Although I like the PC-like features of my Windows 7 Phone, the actual phone part isn't all that great.  As of recently, the phone part stopped working entirely!

People were telling me that they tried calling but I didn't answer when I knew darn well I was available.  Sure enough, I tried calling my phone from a different phone and it never picked-up even though it said I had three bars of reception.   I was also noticing that I often had no bars of reception.   A restart of the phone would get some reception again, but it was hit-or-miss as to whether I could receive calls or even make them.

I eventually called AT&T and they determined the phone was defective.  Contrary to all the negative comments I've read about AT&T support online, I found their support to be very good.  I had no wait to speak to a real person and within a matter of minutes, they had me setup for a RMA to get a new phone shipped to me.  Apparently the phone has a one year warranty, of which I'm now thankful for as I'm not willing to shell-out over $400 for a new phone.

The AT&T RMA process is very well done.   They sent me a box with a bare-bones phone (i.e., they sent just the phone body with no cover, no battery, etc.)  I swapped-out your broken phone with the new one, put the old one back in the box it came in, stuck the return label on the box, and put it back in the mail.   The only negative part about the whole experience is that the phone was shipped via the United States Postal Service which means it took forever to get to my house.  The USPS shipping was free and AT&T did offer express shipping for a small fee, so I can only blame myself for having to wait so long.

After having a "normal" phone for the past 2 years, I decided to give a SmartPhone a try again (My previous SmartPhone was a Motorola MPx220).  This time, I went with more of a PDA-type phone, the Motorola Q 9c (Sprint).   I think Verizon's black and red version of the phone looks much better, but I wasn't willing to switch providers just to get a different color phone.

Believe it or not, my main reason for getting a SmartPhone was that I wanted to be able to load the Bible onto the phone so I could have the Bible with me at all times.  With this in mind, I also wanted a slightly larger screen so I could actually read the Bible.   Due to the high prices of most PDA phones, I almost abandon the idea of getting a SmartPhone until I found that the Q was just over $100 after rebates.

As with most new PCs these days, I was rather annoyed with the Start menu icons that are for trial applications; most of them being online applications.   So, I was able to delete most of the annoying icons using the File Explorer (which requires making all 'hidden' files visible.)   I couldn't, however, delete many of the annoying apps themselves due to security rights.

I find it interesting that most of the mobile applications don't have any exit buttons.   Because of this, once an application is started on the device, it just stays running in the background which can be seen by opening the Task Manager.  Apparently this is by design.  I'm assuming that the OS is smart enough to shut down some of the running applications if it runs out of memory?

Much to my disappointment, there doesn't seem to be a lot of people doing development or at least tweaking their Windows Mobile 6 devices yet.   (Perhaps the OS is too new?)   At the moment, I don't have any ideas for any new mobile apps, but I'm kind of itching to create at least one... simply because I can!

 

My first impression with the phone, after having it for a week, are pretty good.  The battery is staying charged much longer than I expected.  Perhaps that is due to not having the phone setup to automatically sync with any email accounts like my last SmartPhone did.   I also find it actually works pretty well as a phone in that the sound quality is decent.   I put my wife on speaker phone and she said she couldn't tell that I did.