I just took my Q back to the store to reactivate my trusty RAZR, Here is why:

1. The buttons were too small to get any work done. At 1/8" there was no room to even allow letter dialing (800-FLOWERS) needed a cheat sheet or another handset nearby.
2. Verizon did not implement VZ Navigator, which is a great program for many uses, including renting a car, and many other uses when travelling. The GPS applications all need an external device.
3. The Bluetooth was too unreliable, switching between handset and car kit randomly without reason.
4. The keypad was so tiny, it did not allow the user to work fast, like the Treo.
5. Verizon did not allow BroadbandAccess Connect for tethering with a laptop. This disallowed my use of laptop with the device.
6. The operating system would not accept the usual Windows Mobile suite that allowed editing of Word, Excel or PowerPoint, just viewing. No cut-and-paste as expected.
7. The voice commands could only be done in speakerphone mode. It would blast "Say a command", etc., without privacy.
8. All of my contacts, including email would synch with the I-Drive, when all I could use were the voice dialing contacts. This bogged down the I-Drive display.

In short, the Q is a tiny enginering marvel, but not made for enterprise use. It is a great device for light use, but the ease of use for just using it as a phone were not nearly as capable as my trusty RAZR for making calls, or using it as a business device.

 

While my main phone is a Sprint Treo 650 that works fine with my M5, I also have a Sprint PPC 6700 that I would rather use. When I first got it, I found that its firmware lacked the aku 2 update for handsfree. However, I did get an update for this, but had a problem that seemed to be with address book size. When the address book (from Outlook) contained more than several hundred entries, the sync with iDrive seemed to time out. When I trimmed it significantly, it would sync (albeit slowly), but would sometime randomly not only drop the connection, but actually drop the pairing. Navigating iDrive's A-Z communication menu also became incredibly slow and tedious when the lists became rather large.

Questions:

1. Is anyone successfully using the Sprint PPC 6700 with a 2006 E60 (like my M5) or similar BMW including address book sync?
2. Is anyone aware of the problem I cited and any solution for it?
3. Is anyone using another Windows Mobile PDA phone (e.g., the Moto Q in this thread) successfully with large address books (>200 phone numbers)? How does iDrive handle this?

Thanks.

Tom

 

Tom, the I-Drive only imports the contacts from Outlook that have phone numbers, so if you have 200 contacts in Outlook, but 100 are email only, then those don't get imported.

Alternatively, you can copy your Outlook address book and edit it down to what you want to be imported, then resynch using Active Synch, delete the Bluetooth device from the I-Drive and re-pair.

 

The problem is that I have several hundred contacts with most having 2-4 numbers (office, home, mobile, etc.). The iDrive gets an entry for each phone number, which initially was around 500. Even when I pruned this to around 75 contacts, it still had around 200 numbers to sync. When it gets even 200 numbers, it get painfully and pathologically slow in my short experience (I only endured it for a day before returning to the Treo).

It was way too much of a PITA to edit and maintain a separate contact list (fewer entries with fewer phone numbers in each) that iDrive could accomodate. Is this what others are finding with the combination of Outlook, Windows Mobile and E60 bluetooth? Have you heard of any fixes in the offing soon? Being a software guy, I am completely mystified as to how their programming can be so abysmally terrible.

Tom

 

I agree. A new CIP software upgrade is needed that will allow the Communications console to handle multiple contacts. It would also be great if they finally got the SMS text messaging working, after two years of talking about it.

 

Mine arrived yesterday - along with my Slingbox. I have Slingbox Mobile up and running now, XM and Sirius web streaming, etc...

Super nice. Talk about mobile media.

 

Tom, I have about 700 contacts synced to my Q and haven't noticed a significant slowdown in the iDrive interface. It does take about 3-4 seconds when you first enter the Communication menu before the contacts list comes up (though it used to take about 1-2 seconds with my previous XV6600 which had no Contacts transferred to iDrive).

Once I'm scrolling through the contacts, there are no real slowdowns and things seem fine overall. FWIW ...

 

Ha ha. Use SlingBox, Get Your EVDO Terminated
http://www.evdoinfo.com/Tips/PC_5220/Use_S...ed_20060601753/

 

No worries. I'm not using it heavily. It runs like shit anyway. Must be lots of people using tons of BW in my area. Slingbox Mobile generally runs at 144Kbits/sec or less even though the phone reports having an EVDO connection.

10GB of data takes 154 hrs, 19 min, 15 seconds to transmit at 144Kbps. I think the main offenders must be people with EVDO cards or tethered PDAs on laptops. The mobile version of the client doesn't seem to negotiate as high a data rate as the standard PC client.


I hope that we see more flexible options for large bandwidth users soon, but I doubt I'll be anywhere near those numbers.

 

I agree. 10GB of data at 500kbps would take 48 hours straight on an aircard. It must be kids downloading music and movies all day who are being terminated.