After dealing with all the delays, non-existent support and updates and failed promises to ship the phone with next day shipping, I decided that I had tolerated enough and demanded my money back. Hopefully that is easy.
Here's why Dell Venue Pro sucks:
1. Too big. Usually big is a 'good' thing according to the trend of 2010. However, when it's big but also thick, it reminds me of my iPAQ from 12 years ago. With the Otter Case it gets even worse.
2. Horrible Camera. It's slow to activate unlike the Focus, and it takes blurry pictures even in just slightly dim light. I know that no camera phones can take pictures in dim light well, but DVP's camera is blurry even in a room during the day. My T-Mo G1 can do better than that.
3. No 4G. Just a UI change is not enough to switch phones and pay more per month as I had been using Android, and all the newest droids out there have way faster speeds that can even do video chat.
4. Keyboard is not that well integrated. Turns out the "fn" key and "shift" key are highly unpredictable, since it doesn't have any indicator that it's simply on or locked on. I mistyped more password than I did with the soft keyboard. Therefore, it's not worth the bulk.
5. Thoroughly unhackable. No SD Card slot access. No tethering trick. No screenshot trick.
6. Bottom buttons are capacitive. Looking back, the dev phone was perhaps the only great phone because they have hard buttons for Back, Windows and Search keys. Using touch buttons for these important commands make the OS experience finicky. For example, it's too easy to hit the Bing button accidentally while taking photos. It was also way too easy to got kicked out of a game - and having the resume afterwards makes things worse.
7. No confidence left for Dell Mobility, or even Dell in general: They folded the mobile division already. Their updates for Dell Aero and Dell Streak took months and months to fulfill, so how will the DVP be any different? We had already suffered through the lack of information on shipping, and I would expect firmware updates not to be any different.
8. This thing crashes. Unlike some other users here, mine crashes even when Wifi is off. The crashes are all random and not confined to Marketplace or 3rd party apps. If Dell was not so irresponsible, I would ask for an exchange instead of a return, but this is a dealbreaker to me.
One thing I am glad about it is, I had waited long enough to find out about Samsung's Omnia 8, and probably better phones to come in CES and Mobile World Congress.
Thanks, Dell, for being awful, and ruining what would be a good phone.
Here's why Dell Venue Pro sucks:
1. Too big. Usually big is a 'good' thing according to the trend of 2010. However, when it's big but also thick, it reminds me of my iPAQ from 12 years ago. With the Otter Case it gets even worse.
2. Horrible Camera. It's slow to activate unlike the Focus, and it takes blurry pictures even in just slightly dim light. I know that no camera phones can take pictures in dim light well, but DVP's camera is blurry even in a room during the day. My T-Mo G1 can do better than that.
3. No 4G. Just a UI change is not enough to switch phones and pay more per month as I had been using Android, and all the newest droids out there have way faster speeds that can even do video chat.
4. Keyboard is not that well integrated. Turns out the "fn" key and "shift" key are highly unpredictable, since it doesn't have any indicator that it's simply on or locked on. I mistyped more password than I did with the soft keyboard. Therefore, it's not worth the bulk.
5. Thoroughly unhackable. No SD Card slot access. No tethering trick. No screenshot trick.
6. Bottom buttons are capacitive. Looking back, the dev phone was perhaps the only great phone because they have hard buttons for Back, Windows and Search keys. Using touch buttons for these important commands make the OS experience finicky. For example, it's too easy to hit the Bing button accidentally while taking photos. It was also way too easy to got kicked out of a game - and having the resume afterwards makes things worse.
7. No confidence left for Dell Mobility, or even Dell in general: They folded the mobile division already. Their updates for Dell Aero and Dell Streak took months and months to fulfill, so how will the DVP be any different? We had already suffered through the lack of information on shipping, and I would expect firmware updates not to be any different.
8. This thing crashes. Unlike some other users here, mine crashes even when Wifi is off. The crashes are all random and not confined to Marketplace or 3rd party apps. If Dell was not so irresponsible, I would ask for an exchange instead of a return, but this is a dealbreaker to me.
One thing I am glad about it is, I had waited long enough to find out about Samsung's Omnia 8, and probably better phones to come in CES and Mobile World Congress.
Thanks, Dell, for being awful, and ruining what would be a good phone.
Last edited:
