After spending a day with the three new smartphones from Verizon at CES I came away surprised, dismayed, and bummed.

First the bummed. It was the Palm that left me felling empty after playing with it for a good while. Sure, it felt good in my hands, and sure, it had a solid feel, but there wasn’t much to it. The snazzy keyboard took some of the screen away and unlike the Palm OS version, the resolution suffers from that. The lack of voice dial is another bummer, too. All in all, I just left not feeling it lived up to the hype.

Motorola left me dismayed. How do you call a device a smartphone when it has not touch sensitive screen? That’s like calling a automobile without a manual transmission a sports car. I kept finding myself touching the screen to navigate by finger only to be rudely reminded that I was forced to use the D-pad on the phone. Ugh.

The phone itself was nice. Thinner then the Palm and sleeker. It felt good in your hand, too, and retained that coolness it inherits from the RAZR. If it was between the Treo 700w and the Q, I’d go with the Q. But the Motorola won’t allow me to touch its pretty screen, so neither will be purchased in my book.

So the surprise. Yes it was UTStarcom XV6700. Having the 6600 before, I went into to UTStarcom’s large and very void of CES visitors booth with low expectations. The staff had one left. It was a Sprint version, but still same enough to play with and get a good feel for. Later, one of the managers came out with his Verizon version and I got to play with that. My first impression was a good one. The screen immediately looked better then the other two I had seen. It was the regular 240 x 320 and it was bright. The slide out keyboard was trick and the automatic landscape mode was cool. Slow to refresh the screen, but cool. The buttons seemed to be in all the right places and the stylus built into the antennae is way trick. The unit didn’t seem as responsive as the Palm but didn’t seem that slow, either. The camera took good pictures and the browser worked just as fast as the other two smartphones.

When I questioned about the battery life and how my 6600 died faster then my luck at slots in the Hilton, I was told this problem has been corrected. In fact, I was told it was Microsoft’s fault and how it used power. I can somewhat believe this since my Samsung i730 goes dry pretty fast, too. I also brought up the poor Bluetooth and again was re-assured that has been corrected as well. Like the Palm, the XV6700, too, doesn’t have voice-activated dialing. “You need to wait until Microsoft updates Voice Command for WM 5,” is what I was told by UTStarcom.

In the end, these all have cons. Each unit also has its pros and when all added up, I’d say it’s the XV6700 with more pros then cons of the other two.

Comments are closed.