[neoTouch S200 General] epdm2be:
RE:

First of all it didn't fall. Never had been fallen; as I keep it in a Krussel leather pouch AND had a Zagg invisible shield wrapped around the screen AND back too (socalled full body armor). I took both measures after reading how scratch-prone the back-cover was. It wasn't 3 years old either. It was "only" 7 or 8 months old.

As I wrote earlier, the short time that I used it I was very happy with it. Fast, didn't look too bad, nice navigation with iGo, could record phone calls (although not when made over bluetooth), Wake on LAN (for my PC and Mac), could access windows shares through the file-manager, heaps of software to be found. The list goes on.

Negative points. The camera sucked big time as was expected. Windows Mobile needs to reboot every 2 days as we all know and tollerate. This was also with my much more expensive Samsung Omnia (WM6.1) that I owned before the Acer and it's clearly a problem with the OS not being stable enough for prolonged use. Though in reality it didn't bother me to reboot my phone very other day.

If it just wasn't so fragile :-(

I mean, suddenly vibration went dead, bluetooth behaved weird and then WIFI just stopped at all. Comm-manager didn't see any wifi-chip at all ???

Nonetheless the devices aren't available anymore. The only (acer) WM device that I could get was the P300 which is a lower specified device. And I didn't know if that device could handle call-recording which the S200 can without any other software (the S200-dialer simply has a record function build-in). In fact, the store-keeper even offered me a discount because of my bad luck with my former phones, which I found very fair of him. So if you live in Belgium and want to know what shop it is, then PM me. I can wholeheartedly recommend them.

The other WM6.x device on sale in that shop was the ridiculously expensive HTC HD2 (where call-recording doesn't work or at least not without patching/hacking/too-much-hassle-anyway).

The only device with the same price AND with call-recording (that I knew off) in stock was the Nokia C7 (or it's cheaper brother C6-00 with the older Symbian). The C6-01 wasn't available in that store at that time so my choices were very limited.

I must say I've had it now for over a week and I'm pleasantly surprised. It feels much better made than the acer with higher quality materials (metal rim around a real glass screen, metal back, metal cam-module and the plastic looks of better quality too). The screen is even supposed to be "gorilla glass", whatever that means. It's call quality is much, much better as its reception. And it can even record calls over the blue-tooth headset (which my Samsung also could but the Acer could not). Not to mention the recorded calls seem all of good quality and audio-volume (whereby on the acer some calls were very good and others were too quiet)

It's inbuilt media player plays divx, xvid (even with subtitles) and flv's. On WM6.x I used the excellent Coreplayer to play amongst others xvid/divx but as we all know it can't handle subtitles. On the other hand, Coreplayer on WM6.x is able to play streamed files from my windows-xp-shares. The Nokia player can't access my windows xp shares over wifi or at least I haven't figured this out yet.

The web experience is certainly better on the Acer because of it's 800x480 screen. The Nokia C7 has a very good capacitive screen but with a lower pixel count (640x360) and you definitely notice this when web browsing. It's also smaller than the S200 (Acer S200=3.8" while C7=3.5"). It's not bad though but a bigger screen with higher pixel-count simply shows more things and so you have to scroll around a bit less. On the plus side Opera is still being further developped for Symbian (I use Opera 11 now) while unfortunately further development ceased for WM (last version for S200 is Opera 10) :-(

As for the screen clarity and colours. It's day and night. The Omnia had a very bad screen with bad touch-input. While the acer has a very good resistive screen with good visuals. But these amoled screens are really good and capacitive touch is so much more fun to use (especially considering the premium glass feel of actual glass). I can understand that ppl rave on about those super amoleds. But I was happy with S200's screen, it was good enough for me and definitely isn't bad (it's probably the best restive screen out there IMHO). I didn't buy this C7 for it's amoled screen.

Oh, didn't I mention audio quality is great. I mean it's loud and clear without any hacks or tricks. Navigation sounds terrific, playing movies sound very good. Audio-wise, a major step-up from the awfully low volume on the S200.

I played a bit with Nokia's navigation. But I can't comment much on it. At first sight it looks okay. It's not as beautiful as iGO but it definitely looks better than TomTom. It's easy to use and starts up incredibly quick. But I only used it today for real navigation. It does it's job very well and comes free with the phone which is definitely a bonus. There are other navigation apps but so far I've only used Nokia's maps. I doubt that I'll use something else because it's sufficient enough for me and starts up very quickly. As with iGO (which inserts contact-addresses into it's on-board POI-list) you can navigate to stored contacts (you do it from the address book itself).

Tell you what. I like this C7 now but it could very well be that in 6 months time I dislike it (especially when it should break down as quick as the Acer did). Nonetheless I do realize that this too is also "just" a 300 euro's phone and not an 800 euro's iPhone. Of course my problems remain even if this phone should break down within 1 or 2 years... I need in-call-recording which isn't to be found easily with smartphones :-( (strangely enough both Nokia's and Sony-ericsson feature-phones are able to record phone calls without a fuzz.)

Oh well. We'll just have to wait and see how this device hangs on. At least it didn't cost me an ARM and a leg :-) (unlike the Samsung Omnia)

Hope this wasn't too boring.

Cheers