So, after actually buying the XDA Zest out of my own money, the theory being I’ll be able to reduce my mobile tariff and get credit thus paying for it self, I haven’t regretted it and found it far more useful than having a PDA and a separate phone. Finding a decent Spectrum emulator is high on my task list now. Not many reviews on the web, best of the bunch is from 4WinMobile and Trusted Reviews.
What’s it like to use compared to what I have used in the past – being a highly abused Nokia 611o (6 years!), a severly battered Sagem Mx-v55 (4 years) and an LG Shine (nearly 2 years)? Call quality is excellent though obviously battery life isn’t as good as any of those mentioned. Obviously being the fact that 2.8″ VGA colour touchscreen takes more power than a 2″ colour screen and you really can’t compare it to a monochrome screen that takes very little battery power. So far, a good couple of days on one charge but as I’ve been playing with wi-fi, gps and bluetooth, I charge it once day. Good news is that it doesn’t take long to charge but you do need to let the battery go flat 3 times before perfomance improves. Unfortunately the quick start menu doesn’t mention it but the full manual on the website does.
Wi-fi signal pickup is very good. Doesn’t seem to drop the signal as much as my Asus laptop which remains more static than the phone does. Wififofum is an excellent piece of software for “discovering” wireless access points. Bluetooth, as in a previous post, works perfectly with the Focus which was one of the reasons I needed to be specific in getting a new phone. Only issue is, that you have to copy the SIM contacts to the phone before the Focus will pick up the numbers. Having done that, all you then need to do is attach a voice tag on the Focus with the number for the voice activation to work. Though you might not like the sound of your own voice being played back to you before it dials the number associated with the tag. However, it is worth the slight embarrassment as it truly is hands free. Even dialling numbers work perfectly! BT file transfers work amazingly fast compared to my Tapwave but that was v1 and the Zest is v2 as is the laptop so not really a fair comparison. I just use BT to transfer as I really can’t be bothered finding the USB lead and plugging it it.
Which brings me nicely onto charging. Thankfully it is a USB charger and really a standard USB to mini-USB cable (apparently not quite standard) so easily taken to work for charging onthe company’s unused USB slots. Now the bad news, the cable doesn’t work with a USB cigarette lighter socket converter in the car. What happens is that it charges the phone but the SD card is no longer recognised. The problem? The Co-Pilot trial SatNav maps are stored on a mini-SD card thus rendering it useless if you want to use the Sat Nav on a long journey. I’ll be testing it out on a 4.5 hour journey soon to see how long the battery lasts with GPS on for that time.
