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Audiovox
SMT5600
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| Overview | |
| Quick review of Audiovox SMT 5600 I purchased this phone because of all of the high praise I had read in personal reviews of the phone. While some of the praise is accurate, they fail to mention its major shortcoming. I never had a crash or any problems with Smartphone 2003 software and the build quality and feel are excellent. Signal pickup was very good and the screen is sharp and readable. Battery life is also outstanding for a Smartphone device, easily besting the Blackberry 7100t and approaching the BB 7230. The size is just right with a good hand feel and easy to use numeric key pad. The five way rocker is hard to use as is the three way volume control. All the other keys are just fine. Where it falls down is in audio volume. The volume is so low that it is hard to hear in anything but the quietest environment unless you turn on the speaker phone. Then, as a speakerphone it is only adequate as a phone. The volume is just not there for a speakerphone. You have to be right next to it. Unfortunately this volume problem carries over to a Bluetooth headset as well. On the other hand the MP3 playback with Media player 10 has plenty of volume. This indicates that the phone is capable of producing the volume. While I found the OS to be stable and really liked most aspects of this phone I finally decided to return it to Cingular. I searched high and low on the Internet for a fix for the low volume problem and i asked Cingular if they had a patch or upgrade to the firmware that would solve the problem. They said no. Posts on HoFo and XDA-Developers elicited no responses. Apparently there are people willing to suffer the poor audio for the other features. I am not.
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| Results | |
| I did not perform a complete extensive review as I might normally do because the volume was in my opinion unusable. Therefore my into to this review covers the phone. | |
| Conclusion | |
| It could be a great Smartphone if they would fix the poor audio level problem. In every other respect this was a really good Smartphone with a solid feel, good build quality, nice screen, decent battery life, lots of software available and pretty solid OS. The sound level is too low to be usable in anything but a quiet environment. The speakerphone is useless as both volume level is too low and microphone seems unable to properly pick up your voice unless you are on top of it. | |
