Category: Sprint Ambassador
August 14, 2007
Mobile Email Clients
So, I've got two phones now with email clients. The first phone is the relatively new LG Muziq from Sprint. The second phone is the Apple iPhone. Neither one of these solutions is even attempting to try to be as good as a Blackberry. The last Blackberry I used was the RIM 950 pager style and sized Blackberry many years ago. I had it for quite a while, running a Microsoft Exchange server at my home to support it. It would be at least a couple of years after I had it before they would start to support anything else.
One might be inclined to ask why I got rid of it and the service. As it turns out, with a Blackberry you can get and send email from anywhere. That is exactly the most annoying feature. Do you really want to be responding to email while out to dinner, in bed, waiting for a movie to start (ok, maybe here), and other unspeakable places (did you wash your hands first? really?). Seriously, though, between that and the constant vibrating on my hip when email would come in, I ultimately decided it wasn't really worth it. It took more than a month for the vibrating feeling to go away.
And yet I now carry two phones with full email abilities. This mini-comparison is decidedly incomplete, but there are a number of interesting features of both clients.
Read the rest of "Mobile Email Clients"
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(0)July 28, 2007
Sprint Navigation: Too Many Failures
So, having had the Samsung UpStage for a few months now, I've certainly tried to use the Sprint Navigation application on it a few times. All attempts have been both useless and extremely frustrating. I'll compare this to using the Google Maps widget on the Apple iPhone.
Read the rest of "Sprint Navigation: Too Many Failures"July 22, 2007
The LG Muziq (aka LX570) from Sprint
So, Sprint is at it again with their Ambassador program, sending out some more handsets. This one, strangely, basically replaces the Samsung UpStage. Although the service was supposed to go a bit longer on that, it's being terminated. I'm not terribly upset by this, though. The LG Muziq is, from what I can tell, a superior handset in many ways.It is not my intention of this post to be a full review, however. I think I'll be able to get to that, just not right now. The above Flash thing will show a number of images of the phone and comparison with other phones, such as the LG VX9800 (aka The V), the Samsung UpStage, and the Apple iPhone.
Read the rest of "The LG Muziq (aka LX570) from Sprint"June 25, 2007
Sprint Movies: Neat Idea. Does it Work?
So, I was at the airport (you know, returning from the BREW developer conference) and it was looking like I might be at the airport for 3 hours. (I wasn't, a couple of us got on the next earlier flight hopefully easing the burden on the next flight, too.)
In any case, I pulled out my Samsung UpStage and started checking out music. I then realized that 3 hours would be enough time to check out a movie and see how well that actually works. I was expecting fine playback performance on a smaller screen than the iPod and without the ability to finish on the plane. I didn't quite get any of that.
Read the rest of "Sprint Movies: Neat Idea. Does it Work?"May 1, 2007
Sprint's Music Downloads
Unlike last time I had a Sprint Ambassador handset, this time I'm much more interested in the music aspects of it. That probably has something to do with the fact that the phone supports A2DP and I have relatively comfortable headphones that also happen to support A2DP. This allows me to listen to the music in some sort of high quality way and through the headphone I listed to just about everything else with.
Unfortunately, the entire experience has been with some frustration. The basic experience of downloading songs via the Music Store on the handset and playing them on the handset has been just fine. In fact, it's very fast, works really well, and the songs sound great even though they are relatively small and a whole lot can fit on the included 64MB card. The music recommendations work pretty well and the "Others Bought" and "More by this Artist" features help find more songs you might not know or might want.
The Sprint music store also allows for PC downloads of anything you've purchased on your computer. It also allows for backing up of your handset music to your computer. You can't play it there, but if you delete music on your handset, you can't download it again. The handset music is in a protected AAC+ format, which is the reason why it can be so small yet still have very good audio fidelity. On the desktop side, standard protected WMA files are used. It's on the PC side where all of my problems started.
I tried logging in to the Sprint site to download my music (www.sprint.com/digitallounge). First, I couldn't get the password retrieval to work. Finally, after quite some time of trying, I got a single SMS with the password. I then couldn't log in. The site kept saying there was some technical error on the back end. Finally, I tried Internet Explorer rather than Firefox and got logged in. After downloading one song, I was prompted to login again. This time, I couldn't. Neither the password that it sent to me nor the one that I had set worked. I tried requesting a new one, but this didn't work.
A couple of days later, I tried again. I finally got back in with a new password and using IE only. I then downloaded a bunch more music. I then launched WMP11 to play it on my machine (the Sony UX280P with Vista, of course). This didn't, and still doesn't, work. The files are listed as having copy protection, but in the licensing tab there is no information about it. It's very odd.
