E200 Initial Impressions

[Guest Pagemakers]

The long awaited E200 is finally out. What are your initial impressions?

[Guest Brody]

I love my E200, its great, speedy and the camera is great fun!

[Guest Pagemakers]

I think its better than the E100 but if I'm totally honest I am a little disappointed and it's not a good as I imagined. Solely down to a few previously mentioned bugs.

[Guest tooney]

I'm torn between Devastated and Generally dissapointed. I was really looking forward to getting my hands on this phone and it is now the 1st phone I have considered returning after less than a week. Worst has to be the battery life, got 8 hours out of mine today then got the main battery low message. Thats with 1 short call, no camera use, a short game on toki tori and a few texts. It's a joke. I had a 'tiny samsung' analog mobile when they were released many years ago and it had similar battery performance. It's near unusable. Add to this the other bugs (the camera drops back to the homescreen occasionally after you take a pic, the email polling fault, the headset doesn't seem to mute the handset mic on mine, the lack of 8 way joystick...etc the list just goes on and on) and you can't not be dissapointed. God knows how many more bugs will surface, it's only been out a week and we seem to have more problems than were fixed on the original spv in a year! I was willing to accept these sorts of problems on the original spv but this 1 should be stunning and it falls well short.

BAD BAD BAD

....the screen is stunning though! (appart from the yellowish bit at the bottom :lol: )

[Guest statscat]

I have to say I don't seem to have the same battery issue as other people mine tends to go about 2.5 days before it dies a death but then I am not an uber call user instead prefering MMS, SMS, Email and browsing.

I like the phone, yeah the are some issues some of which are MS (eg Email polling, all day appointments) some of which could be HTC or Orange (battery life, joystick etc)

I also don't get the buzzing on the calls that I do make so I have to say I love it (though that I guess is a HTC QC issue) and even my friends noticed the improvement in call quality over my SPV.

I also like the new homescreen and think Orange did a great job here (but then they did that well last time).

I know that the issues discovered so far are niggly and they can annoy but in general it is far more stable than the SPV, I guess its like any MS product, its complex and changes one place affect seemingly unrelated programs so there wil be teething issues with the WM2003 platform from an MS perspective just as there have been with ever other OS in MS history.

Can I add that the things that bugs me the most is that PIE still doesn't support special characters like ← and that is most definately an MS issue.

[Guest drblow]

I don't have one (YET) so I didn't vote (YET), but I thought I'd interject to say that as someone currently considering what new phone to get, & with at least some competition to the SPV this time, I'm still favouring the e200!!

The bugs mentioned so far have mostly, I feel, been minor. This may be because I don't use certain functions that much, or whatever, but it definately seems that alot of the "disappointed" feel has been as much from the expectation that the e200 was going to be all that, & make you a nice cup of tea!! Which is really Orange's fault for again not living up to their promises.

The only thing that I am still debating over with myself is the certfication issue. When I saw the intial news that the e200 would be app unlocked, with just prompts, I wanted one immediately! But it would look like again, to get full benefit from the thing, you need to unlock again!! :evil: Although, as long as the OTA is available, I don't suppose it's too bad.

Just my 2p!! I'm sure I will be among the most vocal about how crap the e200 is once I get mine!! (personally, I think flip phones are for girls!!! :lol: ;) :( )

[Guest statscat]

(personally, I think flip phones are for girls!!! :lol:  ;)  :( )

or musicians ................ :wink: :)

plus those flip phones are murder on your nails (that said though the power button on the SPV was the nemesis of many a well groomed thumb nail) :cry: :wink:

[Guest drblow]

plus those flip phones are murder on your nails (that said though the power button on the SPV was the nemesis of many a well groomed thumb nail)  :cry:  :wink:

ha! :lol: That's REALLY why I don't like 'em! :wink:

[Guest MECX]

i was gonna get one but the 4 way joystick and same crappy battery has put me off at least untill my contract runs out (in january) and by then more phones should be out. :lol:

[Guest Rob.P]

With the release of the E200 reading through the forum is like the heady days of when this all started with the SPV and the bugs and in particular the bad battery life, Deja Vu :lol: I do like my E200, I find it a vast improvement over the SPV, but I'm lucky cause at the moment I haven't suffered from any major bugs and for the moment my call quality is like a 100% better than my SPV was.

Looks like we are going through the same cycle again though, let's make a prediction, MS and O will keep us all hanging on with updates which will slowly fix the phone over a period of a year, then in about 10 months time we'll start getting the info about the next model, then we'll all get the next model, it will be bugged, MS and O will keep us all hanging on with updates...... (you get the picture ;) )

I think I'm gonna see how this year goes with updates for this phone, if it looks like it's gonna turn into that cycle I mentioned above then I will drop out of it and get something different.

On refelection it also looks abit like the life of the Windows OS, think of Smartphone 2002 as Win'95, and Windows Mobile as Win'98, so in theory we only have to wait another couple of years and we should get a Smartphone that's at the XP stage.

[Guest alanclose]

Just got mine last night, The call quality is awful, what is the general consensus, is it a software problem or should you return the phone if it has this annoying buzzing?

I'm half dissapointed and half chuffed to bits with it. Compared to the SPV it feels cheap and plastic and doesn't sit as well in my hand, I really dislike the joysick, you cant slide your thumb up to the soft keys now without hitting it and sending the phone into a different menu. I much prefered the SPV navigation. Its also quite hard to get used to having decently spaced keys again.

The feel of the phone aside I have to say I like the speed of the phone, the built in camera is great. GPRS is very fast and its great being able to listen to music and surf or check e-mails at the same time (the music playback on my SPV would breakup if I tried to use GPRS at the same time).

If I could have the speed increase and the built in camera in the original SPV casing It would be fantastic