vB Easy Archive - My HTC Vox review

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My HTC Vox review
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Posted by: sn0zc0r3

(This review is based on about 24 hours of use with the device. It entails first impressions with the device, gripes and praises)

About a month and a half ago, I came to the realization that I would like a phone with a qwerty keypad due to my new coworkers obsession with text messaging. I've always loved gadgets in one sense of the word and I spend a good deal of time scouring gizmodo, engadget, crunchgear, BGR, etc. Through these blogs, I came up the Helio Ocean and the first impressions of the device at the last cell phone conference in Barcelona (forgive me but I just can't recall the name of the conference and I'm a bit too lazy to look it up at this time). I fell in love with it's inventive dual slider design and it's impressive display. I decided that yes, I will get this device and switch to Helio. Fast forward to last week, after reading numerous personal reviews/horror stories from Helians (or whatever you call them) regarding the Ocean and Helio's service, I decided that maybe I'll stay away from the buggy Ocean and the even buggier Helio. Upon that conclusion, I recalled a different device that I saw at that same conference in Barcelona that also peeked my interest significantly: the HTC Vox.

Fast forward to yesterday afternoon and I have the hot little device in my hands. After sliding the phone out of its plastic sleeve, I couldn't help but compare its size to an older Nokia phone I once had many years ago. Before turning the phone I, I clicked a few of the number keys. A bit small compared to my then current Razr, but not small enough that I would complain. With that said though, the * and # keys are a bit TOO small for my liking. If you look at images of the Vox, you can see that as you follow the keys down, they begin to slide inward upon reaching the * and # keys. It's not as if these keys are incredibly detrimental to the overall usage of the phone, but there are times when the keys do come into play that make me wish they were a bit larger (such as unlocking the keypad or using the alpha-numeric keys to write a quick message when one doesn't want to/need to switch to the qwerty pad).

I excitedly turn the phone and am greeted by the HTC symbol which gives way to Windows Mobile. Going through the Home Screen settings, I'm happy to see a number of stock layouts for selectable shortcut icons, the date and time, and other misc features such as the number of new texts/emails/etc and so on. As I'm going through the device though, I do notice that the OS is a bit sluggish. I'm sure any of you that has read at least 1 of the reviews for the Vox has already been told, it is a bit on the slow side. However, I don't take this negative as such a drastic con. While a fast, snappy OS isn't necessarily a bad thing, I don't think that the speed limitations of this OS necessitate an instant "non-buy". Plus, it's already been shown to be a very nice phone to overclock and shows a dramatic improvement speed wise afterwards. Also in regards to the speed of this phone, the change from portrait to landscape regarding the home screen as the keypad is opened/closed is pretty slow. However, with the overclocking of the cpu and/or removing the sound effect for the action of opening/closing the keypad will help alleviate this problem. As a caveat though, overclocking your CPU will drain your battery faster and may wreck your device. So, if you do so, do it at your own risk (ruined devices are really only in the case of going nuts and overclocking the CPU waaayy too high, but then again I'm sure stranger things have happened).

The keypad itself is very slick. However, it's taken me a short amount of time to get used to it. The keys are quite small but spaced out enough so they don't flush into each other. This spacing though has led me to having to stretch to the left with me left hand to hit buttons or rearrange my hands to hit certain key combinations. The Fn button in the lower left corner is exceptionally small in comparison to the other buttons and is a pain to hit when you're inputting numbers. Atfer a bit of use though, you're typing does get better, but I don't feel like you'll ever be able to type as fast as you can on say, a computer keyboard or a qwerty pad on say a blackjack, blackberry or Nokia e62/62i.

Installing applications onto the Vox is a snap through Active sync or downloading them through the internet. At the moment, I really only have 2 applications installed: Skype and Octro chat. If you're looking for a gaim/pidgin/trillian style messaging program, I reccomend Octro chat. You need to have a gmail/gchat account prior to that considering you can't get access to setting up "Legacy" accounts (AIM, Yahoo, ICQ, MSN) accounts without one. However, once you're up and running, it's all Milhouse. You can click on embedded links which will launch IE, it recognizes a good amount of smileys, tabbed browsing, works over GSM/EDGE, has file transfer capablities through gtalk and uses a very small amount of system resources. I've only tried Skype once last night and I don't believe I had it set up correctly (I didn't have the anti-echo tick checked during my call). However, you can only use Skype through the Wifi settings of the Vox and I've heard that after overclocking, Skype works wonderfully. Speaking of Wifi...

