XDA – downsides
Posted: Mon 27 February, 2006 Filed under: Geeky, Reviews(ish) 4 Comments »Having been using it for a whole week now, I’ve found a couple of small problems with the XDA. Nothing that’s going to stop me using it, just things that you notice as time goes on.
First of all, it’s not been designed with enough memory. It works fine, but because the programs you use don’t shut down properly, you end up running short of memory. If memory serves, you start out with 64Mb of RAM, which should be more than enough, but Windows Mobile eats up roughly half of that on its own, so really it could’ve done with 128Mb of RAM instead. Ah well.
Second, and I know this should’ve occurred to me – but it didn’t, OK? – it’s actually harder to send a simple quick message. On most phones I can “touchtype” a text message without even paying attention. Yeah, you have to check the spelling afterwards and so on, but in general it’s dead easy to send a quick message without even looking. On the XDA, though, you have to either slot out the keyboard, or use the stylus to tap away on the screen’s “keyboard”. It’s just not quite as quick.
I still like the system, and I’m really pleased with the phone – it’s just that they’re the slightly negative points I’ve noticed so far…
Oh, and one very cool thing you can do with the XDA is charge it through the USB port of any computer – just connect it up, and it starts charging. Now that is useful…
Charging via USB is damn cool. My Motorola Razr does it too, and it’s not dependent upon any particular driver either, so it works in Linux too.
Good grief. My last 3 phones have charged via USB.. do try and keep up! 😉
Yes, well, the last three phones you’ve had have been smartphones. 😛 The last smartphone I had was a Motorola piece-of-shit on the 3 network, which should’ve been melted down and turned into a brick for all the use it was.
As a matter of fact, that’s almost what happened to it. Strange the way some accidents occur, isn’t it?
All I want is a charger that will plug into the mains, with international adaptor if necessary and charge my Palm. I can get all sorts to plug into my car cigarette lighter. Which is fine when I’m at home but not much use when I’m travelling.
Sigh