So, my current handset, a T310 was about 3.5 yrs old and mind you gave me prety much flawless service except for its joystick which was fine after a single servicing and I was on the hunt for a new piece. Basically, I thought to myself, it should have all the works, good amount of memory, expandability, a camera, mp3, bluetooth, infra and optionally it should be a 3G piece also. 3G is yet to debut in India so 3G compatible handsets are going to be friggin expensive, or so I thought. I chanced upon the w800i and the w550i and both were pretty good buys. The N90 and the N70 also were on my list but somehow, after owning a T310, the Nokia’s just did not attract me enough.
I wont go into the spec of the w800 much since you will get that from really, anywhere. But there are some fine points that you should know.
The w800i box comes loaded with a handsfree, radio, data cable, charger and a PC suite CD. The w800i, according to me was aimed at the music enthu and aims to be a multimedia phone. Its camera is great and can take pics upto 1632x1224. Its mp3 player is awesome, but I thought that the sound could have been a little bit louder, clarity was never a doubt and believe me it does sound good. It has a 5-band EQ as well and a couple of presets and can be manually set as well. Radio reception is good and has 10 channels that you can define.
So here I have a cool phone with a ton of memory and nothing on it. So naturally I set about filling it up. I attach the phone and boom, Windows detects the phone, installs the drivers just fine and I am all set. I copy some stuff to the phone and copy some stuff from it and disconnect it, but what happens. The phone does not get all the information and over and above that I found that some of the pics I took from my phone are missing.....not good. I scourged the ent for issues with the w800 and found that its a common problem. All of the posts suggested that I update to the latest software vR1AA008/R1AA005. I was currently running R1N035. Downloaded the SE update service but it just would not detect the pone. I had a seriously harrowing time and in the end it was not the fault of the phone but the friggin instructions were poor. In short, I had to restart my PC (as usual) for the changes. Is that not like a general rule with windows, restart ur PC for anything, u installed a software restart the PC, u added hardware restart the PC, u scratched your arse restart the PC. Anyways, the update went well and my phone seems to be working much better. I will add that the software does seem sluggish at times. I have noticed that when the walkman is playing getting a call, or sending messages, or for that matter any other function does seem to get stuck initially abd smoothens out later.
On the whole, the phone does have initial teething issues but nothing to lose your sleep over. They generally iron themselves out. Just remember, the first thing to do after you switch on your phone is to update the software. Make sure that you are running R1AA008/R1AA005.