M600 - * Loads of problems *

[Guest timpharrison]

I was so excited to get the M600 after reading may reviews online and looking at the comments in this forum. I am very surprised and disappointed that some serious shortcomings with the phone did not get reported in the reviews.

Battery Life :P : I get less than a day. I use the Wifi sparingly, but use the bluetooth for syncing at work. The reported "3-5 days standby" may be true, but only if you do not actually use the device for anything. What use it that? I would have liked someone to have reported that under normal use, the phone must be charged every single day and if using bluetooth constantly on, during the day too.

Sound ;) : Same problem as the old SPV E200 - sounds like the speaker is broken or turned up to high. This is supposed to be a phone, not just a PDA. It seems to fail at this key requirement - if I have to speak to someone abroad, I can't understand what they're saying with this phone.

Making calls ;) : If you have a large number of contacts, it is hugely impractical to dial without taking the stylus out. Ergo no single handed use.

Push email ;) : If you are connected via wi-fi the phone still turns on the GPRS to keep a check on push email. It even mentions this in the manual. This means you will have to pay. Whilst on this matter, I am finding that simply maintaing a connection to push email, is using over 1/2 MB a day. I am not looking forward to my next Orange bill.

The PDA bits work well on this phone, but has everyone forgotten this is first and foremost a phone?

There.. feel much better now ;) Interested in your thoughts...

[Guest Stabilo]

I was so excited to get the M600 after reading may reviews online and looking at the comments in this forum. I am very surprised and disappointed that some serious shortcomings with the phone did not get reported in the reviews.

Battery Life :P : I get less than a day. I use the Wifi sparingly, but use the bluetooth for syncing at work. The reported "3-5 days standby" may be true, but only if you do not actually use the device for anything. What use it that? I would have liked someone to have reported that under normal use, the phone must be charged every single day and if using bluetooth constantly on, during the day too.

Sound ;) : Same problem as the old SPV E200 - sounds like the speaker is broken or turned up to high. This is supposed to be a phone, not just a PDA. It seems to fail at this key requirement - if I have to speak to someone abroad, I can't understand what they're saying with this phone.

Making calls ;) : If you have a large number of contacts, it is hugely impractical to dial without taking the stylus out. Ergo no single handed use.

Push email ;) : If you are connected via wi-fi the phone still turns on the GPRS to keep a check on push email. It even mentions this in the manual. This means you will have to pay. Whilst on this matter, I am finding that simply maintaing a connection to push email, is using over 1/2 MB a day. I am not looking forward to my next Orange bill.

The PDA bits work well on this phone, but has everyone forgotten this is first and foremost a phone?

There.. feel much better now ;) Interested in your thoughts...

Battery life, agreed very poor.

Sound, not noticed the poor quality on calls. Did notice excellent quality listening to music AVI's throught he stereo handsfree kit. Shame HTC use a 3mm socket, I have a few 2.5mm to 3.5mm adapters but I will need another to use my FM Transmitter in the car with the M600.

Making calls, if you keep the bottom bit of the navigator held down it flicks through the letters. This way you quickly get to your contact, unless you have dozens of names for each letter.

Pushmail, I have unlocked mine to use the T-Mobile Web n' Walk unlimited GPRS, even though I still retain my ED50 with Orange. I actually find with 802.11g WiFi it tends to disconnect my GPRS, even though I don't want it to as I have unlimted GPRS account. Strictly speaking pushmail does need GPRS but you can disable GPRS and set ActiveSync to check mail every 5 minutes via WiFi and when you request a manual send / receive.

For me it's a PDA first (Video & music player), Email, WWW, Excel etc and a phone second. I suspect the phone is secondary for many, after all if you wanted a phone you could buy a

[Guest jamespvm600]

Hi, I have to agree with the OP, I have had this a few days and found the battery life short.

The same problems with the speaker and yes, I had an e200 and it was just the same.

I had an ipaq sometime ago and I'm not surprised m600 will need charging each day, although with heavy use I think it may not even last a day! I'll be using my c500 for a back up.

