Verizon (UTStarcom) XV6700 has arrived!

[Scott Greczkowski]

Yes I have the insurance.

Haveing a little one I have learned that its good to have, there have been a few times while carrying him he has kicked me and destroyed my phone or digital camera I had on my belt. Its happened a few times.

Good thing though he broke the camera or phone and not the family jewels.

 

[LER]

today must be a friday the 13th for 6700's. Mine was on it's charger all night, and when I pulled it off, the battery showed 100% dead.

I'm going to visit the retailer today to see if he'll swap the battery.

This battery hasn't been lasting worth beans any way (less than 8 hours, if I keep the evdo stuff syncing).

Grr.

LER

 

[LER]

ok, now I'm confused. I put the 6700 on the usb cable (only) to my work PC, and it's seeming to hold a charge. I wonder what fritzed out with the cradle at the house (which wasn't connected to a pc, just the wall afaik).

 

[TheForce]

If you get 8 hours on the standard battery either God has blessed you or you don't use the 6700 much at all. I get 6 hours with average use and close to 5 with heavier use, especially with wifi and phone on.

BTW- I had some good luck today with receiving my new refurb by 9AM. Had it reactivated in a few minutes and then with the aid of my daily backups restored all the stuff in a couple of minutes. Then I found out the BT didn't work and discovered that I just needed to re-pair all the devices. That wasn't carried over with the restore. Then I had trouble with wifi as it would not recognize the key. Finally, I rebooted the phone and voila' it recognized the key right away. I know you sometimes have to power down the on off for wifi to make the settings take but didn't recall a soft boot was required before. Anyway that made it work and all is back to normal again. The daily backup was a real time saver.

Also, as it turns out the refurb was just turned in and retested. Looks like I have a newer unit now if that really means anything.

 

[Scott Greczkowski]

I had to buy the extended battery because I was lucky if I was getting 5 or 6 hours out of the regular battery.

I dont use a backup program for mine, I have all my apps installers stored on the mini sd card, and can quickly bring life back to my 6700, I am always adding and removing stuff from it and am the king of doing a hard reset and starting from scratch, I do it about once every 2 weeks.

This is the greatest phone ever.

 

[TheForce]

Scott- I have one of the extended batteries too but I mostly use two of the std size batteries. My reason is that I have a rear pocket in my belt case for a second spare battery. But if I use the big fat battery, that is all I can take. I can squeeze 2 more hours of heavy use from two std size vs. one fat size.

Also, I just took delivery from Tiger direct on 2 2G SD cards from San disk. That gives me 7 G of on the go capacity now. I have my tomtom entire US on one, podcasts and a movie on another. I' am now putting music mp3s on another and another just a collection of movies to watch. I also include folders for all the program files, temp, PIE temps and other common stuff so my programs are all available no matter what card is in the phone at the time. The 2G file allows me to do WM9 movie renderings with some pretty good resolution quality and stereo sound but I discovered that 320kbps is about mad before stuttering from the SD card feed. The old DVD2PPC software that is sold has much poorer quality at 180kbps.

BTW- the tiger direct price seems to be the best in the country now and they shipped same day. $71 ea. for sandisk.

 

[fkostyn]

I get ~6 hours or so on the battery life on mine, but, I hate the phone.

I've had it since October, and think its the worst piece of junk I've ever had. I'm on phone #5.

 

[TheForce]

Maybe you need to re-evaluate your personal needs. Or, is it perfect for your needs but just that you have had bad luck with the failure rate? If the latter then maybe you need to examine what is failing and why. If it is really a piece of junk as you claim, then 4 bad ones seem statistically amazing for one person. Usually I can tell from the way a person describes what they have as a "phone" or a "PDA" how they view the 6700. You see, I would call mine a PDA. I agree that as a phone it sucks compared to a real cell phone, but then I need e-mail and web surfing more than I need immediate cell phone. Usually when I get calls it is to solve a tech problem requiring my quick access to my web servers or the cable program guide listings so I can correct errors and such. The 6700 has performed remarkebly well in that capacity. Once I had a client complain their commercial wasn't playing right, I entered the private URL and brought up their spot and it played fine on my 6700. Shut them right up when I said, I really believe its your computer!

