Whats the verdict on M5000?

[Guest Heartdoc]

Now that people have had their m5000's for a short while, what is the overall verdict? Are the devices up to expectations?

I still find it hard to justify getting something that is very difficult to use as a phone.

[Guest Larnsky]

Now that people have had their m5000's for a short while, what is the overall verdict? Are the devices up to expectations?

I still find it hard to justify getting something that is very difficult to use as a phone.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Personally i love it, especially now i've removed the Orange homescreen customization. It does everything i want it to, i've been to lectures and typed in word as fast as i would have written things down, i've created fancy looking excel spreadsheets on the move, and thats not counting the amazing connectivity of the device, i seem to never be out of range of some broadband access on my phone!

At the end of the day, if you're not going to use it to its full potential, and you really only need a phone then its probably not for you. But if you want something that can quite easily replace a laptop and be your phone at the same time then its the device for you. They only need to bring one out with intergrated GPS, then i wouldn't have to carry around a bluetooth receiver aswell. ;)

[Guest afhstingray]

and you also need to be prepared to live with a device which seems like all the software in it is at a beta level of reliability.................

[Guest Pondrew]

and you also need to be prepared to live with a device which seems like all the software in it is at a beta level of reliability.................

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Is it really that bad?! Can you give examples?

[Guest Larnsky]

I wouldn't say they were in BETA level, sure there may be a few bugs, and things we'd like to add to it, but when was the last time you installed a software application that wasn't updated continually. Plus would you rather wait another year for the bugs to be sorted out? I know i wouldn't!

[Guest rhaleuk]

and you also need to be prepared to live with a device which seems like all the software in it is at a beta level of reliability.................

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Thats an unfair statement. The DEVICE is not of beta level. It is wrong to mislead people and say that. In my opinion there is substandard software available for the device... software not designed for it.

In my use thus far the device is performing to expectations. It is a unique design, with new software and unmatched hardware features. The software (discounting the Orange homescreen) appears more robust than previous versions and is a good starting point. Pocket versions of Internet Explorer, Word, Excel, Zip Utility, PDF viewer, Media Player... all perform well and are relatively stable. I have imported Excel workbooks without issue, and also wrote small projects in Word. Internet explorer copes well (i advise zooming out) I can use GMail, Modaco, Amazon, eBay... all in a perfectly acceptable manner and with good speed over wifi.

I will admit certain apps... such as RealPlayer and the non beta version of Skype are poor ports and let the side down, but I still believe the device is of huge use and can increase ones productivity hugely.

[Guest No5]

I'm severely disappointed to the point that I'm considering returning it to Orange and cancelling the upgrade.

Chief problem is that it is nearly useless as a phone: with cover "closed" there is no caller ID, the "pick up" button does not light up, and 9 times out of 10 actually drops the call. With the phone in PDA mode, the menus are useless - particularly in that the speaker phone is not initially available even though the phone is in "laptop" mode.

In all modes, the phone alarms are inaudible - absolutely useless if you happen to work in a noisy environment.

Many, many other bugs: in no particular order:

if you assign a picture/wallpaper to the "desktop", the M5000 eventually crashes so that the picture ends up on the menu, with the desktop reverting to Windows theme - and you can't change this without a hard reset.

The contacts can only be organised by surname, first name format - which is useless if you happen to have listed everything by alphabetical sequence on other phones or Outlook.

Why on earth do you have to go to windows - setting - system - memory - programs running - close all just to close programs which you have been using????! How stupid is this?

My M5000 boots from standby with windows media running and the dialogue " a new flash card has been detected; do you want to search it, etc, etc". No!! the blinking card has been there all along - why can't the M5000 remember it?!

Why does 3G/GPRS kick in even though these are "switched off" in the connections menu? No thanks Orange, but i don't want to use your premium services - I'd rather just use wireless network. Somehow, the wireless network doesn't want to work most of the time....

Why is it impossible to assign an audible alarm tone to Pocket Skype?

Why doesn't the alarm tone assigned to text messages actually work?

