March 06, 2004
It's playtime
My new 'Dark Side' Windows Mobile Powered cellphone arrived yesterday, a little later than anticipated in this post last month. After a day of hectic meetings, rehiring a friend and colleague from a few years back and a million other things, I walked back into my office to find a matt black box sitting on my desk. As I was heading back across town to meet up with some old work chums, I resisted doing anything more than turning it on and having a quick 5 minute play. As this phone requires an upgraded mobile messaging-enabled SIM card, this morning I placed a call to migrate my service from my trusty but knackered 6310i to the SPV E200. This will happen sometime within the next two hours so I thought I'd post a picture of the contents of the box along with a few brief first impressions.
Left to right - back row: The aforementioned matt black box; the SPV E200 sitting in it's glossy black (USB connector) cradle; the power cable with UK three pin and US/Euro two pin adapter plates - this can plug into the cradle or, using the small converter/connector shown, straight into the phone.
Left to right - middle row: SD add-on card with additional software and games; SIM card package; licenced companion CD with MS ActivSync 3.7 and MS Outlook2002; a "How can I do that?" Orange 'How' guide; the comprehensive guide.
Front row: Stereo headphone and microphone set.
If nothing else, my five minute play around proved to me that this phone might present a steep learning curve as things seem far from intuitive, at least at first glance. The phone is a tri band unit and has the usual features one would expect on a phone these days such as wap, email, voice memo, calculator, vibrating alert, text Messaging and infrared & GPRS data service. Added to this are some higher end toys including a built-in modem, Bluetooth, colour screen, photo and instant messaging, polyphonic ring tones, a built-in video capable camera and MP3 player. All this comes in a unit weighing 130g, running the Windows Mobile operating system which hums along on the 132MHz processor that was first used the precursor E100 phone. Battery life is reported to offer talk times of up to 3 hours and standby of up to three days. A quick rummage round the net confirms that battery life is on the distinctly short side when compared to the 6310i for example. However, a few posts on forii and lists seem to indicate that, over and above the power demands of the colour screen and wide range of applications, the SD card or the blank that is installed by default would seem to be the culprit. Removing them means the phone doesn't use power to poll/read them and this reduces the rate at which the battery drains - for more discussion on this, search Google with 'SPV E200 battery SD card' or see posts and comments here and here. Even more interesting is this post which suggests that the Caller ID Photo application is also a resource hog, as explained in detail in the 'Battery' section of rawfish's review. Well, the two hours is almost up so I'm off to play with my new toy. What's the betting that I break it by teatime?
UPDATE: I suppose that hoping the SPV E200 would play nice with my T3 was just too much to hope for. Whilst basic file transfers over Bluetooth are fine, I am unable to use my T3's communication apps like Dialler and the SMS Message app as their is currently no Palm driver to support the E200. Searching the usual forii has drawn a blank so I'd be glad to hear from anyone who knows different. For now, it's back to IR...