As far as contact data goes, this phone rocks! I had one cell phone that limited each phonebook entry to 3 numbers (and no address or other data) and so I found myself creating contacts with numbers. Just to keep track of Josh (one of the most connected people I know), you would have to have Josh, Josh1, and Josh2 and still wouldn’t be able to store any information about his web sites and other non-phone information. The SMT5600 overcomes this limitation with style! Contact information is just that – it allows you to contact each person by phone, email, SMS and smoke signals (well, not really) or even pull up their web page if they have one. To boot, it pulls all of this information right out of Outlook so you don’t have to enter any of it directly on your phone.
It’s a good thing you don’t have to enter it manually because doing so would probably kill you. To be completely honest, I have never liked any form of data entry on phones and would rather have a tooth pulled without Novocain than type even a short message. I have seen people that can SMS about as fast as most people can type, but most of us don’t fall into that camp. Most people have to look at each key every time and figure out how many times they have to push the “7” key to get the letter “S”…or is it the “8” key…no wait…
To type in the URL for Google, it takes 24 key presses! I think we can all admit that predictive text input is not going to help you when you want to type in www.tinyscreenfuls.com! Thankfully, Microsoft has graced the web browser on Smart Phones with the ability to add the www and the .com for URL’s, but the Google URL is just an example. As good as predictive text is, it can still be a pain in the neck for jargon, acronyms, names, and other tricky syntax.
Josh can talk way more about the keyboard on his Blackberry 7100t, but I have used it and it’s MUCH faster far easier than the standard T9 predictive text entry that most phones rely on (understandably with that many extra keys, right?). We’ll have to get him to post on that though.
I didn’t mean to make this such a long post, but this text entry is a big drawback for me – maybe even a showstopper. I don’t want a full-size foldout keyboard on my cell phone and don’t have any suggestion for how to make 8 keys work better for alpha-numeric input, but I do know that it’s more than an annoyance for me.
So there you have it…my scoop on these two aspects of the Audiovox SMT5600. I will keep going with my observations and have posted an entry about my black box comment over on my personal blog. Adios until next time!
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