Some of the weaknesses I see in the 6700 is the slide out KB. I believe this to be inadequate mechanical design because it has been reported to be loose on some phones. The two I have has seem fine.
Others have reported the battery cover slids off too easily. I agree with that but use a small piece of tape as a simple effective solution. Others having the problem say they would never do anything like that yet prefer to whine about it knowing full well whining is not going to resolve the problem in an expedient manner.

I'd say that the biggest complaint I have heard is battery life on these PDA phones in general. The Treo700w is a bit better but it is fatter and sports a heavier duty battery, has a lower processor speed and at the end of the day really has about the same run time as the 6700, when you put the 6700 in reduced speed and don't use the wifi. With present LiION battery technology, you just can't have it both ways. Cell phone talk time with PDA brite large screen, 10x the processor power and 20x the memory and 1000x the functionality. One just has to get used to the idea a PDA requires a docking station, is a satellite of the laptop and needs to reside in the charging cradle whenever it is not being used.

I am concerned about the touch screen since this is what failed on mine. I do have an IPAQ that seems to have held up very well now for about 19 months. I still have it as a backup, but the darn T-Mobile phone service really sucks. I had forgotten how bad T-Mobile was having had Verizon since January. I haven't had a dropped call since moving to Verizon but Thursday before I got the replacement phone I was on T-mobile phone for an hour and lost 3 calls due to dropouts!

 

[LER]

Ok, so my battery life is typical (I use it mostly at lunch and on weekends, but the death at the LWE show was annoying ).

I think I figured out what happened with the cradle. it was "almost" connected, not all the way down on the finger.

All better today.

I think I'm going to order either another standard or an extended life battery

Thanks for all the help here guys.

This is why I love this place.

LER

 

[TheForce]

Just remember, that the extended batteries all require a different design cover. Pain IA but that's life with the 6700.

 

[rwells7722]

New forum member

Hi guys. I just joined the forum because I was looking for some kind of user forum for the PPC 6700 from Sprint (UTStarcom). I have quickly scanned the messages to see if a problem I'm having has been noticed by others. I didn't see it. Both my wife and I got the 6700 about a month ago. Both of us have a problem with the brightness being turned all the way down so that we can barely see the screen if we shine a light on it and see the reflection. Tapping a key or the screen doesn't turn the backlight on. We have to go to settings/system/backlight/brightness and slide the bar back to the right. This is hard to do with the backlight off.

We've already made sure that the check box is marked to turn the backlight on when a button is pressed or the screen is tapped. This doesn't help.

Has anyone else had this problem or have a solution?

We also notice that the screen is rather sensitive and we seem to make calls inadvertently or turn off the Audible player inadvertently when carrying the player in the hip holster.

Thanks for your help.

Bob

There appears to be no rhyme or reason for the backlight not coming on

 

[TheForce]

Haven't noticed the brightness being turned down automatically but here is my take on your other issue-

Phone calling out automatically. Unfortunately this is a wide spread problem all phones seem to suffer to varying degree if their keypad and touch screens are exposed. The reason why is programmers made a decision to call the last nuimber in the history with a simple tap of the green call button and with touch screen also. There have been numerous solutions and even people selling software to fix the issue. Most don't work! What you can do is the following which I find is a 90% good solution-

