Orange spv m5000 - my impressions

[ed.dark]

Total arse!!!!

why....

size - way too big as a phone or pda - great as a sub notebook though!

signal strength - crap! 1 bar where my v 600 motorola had 4 barsand my m2000 had 4! (all on orange)

cannot play movies smoothly at 640x320

ate all of my data allowance in 1 evening - dunno why - it was just in my coat pocket!

however,

lovely screen - really really great!

thats about all the good stuff!

its going back! i wish orange did the m3000 over here!!!!!

please feel free to flame me or agree!

[Riceburner]

Agree in parts, but no in others.

The films problem could be due to your program, or the compression methodology.

The gripes I have are mainly about usability. Why are the SD card and power button on the BOTTOM of the unit??? just weird. Also why can't we easily map different buttons, why does virtually eveything have to be a registry hack??

[diggy]

I sort of agree. I had a m1000 and had it upgraded to m5000 and It could be better.
I had the memory issue too. My wifes fault though she decided to accidently record a 25 minute phone call. SO CHECK FOR LARGE RECORDED FILES.
The long delayed ringing issue and 2 second silence on answer is a joke. Spoke to Orange on this explaining that it was a common issue on everyones m5000 they were puzzled.
Also Bluetooth tools what happened! What a let down.

****ORANGE WE NEED A ROM UPDATE DOES ANYONE HAVE A DATE IF THERE IS ONE****

[RyanZA]

I dont really understand why you posted this. Everyone on this board already has an HTC Universal (or very close to everyone). Since the device has been out for months now, any of us who wanted to take the device back already have. So the people you are giving these "first impressions" to already have the device and what you are saying here is nothing new to anyone. (Although I disagree with all of your points.)

size - way too big as a phone or pda - great as a sub notebook though!

Surely you saw the size of the phone before you bought it? I personally quite like the size, and wouldnt have minded a slightly bigger version with a bigger screen. You also need to realise that the size of a device is *not* independant of its features. The device has a 520mhz cpu, VGA screen, bluetooth, wifi, phone, 3G(WCDMA), decent full keyboard, camera, flashlight, stereo speakers, microphones, 2nd camera for voice calls, fairly heavy battery to run all of this, IRDA, etc etc. With our current technology, the Universal is the absolute smallest you can get all these features in. There is simply no way they could make the device significantly smaller without dropping features.

Given all this, the phone obviously was not designed for some people, for example, 15 year old girls. This should have come as no suprise to you, since you must have either looked at the phone before you bought it, or looked on the internet to see the size of the phone. Yes?

signal strength - crap! 1 bar where my v 600 motorola had 4 barsand my m2000 had 4! (all on orange)

Perfect signal strength here, my bars are always maxxed out. You may have very bad 3G/UTMS/WCDMA coverage in the area where you live. Go into phone options, go to the band tab, and change it from AUTO to GSM. This may help your signal.

cannot play movies smoothly at 640x320

Are you using the latest TCPMP player?
If you are, Click Options->Video->Video Driver, and choose either Intel XScale or Raw Framebuffer.
640x320 movies should play very smoothly then.


ate all of my data allowance in 1 evening - dunno why - it was just in my coat pocket!


As far as I know, this can only be user error. Ive been using the device for awhile now, and it only ever uses bandwidth when I set it to use bandwidth. If you only have a 5mb or so allowance, opening up a very graphic heavy page could use as much as 5mb. I'd recommend turning off images or using a service which downsamples images to make them smaller to download. You could also use something like this: http://www.google.com/gwt/n

[diggy]

You are right in most of what you say other manufactures i.e O2 etc. have brought out radio upgades that appear to sort out signal errors etc. However Orange have not brought out an update we are still on radio 1.3. So i'm sure returning them wont make any difference. Other people have had many problems using updates from other network providers. We just want something simple that works. Surely that's not too much to ask.
Other that I quite like the handset and the size to me isn't a bother.