Being back in SF and wanting to be part of the hip and cool crowd, I went out and purchased a Blackberry-esque phone, the Motorola Q on Sprint. I can’t actually get a Blackberry since Microsoft’s mail system does not run a Blackberry Enterprise Server, which is required to have them work with Exchange email (and running the desktop client breaks company policy of having company data pushed outside the org).
At first, I was overjoyed to have my email, my calendar and contacts all on phone at all times. Having the Calendar was fantastic, it let me keep myself up to date with my life and update things as I needed to. I use my Calendar religiously to keep track of my work and personal lives so having it with me was very valuable. After about the first hour of using the phone, the joy wore off and reality sunk in. The phone barley works.
The list of the problems is too many to enumerate, but I’ll give the highlights. The buttons would stop responding. I would click something, the UI would flash that it received the press and then it did nothing. Clicking “Home” would at times do nothing. I could type faster than the screen could draw. It would send 200 text messages when I wanted to send one. The right thumb scroller just doesn’t work. Pushing the “Talk” button to pick up the phone would hang up on the caller half the time. The battery didn’t charge half the time. I would leave it in the charger overnight only to find it give me an a battery empty alert within minutes. The UI for Windows Mobile 5 is inconsistent, unreliable and non-predictable. Each part of it would act in a different way. It was never able to coordinate the vibrate and ring function (e.g. it would start vibrating a full 5 seconds before the ringer started). I could keep going ad infinitum.
End of the story is I returned it this weekend and I’m back to a non-smart, very-dumb, but at least it works Samsung flip phone.