Qtek 8100 vs. Orange Boston (Android 1.6)

This time I want to write an article honoring my new smart phone, I own since July, 23rd, 2010. It is the replacement of my Qtek 8100 smart phone which I purchased on December, 30th, 2005. Since mid 2008, the "green" and "red" key for answering and quitting phone calls and - the latter - for locking the key pad didn't work any more, so I always had to select these functions from the menus - annoying. Since then, I searched for a worthy follower, which was very difficult. Once you're used to such a good phone like my Qtek 8100 was, your expectations are very high. Most of the phones that are produced today are technical crap, with may be one exception: Apple's iPhone. But that phone has one big disadvantage: its price. The greatest producer of crap seems to be Samsung: Their mobile phones seem to have severe stability problems (i.e., they crash very often and need to be restarted, which seems to be accepted by most customers and is obviously considered to be "normal") and the software has never gone through testing, not even rudimentary testing. Samsung is stingy with updates to their phones and doesn't care about their customers. Once they paid, they're lost. I read hundreds of comments on Amazon and my picture of Samsung turned bad. Similar applies to LG. One of the few smart phone producers that create reasonably products is HTC, but I also coudn't afford one of their phones. However, after reading a lot and searching a lot, I found a good offer of a Android 1.6 driven smart phone at Orange Austria. I got it for "free", so I thought, it it doesn't do its job very well, I could replace it in a few months if I have the money. But my old phone had to be replaced urgently, as described above. The biggest challenge for me was to find an easy and quick way how to transport all of my phone numbers and calendar entries to the new phone. This was the critical point that made most of the current phones unusable for me, because there is no acceptable synchronization software. Transferring all my data was easy: I sync'ed the Qtek with my PC, exported my phone book as a CSV file and uploaded that file to my Gmail contacts - finished. I did the same with my calendar and all my data was not just on my phone but also in the cloud, so I can now edit my phone book and calendar online. That's great. :-) It took me about 10 minutes to achive this task. That's how it should work! After using the phone for almost two weeks, I can figure out its positive and negative properties:

Positive

• If I turn the phone, the screen flips in about a second
• The virtual keyboard is simple to use and offers everything I need
• The touch screen works very well (but I think, iPhone's touch screen is more precise)
• The overall usability is satisfying
• Phone shows how much energy which components are using
• The mechanism to lock the screen is pressing shortly on the on/off button, to unlock you have to press the on/off button and touch the menu button. So, unlocking can't happen unintentionally very easy.
• The phone has a built-in 5 megapixel camera. The pictures taken with it look much worse than the ones from my 2 megapixel "real" digital camera, but hey, it's a cell phone, that's okay. Sony Ericsson phones are known to take much better photos, if that is important for someone.
  

Negative

• The screen that shows the state of the battery shows that only in 10% steps. I've installed an app that shows the state on the screen and it also displays in 10% steps. That might be okay for simple phones or for smart phones with strong batteries, but for a phone where you can empty the battery in less than an hour (by turning on WLAN and GPS), this is not good. Whereby it's worth to notice, that it's very simple to do the calculation (present state divided by design capacity).
  
• There's an alarm clock installed, but it only supports annoying ringtones that I don't want to hear in the morning! There's no possibility to use one of the other ringtones that are used for calls and also there's no possibility to choose a file from the SD card. The app I installed (Alarm Clock Plus V2) crashes regularly, once it crashed even at night, so I need a "backup" alarm clock.
• The camera doesn't write or only sometimes writes metadata like date/time, width, height, and orientation. But it writes geo data... nice. :-/
• It the phone is connected to a PC and the phone is used as a mass storage device, the SD card can't be used on the phone. I know that other phones also have this problem, nevertheless that is ridiculous.
• The preinstalled app for watching photos doesn't react to gestures, instead you have to touch two arrows for selecting the previous or next picture. Alternatively, you can touch the screen so the arrows appear and then - as quick as you can - use the track ball (you have to move around and then click) to switch to the next picture. If you're not quick enough, the arrows disappear and you have to try again.

Despite of some annoyances, I'm very happy with that phone and I don't regret choosing it.