The color screen is a nice feature, although serves no real useful purpose related to the functioning of the phone. I was successful in downloading a new default wallpaper using the open source BitPim program.

Compared with the startac this phone is not as comfortable to use every day. You can't cradle it against your shoulder. The buttons are too soft, especially the ones on the side. There is no cup indentation to the earpiece, so the phone slips around on your ear and you find yourself straining to hear the other party.

Listeners on the remote side report to me that the phone sounds better than my old startac, although I believe the startac sounds better as a listening device.

Trying to get the phone to sync with outlook was a bit of a nightmare. the verizon connectivity kit does not do the trick. the synching phonebook sw that verizons ships has some serious limitations. For one, there is no way to filter on category of contact to choose which 200 contacts to send to the phone; This is definitely a problem if you have more than 200 contacts. Also, the phone book sw imports the memo field from your outlook contacts and tries to download that as well to the phone. if the contact memo is more than some max characters, the phone rejects the contact. All these limitations can be overcome through tedious hand-editing of your contact data in the synching software's screens, but this is both a manual process and would need to be repeated each time you create new contacts and re-import from Outlook.

The next option for synching your contacts is Intellisync from Pumasoft. Intellisync is a good product overall. It is flexible in field mappings and does a true sync, changing only the data that has changed on the phone or in outlook. But getting the phone edition of Intellisync to work was no picnic either. Intellisync does not work with the pumasoft supplied cable under XP. Intellisync's tech support was useless on the issue. I did eventually figure out that upgraded serial-to-usb drivers were required for the cable. those drivers are available at futuredial.com. looks like pumasoft ships the futuredial drivers and cable but does not acknowledge it. The open source BitPim program uses the same cable and has better connection-cable debugging info than Intellisync, so use that to figure out your issues. Even after upgrading my cable drivers, synching under XP was unreliable [intellisync would report that 40 contacts were missing from the phone and needed to be added when indeed, they were already there] so I had to synch under win2k. Under Win2k Intellisync works reliably.

The build quality of the phone is fine, but the plastics are cheap and you can feel the lack of attention to detail that was the hallmark of the motorola phones in their heyday. for eg: the holster scratches the bottom of the battery. verizon ships the holster with pads on the bottom inside to combat the problem but it still occurs.
In addition, removing the phone from the holster with one hand is not nearly as easy or natural as with the StarTac.

Many people have commented that there is no business-appropriate ring tone on the phone. Alas, Its true. Sounds like a silly complaint, but listen to the ringtones and you'll agree.

Voice dialing works well, but the number of voice dialing slots are somewhat limited (or maybe it is limited by memory).

Battery life is just so so with default slim battery. And when the battery runs down, the phone often locks up.

phone does have an analog mode but it is pretty poor and is completely inappropriate for the default battery. in fact, slipping into analog mode can eat through your battery pretty quickly.

Overall, this is probably the best phone that Verizon is shipping today, but its not perfect and in some ways, inferior to the startac, the old standard-bearer.


Recommended:
Yes

Amount Paid (US$): $129
Recommended for: World Travelers - Works Anywhere and Everywhere!