One week later, I’m still enjoying my Audiovox SMT5600. The horizontal belt case that it came with has already broken. Jawbreaker is massively addictive — my highest “Big Burst” score is currently 420. The 5-way nav bar that hasn’t made a good first impression with many reviewers and potential buyers… is really not that bad. Probably not great for games that require speed, but for ordinary use it works quite well.
I was surprised to discover that a Java MIDP 2.0 runtime is included.
Minor nits: Can’t voice dial thru Bluetooth headset while keypad is locked. It takes a minimum of 7 keypresses to turn Bluetooth on / off. Activating the keypad lock during a call is a challenge since the shortcut is to hold the End button (press Power 3 quickly instead). Mail client doesn’t delete messages from the server for IMAP accounts.
Larger issues: No way to initiate a file transfer over Bluetooth from the phone — Beam is IR-only. Sending large e-mails (ie: with Picture attachments) frequently times outs — possibly because pdasmtp.attwireless.net sucks. The Movable Type 3.11 UI crashes Pocket IE.
And there’s something about the UI… On the MPx200 I loved that the Programs menu used numeric hotkeys to make navigation efficient, especially compared to Series 60. With the SMT5600’s version of the OS these hotkeys now appear for regular menus as well, which is great, except… Now I feel like those hotkeys should appear wherever there is a list, and I’m annoyed that almost no applications currently do this.
Overall this is the best phone I’ve ever owned, and I’ve owned many.
