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Review of iMATE XDA II
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I've had my
iMATE for just about a month now and I could tell
you everything you'd need to know about it in one sentence.
After 30 days of use, I'd be willing to lose just about
everything I have before giving it up. But let me
discuss why:
When I first saw what
it looked like, I thought it was simply a newer version
of the
T-Mobile Pocket PC Phone edition. After all, it
does bare a strong resemblance to it. But there's
a big price difference, about $500-600.00 so I knew there
had to be some pretty serious differences. I was right,
there were. If you check out the
Spec Sheet you'll see some really amazing numbers.
Basically, the thing has more power and resources than a
top of the line desktop from a few years back. Sporting
a 400mhz processor and 128mb SDRAM this thing has a
TON of muscle, particularly for something this small.
The battery life is similarly impressive. If you've
owned a PDA before, you are amply aware that battery life,
or lack thereof, is the bane of your PDA experience.
The numbers are posted in the link I posted above, but according
to the manual, here's what you are looking at:
-
Talk-Time: 2 -
4 hours
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PDA: 13 hours
(this of course is an approximation but experience bares
this out)
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Standby: 150 -
170 hours (again, an approximation but I haven't been
able to test this)
-
Data Retention
Time: 72 hours
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All in all those are some pretty
impressive numbers and considering that the thing functions
as a cell phone, it's hard to complain with power like that.
It's also got a spare/backup battery and although it's pretty
limited, it's got enough power to bail you out of many major
jams - if the main battery is totally dead it can save your
data for 20 minutes. There are a lot of power setting
you can manipulate on it and I haven't found battery life
to be much of an issue with one limited exception (that was
totally my fault). It's important to remember though
that the iMATE is packed full of features, many of which are
hardware based. If you crank all of these up, you can
expect some diminished battery life commensurate with what
you use. I seldom use BlueTooth or WiFi when I'm not
at my house. If you use Jabra or connect to your workplace
wifi network, this will obviously be a little different for
you. The Camera, particularly the Video Recorder feature
can be a battery hog but this shouldn't surprise anyone.
One day I hit the record button accidentally on my way to
work and inadvertantly left the camera on for about two hours.
I got to work around 8:00 (must have turned on the camera
sometime before that) and around 10:00 I heard the low battery
warning. This may be a slight problem for you b/c it's
not hard to accidentally hit the camera button. There
is a button lock, but it's also a pain in the butt.
With that said, I've had the phone for about a month now,
and as clumsy as I am I've only done this once so it's not
a major deal if you are even remotely careful. As far
as battery life goes, I keep it charged when I'm home.
When I go to work my charge is usually 100% and when I get
home around 5:00 or 6:00, it's usually around 40% depending
on how much I talk on it. I can't remember seeing it
below that. So I usually stick it in the charger for
an hour and then head to the gym or out to eat. Until
I got a
Personal Media Center, I used it for my MP3 player while
working out and again, battery power hasn't been an issue.
Since I mentioned the
Media Player, I'll talk about it a little. When I
got the phone I splurged for a 256 mb storage card which
provides me just about all the storage I'd ever need.
The headphones that come with the phone are a bit lame in
that they are impossible to keep in your ears. So
I went to Circuit City and bought a pretty cool set for
under $20.00. Jabra is another option and the iMATE
has built in BlueTooth so it's a very viable option.
As far as using it for an MP3 player, it's perfect.
You can listen to your music, and if you get a call, it
switches mode, pauses your music, lets you take the call
and then returns you to where you were as soon as your done.
You can also hear a notification if you get a SMS message
or email. Like I said, I just got a
Personal Media Center which is my best friend in the
world when working out, but the iMATE definitely did a good
job.
The phone component
is really cool. As you'd expect, it integrates with
your Contacts in outlook and it takes care of syncing them
for you as soon as you create a partnership. This
couldn't be any easier. You have some pretty amazing
features in Contacts so you'll want to take full advantage
of this. For instance, my girlfriend has a direct
phone line at work, a general work number, a cell number,
a VOIP number, 3 different emails and of course a SMS number
(which is the same as the cell number). By specifying
all of these in her contact, I can call, email or SMS her
just about anywhere (or everywhere) with absolute ease.
