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Hardware Smartphone
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Written by admin
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Wednesday, 30 April 2008 |
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Page 2 of 2
Applications/Performance
As mentioned Orange has customised the interface to disguise its WM5 origins, but they have also supplied an additional video player to go alongside the standard Windows Media Player. The player supports video files in 3GPP format and videos played back ok, but we could not get them to open full screen and even our test video in Windows Media Player was not scaling properly, when we tried to view it in Full screen mode.
Orange has also added preset email account settings for its Orange network and there is a handy wizard for configuring Exchange OWA accounts.
However the only real omission is the lack of any document viewers as standard, we only found this out when trying to open a Word document. We checked the supplied CD to see if we had to load the viewers manually, but the CD only contains an older version of ActiveSync.
Besides with the money that you save from buying the SPV E610, you can easily purchase the excellent Documents-To-Go for around £15, so not a major concern.
As for performance we found the 260Mhz CPU, alongside its 28MB of free system memory and 77MB of free storage was, on the whole, more than capable of opening applications and running programs in relatively quick time.
Sound quality wasn't too bad from the internal speakers, but the supplied headphones were not that comfortable to wear for long periods of time.
When it came to using the camera we found the shot times to be longer than average and with the camera image quality setting set to high and the view screen set to full, the camera almost ground to a halt.
Image quality though - especially for outdoor shots - was actually a lot better than we had expected and puts a few of the 3MP camera phones we have reviewed recently to shame.
Connectivity
Of course at this price the prospects of the Orange device having Wi-Fi or 3G support were always going to be slim, but we could only wish.
That said the SPV E610 is equipped with GPRS and EDGE support, though we have to admit during testing only GPRS was dominant.
The problem with WM5 however is its lack of support for html emails, which means it will still display emails received in this format, but hyperlinks and images will not render/function correctly.
Downloading emails was not too bad, but web browsing on GPRS is something that we would not do often - due to the lower download speeds available. And with an older version of IE installed we would switch to a mini Opera browser (JAVA is supported by the device) as soon as you can.
For those worried about the costs on PAYG we found out from Orange that they do a lot of flexible data bolt-on packages (you can easily add your own Orange contract sim if needs be).
They offer a daily Orange World Data bundle priced at £1 and a weekly Orange World Data bundle priced at £5. Both offer unlimited anytime browsing access (both are subject to a fair use policy of 25MB per day).
Plus for anyone who does not take out a bundle, but still wants to browse/email, Orange cap data charging at £2 per day.
Call quality from the Tri-band GSM phone was not bad, though of course we can only comment on our own location and each location will be different.
Battery
Orange claim a battery life of 4hours of talk time and 170hours of standby, though during our tests we got just under two days of moderate use out of the device before it needed a recharge.
Editor review : Final thoughts
17 of 17 people found the following review helpful
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| Overall rating |
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6.4 |
| Features |
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6.0 |
| Design |
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6.0 |
| Memory |
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7.0 |
| Connectivity |
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6.0 |
| Performance |
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7.0 |
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Last updated: Wednesday, 30 April 2008
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