New Phone Review.

Eh, I got to work today, and since no one was scheduled to close, I got a 4-9 shift instead of an 8-5. I wanted to check VuTales out this morning, but I kinda slept in till 7:55, so that idea was trashed… at the time. So now I have eight hours until work, and, uh, I realized I never blog that much, and, uh, I thought I’d just do a review of the latest phone I got since that’s all I have to talk about. :I

EnV Touch

I got this baby as an upgrade to my old regular EnV, which means I was able to get this new phone for a cheaper price than normal. I went with it since the touch-screen capabilities seemed better than the Dare, and the Internet’s better than the Versa’s. Also, the QWERTY keyboard isn’t a detachable module like it is for the Versa; it comes attached. And by the way, this phone is the successor to the Voyager even though it’s an EnV.

Touch Screen

The touch screen in the front of the phone is pretty nice, as you can customize it with about 16 icons to launch features. It’s just like a regular desktop, and I just love all the little icons; they remind me of TWEWY and all its little badges, and doo-dads, and knick-knacks. You tap a little arrow on the right to bring up two tabs showing Shortcuts and My Media, and those are the places where you get all your shortcuts for your Home page from (I just use them as holders for my least commonly used shortcuts atm). On the bottom of the main screen are your main features which are (from left to right): Your Messages, Make a Call, Main Menu, Contacts, Favorites. I never really use the Main Menu thing since that just brings up the basic applications that people might use. I mainly have access to everything from my Home page, so the Main Menu seems to just be extra shortcuts at the time.

QWERTY Keyboard

When you flip open the phone, you’re greeted by a nice QWERTY keyboard. Luckily I still have the original screen guard for it, so the screen is vibrate, free of bubbles and dust, and it looks beautiful at all times of the day. The keyboard is spacious, and it’s a nice alternative over the touch screen’s keyboard. When you use the browser in QWERTY mode you use the control pad to screen around pretty nicely. Sometimes I use this method instead of the touch screen if there’s a lot of links.

External Features

As for the buttons, they kept it simple. On the left you have (from top to bottom): Camera, Volume Up, Volume Down, and Lock/Unlock. The lock’s really useful, and your screen guard thing has you slide up on the touch screen or press the button again to get access to your Home page, so there’s never anyone accidental fucking up of your Home screen.
There’s a slot for your Micro SD Card for extra storage, a hole to stick stuff in (mainly your headphones and BlueTooth wireless headsets), and the slot to put the charger in. Sometimes the slot to put your charger in gets stuck and you have to mess with it a bit (more difficult for people with no fingernails like myself), but that’s only bad ‘cuz I’m afraid I’ll break it. D: But it’s sturdy I guess.

Camera

The Camera is a 3.2 Megapixel one, so it’s decent compared to the other out there (I think). Starting the camera up gives you the lense’s view along with three options to start in Camera mode, Video mode, or go to My Videos. Touching the screen brings up options to zoom in/out, set the amount of people in the picture, turn the flash on/off, and do other stuff like set recording time (for save/for send), resolution, white balance, color effects, and save option.

When you go into Camera mode, you have access to switch to Video mode, take a picture, and go to My Pictures. If you touch the screen you get all the camera options (including some features for special pictures like one that detects smiles, one that copy and pastes business cards [not so accurate I heard], and a Panorama shot whatever that means). When you go into Video mode, you have access to switch to Camera mode, start recording, and go to My Videos. If you touch the screen you get the same options available as when you first started the camera.

All in all the camera is nice I guess. I don’t really take pictures that much, but I kinda wanna get all my contacts’ pictures since you can put them as Photo IDs in your Contact list.

Messaging/Calling

Going through your contacts is pretty nice. You can scroll through the list, or you can tap one of the letters shown at the bottom. So, for example using the latter way, if I wanted to text BlackNazgul, I’d press V and it would take me to the beginning of the “V” contacts. Then I’d press I (with all the letter choices being reduced to the available second letters following the first letter V), and if I didn’t find him by then I would press N, C, E, N, T, etc. Then you can tap the person’s name, and tap their home/cell/work number or w/e and it initiates the call. Very nice.

As for the call quality, it’s pretty good. I’ve had no problems so far even when I’ve been indoors and outside. Sometimes it’s kinda akward answering a call since you have to unlock the screen by pressing a little lock icon, and sometimes it gets hectic, and I drop my phone in the toilet.

Internet

The main reason I went with the EnV Touch over the Versa is because I heard the EnV Touch’s Internet was a lot better. It’s pretty good, but it took a bit of getting used to. There are two buttons (details in paragraph below) when you scroll around and stuff, and you can scroll by moving around on the touch screen (alright method that I don’t mind using), or you can use the control pad in QWERTY mode (which works nicely and locks to editable areas and links).

The first button you see is on the bottom left and it simply zooms in and out (only two settings though; one for whatever your biggest zoom is and the other’s a more overall view). The other button on the bottom right brings up other things that include a url bar, tabs (up to 3), back/forward arrow, a home button, a link to your favorites, and another button that brings up a bar with some more features (Search, Add Favorite, Display Mode, History).

You get a more conventional way to scroll if you hold down a second in a free space. If you do so, you get a + sign and a – sign which are a bit more limited than the button in the bottom left of the screen. Sometimes they get in the way when I hold a little too long when scrolling, but they do no harm if you avoid them when they appear.

As for the general browsing experience, I’m a bit disappointed that I can’t post comments on VuTales, as pretty much everything else works. The phone also has YouTube set up in a way for your viewing pleasure. Videos play in landscape mode (the phone just tilted 90 degrees), and it’s easy to pause, go back, resume playing, and whatnot. The quality’s not as good as your computer, and I don’t think there’s an HD option, but the videos load with pretty much no lag. However, I tried to watch the intensive 42-minute-version of College Saga, and all the effects got blurred together part of the way in. The text they had was readable until then at least.

My Complaints

1. Sometimes tilting to landscape mode when texting ‘n’ stuff doesn’t work. I have to keep tilting it and clicking to try to get it to recognize I WANT LANDSCAPE FFS! Happens occasionally however.

2. Only two themes, but it’s okay I guess. There might be new ones in the future, but I doubt it.

3. Touch keyboard messes up sometimes when texting. There’s a standard cellphone one, but when you tilt to landscape mode you get a Touch-mode QWERTY keyboard. I wanna be able to use this instead of flipping to the regular QWERTY keyboard all the time, but sometimes in mid-length and longer messages I keep bumping the wrong keys.

Overall

It’s a pretty solid phone. I’m glad I got it, and it was definitely the best choice of phone at the time (I got it about mid-June which is when the phone came out). It was either this or the EnV3, so I think I made a good choice. The abundance of features, the ability to set tons of shortcuts on your desktop-esque Home page, the compatibility with YouTube, and messaging convenience are all good assets of this phone. I give it a 9.5/10.