Why is there no setting to keep the screen light on during a telephone call?

Why does the "battery power" screen light seTting default to "0" every time I use Active Synch?

Etc, etc,....

I really wanted this 'phone, but the reality is that it is extremely buggy, and the design is ill-conceived. I reckon there will be an HTC Universal Mk2 in the pipeline before long...

[Guest unicron]

DAMN! i have a qtek 2020i and was thinking of upgrading in feb to a m5000 but this machine is like marmite people either love it or hate it.....i just do not know what to think or believe.

should i upgrade or just sit tight on my current phone? i mostly use contacts, word, IE, wmp 10 and tomtom5.1. I only use excel a bit and use to use resco photo viewer but now i do not.

as for not knowing who is calling when its closed, i have microsoft voice command and always have my headphones pluged in so it tells me who is calling. My qtek 2020i (touch wood) hardly needs soft resets but my old m1000 did cause it froze up alot, i would like a stable ppc phone like my Qtek 2020i but with the better parts of wm5 added. Is this or is this not the M5000?

[Guest Larnsky]

DAMN! i have a qtek 2020i and was thinking of upgrading in feb to a m5000 but this machine is like marmite people either love it or hate it.....i just do not know what to think or believe.

should i upgrade or just sit tight on my current phone? i mostly use contacts, word, IE, wmp 10 and tomtom5.1. I only use excel a bit and use to use resco photo viewer but now i do not.

as for not knowing who is calling when its closed, i have microsoft voice command and always have my headphones pluged in so it tells me who is calling. My qtek 2020i (touch wood) hardly needs soft resets but my old m1000 did cause it froze up alot, i would like a stable ppc phone like my Qtek 2020i but with the better parts of wm5 added. Is this or is this not the M5000?

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

All of those applications work fine on my M5000, and tomtom looks superb with the high resolution screen!

I will admit that if you have the phone shut it can be quite annoying to open it up to see whos calling if that concerns you, but as you said Voice command says the name, and i have a Jabra BT800 headset that displays the number! fine for me.

I've only reset my device a couple of times, and thats mainly because i was messing about with all the programs and wanted to free the memory back up.

I'm more then happy with mine, a lot of the problems you see around are where people are trying to run programs on it that aren't designed for it yet, but give it a couple of months and developers will re-code them.

[Guest Wizard]

Slow and unresponsive.

That's my main criticism of this device. The screen takes too long to reorient when I flick it around. Moving between applications takes too long. Even opening the Start menu takes significantly longer than on a PC. Opening email takes a second or so. I have to navigate to text messages, rather than just press one button like I could with my old Treo. The customisation options are limited, so I can't turn off the "sliding" Start menu to speed it up for example. Skype barely works. Coverage reception seems worse than my Treo. There's no external display, so as a phone the device is severely limited, and as mention on another post I already missed a call because by the time I'd rotated the screen and the phone responded to my tapping on the screen to answer the call, it was too late. I'm also finding that despite my wireless network being 2Mb, the phone is chronically slow to download and show web pages. Overall I'd say this phone would be a much much better device if the processor was significantly faster - the performance is sluggish even at the best of times. Frustrating, because this is exactly why I stopped using an SPV two years ago. Are they not learning? HANDHELD DEVICE NEEDS TO BE VERY VERY RESPONSIVE, ESPECIALLY IN RECEIVING INCOMING CALLS AND TEXTS. I'm getting very tired of the phone alerting me to something, I pick it up, press a button, and then wait for 2-3 seconds while it thinks about it.

While I'm griping, what is a guy meant to do to use the phone when the screen is blank? I can't see if it's on or not, but if it is and I tap the screen it wakes up (slowly!), but if it's off tapping the screen does nothing. This inconsistency is very irritating. It seems like the power button is a much better solution to waking the device up because it works whatever state the phone is in, but it's hard to press so quite annoying.

