Text messaging nightmare! (Panasonic GD87 Vodafone Live)

Member Name: solas

Product:	Panasonic GD87 Vodafone Live
Date:	30/07/03 (617 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Camera phone, Light and sleek

Disadvantages: Awful for texting, Poor ringtones, No bluetooth

I bought this phone eight months ago now as a little treat to myself coming up to Christmas. Initially I was well pleased. I had one of those camera phones that everybody was talking about - and on top of it all, it was THE latest gadget at the time (I am a bit of a gadget freak you see!)

But the honeymoon soon ended, and little niggling things started to creep in on my happy relationship (with the phone that is!).

I'll start with the phone's good points. It's got a camera, which is the main good point really. The picture quality is quite good, but the images aren't large as the Nokia camera phones. There is quite a large amount of storage available on the phone, and so far I've only had to transfer all my images onto my laptop once (via built in infra-red port, a standard feature nowadays.) The images DO look a little disappointing on the big screen though, especially since I've bought a proper digital camera since to compare them! There are numerous features with the camera also - three "effects" namely black and white (interesting), negative (a gimmick) and sepia (what's the point?), a reasonable zoom option, night-time shooting (don't think it makes a difference) and close-up option (again, seemingly useless).

The phone itself functions well in it's capacity as an actual phone - good talktime, and a very quick recharge time (under two hours!) even when completely dead. It looks quite sexy, and it's very light (probably the lightest camera phone on the market.)

But here are where things start to go wrong for Panasonic.

The text messaging, Lord above the text messaging is a disaster!! Those keys are so incredibly annoying - you actually have to make an effort to press them correctly. In nearly every text message there comes a point where the phone simply will not recognise a letter that you have definitely pressed and then skips it, so that the word you are typing become
s miss-spelled and the T9 predictive text will not recognise the word. Because the display lags behind what you've typed (especially so if you're a fast typist like myself) you end up several words later having to erase all the way back throught the gibberish on-screen to correct the mistake. Highly irritating indeed.

The ring tones are simply terrible. Like others have said, only one of the tones is interesting, the rest are simply bothersome. One of the is actually the sound of a racecar speeding past! Pathetic! The game (Herding Sheep) is cute for two minutes and then just looks plain silly. I'm not much of a fan of mobile phone games anyway, but still to include a really dismal one is a let down.

The alarm clock has been of particular annoyance to me as it has resulted in me being late for work on three occasions! The problem is that when the phone is in silent mode (vibrate alert only) the alarm will only result in the phone vibrating. If the phone is not resting on a solid wooden surface (which will make one hell of a rattle!) it WILL NOT WAKE YOU! Once I was an hour and a half late for work because of this. This is simply unacceptable. Other phones' alarms will ring whether or not the phone is on/off/silent/etc. When it does ring, the alarm is loud enough to wake you.

Many people find the new feature of setting the phone to switch on/off at certain times to be a good idea, but ask yourself, how are you likely to make use of such an item? I get up at 6am and turn my phone on, I go to bed at 11pm and turn my phone off. How is this feature supposed to improve my life huh?

The Vodafone Live! service (Irish version) is boring. The usual news/weather/sport/chat/charts/etc is available, but why pay for something most people get free at work on the internet anywa? Or just buy a newspaper - much cheaper. Ask yourself what you did for news before the advent of GPRS/WAP and stick to that because it was probably a lot
cheaper!

Finally, the phone seems to have a tendency to switch itself off for no reason also. This could simply be a fault with my phone (I've dropped it a few times), but it's upsetting nonetheless!

So looking back, I am sorry that I bought this phone. As soon as my contract has run out I will be selling it and buying the simplest Nokia available (hopefully I'll get my hands on a 6210 again, which was my last phone, and was MUCH more reliable).

Summary: