I got my Dopod 838 Pro back last Saturday and I’m so relieved. I sent it for repair when its LCD gave up on me, after a more than a year of heavy usage.
I’ve been using it for practically everything so I wasn’t surprised when the touchscreen LCD conked out so soon. I use it for sending/checking email on the go, checking out important info from the internet in the car en route to meetings, text messaging, listening to music, taking photos of competitors’ products in the supermarket, taking videos of the kids, playing Bejeweled and Crazy Daisy when waiting in a queue, setting up reminders for prayer times, keeping short notes and even recipes, setting reminders for appointments and to-do’s (it’s the only way I keep track of everything), as a calculator, for making shopping lists, etc. You’re getting the idea…
We have quite a strange love/hate relationship – my Dopod and I:
- I love its QWERTY keyboard so much because I can thumb-type email/text messages to my heart’s content. But the slide-out keyboard makes my Dopod the size of a brick and I hate having to lug around a brick everywhere.
- I love the fact that it’s got tonnes of features but I hate how sluggish the system gets when I run certain programs, like Acrobat Reader.
- I love having a 3G camera phone but hate not having the chance to use it to make video calls, as I only know 2 other persons with 3G camera phones. They’re both suppliers so when I do want to call them, it’s usually when I’m in the office and, surprise, surprise, there’s no 3G coverage in the office! (Note: I’ve been bugging my husband to get a 3G camera phone but he refuses. But that will have to be in another post.)
- I love, love, love that it’s got both Bluetooth and WiFi, something that very few PDA phones can boast of. But I hate, hate, hate its super-duper-mega-ultra** pathetic battery life (**something that my 2nd son, RoundBoy, uses when no other superlative will do), especially when WiFi is enabled.
- I love being able to install a plethora of 3rd party apps (with the memory in my microSD card being the only limitation) but I can’t understand for the life of me why I have to manually close the programs in such a long-winded way: I’ve got to click on Start|Settings|Memory|Running Programs|Close All. Seriously! So what if I don’t bother closing the programs periodically? The whole thing slows down. Or worse still, it hangs. And once it’s frozen, there is no other option left but to remove the battery as the darn thing does not have a restart button.
Despite its flaws, it does what it’s supposed to do and it has proven to be very handy in the past. It’s big and bulky but I guess it’s a fair trade-off for being so jam-packed with features. I just wish there’s something I can do about the OS…