But I think overall the benefits probably just about outweigh the disadvantages (just!). The screen is just wonderful, as is the keyboard (but PLEASE put a Ctrl key back and stop moving everything around, I keep pressing up arrow instead of full stop!). The ability to browse the web, to open documents (spreadsheets especially!) is wonderful, and the over-the-air email synchronisation is fantastic, and I expect so too will the impending push email.

I look forward to upgrading to an M7000 this time next year that has an external screen, proper support for caller id on headsets, a much faster processor, integrated push email, a better set of hot keys to quickly get to applications, longer battery life, and as a smaller device ;)

Wizard

[Guest afhstingray]

Yes, wmp10 works fine, so do most of the inbuilt apps

keep in mind i dint install any third party apps, so my complaints have nothing to do with me installing poorly written apps thus affecting the system. hardware wise i love the device, and i think wm5 has some really welcome improvements. but sometimes when my friends call me, the phone dosent ring, sometimes it randomly loses connectivity (all connectivity, lan and cellular) and refuses to pick up signals unless flight mode is cycled, or its reset. the overall system is rather sluggish, have to wait for start menu to load

and the worst thing is, when i flip it open or bring it out of standby to jot someting down, it may take anywhere from 3-6 seconds for the screen to fully draw. first you get a white screen

then the items load one by one.......i know for a fact these problems are not only to do with my device, as i've played with several..

powerpoint mobile is very slow, msn sometimes dosent recieve some messages, and you get a very frustrating "message undeliverable" message more often than comfortable. never had this problem with my blue angel or typhoon. keep in mind i was connected over lan, not cellular, so no excuse for poor coverage, and it also happens in places with good cell coverage..

it also does not manage its memory as well as my other devices, it dosent close apps when mem gets low, i just get a message saying that i've run out of memory, annd a dialog asking me which apps i would like to close.

when chatting on msn or doing work, alerts come up whenever someone signs in or out, and the thing hangs momentarily while displaying the alert, this is really irritating when you're in the middle of writing something, especially if you have a really long contact list and people sign in and out often.....

i agree that it would have sucked to wait longer for the device while they fix everything, but things like the slow out of standby are unacceptable

however i dont have the slow webpage loading problem the other poster has...

i think ms probably decided to release it to avoid delaying it too long, and they are probably (hopefully) going to fix some of these issues with the update for push email ...i think the rom went gold last week

Edited November 11, 2005 by afhstingray

[Guest unicron]

ok having read your responces (thank you) i wonder if some could perform some simple tests for me.

1. with orange home screen off (on m5000) could you toggle between vertical and horizontal landscapes on the m5000 and m2000/m500/xda2i (or any se ppc phone) to see how long it the difference is.

2. orange home screen off (on m5000) could you play music in wmp 10 then start solitaire and see if there is any delays cause there is none on 2003 se devices.

what i would like is to hear how much delay (if any) the m5000 has when opening up standard in built apps when all other apps are closed compared to 2003 se devices with comparable speeds (400mhz- 520mhz). if its a couple seconds i can live with that but if its up to SIX seconds as reported earlier then i can not justify the purchase of this device and will sit on my htc alpine.

thanks in advance:-)

[Guest Wildfire]

I have had mine for about 10 days and I still love it to bits.

Yes it does lock up once in a while but I put that down to me running too many apps and maybe expecting too much from it.

it does take a few seconds for the screen to rotate from portrait to landscape, and it does take a few seconds for app to load.......the longest I have had to wait is about 5 secs for traffic tv to load.....and I had half a dozen programs open at the same time so I wasn't disappointed with the lag.

wifi is easy to set up and does reduce the battery time a little, again I can't say I noticed a difference in speed between this and a laptop.

I accept that this is a combination of phone and pda, and so there are comprimises that have to be made, but as much as I try I struggle to find any that would make me consider anything but this phone.

I have used the entire SPV range and this is by far the best yet.

[Guest removed-14]

I think a few people are trying to compare the M5000 (or in my case the O2 XDA Exec) with either a computer or a phone. Its neither. Try typing a word document on a normal mobile. Try getting your laptop to 'run' for 8 hours without swapping the battery.

