vB Easy Archive - The Motorola i880 (iDEN) ultimate rant

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The Motorola i880 (iDEN) ultimate rant
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Posted by: cloneman

A note about this rant. I say everything like it is. Often when I make posts of this type on other bb's I immediately get flamed for a variety of vary vague reasons. Please do me a favor - if you are going to take offense to anything written in this post, please back it up with at least a 3-4 lines of thought. Or say nothing at all.

I'm just trying to show the shortcomings of this cellphone, and please just take this post as it is.

About the quality of the text below --- well it is a RANT, by definition a little sketchy. I might clean it up and make it into a respectable, very anal review.

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The motorola i880 disgruntled rant.

I got this phone because the IDEN provider in my area had a decent monthly service. I have no general interest in the walkie talkie feature, I just wanted a high-end phone with losts of features & good sound quality.

My issues:

- the phone is slow. Everything about it feels sluggish, from making a phone call to navigating menus, to starting up. It takes 45 seconds for the phone to boot. Java applications feel sluggish (though I'm not surprised there). Is the Java interface to blame for all this? Probably.

- The interface is often unintuitive. buttons that perform commands such as "ok" "delete" or "bacK" have different assignments depending on what your are doing. This can get very frustrating as you can never get used to the phone - the "ok" button doesn't always work in every situation, sometimes the "OK" is a softkey. The delete/backspace button can be different, sometimes simply in different stages of a similar task. IN text messaging, there is no one touch button to switch between t9 prediction and other entry modes. You have to access a menu, use the arrows to select a different mode, then press ok. This whole process of course limited by the slow menus. There's also no "space" button. You have to use the right arrow key.

-dialing is terrible. There are no dashes or spaces in your contacts/phonebook or when dialing phone numbers, making it difficult to quickly identify a phone number, or ensure you haven't made a typo

-lcd brightness is too high and cannot be configured. The default brightness is reasonable, but when you press a key it gets even brighter for a 10-15 seconds. too bright, especially in poorly lit situations.

- poor battery life. After 2 days on standby, your batt is gonna be low. You pretty much have to charge it every day to ensure you don't run out. This is due to some crappy management I'm certain. For one thing BOTH LCDs stay on during a call. I don't see how that's helpful; the external LCD doesn't display anything, and the internal one just says "connected". It doesn't give you the length of the current call, NOR THE CURRENT TIME. It does give you, though, the time at which you started the call, assuming you haven't refreshed that by pressing menu. If you use a headset and close the flip, the screens finally decide to turn off and save power.

The built-in mirror is useless. You can't see **** in that little thing.

The camera doesn't retain settings. The "spot light" (basically a flash) has to be manually turned on every time (via painfully slow menus), and the video size defaults to "small" every time, (as if the quality of cell phone videos wasnt bad enough). You also can't turn off the shutter sound in the phone. While this is good to prevent people from taking pictures without anyone noticing, I still take issue with this. If I'm buying a 400$+ phone, I'd like to be able to turn that annoying sound off.

The camera/media centre's viewing modes are ****ing stupid. If you try to zoom in to a picture you took, it doesn't do any resizing/resampling whatsoever. You just see more pixels. Also, panning is RIDICULOUSLY slow. Not that you want to pan an image that has been zoomed in like that.

Also, you have to press "OK" AFTER taking your photo in order to save it. Otherwise, it gets discarded.

bluetooth has an artificial limitation set to ~100kb to the size of media you can sent to people. So no sending "big" pictures.

You can't set high quality MP3s as ringers. You have to lower the quality, or use specific type of midi file, for which a converter is hard to come by. All of this is after hacking the phone to even enable custom ringers. (probably your phone company's fault though on that one, that disable the feature). Basically, an artificial limitation has been placed that makes mp3 ringers sound bad.

Pressing "speaker" and "mute" buttons" causes an interruption of dialing. That is, if you press speaker after dialing a call, it actually interrupts the connecting of the call while the stupid animation of a speaker shows. It's also impossible to quickly unmute AND take the call off speaker, as one you press on of the buttons, you have to wait for the stupid animation to press something else.

The call log is by far the DUMBEST feature. As previously mentioned the phone numbers don't have dashes or spaces, making them hard to read. But there's more. If someone who has outgoing caller ID blocked calls you, it doesn't get saved in you call log - it's like they never called you. Also, if multiple conversations took place to them same phone number,( e.g. calling someone back,) ONLY the last conversation to a given number is saved in the log. So if the person tried to reach you earlier in the day, and you call them back, you have no way of finding out what time they had called you before. If they call you later on in the day, your previous conversation (and time spent in the call is gone.) So in essence keeping track of who called who and when is completely impossible.

Also, in the modern day and age of falling memory prices, the call log is limited to a meagre 20 items.