Set the phone to shut off all buttons and touch screen when the phone is powered off. This will keep your phone from being triggered by accidental touching WHEN POWERED OFF. Unfortunately part of the cell phone service is that they turn your phone on when you receive a call. This can be a disaster if you receive a call from someone and then you bump the phone whiole in the holster and now that person can listen to everything you say. Worse yet, even if you don't bump before it times out and his call is now in the last number cue, you bump and your phone will call him back on its own. Verizon nor Sprint tech groups have no solution for this. One additional step to get around this is to set your phone to have a password everytime you call out and a password evertime you power back on. This is the best solution unless you also do unattented system backups. The PW will prevent you from executing an automatic backup. Not to mention the user inconvenience of dealing with passwords. I do backups so I can't use the PW protection from automatic call out. There is only one way we found that is a sure fire way to protect your security from auto call out and this is to put the phone in Flight mode and then power down and put in your holster. Inbound calls will go to Voice Mail and you won't know about them until you take your phone off of Flight mode. This is what I use here and since, I have not made calls to last number in the cue and I do not get calls auto answered when I'm not present. That works and for me, has less hassle than the passwords. Trust me, we've been in the war zone on this and it is not phone specific. I've had this issue with every phone that has exposed keys for the last 6 years. Some are just worse than others and those would be the PDA touch screen phones. But none seem to be exempt. Just last Wednesday, one of my clients I just spoke with , who uses a Mot Razor on T-Mobile that closes and protects the keypad, called me back about 30 minutes later and I heard him arguing with his girlfriend about her spending too much money on his credit card. Really funny but, dare I tell him what happened? Noooooo!
So you have options on how to deal with it but none are perfect.

Simple way to prevent the WMP from pausing while in the case-
WM5 allows you to open multiple tasks. Once I get WMP playing my playlist of sounds, I then launch something else that isn't affected greatly by the screen, take your pick, like new note. Now you can continue to listen as long as you have that option not to pause the sound when in another application and your pause button won't get tapped.

 

[rwells7722]

Thanks Don, for your prompt and thorough answer. I'm curious if anyone else has had the problem with the brightness being turned down. It's strange that both my wife and I have experienced the same problem. For a while I thought bright light on the screen (i.e. sun) might be the problem, but I've had it happen other times too and so has she.

I use a password every time I power up, but not for every phone call. I'll have to live with it, I guess.

What are you calling an unattended system backup? Is that using Blue Tooth to synchronize the device with the PC? (I haven't started doing that yet, but I intend to.) Otherwise, I simply trust that the ActiveSync is a good enough backup and that works whenever I plug my handheld to the USB port.

Thanks for the suggestion to switch to another program like Notes when I'm listening to something that I don't want to be affected by inadvertent pressure on the screen. I think I will do that.

As for Flight mode, I've found that my phone sometimes drops into Flight mode without my intending it to do so. The worst problem with that is that I've sometimes missed calls without realizing it and I'm less than perfect about checking voicemail regularly. At least the phone shows the "notification" tag when I re-activate the phone.

I do love the device. It pretty much does everything I need. My wife isn't so sure. She finds it a bit more complicated than she'd like.

I do need a program that will allow me to shut down programs instead of leaving them on when I switch to a different program. I believe I saw references to this in previous posts, so I'll go back and research it.

Thanks again for your help.

 

[jailbird]

Thanks Don, for your prompt and thorough answer. I'm curious if anyone else has had the problem with the brightness being turned down. It's strange that both my wife and I have experienced the same problem. For a while I thought bright light on the screen (i.e. sun) might be the problem, but I've had it happen other times too and so has she.

I use a password every time I power up, but not for every phone call. I'll have to live with it, I guess.

What are you calling an unattended system backup? Is that using Blue Tooth to synchronize the device with the PC? (I haven't started doing that yet, but I intend to.) Otherwise, I simply trust that the ActiveSync is a good enough backup and that works whenever I plug my handheld to the USB port.

Thanks for the suggestion to switch to another program like Notes when I'm listening to something that I don't want to be affected by inadvertent pressure on the screen. I think I will do that.

As for Flight mode, I've found that my phone sometimes drops into Flight mode without my intending it to do so. The worst problem with that is that I've sometimes missed calls without realizing it and I'm less than perfect about checking voicemail regularly. At least the phone shows the "notification" tag when I re-activate the phone.

