The E200, billed to be THE MS Smartphone to have, is getting knocked left, right and centre at the moment. Already there’s bugs and terrible, terrible battery life (3-4 hours with Bluetooth “Discoverable” turned on – this compared to about a week with a Nokia 6310i and Bluetooth Discoverable turned on)… but now The Inquirer reports on a review which squashes the poor E200.
The E200 piece, called “Living with the E200 Smartphone” has been posted here at idunno.org. Some comments from the article include….
“Orange are pushing Bluetooth hard on this phone, and it does work. You can use a wiresfree headset and use ActiveSync over Bluetooth, but that’s where it ends, and it ends hard. Battery life is under 24 hours with Bluetooth on. Not in use, simply on.”
“The T9 dictionary forgets your custom words (this bug has been there since the original SmartPhone). GPRS does not auto-disconnect on idle, which depending on your carrier could cost you money. The MMS implementation doesn’t include sound messages. The configuration wizards on the driver CD don’t work. IE appears incomplete, it doesn’t tell you how big a file is as you download it, you see a progress screen which states xKB of “0 bytes”, and it’s always 0 bytes. If you click a cab file link which returns a 404 IE displays “CAB file doesn’t exist.. We should output 404 headers etc here”. Right, you should.”
For me personally, the E200 is a great phone. I can live with the bugs.. but this is billed as a Bluetooth phone.. and Bluetooth is … well.. simply not good enough. I shouldn’t have to have it on charge all the time to use a headset. The Bluetooth integration looks like a last minute bolt-on. Bugs can be sorted with patches. Can the Bluetooth hardware stop sucking the life out of the battery? Even with it set to “On” you’ll see your E200 die in 10 hours.