I'd suggest you keep an extra usb cable at work for syncing and top up the battery.

I've also found the same problem with the phone useage, but see the other thread I started their are some other dialers you can try.

I think there is some sort of fix for the volume controls which may help the speakers.

The PDA part of the phone works as expected and I have used it to control media player on my home pc via wifi and I can log onto my home network easily.

Although I have found wifi disconnects regularly at home when there is no issue with the signal-does anyone know of a fix for this.

Overall I think its a reasonable machine, but some of the reviews have been overly gushing...

The best thing is the size only slights bigger than my old phone. The M5000 was just too big, I was waiting for this one.

I've also enjoyed watching divx movies on it on the train, the sound through headphones is excellent a blue tooth head set may be the best option.

[Guest chucky.egg]

Sounds like the M600 is very different to the Dopod 818 (Prophet) that I got.

Battery life was good (admittedly I dont use BT a lot). I regularly got 3 days out of one charge, but with heavy PDA use it would go down to 1.5 days.

Making calls was easy, I don't see the problem. Do you have intellipad installed? You dial the letters in a contacts name and any name containing those letters is listed. More letters = fewer matches. Or are you trying to dial from Contacts rather than from the Phone app?

Push Email. WiFi is a PDA function, which will be disabled when the device goes into suspend mode, so DirectPush can't assume that WiFi is available. I'm certain that my Wizard uses WiFi to sync when I tell it to (but that may be only for manual Send/Receive rather than Push because I turn Push off after 6pm)

MS have said that there is no way to wake WiFi up during Suspend, so there is no way around that

As for your data use, I can't really comment. I have Push on 7am to 6pm, but I'm on T-Mobile so I've never bothered to install a GPRS monitor to see how much it's using.

[Guest b33k34]

I agree - there are a few issues with this if, like me, you've been used to a really excellent *phone* (a 6310i in my case) but i'm not sure about all of your gripes.

---Battery Life :P : I get less than a day. I use the Wifi sparingly, but use the bluetooth for syncing at work.

I'm getting better than i expected to - a couple of days. Wifi does seem to hit it hard and i'm using a cable to sync. In fact, mine is keeping at a higher charge than my phone most of the time because it gets a boost a few times a day when i sync it.

--- Sound

Odd this one. I asked repeatedly on forums about the sound quality and i can't work out what's wrong. it's not too quiet (in fact i use it turned down most of the time) but it's very 'harsh'. I'm getting used to it and find it Ok now. A bluetooth headset might be the answer - i'm considering this anyway so that i can a) leave the phoen in my pocket or ;) make notes whilst in call. One for the Moto Razr would mean no extra charger as that uses miniusb as well.

---large number of contacts,

I've got 800 and this is an issue. my (3 year old?) palm TT allowed you to enter more than one letter using the control pad. Two things that might make this easier that i'm working on (which woudl be unneccessary if the 'categories' filter was sticky (how stupid is that?).

1)the speed dial can have up to 99 entries. that will give a much shorter list to scroll through. i reckon

there are 20 or 30 numbers i dial frequently.

2) Phonealarm (which also gives a proper display of battery life, signal, sms's, voicemail and profile switching from the today screen - try it) has quick access and dial to the most recent 10 phone actions (combined in/out list) which is often enough.

3) voicedialing seems to work well. i've replaced the button hold for voicememo with a shortcut to voicedialing to give a single button press dial. not sure how many voicedials can be stored.

-- The PDA bits work well on this phone, but has everyone forgotten this is first and foremost a phone?

i'm thinking i'll probably end up setting up a forward to a PAYG at weekends on my old 6310 but i'm liking carrying a single device in the week. Outlook sync is great for diary but the notes synchronisation is a joke - they dont sort into categories which dumps my 200+ notes in the top level folder.

Search doesn't help - a name search on my 800 contacts takes over a minute!

[Guest Stabilo]

The PDA bits work well on this phone, but has everyone forgotten this is first and foremost a phone?

I disagree, surely with all the features it has it's a PDA, which can be used to make calls.

