Before you return your SPV

[Guest shaun stuart]

I have been reading this newsgroup with great interest over the last week

and wanted to share my thoughts on the SPV.

Bugs & Fixes

As a Pocket PC user (and early adopter of the Pocket PC OS having tried palm

and Psion) I believe there are less problems reported on the SPV in this

newsgroup than in the pocket pc newsgroup during that software's first week

of release. That may not be much consolation to those of you that are having

a number of problems with your individual SPV but for those who are

experiencing minor problems you should be aware that the pocket pc platform

has gone from strength to strength - with Microsoft and the pocket pc

manufacturers listening to feedback in newsgroups such as this and fixing

most of the problems. (Although I accept not as quickly as some of us would

have liked). In the case of pocket pcs, patches were released within weeks

to fix some of the early release issues and not months as suggested in other

threads here.

My advice to anyone that has 3 or more problems with there device is to

take it back and exchange it for another SPV in the first instance. A number of early pocket pcs suffered from inconsistent performance - this did not mean that the entire platform was faulty but as in a lot of cases with

consumer electronics QA will not pick up all the faults with all the devices

every time -especially during first releases (not that we should accept this

but it is a fact in a lot of cases) . For those of you who are prepared to

wait I am sure patches / updates will be released in the coming weeks.

Software

On the issue of software and certification - I agree with most of the

sentiments in this group that Orange/Microsoft are not helping the platform

by charging developers - I appreciate that some of you have written to

Orange and MS to express your concerns but suggest that another approach is

also considered. Earlier this week I wrote to Hexacto

http://www.hexacto.com/games_smart.php - a pocket pc and smartphone games

developer and explained that there were a large number of new users waiting

for games to be released. I asked them about the issue of certification and

although they were not prepared to comment on this subject they did thank me

for my email and informed me that they hope to have some of their smartphone

applications made available through www.handango.com from Monday. I suggest

that if you want to see more software that we all email the companies that

currently supply Pocket PC software and prove to them the market for these products already exists.

note; I am not affiliated with Orange or MS in anyway, I have been using

Pocket PCs since there introduction and currently use an Ipaq 3870. I

purchased the SPV a week ago and although it is not perfect overall I am

impressed with what you get for your money. An ipaq 3870 costs £450 vs £99 or free SPV with contract. The fact that the phone is upgradeable means that it can only get better. My view is give it a chance

[Guest dj simonz]

Your points are very understandable, I've been following the forum for a week now and I'm still waiting for my SPV to be delivered. At first, I personally felt that with all the complaints on the board regarding bugs and incompetent features of the SPV (i.e. Lack of battery life etc...), I felt that I really wanted to cancel my order as there are many other phones out there that are way cool too and user friendly.

I can feel the distraught and resent that some people have on this forum for purchasing the phone and even having trouble returning the product to Orange. These are all genuine people who have used the SPV and have genuine reasons to dislike its functionality. However as you said, it takes time to get things perfect and your points regarding MS working on patches etc are actually true and I agree with this statement.

For everyone else out there not familiar with MS things, Windows 2000 for the PC for e.g. still to this day has updates and patches to download and this O/S was released as far back as 1999. Thats nearly 4 years down the road and MS are still supporting it. It goes to show that MS do care about its product enhancements and yes, this might take some time to solve especially for the product being new.

It's good that most problems are related to the functionality of the device which is mostly software based problems. This is a good thing because software can be manipulated and corrected much easier than hardware can. Imagine if all the SPV's had to be recalled back due to a hardware fault! Luckily there hasnt been problems regarding hardware faliure as yet.

The phone design is pretty solid and asthetically pleasing, yes the keypad is hard to press but I'm sure it will grow on you with more use.

If MS and Orange do release a fix for the major problems addressed, then I'm sure the phone and its technology will catch on to more consumers. I'm sure they will sell alot of units during the Xmas period and in January have a strong enough customer base to fully establish their consumer relations in providing a better service.

I just can't wait to send and recieve loads of photo msg's from my gf during Xmas as we will be away from each other for a few days. With us having an SPV each, it would be well cool. I think the phone is worth the price for that purpose only (well it was free on contract anyways :D).

[Guest Gaf]

Yes no doubt a SP will sort a lot of bugs, but even a bug free phone has one major disadvantage over all the competitors - no running of homebrew/3rd party sw without a cert. Never mind what people say about how advanced the SPV is, as long as it has limited SW to use with it then its not a patch on a modern JAVA equipped phone.

If ORANGE dont sort out the cert thing BEFORE the P800 comes out there in serious trouble IMHO.

[Guest Jono]

Yeah, but think about it - I reckon orange and ms KNOW the phone is bugged, they just wanted to release it NOW. Now, they have to sort out all the bugs with their own software before having to worry about someone else's programs bugs.

That is (I hope/think) why the phone is SW limited to orange/ms. Makes sense to me; annoying, but understandable.