So, I thought maybe I was missing something. After some searching around on the Sprint site, I gave up with trying to find any downloads for Vista. The CD even listed XP as required. Well, the CD also had a URL on it that I didn't recognize. I went to it and there they had a Vista version of the music manager. So, I downloaded and installed it. That took two reboots. One for the installation and one to fix whatever went wrong when I ran it for the first time.
The music manager requires the USB cable to be used with the UpStage. It also shows my UpStage as having 0 bytes used of 0 bytes total. I couldn't figure out how to sync any music to the phone at all. I would start, but never give status or anything. When I finally tried to close the application, it said there was a sync pending. Well, if there was, it was going at a bit a minute. Maybe.
The Sprint Music Manager is even more of a joke than just not working. The content tab is just a browser window that brings you to the normal login location. It doesn't even short cut you to the download site. So, naturally, it didn't anything new to work that was broken. Although, when trying to play the music through it, there was no detection of errors. The status would say playing, but naturally nothing was playing and the play time wouldn't change.
Now, to be fair, I haven't had time to call the Ambassador support line to see if they can tell me what I'm doing wrong. However, I don't think it's supposed to be this hard! Well, I'll post more information later if things start working...
April 27, 2007
Where Are My Apps?
On our recent trip, I had wanted to use the Samsung UpStage for some additional navigation, especially walking around or when it didn't make sense to have the Sony UX280P connected to a Bluetooth GPS and out in the open. So, I went to search for the navigation application, Telenav, because I couldn't find it in the download menus. It did come up, but then it didn't allow downloading of it because it said it wasn't available for my phone yet. Strange.
I later found a hard link to the application in the menus. Not too surprisingly, it was a link to download the application which isn't available for the UpStage yet. It's strange to me that Sprint would allow that to happen. A similar thing happened with the podcasting application. The Samsung site claims it's not available for this phone yet although a version that works fine is preloaded onto the handset.
A couple of games are also preloaded onto the phone as well as the basic set of built-in applications, such as the video player. I recently got a response back from an Ambassador feedback post I gave even before they'd shipped me the handset. I was concerned that the form factor would prevent many applications from either being ported to it or even being able to function. (I touched on the UpStage input issues yesterday.)
The response:
Absolutely the UpStage has the ability to play games, play music, text message and all other power vision applications that you are used to using on our handsets.
Well, where are they? Every category I click on when browsing to "get new content" seems to be empty or broken. There was even a section for "Free Gameloft Demos" but all the of the direct game links there resulted in an error saying that the game isn't yet available for my phone.
The phone shipped with five game demos: Midnight Bowling, Nightclub Empire DEMO, PAC-MAN / Ms. PAC-MAN DEMO, Tetris Demo, and World Series of Poker. I haven't found a way to download any other games, applications, or email/IM clients. Even the "What's Hot" and "What's New" application categories are empty.
Sure, there are plenty of wallpapers and ringers for download. The music store works just fine as does the Sprint TV player and Sprint Movies. (I'll be talking about some of those later.) There just isn't anything available yet. The phone has been out for a few weeks, though.
April 26, 2007
Samsung UpStage M620: Data Entry
So, the Samsung UpStage that I have through the Sprint Ambassador program is an interesting beast. It's got a tiny screen on one side where you have a normal phone keypad. On the other side, it has a large screen but only an 8-way navigation pad with no numeric keypad (8-way => up, down, left, right, left soft key, right soft key, select, and back although it also has an "end" key).
On the large screen side, we'll call this the media side, all but the select key are touch sensitive buttons. Besides the direct (and virtual) push of the four corner buttons and four directional buttons, the pad supports scroll gestures for for the directions. You can scroll one line or item, or by two lines or items. Additionally, you can cause it to start auto scrolling in the direction you've swiped. All of this is given in the tutorial that launches the first time you run the phone.
Although this functionality works OK, it has a couple of serious flaws. Frequently, the phone misses the first part of a scroll-down gesture and instead just triggers the key press for the key at the end of the swipe. This is inevitably the "end" key. Sometimes the applications asks if I'd really like to exit, saving me a huge amount of pain. Other times, I'm just left with the idle screen again. The same thing happens with the back key, too, but that's less of an issue. Overall, it means I have been trying not to use the gestures, even though they make scrolling much faster. Even so, when pressing the down arrow, being off by a little bit to either side can cause the same problem. To be fair, I haven't adjusted the sensitivity settings any to see if that can help. I'm not certain which way it's off by, if either.
As you may have guessed, you can't use the media side to have phone calls. Using the contacts or call history, though, you can trigger a call. The phone will then tell you to flip promptly. If you're phone is asleep and you need to make a phone call, you have to hit a button to wake it up and then hit the flip button to give control to the small screen side, which I call the phone side, so that you can then start to dial. This isn't particularly good for emergencies. You can't just pick up the phone and start to dial. The media side doesn't have a speaker or microphone, either, but that's fine since it saves that screen from face juice in favor of hand juice while holding the phone to your ear.
