*THE* Nextel Phone to Own!
Written: Jul 26 '01 (Updated Jul 27 '01)
|
Product Rating:
|
|
| Durability: |
 |
|
| Clarity: |
 |
|
| Portability: |
 |
|
| Battery Life: |
|
|
|
Pros: Improved display, improved menus, lightweight, lithium ion battery, lots of features
Cons: Not as compact as other contemporary phones, buttons are exposed
The Bottom Line: The i85s is simply the best Nextel phone on the market. It's got the best display, the easiest menus, plenty of great features, and uses a lithium battery.
|
|
|
| engwall's Full Review: Nextel i85s |
I've seen and tried several Nextel phones, and this is the one to get. It's not as compact as the i1000, but it's a much better phone in several areas.
Display
The display on the i85s is the most apparent improvement over previous Nextel phones. The i85s has a higher resolution display that is capable of up to 7 lines of small text (on the Compressed display setting). This makes reading text messages, e-mails, and web sites a lot easier. If you want larger text, there is the standard display, with 5 lines of larger text, and the zoom display, with 4 lines of huge text. Older Nextel phones provide 3 lines of text on the screen, at a single resolution.
Menus
The menus on the i85s are also a vast improvement over the older Nextel phones. Because of the limited display, previous phones had a single menu button, which cycled through two menu options per screen, and once inside the menu, you could see a single entry at a time. The i85s uses a more intuitive interface to its menus. You start with a list of menu items that you move through by using a 4-way button (like on handheld games). You highlight the entry you want, select it, and then you see a list of entries inside that menu. With a compressed display, you can see 7 menus, or 7 entries at a time. Even with little knowledge of how to navigate the menus, it is relatively easy to figure it out.
Battery
The battery life on the i85s is quite good. On stand by, the battery lasts about 2-3 days (on 24 hours), and can handle several hours of talk time. I usually go through about 36 hours with about five 10-20 minute conversations before I find myself needing to charge the battery. The phone comes with a rapid charger that will charge the phone up to just about full capacity in a couple of hours. The best part is that the phone takes a lithium ion battery, which does not need to be discharged before you charge it again. This makes charging the phone very convenient. I simply charge it every other night, or while I’m at work.
SIM Card
The i85s uses a SIM (Subscriber Identity Module) Card, which is a tiny chip embedded in a tiny plastic card that sits behind a panel under the battery. If you are leaving the phone unattended, you can remove the SIM and no one can use the phone. You do this, of course, at the risk of losing the SIM (which is about as big as a thumbnail), and thus rendering the phone useless. Another method of security is to use a PIN to activate the phone. When the phone is turned on, you must enter a PIN to use the phone.
Also, if your phone breaks and someone else has one, you can put your SIM in their phone and use it as though it were yours - calls get billed to you, etc. This is an interesting technology, but other than the PIN, you probably won't use it much. Note: You can disable the PIN if you so choose.
Features
There are so many features available on the i85s, that it's best if I talk about them one at a time:
Phonebook
The phonebook on the i85s is very nice. You can store up to 250 numbers, and the i85s has a very nice organization system for its phonebook. For each name, you can store several numbers, each with its own icon. When you pull up a name, you can cycle through the icons to dial the various numbers. This makes the phone list very compact when you have friends or colleagues with several numbers. Each number is assigned a 1-3 digit speed dial number, and you can store a voice key for each number as well.
Digital cellular vs. Direct Connect
Each Nextel phone has two methods of communication - Digital cellular, which works the way that you expect a cellular phone to work, and direct connect, which is a little more like a long range walkie talkie. To use Direct Connect, you hold a button on the side of your phone while you speak, then remove it when you are finished. The other person then does the same, in turn. You can have one-on-one or group calls this way. The i85s handles these very much like older Nextel phones, with the exception that you do not need to put your phone into a separate mode to initiate Direct Connect calls. The phone automatically switches into the appropriate mode. This is nice, since it means that you store direct connect entries alongside your other phone numbers in your phonebook. Older Nextel phones stored direct connect numbers independently of cellular numbers.
The sound quality of both the digital cellular and the direct connect is excellent. I find very little significant difference between a call on my Nextel phone and a call on my phone at home.
Also, one nice thing about all Nextel phones is that after a minute, all calls are rounded to the second, not to the minute.
Keypad Lock
This is a simple feature, that is more designed to accommodate the fact that the keys don't have a cover (more on that later) than as a security feature. It's easy to enable and disable, and is an important feature to get to know.
Speakerphone
The i85s has a speakerphone feature which works a lot better than I would have expected. I can sit the phone on a table or in a cup holder in my car, and maintain a conversation with someone. I've never listened to what it sounds like, but I've asked whether they've had any difficulty hearing me, and no one ever has.
Messages screen
If you subscribe to voicemail and/or text messaging, you can use the i85s' messages screen to see how many new vs. old messages you have for each type of message. The text messages can be retrieved and displayed on the phone, and the screen provides a button to autodial your voicemail number from this screen.
Datebook
The i85s comes with a datebook, that is moderately useful. Although I wouldn't use it for everything that I put in a datebook, it is very handy for storing alarms for appointments. Set up an appointment and you can have the phone ring 0 or more minutes, hours, days or weeks before the scheduled appointment.
