Would the real Simon Perry step forward

[Guest Cent]

I am aware of the full list of bugs. I am also aware of all ongoing discussions and problems with the SPV. I own one of them - oh my god - I own it with all the bugs and problems.

However the review Mr. Simon Perry wrote which is featured on Slashdot and the Register is with the exception of a few points a lot of horsedroppings. I have dialed from my contactlist and have had no problem so far. Where does this character find his problems ? Our buglist does not contain this bug yet - why ? Why did he bother getting one if all he writes is true ?

Does he really think this false review is helping anyone ?

[Guest Rob_Quads]

The feature on theregister.co.uk did make me wonder - They were a bit too quick to make an article on the complains of one person. I had a problem of the menu resetting it self - I 'could' have sent in a complaint but a few days later found out it was a setting that needing changing.

It stinks of the register just trying to put down the SPV due to the microsoft connection.

It is unteresting that they have a small sentance saying they have been contact by others saying they don't have this problem. This would indicate that he has a 'one-off' problem not a common problem and thus they really should change the way they word thier article

[Guest Flopsy]

And is it just me, or does his bad quality photo just look like he failed to remove the little plastic sticky protector from the camera lens? :D

Ralph.

[Guest Rob_Quads]

Now who would be thick enough to do that :oops: One of the guys at work spotted it was still on there on the 3rd day of ownership

[Guest Fulkrum]

The issue he goes on about relates to contacts synchronised over from his Outlook. Its actually a bug with windows. Should you enter contacts manually into Outlook, dont enter the first digit of 0 as outlook will bang a +44 in front of it and you cant stop it. We are looking into it at the moment.

[Guest Fulkrum]

I have just read that geezers article and guess what. He has the numbers entered into outlook incorrectly anyway. Thank god for expert journalists and their reviews. :oops:

[Guest Treadsoftly]

The article has been #ahem# amended:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/64/28393.html

[Guest Simon Perry]

Someone whispered in my ear that my presence had been requested, so I thought I'd drop by.

BTW - Thanks for the interest in my review. It is flattering to know I've been read and have entered the subject of discussions.

When I wrote the review, I was trying to give a balanced view of my experiences with something that I was very excited to get to use. I feel smartphones are a significant technological step forward and I wanted to have an informed, first-hand view.

Having been an early Orange subscriber and SMS'er from the days when they didn't charge for them (as they didn't always work), I knew that a new phone like this wasn't going to be a smooth experience - after all it was v1.0.

As it happened, my handset didn't deliver enough for me as I couldn't make calls as easily or quickly as I could with my old phone put me off and using the phone was not a pleasant experience as its response was generally just too slow. I know it's doing lots more than my current 6210, and I cut it some slack for that, but it's significantly slower than my 6210.

For me, the minimum requirement from an upgrade is that it's at least as good as what's being replaced.

I tried all routes with Orange to get the problem resolved during the time between my five or six fairly lengthy calls to them.

They did suggest a work around - I could delete all of the contact entries and re-enter them on the phone hand set. I couldn't see myself re-keying ~2k contacts in to any phone - especially one with a keyboard the size of the SPV's keyboard. Oh ... and the other small point that syncing with my PC is one of the reasons that I bought this phone.

I've read this morning that the dialling problem I had may be caused by SPV having problems dealing with phone numbers that have non-numeric numbers in them. All of my Outlook contact entries are all of the form +44 (0800) 100 100, as this is the format that MS Outlook suggests to me when I enter a phone number. It's a shame that the SmartPhone OS team didn't speak to the Outlook team about this and it's frankly surprising that MS don't have company wide standards for data formats.

Potentially, I could have got the phone swapped over, possibly to a working model, but was told by Orange that I would then forfeit my money back guarantee. Given it took me five days of phoning Orange to extract an answer from their Tech support, I didn't have a lot of time left. This, on top of my concerns over its slow execution, I felt I'd run out of options and had to return the SPV.

I didn't want to give it back - but I had no real option - given Orange couldn't give me a solution before the end of the year ... and, yes I know it's only potentially a month away, but I didn't buy the phone to sit in a draw, on the off-chance that there might be a fix. I'll hold on to my money and try the next interesting model.

I'm glad I got the SPV as it gave me a glimpse through the window of up coming smartphones.

It reinforced my two major reservations with this form. The amount you can display on the screens is too little , causing you to constantly scroll left and right to look at a Web page (it might be an idea to enable the viewer to see the page sideways). There needs to be a better way of entering information into the device, this keyboard is just too small but there is some interesting approaches [http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973...3,713584,00.asp] to this coming along.

This hasn't made me jaded - I don't think that this will be the last smartphone I try. As I said in the original piece, I'm looking forward to the Sony Ericsson P800.

[Guest Cent]

Thanks for your response Simon. I am sorry your phone didn't work out for you. I suppose if there would have been more *noise* about our forum you would have found that most of the things that you were talking about are already addressed under Tip's & Tricks in this forum. In other words there are workarounds for the +44 problem and there are workaround for a lot of other issues.

As to the widescreen browsing the web ... hey, I love that idea too and hopefully MS will be sensible enough to address it in a patch or if not at least in the next version of the Smartphone OS.

[Guest Fulkrum]

Simon

That glitch was with outlook and not the spv. If you edited the numbers in outlook after the outlook bug changed your number to +440208 etc to +44208 and then synced there would be no issue. I know you say you have over 2k entries but The SPV didnt enter the original information dude.

:oops:

This problem is still there with the p800. I know because I have been testing it for the past month and this issue with the SPV made me look at the synchronisation on it. Today funnily enough.