The built in MP3 player is reasonable, though I'm not impressed with the sound quality, both on headphones & the speaker. It's acceptable, but it doesn't compare to even a cheap radio and definitely not an ipod. As usual, the interface is slow (& it takes about 3 minutes to "organize" you media). Also, in order to use decent headphones, you have to buy an adapter which is nearly impossible to find. I found ONE seller on ebay that had it. I'm sure some generic adapters would also work, but the question is really which one is needed on this phone, and you can't tell until you've tried it.

the gps is ****. It simply doesn't work well at all unless you stand perfectly still with an open sky view. There are no maps or anything, you just get coordinates. You can't use it in a car. It's just too slow, and never syncs up with satellites properly.

The built in memo thing is a joke. You can't even have more than 1 memo.YOU CANT PUT ****ING SPACES IN YOUR MEMO. HELLO! ****er who designed this phone! IN ENGLISH WE NEED SPACES TO TYPE sentences. Thankfully some notepad java apps exist.

When the phone rings/vibrates but you can't take the call, the only way to silence it without shipping the other party to voicemail or to an automated message (making them immediately know you are ignoring their call) is to lower the volume of the ringer using the control on the side of the phone. Of course, this causes your ringer to be muted until you bring the volume back up manually. Also, if the phone is on vibrate, it wont vibrate anymore if you had used this method to make it stop.

The phone makes a loud beep when it turns off/on. Good to wake people up when you're turning off your phone before going to sleep.

On to the positive points -

- build quality is good, but it could be more rugged.

- sound quality is excellent - weather your using the phone, the speaker, or an external wired headset, it's superb. I only tried blutooth once and it wasn't that great, but it wasn't a motorola headset, it was plantronics, so maybe they just don't play well together.

- there are a lot of features. Almost everything you could want in a phone is there. You can import cool (but slow) Java apps onto your phone, like Gmail, google maps etc.

- The phone is stable. I've never seen it crash, except once when I tried to open a Java application that wasn't compatible. I also don't notice the phone getting any slower while having java apps open.

- The camera quality is decent if you take the time to take a good photo under good lighting conditions. I haven't had much success, but some people have taken some stunning photos with it, after correction with photoshop. As a quick point & shoot camera, it's mediocre - though to be fair I haven't used many camera phones to compare.

- you can record voice memos and phone calls. Kind of useful.

- built in calendar is decent, though reminders don't ring if your phone is off.

- the phones ringers can get pretty LOUD of you need them too.

- The spotlight is cool. Also, the LCD is so bright you can use it as a flashlight for close objects.

- The phone charges pretty quickly. I've never measured, but I'd say it charges within an hour and a half tops.

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Posted by: Coop486

This might as well be a iDEN Motorola Phone Rant. Everything you've mentioned above, Slow Menu, Poor Battery Life, Un-Intutive Menu, etc etc are problems that have plagued iDEN phones for the longest. Just one of the many reason I left Nextel. Hopefully their new phones the iC series improved upon many of the before mentioned issued.

Posted by: cloneman

Quote:

Originally Posted by Coop486

This might as well be a iDEN Motorola Phone Rant. Everything you've mentioned above, Slow Menu, Poor Battery Life, Un-Intutive Menu, etc etc are problems that have plagued iDEN phones for the longest. Just one of the many reason I left Nextel. Hopefully their new phones the iC series improved upon many of the before mentioned issued.

Well some of the older iden phones didn't have cameras, backlit LCD displays, MP3 players, or stupid animations - so those new complaints don't apply to those

Of course you are right though similar problem plague the older ones as well.

Posted by: Coop486

Quote:

Originally Posted by cloneman

Well some of the older iden phones didn't have cameras, backlit LCD displays, MP3 players, or stupid animations - so those new complaints don't apply to those

Of course you are right though similar problem plague the older ones as well.

They sure did....I had Nextel when the first released the i1000plus. Even then, the phone's UI was slow....and the screen was mono-chrome. The addition of the MP3 Player, Camera, Animations, have made the phones even slower.

When it comes to iDEN Motorola holds the patent. There is nothing there to spur competition and have Motorola make better phones.

Posted by: exkalibur

Quote:

Originally Posted by cloneman

You also can't turn off the shutter sound in the phone. While this is good to prevent people from taking pictures without anyone noticing, I still take issue with this. If I'm buying a 400$+ phone, I'd like to be able to turn that annoying sound off.

If you have a Java Application Loader of the Lab type, you can very easily disable this sound.

Posted by: Kabuk1

These very reasons are exactly why I never went with iDen service. I worked in a Sprint/Nextel store briefly & flirted with the idea of getting an i880, but I'm glad I didn't. Nextel seems like an ancient service with backwards phones. It's wierd. I just don't get it- The last I heard, just to send a text you have to go through the web, and half the time when you call a Nextel person, you're told by an automated voice to wait while they look that person up.

