[UMi ZERO Guides, News, & Discussion] fines321:
My experience with the Umi Zero

It appears to me that when they first offered the Umi Zero for sale they presold it without proper testing in order to beat the competition before they offered a similar phone with the same specs. Fortunately for me, I bought mine at Tinydeals which does product testing and as of now I have had no hardware problems. Consequently, I didn't receive my phone until about two months after ordering. The lesson here, is don't rush your dealer and use Paypal in case of a problem.

Below I have listed some of the minor headaches I have had.

1) There is no instruction manual with the phone or online. So I have had to rely on this and the Umi company's forum for guidance.

2) I bought the Umi Zero to use as an Internet phone when I travel so I haven't tested it with a sim card. I have used it once to make an internet call and the sound was of a good quality and the other person had no problem hearing me. However, out of curiosity, I imputed the two Imei numbers on the back of the phone with my current cellphone provider on their website and the response was that they couldn't verify if the phone would work on their network. Based on the frequencies the phone is suppose to broadcast in, it should be compatible with the network,

3) The power button is in the middle on the left side of the phone. Thus, holding the phone in the normal fashion you are very likely to hit the power button and it could result in unintended consequences. There is no "hold" button to prevent you from accidentally pushing the power button.

4) To connect the Umi Zero to my Windows XP PC, I had to download a bunch of drivers. Frankly, I didn't know exactly what I was doing as I am just an average computer user, but I did get it to work. When I connect my Umi Zero to my PC and then use the safely remove hardware button on my PC to disconnect, I see two interfaces "Android ADB Interface" and "Linux File-CD Gadget USB device". I can't tell you if both are necessary. Once connected to your PC, on the main screen of the phone you need to swipe from the top. There you will normally see if any updates are available or if your anti-virus is working etc. But you will also see "USB Connected". You need to click on that and then click on turn on USB storage. Also, you must have USB debugging turned on. To do that go to a) Settings b) About Phone c) Click on "Build Number" about seven times. That will turn on "Developers Options" where you can tick the USB debugging line.

5) When it comes to updating your Umi Zero with the latest operating system, make sure the exact name is "ota-update.zip". I had gone to one of the mirror websites listed on this website and they had changed the name. If you use the SD card method to update make sure it is formatted in fat32 and if it already came with the fat32 format, reformat it again with fat32. I had to do this for two SD cards that had already been formatted with fat32. I tried the exfat and NFTS format but the phone wouldn't recognize the SD card.

6) I took about ten pictures (all were clear and not blurry) with the camera and the average megapixels per picture was 2mb having set the camera to use 13mb. Right now there is a lot of snow on the ground so that could be the reason for the low amount. By contrast my point and shoot 12mp camera uses an average of 3mp per picture. And of course it is difficult to see the screen on the phone in bright light.

7) To charge my phone, I have used a .5A, .7A, 1A and a 1.8A, all 5V chargers. They all worked but the .5A seemed to get hot so I disconnected it and the .7A was getting fairly warm. You can also use your PC to charge the phone. I had read somewhere that using the quick charger was not good for a lithium battery so I haven't used it. I don't know if this latter assertion is correct.

8) I noticed that my leatherette eyeglass case was a perfect fit for my Umizero, so I bought a neoprene one at a local dollar store. There is even room for a stylus.

9) I had a bought a 64GB micro SD card for my phone. It came with the exfat format instead of the fat32 format. Windows doesn't provide a method to format a 64Gb card with fat32 so see post #854 on page 86 of this website on how to do this.

10) If you want to use the compass feature of this phone, you will need to download an app from the google playstore. I also found that the music player didn't handle wma files, so I downloaded both Armamp (tricky to set up but will be updated) and JetAudio basic. To play wmv files (video), I downloaded media player but you need to use the file manager that came with the phone to load the video files. The GPS and WiFi are all satisfactory.

So in summary as of now, I haven't had any hardware problems. The battery works fine, the SIM card tray although somewhat flimsy slides easily but you have to be careful when inserting a SD card so that it is properly flush with the opening. The rebooting issue maybe caused by the power button being in a poor position. There are just plenty of software issues that could be alleviated with a good instruction manual.