I Gots Me A New Phone
For a while now i've been using an iMate JAMin as my phone/pda. It was pretty good, cept for the lack of buttons. It was all touchscreen.
I upgraded a few weeks ago. I wanted something that was pretty much the same, but i wanted to be able to type, not just tap.
Enter the iMate Ultimate 9502.
So far it's going pretty well. There's issues, but it's a bleeding edge phone with no ROM updates or patches available yet, so I've had to learn to baby it along.
Issues I've had so far:
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It takes SD cards, but not SDHC yet. Apparently there's an update coming out that will make it work. There's an unofficial patch floating around that will make SDHC work, but it's no good for me. A common side effect of this patch is failure to read the card from Media Player. Since the thing i do most with this phone besides send texts is to use it as my mp3 player, it makes it difficult :)
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It's got internal GPS, but it doesn't come with GPS software. I haven't got around to (read: I'm too tight) buying an app that works well.
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Most of the time, the keyboard runs a little slow. Those of you who know the size of my hands will realise that being able to use my thumbs on the qwerty keyboard is a feat in itself, but I can actually type really well on it - my thumbs are just pointy enough. So i type away as fast i can and...the keyboard can't keep up. It drops letters all over the place unless i slow myself down. This only seems to happen when texting - if i'm in word it keeps up ok.
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Random hardware messups. I have to reboot it once in a while because the vibrate function stops working. A reboot fixes it, but it's a strange little bug.
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I use the pre-installed windows live messenger a fair bit when i'm at home (since it's got wireless, so i'm not paying for data access). But I also use Yahoo (ugh) messenger a lot, and a decent windows mobile client is really hard to find (that's free). anyone got any suggestions?
What else have I learned? It's amazing how much value you can get out of quite a small cap. I'm only on the $49 cap with vodafone, and I do a LOT of texting and a bit of going online to check emails or random webpages when i'm out and about away from home. I've come close to going over the limit for the month, but not quite. That's pretty cool.
I do need to work out how to create my own themes for winmobile though. I really like the green theme that comes built in (coz i lurv green), but I need the text on the today screen to be green, not white. My preferred wallpaper is quite pale, so reading the white text on it is a little difficult.
But yeah. It's been geek heaven.