Wifi set up on the Vox confused me a little at first but I was eventually able to connect to my home router. There have been some reports of problems connecting to certain types of routers, or it may have been just the settings on their router but nonetheless, there have been a few cases

Battery life seems to be pretty good but as is said at the top of this review, I've only had the device 24 hours. Because I hooked it up to active sync last night, I didnt drain the battery all the way. I had a full charge at 8:30 this morning when I unplugged from the charger and went to work. During the day, I fussed with some of the settings, talked for about 30-45 min on the phone and was connected to Octro for about 3 or 4 hours through EDGE/GPRS. I lock the keypad whenever I don't use it and I have the backlight settings as low as they can go (supposedly, you can turn off the dimmed backlight even faster with a registry edit, but I haven't done that yet). It takes about 10 seconds for the backlight to dim and about a minute for the screen to go completely off. As of this writing, my battery is at 72% (so, that means its 72% after about 6.5 hours). I wouldn't say that that is too bad with all things considered.

The internal speaker/headset speaker is a little quiet for me. Going to too many shows over the years has damaged my hearing I'm sorry to say (in addition to almost losing my hearing as a kid) and as such, I press the phone into my ear at times to better hear the person on the other side. I'm hoping that there is a registry edit or some hex code I can edit that will make the speaker a little louder, so if anyone knows of any such thing, reply in this thread or drop me a PM please. On the other side of the call, I was told that I came in nice and crisp. My mom (yes, I'm going to talk about my mom) mentioned that she could hear me better on the Vox than she could when I called home using my Razr. She also thinks I'm cool. FYI.

I hooked up my Plantronics 510 headset to the Vox without a hitch. I could hear much better on my headset than I could on the headset speaker so that made me happy. However, as I was on the phone with my girlfriend, I lost connection to the device even though I was less than (I would estimate) 5-6 feet away. I would more than likely blame this up to the headset itself though considering this would also happen with my Razr. I should probably call Plantronics and complain but eh, it's not the end of the world and I do like my 510 well enough, regardless of the short range.

All in all, I'm mighty pleased with my purchase and am now a fan of HTC products. After having a phone that isn't branded to any carrier, I can say that I'll never go back unless I get a hell of a deal (which, lets face it, happens often with this carriers but I don't want to be tied down to a contract any longer). If you have any questions for me about my particular device, let me know and I'll see what I can do to answer them. As an aside, I have not picked up a MicroSD card yet so I can't comment on that, and I have not played any music or videos on the Vox mainly because I don't like to use a cell phone for such a thing. I feel that a cell phone is a communications device and thats what I use it as.

Posted by: sn0zc0r3

Someone in another thread asked me to comment the sluggishness of the advice specifically. So, without further delay...

The processor is a big sluggish, make no mistake of that. If you are expecting a phone that has lightning fast transitions between screens, the screen changing from portrait to landscape, etc, the phone will dissapoint. However, in my opinion, I don't think it is necessarily a horrible issue. Take into account the speed of the process is 200 mhz (according to Omapclock, it lists the speed as 186 mhz). With only ~200 mhz to the machine, it does it's job fairly well, not to mention a faster processor would drain the battery much faster. Now that I mention it, let me follow up on the battery issue a bit more. After work yesterday, I went to a pool hall with a coworker and shot some pool (as one usually does at such an establishment). When I left my office to go to the pool hall, I signed in Octro and stayed signed in. Throughout the night, I sent some texts and im's. I came home and eventually signed off of Octro around 11/11:30-ish that night. Went to bed and woke up the next morning to see the phone at 1 bar. It said the battery was about at 27% I believe at 8am this morning. Went to work and went up until about 1:30 in the afternoon and I was still at around 20%. At this point, I wanted to put OmapClock on my phone so when I use skype, I can beef the processor up a bit. I'm sure when I stop fiddling with the phone during the day and let it sit, I can get at least another day off of a single charge. Needless to say, I'm impressed with the battery life. I really wanted a more advanced phone with a qwerty keypad, but I was worried that I was going to be stuck with phones that can barely last a day. The Vox can last a day easy and definitely more depending on your usage of it.

Back to the sluggishness of the OS. The biggest slow downs you'll notice will be sliding the keypad in and out and when you have several programs running concurrently. However, we aren't talking 4-5 seconds. It's more in the neighborhood of 1 sec, 2 second max. The keyboard is different than the norm though. Sliding it in and out with the sound effect for it turned on, the sluggishness is a bit higher to 2-4 seconds (more if lots of programs are running). However, if you remove the sound effect that plays when sliding the keyboard in and out, it will reduce that time amount.

Majority of these problems can be fixed by overclocking the cpu, which is a very easy thing to do. Some problems arose from the clock resetting back to normal when the phone goes into standby mode, as well as resetting when the phone is rebooted. There are simple ways around this problem (as seen in the link above), as well as tweaks to only have the phone become overclocked when a certain application is executed (like Skype for instance).