Good morning and a happy new year to everybody.
In the end I decided to take the leap of faith and upgraded from WM03 to Wm5. Here are my 2 cents after one day of use:
- Flashing was a breeze. I went through the whole process in less than 50 minutes. No problems at all.
- First thing I noticed upon powering on the phone was the lack of a file manager. As advised in this forum I loaded Resco Explorer and the problem was solved. Another piece of software that is not embedded in this release is a battery/memory meter. In this case too I did as many other MGN users and downloaded Resco's Battery & Memory in order to implement such missing feature.
Nonetheless I feel that this OS is crippled at best. It lacks many important functions I had become accustomed to under 2003 and, I overall find I have much less control on my phone now.
An example: Where are the settings to switch the "airplane mode" on/off? If I try to press and hold the "home" button to get this function, as I did withWM2003 the phone will just freeze. No sign of the "airplane settings" anywhere else...
I will keep on using it to see if it's just me or if this WM5 really is a no go.
- Power on/switch off.
My SD card might be a fast one because the phone does not seem to be any slower than before in switching on/shutting off.
- Radio strength and battery life.
While the majority of comments in this forum are positive I do not feel that my Mpx200's battery life has improved together with the signal strength: While under 2003 I never had a signal problem now I have had some:
@Yesterday evening I called home while I was outside and could barely hear what my wife was telling me as the signal was very blurry and full of static interferences.
@At home I never got more than 3-4 signal bars where I'd usually get full signal strength.
@This morning upon entering my office (yes.... I'm working....) I took the phone out from the jacket's pocket and noticed that the "no service" signal was displayed on the phone's screen. While this is obvious because I had just exited the subway station where there is no cell coverage, it is nonetheless not normal as between my office and the station there are 200 metres which are more than enough for my phone to pass from "no service" to full signal strength in normal conditions.
My impression is that the phone has become much less sensitive to the signal fluctuations as it seems to not be any longer able to gather signal as soon as any is available, as it did before the upgrade.
For what is about battery life I can just say that when I powered off yesterday night the battery was 98% charged. When I switched the phone on this morning I had one bar left on the battery meter and will very soon need to recharge...
In order to try and be less "empiric" I will just let the phone discharge completely and then will plug it to the "juice" until it gets fully charged. If less than one day passes between charges it will definitely mean that the battery life under WM5 is worse than what it used to be under 2003.
- Programs.
No problem here, I have reloaded almost all my "old" software and so far haven't found a single program that won't work under 5.0
- Gui.
No doubt. WM5 is a major overhaul and it solves some little quirks that the old interface had. It seems to be somewhat more customisable than its predecessors but this is just an impression. More on that as soon as I'll be able to do some more digging.
So far this is it.
While there are some things that annoy me on this release I nonetheless cannot prevent myself from thinking that I'm toting a three years old phone which sports the latest operating system just as a a "new-off-the-shelf" device; this once more confirms that I did an excellent choice when I decided to buy my Mpx200 back then.
Have a nice first day of the new year
Lorenzo
This post has been edited by elviaitalia: Jan 1 2006, 10:28 AM