For entering text in to applications or sending text messages, you can either flip the phone over by using the left or right soft key when prompted by the application or you can choose to use a scroll type selector to choose letters and numbers one at a time. 
You can't use the physical flip key, though, as that sort of flip exits all applications. That's good for flipping to make a call and yes, it does prompt you that you will close all applications. 
There are even a couple of cases where you can only use the media side entry, such as when entering a Bluetooth PIN code for pairing. 
On the other side, sometimes It'll say "flip," but most of the time it says "save" which I haven't quite figured out the meaning of since all it does is flip back. Why is this all so inconsistent? Why ask me? Ask Sprint or Samsung. (I asked Sprint via the feedback.) Sending messages can happen entirely on the phone side and can also be triggered from the media side.
I had expected the hassle of flipping back and forth to be a real problem. As it turns out, it's surprisingly natural and easy, even if the UI is inconsistent. That said, if you've got a game that relies on the numeric keypad for game play elements or an application that uses the numbers for important shortcuts, you'll be out of luck. The keypads on the opposite side of the active flip side are completely disabled.
Another annoyance I have is that all of the menus throughout the phone still list shortcut keys next to them. Every time I see a menu I am reminded that I have to scroll down to the nth item instead of just pressing the n-key. This causes a certain level of frustration that could have been solved be requiring, at least for built-in applications, that the number short-cut keys were removed. If they were, I'd soon forget how much faster certain navigation elements would be. It's minor, but surprisingly frustrated especially when scrolling down and accidentally hitting the end or back key and having to start all over again.
Do the benefits of this design outweigh the issues with the input? In my opinion, they might after some use. The phone is definitely very small when not in it's battery wallet. The screen is much bigger than if a full keypad were to have been on the media side. A slide-out keypad would have increased the thickness as well as adding cost and complexity. Overall, the usability has surprised me in a good way, even with the annoyances and frustrations. I just don't do the same things on it that I do on my LG VX9800 handset that has a full keyboard but that is almost exactly the same size as the UpStage in it's battery wallet. Put another way, the UpStage is basically the same size as just the top part of the VX9800 (the part without the keyboard and battery).
One final comment... why didn't Samsung give this device the Bluetooth HID profile for keyboard input?!
April 18, 2007
Sprint's UpStage: Now Playing
So, without even so much as a shipping announcement since a letter that stated it'd be a few weeks since they were low on stock, my Sprint UpStage arrived.
I haven't really had a chance to do anything but open it and take some pictures. It's smaller than I had expected, as you'll see in the comparison shots to the VX9800.
That said, in the battery case, the whole bulk is about the sane as the vx9800. I'll write later about features and usability. So far, though, it has actually been better than the old Samsung MM-A620, but the form factor keeps it from being perfect. It's amusing to me that the numeric part of the model is the same. ;)
Click on the picture above for a link to the Picasa Web Albums images. Doing that was more convenient than uploading a generated gallery last night while tired. Sorry! (The image below is a link, too, using the Google HTML rather than the link itself.) Anyway, enough about Picasa and Google... I must go off and play with my new Samsung UpStage M620.
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| Sprint Samsung Upstage Unpacking |
March 26, 2007
Sprint's Flipper: The Upstage
As expected,this is the two sided Samsung handset+. The design leaves some questions, though. Sure, it's new and novel. Is it useful, though?
The front screen doesn't look big enough to run applications. However, the rear screen doesn't have a keypad for entering any dato in to it. So what is one supposed to do? Can you not do email? Play games that need to digit pad? Use shortcut keys when browsing?
Maybe it will support the Bluetooth HID to help out. That would at least be something.
As a music and video phone, though, it might be relateively nice since you end up with a larger screen than you would have otherwise. It's probably more useful than the LG Chocolate on Verizon where the keys are very difficult to accurately hit and not accidentally hit since they aren't physical keys.
Only time will tell if this design works or not. Certainly the simplicity of a candy bar for just phone calls is nice, too. I like that about my Verizon VX9800 (The V). How many people really use all that many applications, anyway? This might be ideal for the person who just wants a phone and a media player in one.
March 21, 2007
Sprint's Ambassador Program
So, it looks like Sprint's program is still going and about to go in to Phase III. They must be having pretty good success with the program if they are keeping it going for another six months.
I don't know much more about it at this point. However, I'll be sure to share if I do hear more. ;)
Programs like this are pretty interesting, though. On the one hand, they serve the purpose of having a directory study group. On the other hand, they also have a potential way of gathering a bunch of discussion and blogging around the community (this here post is a case in point).
I've heard things about Verizon having a similar program, but I haven't really seen any details on that. Anyone know of any other companies (cellular operators or not) doing similar, fairly wide, study programs? (As opposed to closed door focus groups and the like.)
