My Orange SPV E650 experiences

I love smartphones. I wish I could own as many as Stephen Fry, but I think that might be overdoing it! The devices i’ve owned include:

• Orange SPV E200
• Motorola MPX200
• Orange SPV C500
• Orange SPV M500
• Orange SPV M600
• Orange SPV E650

Wow - Orange certainly have had their money off me!

There were certainly alot of rave reviews about the E650 (Which is already being replaced with the newer version) at the time I purchased the phone. I liked the form factor (And was perhaps a little tired of the bulkiness of the M series range from Orange) and wanted to get my hands on Windows Mobile 6.0 because i’d hoped that it would have quite a few more improvements in terms of Office, Messaging and other funky little tools.

I soon found out that the majority of these ‘nice’ features were in the ‘Pro’ version of Windows mobile software, so the version I have is fundamentally inferior, and therefore loathsome.
My major gripe with the phone ended up being that it wasn’t the fairytale I expected it to be. Phone features such as RDP, Proper ink Notes, and the ability to easily turn GPRS off are gone. The T9 is so unintuative that I end up using the sidewards keyboard all the time (It’s a good job it’s there!), and build quality is also slightly suspect.

So all in all, this ‘geek’ phone has lost all of the major features that actually made it useful!
Major gripes:

Activesync is utter crap - it only seems to allow me to sync my exchange email, but not my calendar or contacts. I’ve never had a smartphone do this before but it seems that hardware resetting the device doesn’t solve the problem.

- RDP is missing - ok the screen’s probably to small anyway.
- T9 is awful.
- GPRS comes on by itself, repeatadly, and is somewhat cumbersome to turn off.
- The camera is still rubbish - when will HTC learn!
- The screen sometimes does odd things, and requires me to open and close the keypad to refresh the UI. Bizarre…
- I miss inking…
- I was just about to say that I couldn’t find Notes or Voice Notes at all, but it just appeared that Orange had moved the interface around. Annoyingly.
- There’s no MSN live package on here - Orange :s

But:

- I can make calls
- The phone is small (ish)
- It still has that cool factor
- It has wifi! And SIP support! Sort of…
- Battery life is pretty good.

So if you’re really going to miss any of these features, this form factor is not for you! I’ll be going back to ink based products I think. That LG Pradary thing looks nice :)