Phone woes -or- The XV6700 sucks

I need to get a new phone. The phone I have is a Verizon-branded UTStarcom/Audiovox XV6700.

Two words: “It sucks.” The problem is that words alone cannot capture how much this phone sucks. It doesn’t work well as a phone. It doesn’t work well as a PDA. It doesn’t work well as a Internet-access device.

The reason I’m bringing this up is I need a phone for my trip that works. I don’t want to be out in the middle of nowhere without a phone in case I need to call someone. This is a safety issue.

Battery Life

From the claims, I should be seeing around 200 hours of standby. Interesting. Maybe the battery when removed from the phone holds a charge for 200 hours. Maybe. The original ROM that shipped with the phone allowed for around 8 hours of standby. A hacked ROM that I found gets that up to a whopping 14-24 hours. 200 hours my ass.

On my recent trip I put the phone into “flight mode” which turns off all radios. After 24 hours I was down to 60% charge. Extrapolating out would give me around 2-1/2 days: 60 hours. I have no frickin’ idea how anyone came up with 200 hours. Whoever they are deserves to be fired.

I can understand being optimistic about battery life, but outright lying is another.

Phone

One of the key components of a phone is the fact that it can ring to signify that an incoming call is waiting to be answered. Someone should have told this to the phone designer. Now I know that the first thing that your going to point out is “well, you have a different ROM than what shipped on it.” Yeah. The problem exists in the XV6800 – it’s successor with a stock ROM has the same problem.

Here’s the experiment I did:

• On a land-line phone on speaker, called my phone
• Count the number of rings before my phone actually rings

The number is between 1.5 and 4. The length of a ring signal is 6 seconds. That means around 10-24 seconds for my phone to start alerting me that a call is present. A call goes to voicemail in 4 rings. I miss a lot of calls.

When the phone does ring (or vibrate as the case may be), it’s too quiet to be heard in a loud room. It doesn’t vibrate enough to be felt either.

Internet Access

Well, you might say, you still can surf the net, right? Technically, you’d be right. Unless you mean being able to pull up a Wikipedia article and scroll to the relevant portion in under 3 minutes to to surfing. It makes my old 19.2kbps modem seem outright speedy. It’s probably not the network which, allegedly, can support hundreds of kilobits. I blame it on IE. It sucks. If my life depended on it, I guess I can surf the Internet. Otherwise, I’ll pass.

PDA

It might work pretty well as a PDA. Except the touch-screen only functions 90% of the time. It’s a pain trying to drag cards while playing solitaire on the can when the cards keep jumping around because the phone doesn’t know where the stylus is.

Next…

At this point I’m just waiting for July 11th. I’ll break my contract with Verizon any day of the week. I don’t care how much it costs. I don’t care about almost anything. I just want a phone that works. I’ll be one of the geeks that takes the day off to wait in line to make sure I get one.

The only problem is that En’ll want one too.