Today we’re going to look at our three smart-phones and how they perform as well…a phone. For me, this is the most important category since I want a phone in order to talk to other people. For some, this one is down the list but tops in my book.
The winner by a hair in the phone category is:
Window’s Mobile (Blackjack I & II).
Here’s how it all went down:
Call Quality:
The overall call quality of the Blackjack I and II was great. I never had dropped calls or static, always heard the other party well and basically could forget I was using a device and just talk.
I would have to say the iPhone is a close second. The only factor that took it down slightly is that sometimes I have trouble positioning the listening speaker at the right spot on my ear so I have a little trouble hearing the caller.
The BlackBerry was horrid. On my first device I would answer calls to dead air even though the caller could hear me. Or, as I was talking the earpiece would develop static and go dead while the other party could still hear me. If I called them back, no problem. AT&T did switch out the unit and the second was a little better, but I still experienced an unusual number of dropped calls.
Dialing:
This is probably one of the most important aspects of the phone after the calling issue is settled. This is also why I chose Window’s Mobile as my favorite. WM has the easiest and most intuitive dialing interface. As I would start to dial a number/name the display would populate with matches from my contact list and winnow the list down as I continued until I was ready to scroll to the name and select the number. A nice feature was that it prioritized the list with the most recent inbound/outbound calls. It just always seemed that whomever I wanted to call was no more than about three buttons away.
The iPhone is close but seems to take longer to look up and dial a number. First, since there is no dedicated keypad you have to activate the device, unlock it, click home screen and click phone. Then click keypad, contacts , etc. Or you can scroll to the search function (which we’ll talk about later this week) from the main screen. I keep my phone screen on “Recent” which handles most of my direct calling fairly well. For a phone there are a bit too many clicks to get to the number. What I’ve found though is that I use the voice dialing about 80% of the time with excellent accuracy. I don’t have to look down at the phone, keep my eyes on the road and it is RARELY wrong. Without this feature I would have serious reservations about the iPhone as a well designed mobile phone.
Finally, the BlackBerry. Honestly, I don’t know how anyone uses it. I’ve almost buried myself under more 18-wheelers trying to call someone on this phone. As you begin to type, it too brings up a list of contacts but does NOT prioritize them. You end up typing almost the whole name or scrolling through the list. But wait, it gets worse. When you start scrolling, the list dynamically expands and collapses the calling options for each contact as you pass the name. So, you can’t look up at the road and look back down at the screen in the same spot to find where you left off because it is changing the line position of each contact around. The dialing on the BlackBerry was so bad I finally found myself just dialing in the whole number each time.
So, there you have it in the Phone category. Of course there are many more features that I could have delved into, but those are the critical basics. Stay tuned for tomorrow’s run-down in the Personal and Productivity Manager category.
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