Recent Calls
This is one of the features I use the most on my phone. The i85s stores a list of the 20 most recent incoming, outgoing, or missed calls. This comes in very handy if you call the same person frequently, miss a call, keep getting a busy signal, or just want to grab a phone number of someone who called you recently. You can dial any of the numbers in the list with a single button, and you can store any number from the recent call list directly into your phonebook.
Voicenotes
You can use your i85s as a digital recorder, and store up to 20 voice notes (total time up to about 3 minutes). You can even record from phone conversations, though keep in mind that there are legal restrictions to doing this.
Wireless Web
One of the things I love about the i85s is how well it works with the wireless web. One of the reasons I chose Nextel service is that all wireless web usage is unlimited and does not contribute towards your usage of minutes. I spend the extra $10 per month to get the Nextel Online Plus, which gives me access to any web site (keep in mind that most web sites are not compatible with web phones, and that some services are restricted to specific web phone vendors), and to e-mail of my choice (as opposed to the hotmail only option that comes with Nextel Online basic service). There are three sites that I regularly visit using my phone - WeatherBug, which provides real-time weather from a nearby weather station; my e-mail, which interfaces nicely with my yahoo e-mail account; and news. Also, Amazon has a very nice site for the web phone.
The 4-way button is used to scroll through a page, and pages are broken up for quick load times. Links are displayed in square brackets, and are highlighted as you scroll past them. Once highlighted, you can select them to activate the link. The phone has a back button, which takes you to the previous page, and a home button which takes you to the initial page. Most pages can be marked with a bookmark, and most lists of links can also be selected by pressing a number associated to the link.
T9 Text entry
I want to make special mention of the T9 text entry system on the i85s. This is a very nice means of entering text via a phonepad. You can either choose alphabet entry, by which you cycle through the letters associated with a number by repeatedly pressing the number (not very efficient), numeric entry, which works as expected, symbol entry, which pulls up a map of symbols associated with each number, and word entry, which is particularly brilliant. The way it works is that in order to type a word, you just type the sequence of numbers that are associated with the letters in the word, one number per letter (you don't cycle through the numbers for each letter). Since each number is associated with up to 4 letters, the phone has to guess which letter you intend to use for each number you put in. As you type each number, it goes through an internal dictionary and determines which word you are most likely typing and displays that. If the word is long enough, there will be only one choice. Shorter words have more possibilities, and if the wrong word is selected by default, the 0 acts as a next button, which cycles through other possible words. The dictionary is quite extensive, and I usually only have to resort to using alphabet entry when typing proper names. Once a word is typed using the alphabet entry, the phone will remember it for future use in word mode.
I've used this many times to compose quick e-mails, and it works very well. It's no substitute for a regular keyboard, but when you don't have access to the internet except through your phone, it's great.
I have to note here that I would not want to try reading e-mail or browsing wireless web on a 3-line, chunky text display. I would find that incredibly frustrating. 7 lines isn't the bees knees, but it certainly suffices.
Java Apps
Just to be thorough, I have to make some mention of the Java Apps, because if you've encountered any ads about the phone, they've mentioned that the phone can run Java Apps. To be brief, they're nothing to write home about. There are some calculators, an expense pad, and an *extremely* dull and pointless game. The calculators are ok (there's even one that will calculate number and length of risers from height and depth of stairs... if you need that sort of thing). The expense pad is nothing special. Overall, I never use these, and while there is the possibility of someone writing a cool Java app for my phone, I'm not running out to purchase the data transmission cable necessary to download Java apps anytime soon.
Complaints
Also to be thorough, I have to mention a few peeves about the phone. First, the keys are exposed. There is nothing to cover the keys, and so they are easily bumped. Because of this, it is very important to use the Keypad Lock feature. This becomes all the more crucial, since the first 9 speed-dial entries in your phone book (those assigned the speed-dial numbers 1-9) can be dialed by pressing and holding the corresponding number. True story: I plugged in all my work contacts into the first 9 speed dial entries, and one day my phone rang. It was one of my contacts calling me, asking if I just called. Turns out, I had leaned my phone against something and called them inadvertently. Not a good thing. Consequently, I use the Keypad Lock as much as possible, and just to be safe, I do *not* use the first nine speed dial entries. This leads me to my next peeve. When you enter a phone number into the phone book, it automatically grabs the first available speed dial number. ARGH! Finally, the phone is not as compact or sexy as some of the other phones on the market. That's not to say that it's bulky by any means, and it is certainly light. However, it is not a phone you can slip into your pocket comfortably, so you need to use a belt-clip or some other means of holding the phone. Those things are rather trivial, though, and I am extremely pleased with my phone nonetheless.
Caveats
I should note that the Nextel service is rather pricey. I think that it's worth it, but it may be more than some want to pay. I also cannot speak for the service coverage, since I don't travel much, and have only used the phones in metropolitan areas. I have had some problems with cut-outs, but mostly only on the train, which is not surprising to me.
To sum up, the Nextel i85s is simply the best Nextel phone on the market. It's got the best display, the easiest menus, its got plenty of great features, and uses a lithium battery that is quick to charge, lasts a long time, and can be charged at any time.
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 199
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
engwall
|
|
Member: Keith Engwall
Location: Chicago, IL
Reviews written: 67
Trusted by: 67 members
|
|
|
- Add to My Yahoo!: 
- Add to Google Homepage: 
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.