myPhone

After 1.5 years of using Nokia NGage QD I bought a new mobile (i-mate SP5m). I got N-Gage for about Rs.7500 and I was impressed with its performance. I bought new mobile because of two reasons – 1) My N-Gage’s cover is torn-out. 2) It is bulky to carry.

I searched more than 2 months and found some good links. If anybody looking to buy new mobile, then the following links might helpful.
http://www.nokia.co.in
http://www.sony.co.in/subcategorylist.do?catid=367&parentcatid=366
http://www.samsung.com/in/products/gsm/index.asp
http://www.fonearena.com/mobile_phone_pricelist.html
http://www.techenclave.com/forums/mobile-phones/

Since I used to Symbian OS(N-Gage), I wanted a Symbian mobile. Also I wanted big screen and good resolution. The other things I wanted were all kind of connectivity (USB, Bluetooth or infrared); importantly I wanted USB because N-Gage QD does not have USB and Bluetooth was very very slow. I wanted Nokia brand – since I had a bad experience with one Samsung mobile.

After viewing technical specifications of lot of mobiles I short listed few mobiles- Nokia E50, Nokia E62, Nokia 5300 and Sony M600i. I was more towards buying Nokia E50. The only thing that stopped me was a random speaker phone activation bug in that mobile. I was impressed by M600i’s touch screen and other features. Price is the thing which made me to think twice before thinking about M600i. The price of M600i was 14,500.

While browsing through techenclave.com, I found a thread which gave positive feedback about i-Mate SP5m. I have used HP iPAQ while doing a project and had good feeling about having Windows OS in the mobile. But I thought all the Windows mobile would be costly. The price of i-Mate SP5m was mentioned as 11,000 in that thread – so I got another mobile to consider. I went to i-Mate website(http://www.clubimate.com/) and stunned by the specification of the phone. It has everything including Wi-Fi.

Finally I decided to go for i-Mate SP5m or E50. I asked my friend to help me to find i-Mate shop in Bangalore. He found some dealer in Jayan Nagar. We went there and saw the model. I liked the model but I didn’t purchase it because they quoted Rs. 12,500. I changed my mind to buy E50. So I and my friend went to a Sangeetha, Jayanagar to see E50. There we saw all the mobiles that I had in my list. They even had all the models of i-Mate. They quoted 11,500 only for the i-mate sp5m. I was happy about that price and decided to buy. My friend bargained for me and got the mobile for 10,700.

I also bought 2 GB SD card from SP Road for Rs.1000. It is working perfectly. I am not sure whether 4GB will work with windows mobile or not.
http://blogs.msdn.com/windowsmobile/archive/2007/01/12/everything-you-want-to-know-about-sd.aspx

One of the drawbacks of N-Gage was its mono-sound output. Although I did not consider using mobile as MP3 player, I am using my i-Mate SP5m as an mp3 player because of its decent stereo audio output.

So far I have not found any problem. However there is no default pdf/document viewer. I am searching for a good pdf viewer.

In my home I was able to connect my device to my computer without any problem. But in my office I was struggling to make it work with sygate firewall. ActiveSync hangs when it trying to retrieve settings from the mobile. From the following thread I came to know that USB settings are the problem. http://www.aximsite.com/boards/showthread.php?t=120851
Registry Sub Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Drivers\USB\FunctionDrivers\RND IS]
Name of the Value to add: MTU Type : DWORD Data: 1514 (Value is Decimal)

Registry Sub Key: [HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Drivers\USB\FunctionDrivers\RND IS]
Name of the Value to add: MaxOutTransfer Type: DWORD Data: 1642 (Value is Decimal)

Because Sygate Security Agent requires the maximum transmission unit (MTU) for the network connection to be set to 1514 which is the same as the default for Ethernet.

The most of the registry editors was not able to create/modify registry entries. They ended up with “Unable to perform this operation”. Finally got the “RegEditSTG.exe” which worked perfectly without any problem.
http://www.modaco.com/index.php?act=Attach&type=post&id=16345.

Features I like:

Windows Mobile 5.0 :)
Good Display (High resolution and color reproduction is good)
Synchronization with Outlook (Calendar is most important feature for me)
Media Player
WiFi
USB Charger – less wires :)

Not for:

Looks –smart but not so pretty
Battery life – although I am not sure I feel it drops to half within 2 days
Camera – 1.3MP, I don’t like a camera in a mobile so no problem for me
SD Card is not hot-swappable
Less free software compared to Symbian – Infact it is very very less