Posted by: Baldilocks

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kabuk1

These very reasons are exactly why I never went with iDen service. I worked in a Sprint/Nextel store briefly & flirted with the idea of getting an i880, but I'm glad I didn't. Nextel seems like an ancient service with backwards phones. It's wierd. I just don't get it- The last I heard, just to send a text you have to go through the web, and half the time when you call a Nextel person, you're told by an automated voice to wait while they look that person up.

Yes, having a few friends with Nextel I am very familiar with the "Please hold while the subscriber you are looking for is located....." message...

Posted by: cloneman

There's no automated message like that on Telus (the canadian Iden provider). However we have our own set of constraints.

The company witholds usage information from their customers. That is, you can't know how man minutes you have left, even if you call customer service. You find out only when you receive your bill. Secondly, Data (on both Telus and Nextel as i've heard) is pitifully slow. Much slower than any of the competing wireless technologies.

As far as having to send a text message via the web browser, this is only true for IDEN blackberry devices. Also, you can't reply to text messages or see who sent it to you on an IDEN blackberry.

One final irritation about telus must be mentioned. They don't allow you to change the number of rings before a call goes to voicemail. The default is 3 rings, and it's very easy to miss calls this way, I've had to enable voicemail only when my phone is off for this reason.

As some others have said there's absolutely no valid reason to get IDEN services when you have stupidly designed phones like this. That is, unless you need the Walkie-talkie thing.

Posted by: aparker813

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kabuk1

The last I heard, just to send a text you have to go through the web, and half the time when you call a Nextel person, you're told by an automated voice to wait while they look that person up.

the texting part is the worst...its a solid 2 minute ordeal to send a text, and thats assuming you know the persons number without having to look it up since you can't access your phonebook or select the name of the person you want to send the text to - you can only enter the phone number

Posted by: Kabuk1

I dunno how they do it in canada, but here in the states all the texting goes through the browser. Last I saw anyway, back in March. Back in 03 when I got my first Sprint phone, their texting was like that too. You had to connect, sign on, and navigate through several achingly slow web pages before you could send your message. Idiotic way to do things, IMO!

It's so wierd, iDen is like some bizarre early 90's technology that's NEVER been improved upon. I don't understand why ANYONE would want it. Unless of course, for the walkie talkie thing. But even in that case- just get a set of walkie-talkies! They make them with, like, 25 mile range now.

Posted by: cloneman

I found a couple of other things to gripe about, in particular the backlight:

1) The backlight cannot be configured. worse, when a call is ringing, after 3 rings the backlight turns off! So you can't see the call display anymore until you press a button. Wow, I 'd like to hit the design person who didn't see that with a blunt object. And then with a sharp one.

2) If you are holding down a key (such as is necessary in a java app sometimes, or when going through a long list) this does *not* keep the backlight on to 100%! It dims as if you had stopped pressing buttons, it treats it as an idle state.

Posted by: Outrigger

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kabuk1

I dunno how they do it in canada, but here in the states all the texting goes through the browser. Last I saw anyway, back in March. Back in 03 when I got my first Sprint phone, their texting was like that too. You had to connect, sign on, and navigate through several achingly slow web pages before you could send your message. Idiotic way to do things, IMO!

It's so wierd, iDen is like some bizarre early 90's technology that's NEVER been improved upon. I don't understand why ANYONE would want it. Unless of course, for the walkie talkie thing. But even in that case- just get a set of walkie-talkies! They make them with, like, 25 mile range now.

iDen has no competitors, hence, very little enhancements through the years.

25 mile range still doesn't beat walkie talkie someone who's in Calif and you're in New York. And who wants to carry a walkie talkie all the time?

Posted by: iansltx

One small iDEN critique: newer phones (at least the i415 and i450 and i425 on Boost Mobile) give you on-phone texting. But the UI is still disgusting. The oly redeeming quality about the phones is (in some cases on some phone models) GPS\LBS...my $300 Mogul STILL doesn't have that built in, or at least enabled yet, and the "walkie talkie thing". Which will be supplanted by QChat as soon as Sprint gets EvDO Re. Aa rolled out everywhere Nextel is, which they're doing pretty quickly.

You can no get small iDEN phones (i425 and...i425) but personally I would at the very lest save the headache and et an ic-series phone instead, even if they're a bit more expensive.

Posted by: celluser7

That is why i dropped straight nextel and went with powersource... Nextel type phone with sprint's UI & network. cant beat that...

Posted by: cloneman

Just to add closure this story... I finally found someone to buy out my contract and left telus. Good Riddance.

I've since been using a cheapo Nokia ultrabasic phone - followed by an iphone.

They are both significantly faster and more functional. The only thing I'm going to miss is not giving a damn about my phone