Everyone has different needs and wants, and obviously the PN-820 is right for several people here. But I just sent mine back and thought I'd share some thoughts with anyone considering the phone. A lot of these are minor issues, and not the kind of thing that you might think about before making a purchase decision. Also, I'm a somewhat older guy with some out-moded tastes, so take these thoughts for what their worth. Your mileage may vary.
First, the totally unacceptable: When using a couple different corded headsets with the PN-820, including the one that came with the phone, people on the other end of the conversation could barely hear me. And sometimes the volume would change dramatically if I moved my head or the phone. Very flaky. I sent the first phone back, but the replacement phone did the same thing. The first one was also flaky just talking into the phone's mic, but the replacement was evidently OK.
If you're used to the
Palm OS on another phone/pda and are considering going to Windows Mobile, reconsider. Windows takes a long time to boot (what a surprise), is not particularly intuitive and is just, well...clunky. I've been using PCs since before MS-DOS was a standard, but now I know how people who learned computing on Macs feel when they have to use Windows.
When I synchronized my old phone (Kyocera 7135/
Palm OS) to my laptop, it copied over all the phone settings and databases. After a hard reset, a resync brought the phone back completely. Not so with Windows (unless I missed something). During testing I did a hard reset on the PN-820, resync'd my contacts and schedule and then still had to manually set up the phone settings, speed-dial, etc.
Hated - hated - the ring tones. Man, what a step backward. Just give me a good old-fashioned ringer. I realize that all newer phones probably "feature" the same kind of polyphonic, MP3 showtunes, but I'm definitely going to find something else to install on my new phone if required. Yeesh.
One of the reasons I went with the PN-820 was because it's a flip-phone. But I had given that too much weight. It's not as important as the
Palm OS and other features.
Conversely, I thought that losing the touch-screen would be relatively insignificant. It ain't! It's so much easier to use the touch screen for dialing, using the calculator, etc. Oh, and the calculator on this phone just plain blows.
The phone is light weight and I know many people consider that a good thing. To me, it feels flimsy. I just didn't like the way the phone felt in my hand. The local Verizon store didn't have one in stock so I couldn't test this before ordering.
When speaking directly into the phone, the screen picks up a lot of schmutz from your cheek. My old phone did, too, but it didn't matter for some reason. I only had to clean it when I was feeling compulsive. But the PN-820 seems particularly vulnerable. Maybe it's just the dark blue background screen color. Not sure. But I had to keep wiping off the screen in order to use the phone. And yes, I wash my face regularly!
Like I say, mostly minor but annoying issues. And I'll say that I loved my old phone so much that anything else is going to have to be pretty good. So next up it's the
Treo 755P and we'll see how that fares.
Login
Panel
