This phone has served me well over the last year and change, but I did hit a few snags.
The first of which is it’s death. I sent a text message one night and then checked it five minutes later and it was dead. It was not a dead battery, the phone died. No warning, no damage, just death. Customer service was good and I had a remanufactured phone fedexed to me in under 36 hours. I called the morning after the death around 7 am and then the replacement arrived at 2 pm the next day.
Activating the phone was a problem. Alltel is canceling it’s service everywhere. I live in an unsupported area in Southeast Louisiana. Customer service was able to get me connected, but in the Roam mode. Then about two weeks later, I was in the New Orleans area and updated the phone in seconds.
Service on the phone is marginal, phone calls are dropped and the phone freezes up from time to time causing a hard reset. I have most of my stuff on a sd card so this doesn’t present that big of a problem, but if I didn’t have my contacts and calendar linked to an Exchange Server, this would really be a problem.
My daughter, also, has a Q9c. Her phone is even more irratic than mine. She, also, had to get the phone changed out for a new one.
Downsides:
I came into possession of an iPod/iTouch and have had access to the iPhone way of doing things. The most dramatic items of note is the way the device handles email and calendars. The email is much easier to read and you can have multiple calendars. HTML emails render much better than the Q9c, which barely renders them at all. Multiple calendars is a nice feature, I can link to multiple calendars on my Exchange Server as well as my calendar from Google and an online ics calendar.
Another sticking point is the contacts. To search remote contacts on the Q9c, you must first save the contact to your phone and then look it up and then create the email to send it to. On the iTouch, you search for the contact and then send the email mail to it. You do have the option to save the contact to your contacts, but this is not necessary and if you decide to save it, there are several opportunities to do this task.
The point I am trying to make is that an Apple device handles the Microsoft Exchange Server better than a Microsoft mobile device. I find this ironic and aggravating.
I am waiting for my contract with Alltel to expire so that I may change my service to another carrier. Probably AT&T because I like the way the iPhone works. Nearly everyone I know has one and they operate well. The experiences I have had with the iTouch only reinforces the positives I feel about the iPhone. The one negative that I feel the iPhone/iTouch has is that you can’t do a mass deletion of email. This would be nice, but the speed at which you can delete single emails is quite accomodating.