I bought this little phone; the technical specifications are at 👻 The phone catalog is gone, even though mobilmania.cz is still alive. or 👻 This link is now just a memory, just as the blog’s name suggests..
Another page that finally convinced me to buy it: 👻 This link is deader than Flash Player.. You can look up the rest about this phone on Google https://www.google.com/sorry/index?continue=https://www.google.com/search%3Fie%3DUTF-8%26oe%3DUTF-8%26sourceid%3Dnavclient%26gfns%3D1%26q%3Dvodafone%2B845%26sei%3DyUOLatOsEsKL7NYPr5KY2Q8&q=EgSTTvBzGMmHrdQGIjDx3YrpS8jYG-bToBrExzashfLOcJqpdOyuit4xgZaAfje8vgkwYiKuWWeI5Q4kW6cyAVJaAUM . I won’t describe the purchase here, even though it was quite an experience too, at least for me :-). I’ll describe the phone, what I don’t like and what bothers me. The following text will be copied to Mobilmania as a user review.
I guess I had idealized Android; I expected more from it. The first things I installed were these basic apps that I knew from the PC or from the internet:
These apps came preinstalled:
- Alarm Clock – By default there are 3 alarms, and their number is probably unlimited. Each alarm shows an analog clock. The settings include: alarm volume (even at the highest level it is a pathetic little rasp), whether to ring in silent mode, snooze time and side button behavior while ringing.
- Dialer – Opens the call manager on the dialer tab, i.e. where you can enter a number to call.
- Documents To Go – A trial version for viewing MS Office files. The full version can also edit and create files. It also supports pdf files, and in the full version including creating them.
- Email – For Seznam, all I had to do was enter my login and password for Seznam; Android figured out the
pop3and probably thesmtpaddresses on its own. - Facebook – A Facebook client. Right from the app you can take a photo and upload it to the FB server. Otherwise the menu has these icons: News Feed, Friends, Photos, Take Photo, Profile and Notifications.
- Fm Radio – It won’t work without a headset. During the first auto-tune, all stations get saved. The radio is one of the few programs that can be turned off from within the program itself. Stations can be renamed or removed. You can also enter a different frequency and tune step by step or automatically. There is also a button for switching between the speaker and headphones, but the speaker is so quiet that you can barely hear it.
- Camera – The photos match the quality of the lens. They are overexposed and have poor color balance.
- Gallery – Right from the gallery you can take a photo or record a video. There are some options in the settings. I only have one photo here, in the
Camerafolder. - Gmail – The name says it all. Just enter your Google account in the app settings and Gmail works right away. The menu has refresh, compose, accounts, view labels, search and settings. I don’t think any of that needs further explanation.
- Music – The library can be sorted by artists, albums, songs and playlists. The only menu option is whether to shuffle. Since I have no memory card and music can’t be copied to the phone’s internal memory, I don’t have a single MP3 here.
- Calendar – It syncs with the Google calendar, of course.
- Calculator – The simplest kind, with big buttons.
- Contacts – Opens the phone app on the contacts page. Syncing with Google is a given.
- Maps – The menu has Search, Directions, Layers, My Location, Join Latitude and More, which contains items like Google Labs, Switch account, etc.
- Market – That one word says it all.
- Settings – I’ll write a separate article someday, but in short: I expected much more from Android, just as I did from Linux.
- OMA CP – This is for receiving some kind of messages, but I don’t know which ones, maybe network status messages.
- Notes – Simple, it lets you write a note or delete it.
- SMS and MMS – Handles MMS the same way as SMS.
- File Manager – The program has the folders
Pictures,Recordings,Videos,ContactIcons,lost+found. You can work with the clipboard, search, create a new folder or check memory status. - Google Talk – A fairly sophisticated client. It can show all friends, add a new friend, and show blocked ones. I was pleased that the phone can vibrate when a new message arrives. There are also options for whether to show up as Android and whether to automatically set your status to away.
- Twidroid Pro – I haven’t even tried launching it; it’s going to be uninstalled if that’s possible.
- Call Log – a list
- Youtube – I haven’t tried it; with my 100 MB FUP and GPRS I’d be in for a treat.
