB cable and seeing drive:F or whatever, you have to email files as an attachment, in which case your carrier gets to clip the ticket, so theyre not going to help, and in my case, my cell reception here is marginal.
There is a wifi work-around available, but as I said, wifi connection's another problem to overcome.
You can also swap stuff via an i-drive like Skydrive, and I can see some potential in being able to access stuff from anywhere, but jees, again with my marginal reception I have to go down the end of my driveway to be sure of making the down/upload, that is, if I can ever get connected to the internet.
However, the real dark person in the woodpile on this one is, what happens if there's a complete power/comms failure like we had in the 2004 flood, or some hostile power decides to blow the satellites out of the ether, or why would you even put private information into the cloud where every tom, dick, and hacker can have a go at it.
There is an accompanying file transfer capability in the form of Zune, but it only does pics, music, and vids. Why not data files FFS? Nowhere near the facility of Docs to Go with Android.
And of top of that, when I set the Zune system up on my desktop, it started to do some uninvited read-in (or out) of my existing several thousand pics, so I quickly emasculated that, plus I swear there's some definition loss between phone and desktop.
I followed Nokia because I thought I could simply copy my custom ringtones across, but no such luck again, the 5800 used .arm files for ringtones, so I have to convert the files to mp3, then go through a bit of techno-acrobatics to genre them into the Lumia.
I also thought I'd get the superior Nokia reception of my 5800, but another fail. Retailers look at you bald-face and say there's no difference between any of them, which again is laugh-100 territory. Right now I've got 3 bars on the X5, and ranging from half to nothing on the Lumia. Vodafone offer a signal amplifier adding a $340 insult to injury, but its wifi dependent, so help me.
The Lumia is a nicely crafted machine, comes with a rubber sort of protective surround, +/- buttons on the top, plus a shutter button that takes you direct from phone to camera, and ziess lens which is another plus. Unfortunately, the lens is near mid.mounted on the back, and it gets condensation off your hand pretty easily.
The simm card is a micro simm which means you cant swap it out to the old phone, or others youre using or trialling.
These two phones cost the guts of $1400, I've got a couple of fancy bits of machinery, but I'm no better off function-wise. With Microsoft and Vodafone I expect I'll have to spend even more for solutions.
As for Nokia, c'mon guys, surely you can do better than this ...

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