[JASJAR, XDA Exec, MDA Pro General] Anton.Valleyman:
Wow, that's taken nearly 1/2 hr to read!!!

For my part, I believe that for the pure logistical reasons alone, if you bought the Exec primarily as a phone, you will be disappointed. It's bigger, the battery doesn't last as long as my old 8310 (the last time I HAD a non-XDA phone....I've since had the XDA, XDA2, XDA2i and now the Exec) and held to your ear for a while results in armache!

I do NOT have dropped calls. No I take that back. I had ONE when I had the o2 Active stuff stuff on to see how it performed. In the past it was always the first thing to take off the XDA and wanted to see if it was any better. For the most part that stuff is actually quite good, but by its very nature it slows the device down. But back the point, once it was off...no more slowdown and no more dropped calls.

I've just rung my Exec which was turned off with the clam closed. I counted two seconds before I heard the ringtone. Considering I have my o2 settings set to ring for 25 seconds, this is hardly an issue for me. With the phone on and in open laptop mode, I'd say it was more like 1/2 a second.

When my phone rings, it tells me who it is and if I have a picture set up or a customised ringtone (can't see why anyone WOULD want that, but...) it displays that. If I want to ignore it and send it straight to voicemail, I can. If I want to silence the call but leave the caller believing I am just not with my phone, I can move the volume slider on the side and put it back down. If I want to answer it with my headset, I can do. If I want to answer it without the headset, I can do. Call history, there. Speed dial, there. Restrict types of calls, there should I need to. Call forwarding options, there. Call waiting, there. Speakerphone, there. Recently upgraded to the new iMate ROM with Radio 1.09...signal quality seems greatly improved to me.

The ONLY phone-related issues I have are the lack of a caller display on the back of the clam which would be VERY useful, and that unfortunately the phone side drains the battery a bit. Having said that, the caller can be seen by opening the clam and then very showoff-ishly loudly closing the clam to take the call. I suspect if I wanted to lessen the battery drain I should disable UTMS unless needed.

People are letting personalities interfere with this post and that's wrong. The post was intended to discover what people thought was the Universal's biggest problem. For me, I suppose it would be battery life generally. I play a lot of music on mine. I upgraded to a 2GB Sandisk Ultra II and using aacplusv2 I now have 60 full albums on it, plus 4 films, TomTom and other installed apps. Using TCPMP rather than my paid-for PocketMusic has decreased the drain as it's far less resource hungry and also shows album art (very important!!), not to mention allows me to use the thing whilst still listening (try typing a text message when PM is running!!!).

Contacts is perhaps a little restrictive but is a vast improvement on PPC2003SE. I too had always thought the phone side was a little weak, and in 2002 / 3SE it always felt tacked on which is true to an extent. However, sitting and writing the above out regarding its features on the phone side in WM5, I'm having a hard time thinking of stuff it DOESN'T do that I NEED it to. I suppose if I had the kind of issues experienced by others perhaps my opinion would change. I agree with Gajet in that users are often a device or applications' worst problem - though I would perhaps have put it better :wink: - working in App Support and Development for a big US firm has tought me that. Poorly written and customised 3rd party apps are often the downfall, also. I have nothing on my today screen apart from the new iMate ROM date and time (with alarm notification icon, brill) and Pocketbreeze with Inbox / SMS notifications built in. Oh and the Device lock - not too useful as it's usually kept in clam mode but still looks good! Screen rotation is usually just under or over a second because of PB reorienting and resizing.

I know some people have posted "well if you want a phone, buy a phone" and I agree with this to a point, as well as the "it's a PDA with a phone, not the other way round". Users who pay good money for this device should expect a certain level of performance. I do, I don't get the kinds of issues some people get. For this to be occurring, either the phones are faulty, or the software installed (carrier-installed or 3rd party) are causing instability. Installing a today plugin to the storage card or a big application into main memory when SD would be fine are just a couple of such examples where Gajet is right about the way in which people use their phones.

To sum up (cos I'm getting bored). Complaining for complaining's sake is a waste of time. If people are experiencing these kinds of issues, then a bit of root cause analysis is required. Do the calls drop with the OS installed without any provider or 3rd party software installed? Same with the BT issues. Same with the length of time to answer, and in what states? If not, install your required apps one at a time. Very often, the device or its OS gets blamed for something that a poor bit of 3rd party code is responsible for. Case in point: Pocketbreeze with iLauncher installed as a plugin of PB rather than standalone. There's an "memory leak on the imate JasJar" on their forums, which has seemingly now been discovered to be an iLauncher issue....NOT the phone's.

Let's all exercise a bit of common sense and try to find the real cause of such problems. If one person has an issue that someone else with identical kit doesn't, try to determine WHY THAT IS!.