The Universal is great, the screen is excellent, it has the best keyboard for its size. I admit it is a bit slow sometimes but it ISNT a PC! Look at what it does for the size of the thing! Only let it do one job at a time and it works fine for me.

The only major gripe is I wish there was a screen on the outside that displayed the caller. Ive now opted for a customised ringtone for each person who is calling. Im even thinking of recording the persons name and using that as a ring tone.

In conclusion it is a great device which saves me carrying a phone, pda, mp3 player and a laptop. Throw in a bluetooth gps reciever and i dont need a sat system! All for £150 and £19 per month. Thats a great deal!

[Guest dazza12]

One of the main problems is that software developers are still catching up with the WM5 release, so applications don't necessarily work correctly. For instance, some may not manage their memory correctly, or not know how to set themselves to go to sleep. If this happens, a phone will slow down as the program in question refuses to go to sleep.

Any program that isn't specifically designed for or updated for WM5 can not be guaranteed to work correctly. Skype for instance is not written for WM5, there is a beta version but as with all betas, it cannot be guaranteed to work correctly. TomTom works, but you need to jump through a couple of hoops to get it installed on the device. Is this the fault of the device, MS or Orange? Neither. As new operating systems come out with newer features, older features are retired or replaced. Programs that specifically use the older features will not work. Other programs that optimize their code for a particular CE, PPC 2000/2002 or WM2003 function may not run efficiently on WM5.

Regarding the order contacts are sorted, the phone is designed to work with Outlook. If you want a contact shown a particular way, for instance company name or Firstname Lastname instead of the default, it has to be done in Outlook. It comes with a licensed version of it so it's not software you need to get hold of.

If you use applications optimised for WM5, you don't need to close the applications down. That is why the memory manager is in Settings and not on the front menu, you shouldn't need to access it on a regular basis.

It sounds like some people here should take the device back and get something more appropriate for them. People looking for a device that is primarily a phone but want PDA functions, have you considered a separate phone and a PDA? Those that want a combined device but can't get their head around the way WM5 works, there's the Treo or a Symbian device. And those that think the phone is too big, perhaps a Smartphone or small form factor device such as the M500 might be more appropriate.

[Guest afhstingray]

well pdas absolutely have to be more responsive than pc's. this is because when you whip out your pda to check your schedule its only to look at it for a few seconds, but waiting an additional 3-5 seconds for the screen to actually activate is silly!!!

also , any phone, pdaphone, communicator etc its very important for it to be stable, if it crashes in your pocket, or loses text messages etc, it can be very damaging, especially if its a business device like this one.

being able to type word documents etc is irrelavant. it has to get the basics right!! eg, not lose texts, not have to wait for screen to activate ...

its kind of like having a car with a 70,000 watt sound system, widescreen tv etc, but it dosent actually drive well!!!

Edited November 13, 2005 by afhstingray

[Guest afhstingray]

One of the main problems is that software developers are still catching up with the WM5 release, so applications don't necessarily work correctly.

Any program that isn't specifically designed for or updated for WM5 can not be guaranteed to work correctly.

Regarding the order contacts are sorted, the phone is designed to work with Outlook. If you want a contact shown a particular way, for instance company name or Firstname Lastname instead of the default, it has to be done in Outlook. It comes with a licensed version of it so it's not software you need to get hold of.

If you use applications optimised for WM5, you don't need to close the applications down. That is why the memory manager is in Settings and not on the front menu, you shouldn't need to access it on a regular basis.

It sounds like some people here should take the device back and get something more appropriate for them. People looking for a device that is primarily a phone but want PDA functions, have you considered a separate phone and a PDA? Those that want a combined device but can't get their head around the way WM5 works, there's the Treo or a Symbian device. And those that think the phone is too big, perhaps a Smartphone or small form factor device such as the M500 might be more appropriate.