- Sound Recorder – Records sound through the microphone.
I immediately installed:
- C:Geo – A great app for finding geocaches.
- Endomondo – For when you need to measure a stretch you have walked or ridden and also record it on a map.
- Foursquare – A geosocial network. I like it better than Gowalla.
- Gowalla – Like Foursquare, a slightly different system.
- Meebo im – A messenger for several types of IM.
- Skype – IM communication
- Twitter – The official Twitter client.
- Voice Search – Voice search from Google. Some words it finds well, others not so well. The program still needs a lot of work.
- Disp Wifi Info – Shows information on the following items: IP, SSID, Link, MAC, Gate, Mask, DNS1, DNS2.
- Disp Wifi IP – Shows the same as Disp Wifi Info, but also in the menu.
- Wifi OnOff – If Wi-Fi is on, it turns it off, and vice versa.
- WIFI Power Manager – Whether the phone should switch it off when the phone is running on battery.
Stopping programs after boot:
Auto Task Manager – Lets you stop either programs right after boot or running programs. However, it doesn’t show all running programs. For me it only showed Auto Task Manager and Home. And when I closed Home, “nothing happened” anyway, because the phone immediately loaded Home back into memory. At least now I know what takes so much time during boot.
Autostart Killer – Right after startup it asks me for a password, but I have forgotten it. All I know is that, out of caution, I didn’t give the program the real password I use everywhere, and that it was a single letter, but I don’t feel like trying them all.
Startup Manager – The program behaves a bit strangely. At first it showed me only one screen with an Add start application button. After closing it with the Back key and launching it again, all I ever got from the program was a blank screen. After a while the programs I had selected in it appeared. With a tap on a program I got a menu asking whether to launch or delete it.
Battery:
Battery Threeee – The program’s menu has the buttons Stupid mode!, Stupid Voice, Toast off, visible notification icon, autostart. At the bottom there is a row of 3 buttons: Start, Stop and Close. Whether it announces low battery or what, I don’t know. I searched the internet, but without success: 👻 Google shut down the goo.gl URL shortener, so the link is dead.
Disp Battery… – The same as Disp wifi. It shows useful information about the battery, such as Plugged, Present, Status, Health, Level, Voltage, Temperature, Technology. Just for comparison, my temperature is 34 °C. One icon shows the information in the menu as well, the other opens a new window with 2 buttons for closing and copying to the clipboard.
Other:
PicMe – After accepting the license agreement, it says Failed starting the server and that I need root privileges. I don’t need a program like that, so it’s going away. I’m not letting anyone wreck my phone.
Speed Loader – It loads automatically after boot. The first screen contains just one button, Configure. Here you check the programs you want on Speed Loader’s first screen.
Start – The only setting is whether to launch at startup. It automatically organizes the entries in the system into these groups: Favorite, Recent, Shortcut, Application, Live Folder, User Folder, All. Unfortunately I didn’t figure out how to add a program to favorites, and only the recent and application categories were filled.
Voice Comm Lite – A program for trying out the Voice Recognize feature, if you don’t want to run a search after every input. I have the feeling the program is more successful than Google Voice Search. However, it couldn’t transcribe the Czech phrase for “this is a beautiful program”; no matter how hard I tried, I always got “what is a beautiful program”. But of course it knows the word “this” on its own. I don’t know whether this program was to blame, but while I was using it GPRS was running.
Voice2Text – The program shows a history of the last 100 voice-to-text transcriptions. Any item can be deleted. The program takes a little while to start recording. After you speak, the item is sent to the default output, which fortunately can be set permanently; the options include pretty much everything, from Bluetooth to other programs to simply copying to the clipboard, which is what I chose too.
Auto Unlock Trial Edition – The main menu item is Enable auto unlock.
What bothers me:
– Limited settings – for example, you can’t disable the unlock screen, or set how long before the lock kicks in. I put the phone in my pocket, take it out and have to unlock it.
– Some apps can’t be uninstalled , even though I removed every app I possibly could
This is just a first, very preliminary version of the article; right now I have other things to do that are more important. At some point in the future I will revise and expand this article, so I can get a picture of which ones are important, because I will delete most of them.