Verizon SMT5800 Cell Phone Review
By Alfredo Padilla
Reviewed.com Editorial Staff
Published on March 25, 2008
The SMT5800 is a Windows Mobile Standard smart phone that has a nifty feature, a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Unlike many phones with such slide-out keyboards, however, the SMT5800 retains a standard keypad for easy dialing. The phone is well built, small for a smart phone, and has professional good looks. The SMT5800 is available exclusively from Verizon for $199.99 with a two-year contract and after mail-in rebates.
Dialing a number on the SMT5800 is a little slow, mostly due to software that isn’t able to keep up with the speed with which we enter numbers. As a Windows Mobile smart phone, the SMT5800 provides excellent organizational features including contacts, calendar, and tasks. What it is missing is a notes application, however you do have the full Office Mobile suite for viewing Word, Excel, and Powerpoint documents. You can edit Word and Excel documents, but you can’t create new documents.
The SMT5800 performed very well in our audio tests. For both incoming and outgoing audio there were no serious deviations from our ideal, and you should be pleased with the quality of the audio provided by the device. Side tone, the small amount of your own voice piped back into your ear so you can judge how loudly you are speaking, is also right about where we would like it. This means you won’t find yourself speaking too loudly or quietly.
The SMT5800 has a 2-megapixel fixed-focus camera. The quality of photos captured is unimpressive, with problems in color capture particularly evident. You probably won’t be framing photos you take with the phone. Music and video playback are handled by Windows Media Player Mobile. This software provides solid functionality - you can easily synchronize music from your PC and can watch or listen to content protected by Microsoft’s DRM. Unfortunately, battery life when listening to music isn’t very impressive at just about 5 hours. This is several hours less than average for a cell phone.
Windows Mobile Standard is a powerful cell phone operating system that gives users many built-in tools and the ability to expand the capabilities with a wide variety of third-party software. Internet Explorer Mobile, however, is a little behind the times. It does a better-than-average job compared to most mobile browsers, but is not as good as the more advanced browsers found on the iPhone or Series 60 smart phones.
Typing on the QWERTY keyboard is quick at 47.78 words per minute in our test and, combined with the solid e-mail functionality of Windows Mobile Standard, makes the SMT5800 an attractive messaging device. Unfortunately, we also found the responsiveness of the SMT5800 to be lacking in places, creating lag that can frustrate users.
The SMT5800’s biggest Achilles heel is battery life. We already mentioned the lackluster music playback time, and talk time is even worse at a paltry 2 hours and 18 minutes. This means an otherwise capable device is rendered useless to anyone who spends a lot of time on the phone, like the business users the device is targeted to. Throw in the fact that an advanced device such as this is likely to see more use in all areas, and the battery life becomes a serious limitation.
Despite liking its solid construction, very usable slide-out keyboard, and advanced features, the SMT5800’s poor battery performance will frustrate most users. If you’re looking for a small smart phone that you won’t use very often, perhaps the SMT5800 is a good choice. Most users who actually want to take advantage of the advanced features offered by a smart device, however, are better off going with a more dependable device like the Samsung Blackjack II or BlackBerry Curve.For a more in-depth review, visit the HTC SMT5800 Review at our partner WirelessInfo.com
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