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

personally i do need the features, and havent installed 3rd party apps for the reasons you gave, the hardware is a dream, but i just wish a rom update fixing the annoying issues will be released soon....

[Guest removed-14]

well pdas absolutely have to be more responsive than pc's. this is because when you whip out your pda to check your schedule its only to look at it for a few seconds, but waiting an additional 3-5 seconds for the screen to actually activate is silly!!!

also , any phone, pdaphone, communicator etc its very important for it to be stable, if it crashes in your pocket, or loses text messages etc, it can be very damaging, especially if its a business device like this one.

being able to type word documents etc is irrelavant. it has to get the basics right!! eg, not lose texts, not have to wait for screen to activate ...

its kind of like having a car with a 70,000 watt sound system, widescreen tv etc, but it dosent actually drive well!!!

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Ok thats fair but i primarily want a pda/laptop replacement. I dont use text messages that much, and i get a few calls a day. But the pda features are better than my Dell Axim I had. When i go to check my calendar its there... it is responsive and so far it has never lost a text, e-mail, appointment, call etc... Like someone said earlier, it wont be for everyone but im on my feet all day and i cant carry a pda and phone so you might say i would comprimise with something that was a reasonable phone and good pda. Well in my opinion ive get the best of both worlds! But if it aint for you, then it aint for you.

[Guest afhstingray]

yea, this pda really opens up an interesting sector of the market.....some laptops are marketed as "desktop replacements"

well....this pda could very well be marketed as a laptop replacement. thats why i got it.i need my data (pdfs, word docs etc) to be available where ever i go, but its too cumbersome to lug a laptop!... i did not want to fork out cash on a x50v which could have done a similar job, so i bought this under a contract from orange. brilliant! new phone., and cheap pda YAY:P

i can see wm5 is a great step towards treo-like keyboard control and one hand usage. the only hardware issues i can think of are the weight/size (but its not too bad, its ok for me since my previous device was a sony nx70) , and the fact in tablet mode the "soft" buttons are not there, just a d pad. if they had included those, there really wouldnt be any need to tap the screen. a graphics accelerator would have been nice, but i dont really use this for gaming so i dont mind.

so lets just keep our fingers crossed and hope the next rom update that includes the Push Email functionality will be responsive and as reliable as my wm2003se devices have been

Edited November 13, 2005 by afhstingray

[Guest removed-14]

Yeah a ROM update would probably sort a few gripes out but im not holding my breath/ I was waiting ages for my C500 to be updated by Orange! That was between sending it back for dust to be removed from the screen!

[Guest afhstingray]

well i guess as an interim solution we could use roms from imate or dopod or o2....whoever releases a good one first...until an orange rom is released

[Guest removed-14]

well i guess as an interim solution we could use roms from imate or dopod or o2....whoever releases a good one first...until an orange rom is released

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Well ill be waiting for an official ROM from O2. Dont know how quick they are with ROM updates as ive been with orange for the last 8 years.

[Guest afhstingray]

when i had my mda III there were really bad problems with bluetooth, and microphone volume/distortion.

i mate was the first to release a fixed rom. then o2, then orange. and finally t mobile :S

orange is a bit slow, but they incorporate more fixes, where else imate and o2 they tend to come out with more roms, each fixing a few

[Guest Pondrew]

when i had my mda III there were really bad problems with bluetooth, and microphone volume/distortion.

i mate was the first to release a fixed rom. then o2, then orange. and finally t mobile :S

orange is a bit slow, but they incorporate more fixes, where else imate and o2 they tend to come out with more roms, each fixing a few

<{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Orange released an update for the SPV M2000?! Where was I when that happened? Where is it? How come they deny the existence of any new rom? ;)

I'd say that I-Mate are usually best for rom updates, followed by Qtek, O2, T-Mobile and Orange a FAR distant last. Seriously, the only rom update Orange UK have ever officially released for a Pocket PC Phone was for the M1000 a LONG LONG time ago.

[Guest afhstingray]

really?!?!?

i could have sworn they had a rom that fixed the mic and bluetooth problem!!