Edited May 16, 2006 by Stabilo

[Guest mandt]

to make dialling numbers easier try the free d9 dialler from HERE which promises to make dialling much easier due to its nice fat buttons and t9 support, just downloaded my copy and it looks pretty good. will install it and have a play later.

As for the battery life my vario is pretty bad but is getting slowly better after each full discharge/recharge cycle.(still only two weeks old) I remember my old C550s battery life was awful at first but after a while would last up to three days

[Guest jamespvm600]

I tried D9 last night with M600 and it wouldn't load??

[Guest mandt]

Not a good sign, I'll try it tonight and see how I get on.

and now i must do some work!

[Guest mandt]

Ok so I got it working. Seems like it needs to install on the phone, as it wouldn't work from my card. did you install the OpenNETCF SDF Setup?

I must say it's a bit buggy though, pressing the directional pad in any direction at the first 'welcome to d9' screen causes it to crash, but it's certainly easier to hit the right button than on the standard dialler.

[Guest raiderz]

---Battery Life ;) : I get less than a day. I use the Wifi sparingly, but use the bluetooth for syncing at work.

I'm getting better than i expected to - a couple of days. Wifi does seem to hit it hard and i'm using a cable to sync. In fact, mine is keeping at a higher charge than my phone most of the time because it gets a boost a few times a day when i sync it.

Used my M600 for couple of days, off charge 7am yesterday, usage statistics: bit of WiFi, bluetooth on from 7am to 11pm, using b/t handsfree car kit, similar use to my old Nokia 6680, been in use approx 39 hours at moment, and batt life says 45%.

[Guest Funster]

Used my M600 for couple of days, off charge 7am yesterday, usage statistics: bit of WiFi, bluetooth on from 7am to 11pm, using b/t handsfree car kit, similar use to my old Nokia 6680, been in use approx 39 hours at moment, and batt life says 45%.

I agree with raiderz. I get similar use out of my M600, typically 72 hours. Bit of wifi and mostly calls. I also have push email enabled from 6am to 8pm most days. The push email doesn't seem to affect the battery as much as I thought it would. On the C600 is kills it in 2 days.

[Guest spangelsaregreat]

Battery Life - Comparing it against my JAM my JAMin is far better. I do put mine on charge every night anyway so it isn't an issue personally. What I did notice that using a topographic GPS program for off road navigation I can easily get over 8 to 9 hours use (with BT receiver) where before I would only get about 4 to 5 hours using the JAM.

Speaker - My JAMin is currently away getting a speaker fault fixed so yes this appears a weak point.

Contacts - I use PocketBreeze with ContactBreeze, total one handed operation!!

I don't really use email so can't comment on that.

Regards

[Guest jamespvm600]

I've had enough of it, I can't get the wifi to work at home, tried WEP WPA and open network SSID enabled or not, it locks on for a few minutes then has to search again.

The speaker is poor, I find it very difficult to hear people particularly calling from other mobiles.

Also the sound can be very shrill sometimes.

The dialer is very bad and the keypad is difficult to use with out the stylus.

It has developed a fault also one of the front buttons for calender notifitcation doesn't seem to work propely, this may be a software fault but all the same its not working.

My old c500 was much better I think I'll swap it for a c600.

Good features-WM5 works well, I can download movies to watch on the train. Its a reasonable size.

This is very disappointing I really would have thought these devices would have been a decent build with the functionality they advertise.

I haven't got time to keep searching for upgrades and downloads plus we have to pay for the privilege!

[Guest raiderz]

The speaker is poor, I find it very difficult to hear people particularly calling from other mobiles.

Also the sound can be very shrill sometimes.

Must admit the earpiece on mine is awful, however seeing as I use it via my b/t handsfree this isn't as much of an issue as if I was using it normally.

Battery life is pretty good, thought I would see how long it would take to flatten completely from 50%, put the backlight on full, wifi & b/t on, took over 2 hours before it went off!

Had a few issues with my wifi but found this was because of a setting on my router so its fine now.