First impressions of my new Sendo X
I have been waiting for this phone since November and when it finally came out I decided to buy it despite people saying it was very buggy. When I got it the first thing I thought was that it looks so much better than in the pictures and so much smaller! Build quality seems very good. Anyway I decided to write down some of the good and bad points about it while keeping a note of all bugs so that I can send them to Sendo. At the moment there is a lot of negative stuff on this forum, which simply isn�t fair for such a good phone. Stuff that might put off future buyers, so I have compiled a balanced summary of the pros and cons.
Good Points:
-Stereo loudspeaker sound is a dream; I can play MP3�s at a quite high volume and still get excellent sound quality. The speakers are unbelievably good for the size of the unit! I have tried a phone call on loudspeaker and it seems to work extremely well.
-Display is excellent, perfectly visible even in the bright sunlight. I have it on the Ultra Bright setting.
-Voice recognition is not going to be my most used feature, but even so it is really good � works with no training for everyone I have tried it with.
-I thought the Image editor would be really poor, but it is actually brilliant. So many possibilities; however I would like to be able to add my own icons and frames and stuff.
-I was told that the flash was only a crappy LED, however it is so bright. My Sendo X flash is so much brighter than my brothers Samsung E710.
-Now! Screen is brilliant. Very useful indeed.
-Quite stable - no crashes so far. However, some minor lock ups have occurred.
-Camera and camcorder viewfinder is really quick and smooth.
-I have read that RF reception was poor and had problems, however I would say that it is better than my SL45i (which always seemed to have very good reception). I have had no problems yet, hopefully that won�t change!
-Supplied headset has a volume control on and sounds fairly good.
-Messaging is very good; when sending to multiple people it just queues them up and sends them in the background. If there is no signal it schedules them to be sent later.
-Battery life seems very good (I have not run it completely down yet), and indicator so far seems very reliable.
-Little additions like the converter and document viewers are so useful.
-Bluetooth works very well. USB cable and software also seem very good.
Bugs/Problems:
-Camcorder function has a really poor frame rate no matter which settings are chosen. At first I thought it might be the realone player, but I watched on my PC and the audio is terrible and the frame rate is very choppy. This needs to be fixed.
-An annoying problem is that the backlight takes about 2 seconds to come on after pressing a button. I really hope they fix this!
-Sometimes when multitasking the music comes out really horrible and distorted. Seems to be at random times, and is very infrequent. The way to fix it is to pause the MP3 player and then un-pause.
-Some noises are still played in silent mode (like changing profile tone)
-MP3 player shuffle system isn�t very good; I always get them in the same order!
-When multi tasking and playing mp3�s the music is constantly interrupted although only for a small time normally. I was hoping the SoniX chip would sort this � maybe in a firmware upgrade then�
-Once you restart the phone it seems to ask me if I want to copy SIM contacts to the phone memory every time I go into contacts. Also the phone lock code resets as does the lock status.
-It needs Airplane mode; so you can use it to either free up memory or for hospitals/planes. I was allowed onto Thomas Cook airlines with my SL45i because I took the SIM out. I don�t see why this phone doesn�t have Airplane mode.
-Some of the help files don�t match up � like help says there should be a contrast setting under �display�, but there isn�t.
-The PTT button on the stereo headset doesn�t do anything while the MP3 player is active. My SL45i used to pause/play on a push, and if you held it down it would skip to the next song. That was very useful.
-Oggplay doesn�t work
Does anyone else have these problems?
Overall I would say it is an excellent phone; scoring 8/10 and hopefully with some of these problems fixed it will score 9 or even 10. Top notch - Sendo really put a lot of effort into it, and it shows!