So I finally broke down and bought myself a new 505i. I managed to find
a Docomo shop that had a network-attached F505i to play with, and web
browsing on it seemed fine, so I went with that. (Well, the purchase
process was a rather longer story than that, but I won't get into it,
except to mention that they screw you over to the tune of an extra ten
thousand yen even if you haven't bought a new phone in two years, if you
happen to have changed it in the last ten months.)
Anyway, I'm quite pleased with it so far. It's reasonably light and slim
(the smallest in the 505 series), and of course has the expected nice
display and other 505 accoutrements.
Here are some of the nice things about it that I've seen so far.
The standard main screen display rotates to a new picture every few
hours, which is kinda fun, at least for the first little while. You
never know what you're going to see when you open the phone.
The UI is pretty good overall, reminding me much more of a Panasonic
UI than the old Fujitsu ones. No complaints there! The text input has
switched to the standard method all the 505s seem to use, using a button
to switch between upper and lower case, and staying in that case until
the button is pressed again. Small tsu and so on are also selected by
choosing a large tsu and pushing the case button. The one real annoyance
is that I've still not found a fast way to enter a Japanese period or
comma; I seem to have to hit "menu," scroll down to "input symbol," and
then scroll to the appropriate symbol on the display. I wonder if I'm
missing something here.
The sound is fantastic, with some amazing built-in ringtones. It even
does very convincing voice effects, to the point of having singing in
songs. The one that really had me on the floor was the ringtone that
sounds like a modem connecting.
There's the usual bunch of built-in tools, including alarm, calculator,
scheduling, to-do-list, and some sort of "music mixer."
Now to the slow display. There are definitely times when it doesn't
render as fast as one would hope. It's especially noticable when you've
got a small font, as the rendering speed seems to be more or less
proportional to the number of characters on the page. With i-mode it's
not all that noticable, as you don't seem to have a choice of fonts. (At
least, I've not figured out a way to change it from the default 20x10
character font--though I wish I could.) With mail, which I use with a
30x15 character or so font, a long e-mail can easily take a couple of
seconds to render. The good news, however, is that this is only when the
page first comes up; after that scrolling using the page up/down buttons
is pretty close to instant. So it's not anywhere near as annoying as you
might think.
Anyway, I'll have more news later, and of course I'll be happy to answer
any questions anyone has. The manual is impressively thick: over 600
pages, so it looks like there's a lot yet left to learn.
cjs
--
Curt Sampson <cjs_at_cynic.net> +81 90 7737 2974 http://www.NetBSD.org
Don't you know, in this new Dark Age, we're all light. --XTC
Received on Mon Sep 22 05:10:06 2003