But another cool feature is the Photo Contacts. This
allows you to add a picture to each of your contacts so
when you select the contact, their picture appears.
Similarly, when Caller ID detects that someone on your Contact
list is calling, it will show their picture if available.
I found that adding pictures was a bit counterintuitive
and the iMATE Maintains a separate 'Photo Contacts' and
'Contacts' area, although Photo contacts will grab its information
from Contacts. After figuring it out for the first
time though, it was a piece of cake. You can also
attach custom rings to your phone, so between these two
features, you can have it 'your way' to a degree I
haven't expreienced before.
The iMATE has all the
goodies you'd expect such as BlueTooth, GPRS connectivity
etc. One of the cooler features is the ability to
recieve an email, hit reply, record a voice message and
send your reply back as audio. How much you want to
do this depends on your service plan but it's very cool.
All iMATE owners can sign up for free at www.clubimate.com
which has an Exchange server and the new Outlook web interface
(very nice touch). They have a lot of add-ons like
Ring tones and back grounds (although I noticed that all
of the ring tones were either India or Arab based - wasn't
sure what that's all about).
As far as the speaker
and receiver, they are both pretty strong. I've tried
a few various headsets and none of them have been that impressive.
However, if I use the phone directly, the volume is quite
powerful and with limited exceptions, no one has reported
any problems hearing me. I had a weird problem for
2 days where the volume seemed to go out - and this would
have been a career ending injury. I could use the
phone with the headset but other than that the audio was
gone (and NO, I didn't have the mute on or the volume turned
very low). But this just fixed itself after a day
so that was a pleasant surprise.
The camera is pretty
cool too, and will allow you to shoot still images or video.
As far as Phone cameras go, it's probably the best I've
come across. As far as stand alone digital cameras
go, it's a little limited. The main problem seems
to be with lighting and that's possibly because I've missed
something (bubblehead moves like this have been committed
by me before). There are some built in templates that
you can use and integrate your pictures into PictureShow
- a very nice touch. Moreoever you can use your pictures
for the Today Screen. Another feature that's cool
is that you can have them auto sync with the desktop - nothing
out of the ordinary but very convenient nonetheless.
Also, the video and audio capabilities are pretty strong
overall and they are a great fit with the MMS functionality
the iMATE provides.
So I can say that each
of the advertised features of the iMATE do what they say
and do it well. If you are a feature freak, you'll
be in love from the first second you see it. But it's
biggest feature is the power. 128mb of RAM gives you
plenty of elbow room on the device and you can even write
really sloppy compact framework code and have it run pretty
well on an iMATE (of course, I would never write such code).
Same goes for the processor, plenty of power to do anything
you may want to do. I have yet to be even slightly
disappointed with the iMATE's muscle. And compared
to say , a HP 1940, this thing is a PowerMonger. The
battery life is great too. There are some great settings
so you can turn off the PDA without turning off the phone
and you can turn things off after a few mintues - in a nutshell,
you can really conserve on power and that won't be a problem
if you are even remotely good about charging it.
Finally, there are a
whole slew of accessories and I have the standard leather
case. There are plenty more available out there if
you are so inclined but considering the iMATE's price tag,
you may not be really anxious to go out and spend a bunch
more on it. With that said, you won't be disappointed
if you buy one, on the contrary. Even though they
aren't cheap, you'll get over the price tag in 10 seconds.
Every single person I've shown it to has had the "Wow" effect
and among PDA or smartphone enthusiasts, this is even more
pronounced. Now not everyone likes the PDA form factor
and for them, iMATE has a Smartphone version which looks
just like the Orange SPV. Rob Tiffany is about to
review his, but I have no doubt he'll find it to be just
as cool as I found mine to be. Few gadgets honestly
justify their pricetags, but without a doubt, the
iMATE does. It is the coolest Phone I've ever owned,
as well as the coolest PDA and until I got a Personal Media
Center, it was the coolest portable music player too.