[Advantage X7500, MDA Ameo General] HeartOfDarkness:
I voted "OK" at the poll. But could you please give me specific reasons why the telephony part of the Athena "doesn't do well" out of the box ?

The Athena is sold by phone companies because it has phone capabilities. BUT it is also clearly stated everywhere that:

- there's no embedded earpiece;

- notably as a consequence of the previous point, a wired head-set is included;

- a bluetooth headset can (and of course, should) be used with the phone.

Is it because the Athena doesn't have an actual embedded earpiece that its telephony is bad ? If so, I disagree. I personnally would NEVER use it (the very idea of having the Athena to my ear is ludicrous to me).

What I mean is that this is a *subjective* point of view, and can therefore not be judged as a "universal" criterium to evaluate the telephony functions.

In my mind, such universal criteria would non-exhaustively be:

- network reception sensitivity;

- reactivity of the telephony interface;

etc.

Once again, this is completly subjective. I, for instance, find a style-I-type thingy, altough "interestin", completly useless for me. I much favor a good and small bluetooth earpiece, or stereo earphones with phone capabilities. It's a matter of taste, and I think that the Athena (and most other modern PDA-Phones, of course) has the advantage here, since it allows for ALL types of phone-oriented devices, whether wired, bluetooth, earbuds or phone-like stuff...

Why is it unfair ?? Now that's curious ! The Athena does something PHONE RELATED much better than other phones do, but since the others don't do it, it should be ditched ??

Contacts management is an EXTREMELY important phone-related functionnality for ANY phones IMO. And the Athena is far better for that than anything Nokia, Sony or others does, that's the bottom line.

Besides, Nokia DID understand that and tried to provide synchronisation functionnalities supposedly on par with PocketPCs. It IS relevant to the poll and the comparision that they screwed up quite nicely !

Couldn't agree more. I think I know why, although this cannot be seen as an excuse.

As I said somewhere else, HTC is NOT a software company. They rely on Windows Mobile almost completly to make use of the functionnalities their hadware offer. And since Windows MObile doesn't offer, out of the box, support for such a thing as VueFlo, HTC provided the BARE minimum to *show* that it works. Do they expect that third-party software companies will capitalise on it ? Did they expect such integrated support in WM6 ? Dunno. But it sure is a shame... :-S

Me either. But as I said, I would never hold the device to my head. Would feel like holding my LCD screen to my ear. lol

An excellent question, once again I think explained by the fact that they are not software makers. They rely on Windows Mobile to use the hardware they provide. Is that an excuse ? Of course not. So I completly agree with you that it clearly is a huge flaw of the Athena.

It is to note that WinCE is fully VGA-compliant (actually, it does not have any qualms about screen-resolution, it handles them all). Once again, it's the Windows Mobile team which is at fault, and I'd be hard-pressed to find them any excuse... >:-[

Not crappy, no. But definitely far from how good it can really be. And I agree 100% with you that some of these shortcomings are unacceptable.

But once again, this weakness also shows one of its great strenghts: its versatility, its ease of customisation, its enormous user and developper community...