It’s that time of year again… Smartphones Now time! Smartphones Now is our annual discussion of all things smartphones and will detail the ins and outs of a turbulent and exciting year, a year eclipsed by an 800-pound gorilla and witness to some spectacular flame outs. This is a year of transition, a time when Apple redefined the market and Microsoft played catch-up. New interfaces and gesture-based systems were taken out of labs and universities and smashed into smartphones that are better — or worse — for the effort. Things are changing, and this is just the beginning.
We’ll talk about Palm, Symbian, Palm OS, and WinMo. We’ll talk about the iPhone — is it really a smartphone? We’ll talk about the gadgets and gear we played with all year and predict, pontificate, and do penance for our lack of foresight. Welcome to Smartphones Now.
Have any smartphone horror stories? What is your favorite phone? The worst phone you used this year? Drop us a line at tips@crunchgear.com.
Comments
I have a story crunchgear!
So I bought a blackberry pearl about half a year ago. I loved it. It was my first smartphone, but I’ve had a PDA before… until someone stole it… not cool. But that is another story! So one day I find my self listening to my viocemail while I shaved away at my ragged face. Nothing unusual. Until I dropped my (at the time) 2 month old Blackberry Pearl in the sink of water.
Shit.
Blackberrys don’t like water, which I soon found out, and much to my dismay, it was soaked. It had been completely submerged. Underwater phone. Broken. Me sad =(.
So I did what any DIY would do. I took it apart and held a hot blow dryer over it for about an hour. All dry! I left all the little pieces out to dry some more over night, and then I put it all back together the next day.
Much to my amazement, it turned on and worked again! I was all like, “w00t RIM! They roxors! I don’t need another blackberry!”
And thats how I lived for about a month. Me and my happy, fully functioning, totally undamaged Blackberry. It was love baby. Love.
But one morning, I woke up, turned on my little baby, and was about to check my email, when all of a sudden the letters QEQEQEQEQEQEQEQEQEQEQEQEQEQEQEQEQEQEQEQEQEQEQEQEQEQE show up. I’m like, “WTF?!?!” and so I hit the end call button. I scroll the little trackball up a little to my messages, only to have QE type repeatedly on my phone again. I was pissed. Upon further examination, I found that it was specifically to the left. Whenever I scroll the trackball even the slightest bit to the left it typed QE.
SHIT
And not only that, but the software thinks that I’m holding down the QE buttons, and doesn’t let me exit, so i have to jog it back and forth to shake it out of QE mode in order to exit.
I was SOOOO pissed.
I would SO have turned it back in for a new one (was still under warranty) until I realized that the water damage had voided the warranty. not cool. It hit me like a rock to the face. I didn’t have a functioning BB anymore… =’ (
I took it apart again, just to check out the little trackball mechanism, but nothing looked out of place. I even held a magnet to the motherboard in case something became polarized and needed magnet-power-something.
Nothing. It was dead. Well more like, crippled.
But i haven’t gotten any other phone yet as I was thinking about saving up for teh almighty iphone.
And thats my scary BB story. How RIM fucked my BB when I thought everything was fine and dandy.
If any other crunchers have any suggestions as to what to do… I’m open to them. I’ll be checking these comments periodically.
i am having the EXACT same problem! (except my phone wasn’t completley emersed in water) but, i AM having the ‘Qeqeqeqeqeqeqe’ problem!
I do have 8100 blackeberry also. Never in the water but it start to do the “qe” also with constant restart. The blackberry is 1 year and 4 month old so no waranty. No support. Need to be replaced. I decide to go Nokia. Blackbeery is a toy that can not be repair.
George
My dear Crunchgear, my 1st impression on WM5 phone is anything but pleasant. My company gave me a Dopod 838 WM5 machine 2 years ago and still using it (looking forward Nokia E51/E62), at 1st I thought wow, superb gadget but after a few months of trying lots of apps gone missing mysteriously, and couldn’t recover back.
Also the vendor stuffed in some time-trial products that jamming the phone’s processor. I had to remove them all till my phone comes to the state of bare minimum. Even that, its still slow, processor is only 190+ mhz, lousy memory size. Being the 1st time user, I didn’t know WM5 is a total new scape from normal WinXP where you got recover CDs or like other phones where basic functionalities are hardwired.
Nightmares ? Well a few,
- like couldn’t get up on time for my morning transport and only to find out that, WM5 freezed and missed the alarm mark.
- couldn’t handle important calls when you need it the most, WM5 again freezed.
- sluggish bluetooth connection, sometime couldn’t turn-on/off calls.
- at times, i really dont know whats jamming the phone, as i checked the task list, it was empty.
- at times, it couldn’t recognized the on slot SD card.
- phone took ages to come alive after a reset.
- on average i had to reset the phone 3-5 times a week. On fine day, it functioned without reset for the whole week.
The reason for keeping the phone until now is that, I’m using Skype for communication thru wifi when travelling.
Also being a company phone, you dont have to pay for it, the line is free.
My take is, stay away from WM5 phones, I dont know about WM6 or the up-coming WM7/8 phones but from my pass experiences, Windows is OS for desktop only. Anything off that are no no go. MS are not expert on phones, certainly not expert in embedded devices and small OS architect. Just look at all those Win OS, those are overweight and demanding soul in over work machine
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