[JASJAR, XDA Exec, MDA Pro General] gubbs:
Hmm I'm not sure if this is just my experience or not but I have never had a contract mobile before ..

Always suspected they were a bit of a con/rip off/customer service black hole.

So anyway, I finally decided I need a personal organizer/pda for work and since my employer gets a 50% discount on o2 I figured why not splurge.

Ordered my XDA Exec yesterday on 400 mins cross network tarrif (£15 p/m) and the handset was £149.

It arrived 48 hours later!

Only it came by DHL in an obviously re-sealed box. The unit was inside, no cellaphane in sight. The battery was charged already and despite the courier listing a simcard in the box inventory there wasnt one in there anywhere.

I am pretty deflated by this rather awful service so far .. is this normal?

Anyway I figured, this does not prevent me from firing it up and playing around on the WIFI networks at work.

I have played with this thing for a good 6 hrs today at work and here's my first impressions...

1. Asthetically its lovely but the buttons are easy to press while getting it out of the leather wallet. Camera is always on when I open it up .. grr.

2. My screen has a yellow tint to it. Is this normal? Seems kind of like a crap TFT panel used to look on earlier laptop units.

3. Anything network related seems to frequently cause the unit to hang. Checking my mail .. downloading 500 mails from IMAP took 15 mins and eventually crashed it.

MSM seems to crash a lot.

IE on this thing is quite simply poor. This may be biased by the fact I am a firefox developer .. but it is clunky, slow to respond, PHP sends it into a catatonic state and secure websites just plain confuse the thing.

Lots of crashing. No flash support??

Not impressed.

4. Software. Like, where is it? WM5 has next to nothing useful thats free. I don't believe in shareware at all .. where's the OS stuff? Where's the PDA port of this and that? Very dissapointed that all the stuff I found was win 2003 se only and that was that.

This alone renders the thing a waste of time .. sadly ..

5. Keypad is just useable but I hate the feel. Keys are flat and the rebound is so firm you frequently have to go back and press it down harder to get the right chracter to appear. Its hard work tbh.

Oh and the most annoying 'bug' of all ..

When the thing turns the backlight off to power save, it doesnt seem to come back on at the same level it was at before going into standby.

It comes on so dark you have to tilt it to the light to get through the menus to turn it up.

Annoying .. but fixable I'm sure ..

Anyway, some thoughts.

Generally I think this has potential but it clearly hasnt got enough memory to run smoothly .. 49mb of useable memory? Pah! It reminds me of the kind of things you see on ebay where someone is selling a p4 laptop with 64 mb of ram installed. Waste of time.

The cpu is either crap or scaled so far back to save power it crawls. Jury is out on that for now ..

Summarizing, I DO like this .. but the lack of good free software and the diddy memory and seemingly bloated and clunky wm5 + bugs ruins it totally.

I will probably be trading this in for an XDA IIi next week.

That is if O2 sort me out. As it is, I am frankly disgusted with their approach to new customers! "Lets send em a refurb and see if they notice ..". I even told the guy I was a customer relations rep for a large corp. Like I know how it works .. bah.

That said, am getting 50% discount over Mr. Public. So can't complain TOO loudly ..