For everyone here who used to own a Samsung Palm phone (especially members of that first group that eagerly embraced the i300 when it first came out, honestly believing up to the last day that Sprint would eventually release the SDK and life would someday be perfect), how good is the 6700 compared to how good you thought it would be the day you bought it?

Put another way, thinking about all the things that used to annoy and piss you off about your i500/i330/i300, how many of them were finally solved by the 6700? Now, on the flip side, what things that you used to really like about your old phone did you lose by going to the 6700, and still miss?

Finally, what deficiencies of the 6700 caught you TOTALLY by surprise, and to this day continue to blow your mind that they could still not be fixed/mitigated by Sprint or thirdparty apps?

In my case, the one thing that's always annoyed me about both the i300 and i500 is the total lack of anything resembling a functional game controller. The i300 proved to be semi-tolerable, because the up/down rocker happened to be a size and in a position where I could "sort of" use it with the adjacent side buttons as a bad gamepad... but my i500 has proven to be almost useless for anything resembling an arcade game due to the button layout. As far as I can tell, the 6700 has a real, honest to god usable-for-arcade-games joystick. Is it as good in reality as it seems in theory?

The 6700's bigger screen, both resolution-wise and size-wise (relative to the i500, at least) seems like another major perk. I've always felt like the i500's screen was a hair smaller than I really want a screen to be, and felt like a device with the dimensions of an i300, but a higher-res screen, would be ideal. I've never directly compared dimensions, but holding a 6700, it seems to be about the same dimensions as the i300 was. What do you think about the 6700's screen size now, vs what you thought about it before buying it?

One thing that irritates me to no end about the i500 is its lack of speakerphone capabilities. I rarely used the i300's speakerphone per se, but it was damn nice to have if I went out on a weekend night and had to make a call in a noisy place. And the i300 definitely seemed to have pretty beefy volume, at least as far as the phone's ringer and speaker were concerned. I've read lots of complaints about the 6700's too-quiet ringer and speakerphone. I vaguely remember reading that you can solve the problem by removing the mirror from the back. What are YOUR thoughts about the 6700's volume (or lack thereof)... especially compared to what you expected before buying it?

Web browsing on the i300 was fairly dysfunctional, though Netfront and Xiino have made the i500 a bit more usable. How does the 6700 compare? Is web browsing still fairly dysfunctional, even with tiny fonts and landscape orientation, or is it several orders of magnitude better?

How much of a pain is it to connect and disconnect from Vision with the 6700? Is it like the i500, where you have to explicitly select it as a menu option from within a running app, or can you just hit a key to display the "phone" keypad, and hit another key to forcibly disconnect Vision (or something to that effect)?

How OBVIOUS is it that you're connected to Vision and can't receive incoming calls? Particularly, if you were connected to Vision with the browser, hid the browser, and displayed the phone's keypad. Is the vision connection status blatantly visible from there, or is it subtle enough to easily overlook and go all afternoon with calls going straight to voicemail without realizing it until you trip over it by accident?

I don't think I can awnser all your questions, but having owned the I300 and the I500, I'll make my general generic summary.

I miss the i500, and I'm pretty sure I'd trade my 6700 for an i550.

The 6700 is more like the i300 in the sense of relying heavily on the touch screen. It's like the i500 with the lack of speakerphone. (Well, the 6700 has a speakerphone, but it's virtually useless.)

Ringerwise, I never had a problem with any of them.

I deffinatly miss the simplicity of the Palm based devices, though at the same time, enjoy the multitude of functonality of the WM5. I can't say for certain if it's my setup, or if it's from WM5, but things like Internet Explorer will randomly close on me any time I try to load a page. A soft-reset of the phone, and everything works normal again. I rarely used the browser on the i500 or the 300, so I can't really compare too much. Blazer was Blazer, pocket IE is..well...Internet Explorer.

the 6700 deffinatly wins in terms of the screen!

Gaming - bleh, I've tried it, and I just can't get the feel for the tiny keys with any of the above mentioned phones. THe 6700 deffinatly has more "options", but the controls still bug me. (Though there is a Windows Mobile version of Age of Empires I need to try).

As for the vision/missed calls problem...my phone actually allows for the ring-through to function properly.

In summary -

The i300 was a noble attempt at a PDA phone (in retrospect, not that great, IMHO, but for it's time...). The i500 was a great phone with PDA functionality. The 6700 is a great PDA that can be a somewhat awkward phone. Just make sure you add a mini-SD card.

- xian -

still praying to one day see something like an i550 for Sprint in the US.

Well, I've been playing heavily with my roommate's JasJar all weekend (on the theory that it's faster & has a bigger screen than the 6700, so anything that makes me feel cramped or slow is likely to be as bad or worse on the 6700). So far, the thing that's blown me away (badly) more than anything is just how sluggish and "stuttering" it feels. It's literally 10 times as fast, has more than twice the ram, and the same video resolution as the laptop I had my senior year in college (Digital HiNote Ultra 450... 50Mhz 486DX2, 640x480, 24 megs), yet it feels like my first post-Amiga PC (33Mhz 486DX) struggling to run OS/2 Warp. I'm starting to suspect that the JasJar is basically a big cellular Winmodem, bogging down the CPU with all the things a twenty-cent DSP could do 16 times faster & struggling to keep its head above the water the whole time. UI-blocking network calls aside, my i500 almost feels faster...

But then again, I remember reading lots of complaints about an hour ago complaining that the JasJar is a slow beast (though nobody really seemed to know why), and I ran across a few other postings that said that the 6700 feels MUCH faster than the JasJar... so I'm still feeling hopeful.

Right now, I feel like I did the month before I sold my Amiga 3000 in early 1992 and bought my first PC. I'm totally sold on the 6700's hardware superiority in every meaningful way... but still... it's hard. If only PalmSource/ALP could be persuaded to port ALP1.0 to the 6700 and distribute it with reflash utility as part of the SDK (both to re-establish the Palm ecosystem and sneak into Sprint and Verizon through the back door without wasting time playing their silly exclusivity games and pissing off roughly half their potential developers stuck with the wrong carrier...)

To tell the truth, I actually liked the i300's formfactor (and the 6700's) better than the i500's. Give the 6700 a 320x480 screen, put a "bubble-dome" numeric keypad on the back of the battery with sliding on/off switch to provide an alternate physical keypad that can be dialed by touch when trying to navigate an autoattendant while driving, and it would be just about the perfect hardware reference platform for the next "Palm" (running AccessLinux).

I ended up owning 3 I 300 al of them went bad on me. the tio 1/3 of the screen would start to fade and go dark. I couldnt wait for the Audiovox 2023 to come out to change mine out.