Is this a dagger I see before me?
No!
It’s a Virgin Mobile Lobster 700 that called to me late on Friday at the Virgin Megastore on Oxford Street.
Well done to Helen for correctly guessing my intentions from the Flickr picture I posted earlier.
For all those who think I’m a Windows Mobile hating heathen, let this purchase demonstrate to you that you’re wrong. I am truly a Windows Mobile fan. It’s just the operating system and the hardware continually and spectacularly underwhelm me.
So I charged the phone overnight and didn’t dare touch it lest I screw up the battery. Having done this, I unpacked it, stuck in the new Virgin Mobile sim and kicked the proverbial tires.
Ah hah, the Windows Mobile interface!
‘Let’s have a look at messaging,’ I thought, clicking on to that and selecting it.
Woe is me as up pops the sodding Windows Mobile hour-glass-equivalent animation. Seriously it took nearly 4 slowly counted seconds to boot up the messaging application. I was willing it to move quicker.
4 seconds is an age, an eternity, when you want to send a text message.
This isn’t the phone though. It’s not the hardware — I’m sure it’s the software.
I challenge anyone — anyone who thinks WIndows Mobile rocks — to answer the above point. Tell me it’s bullshit. Tell me I’m seeing things. Tell me I’ve bought the wrong handset. EXPLAIN to me why any Windows Mobile device behaves in the same way. It’s absolutely abysmal. For all those who seem to use such devices every day with no trouble, I bow before thee and extend muchos respect. I just don’t command anywhere near the level of patience required to wait while the OS limps along.
However, back to the handset.
it’s nice.
It’s big, yeah. It fits nicely in your palm. It’s a good size for holding against your ear, I reckon.
The screen is nice and big and brilliant quality — and the buttons, although a little ‘plastic’ for my tastes, are surprisingly usable — they make you want to think of someone to send a text to, just so you can use them.
The headset is good enough although I’m conditioned to the ultra high quality ones you get with Sony Ericsson’s handsets nowadays. Still, they work fine.
But, to the main event. The TV and the radio.
I’ve had so much trouble trying to get my Apple to use one of those USB digital TV tuner things you can get that I wasn’t holding out a lot of hope.
You need to put in the headphones before you can access TV or digital radio — as that acts as the radio. Load of shit, I thought. How can I flimsy headset get a signal to this device when my Apple can’t pick up any digital signal whatsoever even with one of those booster aerials?
I went through the setup. The device obtained various licenses to let me access the channels and did a search. It found four, which, I gather, is the default:
BBC1, E4, ITV1 and bits of Channel4.
It then found something like 52 radio stations.
Hmm. I was still suspect, yet on the cusp of being impressed. Would the signal be any good?
I flicked on the TV on to BBC1 and………..it…was…a…bit…bitty…. so I moved the handset a bit and stretched out the headset a little. WOOSH! There we go. TV in the palm of your hand, working rather well. Good sound, good picture. Watchable. Wow. Rather impressed.
Now for the radio….
Perfect. Absolutely perfect. I was flicking through from Classic FM to Radio1 to Capital quickly and listening in super quality. I even put on the phone’s speaker and pottered about my room doing stuff whilst listening.
Workable, very workable.
After this 30 minute play though, I took a look at the battery meter and saw one bar had gone already. Hmmm. However, I have had it on standby for just over 2 days — that is, I haven’t used it for 2 days — and the battery is still set to full. So too early to judge to give a fair perspective.
What else? Well, there’s a range of the usual suspects in terms of applications and facilities. MSN Messenger is installed by default. For some reason, the last Windows device I got — was it the MDA Pro? Or another one? Well, the last one didn’t have MSN Messenger installed on it by default. You had to go and buy some stupid £20 mobile package to get it. That’s all changed, clearly. Don’t know what idiot thought of that strategy. I signed on to MSN and said hi to a few people from the device. However I also remembered I was paying half a penny for 1kb of data. So a 40k image costs 20p. Shit!
I think it’s particularly interesting that Virgin’s Lobster 700 is a Windows Mobile phone. That’s a coup for Microsoft. The more and more handsets they can put in front of the non geeky masses, the better.
I’ll take some video of the Lobster playing some TV to show the quality, shortly.