I do love the device. It pretty much does everything I need. My wife isn't so sure. She finds it a bit more complicated than she'd like.

I do need a program that will allow me to shut down programs instead of leaving them on when I switch to a different program. I believe I saw references to this in previous posts, so I'll go back and research it.

Thanks again for your help.

A real easy "fix" to the keypad issue to to tap on the padlock on the Today screen that says "Device Unlocked". That will lock your keypad, and yet not require you to enter a PW to unlock it. It works fairly well for me.

My only complaint is that if I make/receive a call via BlueTooth, the PDA part turns on to make a call, and then stays on afterwards. It would be nice if it would remember that it was off BEFORE the call and to turn itself off AFTER the call, but alas.

To shut down programs all of the time, try Magic Button. It seems to work fairly well.

 

[TheForce]

jailbird- Not sure where that padlock is. Don't see it. Maybe you have to activate something to get that. I'd like to look into it though.

BTW- the habit of powering off the phone with the end button near the sd card slot is only good if you also have the touch screen and all other buttons locked off in the setup menu. That is how I use it and only a phone call inbound turns the phone back on. At that time, I'd be vulnerable to the auto answwer and auto call back, but the flight mode fixes that.

Another screwup on the part of the software writers, either HTC or Microsoft is the phone pad. I recently added the cab file to add a speed dialer on the Today screen. Don't have the pictures in it, just the names and it really makes speed dialing a breeze. This was actually a hack mod sourced from Treo700w.

Speaking of Treo 700W, I bought one of these for my wife since she doesn't need to be experimenting with all sorts of applications but just needs a good PDA phone for phone calls and e-mail plus GPS and I added sling box mobile that she uses. While her Treo700w has much less memory than our 6700's she is getting along fine with the simple apps she has.

Backups in auto mode- There are now two good ones people like. I use Sprite backup and it saves a single compressed file of the internal setups and programs every day to a folder on my mini SD card. I have it set to store a maximum of 4 backups so I have several days to revert back to as a safety net. I've been using Sprite for 2 years on PDA's and it has never failed me. The cool thing is I can be back up to speed in about 10 minutes from a hosed system with that SD card's backup file set. No laptop necessary!. Cost about $20. I also have it instaled on my wfe's Treo700w

The alternative software is SPB Backuop and that company makes nice stuff too. It has an advantage over Sprite in that it doesn't auto reboot your phone during the backup process. Some people like that but that procedure can cause a screwey restore depending on what's loaded just before a scheduled backup.

 

[Shawn95GT]

Don - you might have hidden it if you've done any cleanup of your homescreen settings.

It'll say 'device is unlocked'. It shows at the bottom of my Home screen. (Different Phone, same OS).

 

[Overlord66]

Does anyone know if MS voice command can enter additional numbers even when a call is connected. For instance can I say dial 1800-000-0000 then when that is connected speak the queue options such as # then 4 or maybe a phone extension.

 

[TheForce]

Overload66-

There may be some hacks, but I just tried it and no, you can't activate the Voice command button after a call is connected. If you know what the extra numbers are such as a common extention or like a pass code for Voice mail, you can always use the pause pause and then the extra numbers if you knew them in advance.

 

[TheForce]

Shawn- what do you mean different phone same OS? If you have a XV6700 then you either have Sprint's OS or Verizon's. Both run wm5 but each is slightly different, especially with the different roms running as well as the carrier special cabs that load. Even Treo has a different look to the Today screen although it is wm5.

 

[Shawn95GT]

Sorry - I have completely different phone, but running the same Windows Mobile 5.0 software.

I'm sure you're right about the differences, but it looked OS level to me.

In Settings | Today | Items Tab | Checkbox for 'Device Lock'.

I had taken it off when I first got my phone but I quickly put it back when I noticed how handy it was. If it's an option for you there you'll be good to go.