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Blackberry 7100t |
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| Overview | |||||||||||||||||||||
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As soon as I saw the 7100t I was hooked. It appeared to solve many of the issues with the phone by adding a much better screen and a speakerphone. Having Bluetooth was the added kicker that convinced me to go buy one. I hoped that it would be the 7230 with the better screen and speakerphone and that with the new quad band radio it would have better signal holding capability. The 7100 screen was everything the 7230’s wasn’t with the exception of daylight visibility which is almost non-existent.
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| Results | |||||||||||||||||||||
| The size of this phone was really nice when compared to the other Blackberries though thinner would have been better. SureType was ok for most message typing. Not quite what the 7230 with full QWERTY keyboard offered but a good compromise to cut down width. (All things being equal I will trade thinness for width any day so I can slip it in a pocket without a big bulge) I like many others was disappointed in the lack of full Bluetooth functionality. This shortcoming became really obvious when I wanted to use the Bluetooth with my Lexus built in system. With no way to transfer my phone numbers from the device to the Lexus and no way to manually enter the numbers and names in the Lexus I had to go out and purchase a cheap Bluetooth phone, load my address book into it and use it to transfer my address book into the Lexus. Then return the phone afterward. Not very convenient for entering ones address book. Unfortunately, the T-Mobile service did not improve and the reception capability was actually slightly worse with the 7100t. I had the 7100t and the 7230 unlocked by T-Mobile and they were very accommodating. I liked their customer service even though they often failed to do what they said, but they were always nice about it and sooner or later fixed it. Compared to Nextel customer service that is powerless to do anything for you and will not let you speak to a supervisor it is a huge improvement. I took my work AT&T SIM and tried it on both units. With the 7230 there was no improvement because it lacked the 850MHz band; however, with the 7100t I suddenly had a very usable signal both at home and at work. Yes, it still dropped calls but not as frequently. I was still running the version 3.8 handheld software. Was I now a happy camper? Well, no not exactly. My complaints were as follows: The quality of the case and screen plastic seemed poor and scratched easily. The nylon holster was uncomfortable to wear and the unit is very insecure tending to easily fall out. SureType required a lot of extra steps because we use so many acronyms and constantly having to backspace and make corrections was getting annoying. The responsiveness of the unit to commands was slow and the entering of numbers for DTMF was painfully slow. The aforementioned Bluetooth shortcomings were still present but the worse feature was the lack of reliable communications. At various times it would lose the signal and nothing short of a hard reset would recover the signal. The worst part of this is that you would not know that it had happened and suddenly you would realize that the unit had no signal and was in constant search mode. The convenience of instant push email and phone calls was lost. This happened frequently after being on the USB port charging and after going through a weak signal area. Version 4.0 of the firmware became available and I upgraded to it with high hopes that all of my past problems would be resolved. The biggest improvement I have seen is that it does not lose the ability to recover from a lost signal as frequently and it seems a little more reliable but in my opinion it still has too many short comings. Another upgrade to the firmware has helped solve most of the problems and the phone is now far more reliable. A lost signal does not require a hard reset for it to reconnect. It is still slow but it works much better than before. I used it through many parts of Europe recently and it worked very well for both voice and email. For some reason I never got voice mail notifications and sometimes did not get a missed call notification. | |||||||||||||||||||||
| Conclusion | |||||||||||||||||||||
| All in all it is a decent unit. I can't say that I am fully satisfied because Bluetooth quality is still less than it should be and overall quality is not on par with the 7250 or 7290. Battery life is acceptable but not great. The SureType is just a little too annoying for me as I can type pretty quickly and find it a pain to have to go back and fix words that are incorrect. The browser is just plain too slow and as a result I hardly ever use it. I would conditionally recommend it but I sure can't enthusiastically recommend it. I really liked the 7250 better but the phone was even worse on the 7250. The speaker phone is a great plus for hearing it but it doesn't work very well as a speakerphone and people constantly complain that they cannot hear me even though I can hear them just fine. | |||||||||||||||||||||
