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Saturday 9 September 2006, 9:53 AM
Stay Away!
This must be the worst purchase I have ever made. The A701 is a bad choice for anyone that requires either GPS *or* a mobile phone.
The only upside I could find is that it's not that expensive, so if you have a few extra bucks to spend on a dysfunctional product, you certainly want to buy this baby.
Hardware:
Responsiveness slow, slow, slow! Every screen tap seems to put the A701 in a "thinking mode" that takes forever. For example, hanging up from a call takes about 4-5 seconds (!!!) from button press to disconnection. Answering to an incoming call takes about 3-4 seconds. In general the whole experience is about 60%-80% percent slower than any other smart-phone I have ever used.
Mobile functionality - awful. I have missed about 20% of my incoming calls. Certain numbers/networks simply refuse to connect with the A701 properly. The audio quality is noticeably low. The speaker is too week.
LCD decent for nighttime, simply unusable for daytime. Simply not enough contrast for you to see anything when any type of sunlight is present. Finally, after a few weeks the LCD simply snapped for no obvious reason.
Bluetooth connectivity awful. My Motorola BT earphone works perfectly with my IBM laptop and my Nokia phone. However, it is barely functional with the A701. About 1:2 chance of actual device discovery, no matter what the hardware configuration is. Noisy audio with extremely bad quality that seems to be from insignificant processing power assigned to the connectivity task.
Battery life short. A few hours tops of cellular activity. A few minutes of GPS activity.
Camera awful. Camera activation consumes so much CPU and battery it makes you wonder whether the MIO TECH engineers actually tested this thing.
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