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Customer Review
- Reviewed in Canada on December 9, 2024I bought this for my Dad, because he's older and really struggling to use his virus-laden smartphone. I didn't realise this is an Android phone when I bought it. I just needed something that worked for phone calls, and receiving text messages.
I tried this with my Freedom Mobile SIM, and his Koodo SIM, both worked great. Call quality is fantastic. Nice, heavy device. I appreciate the ruggedness, and the external screen. Buttons have a nice tactile feel to them. I do miss the simplicity of flip phones, but I digress.
These are the problems I've run into:
The default virtual keyboard is laughably small. No person could ever use this keyboard. On top of that, it was constantly filling in words when I tried to press a letter. I discovered that it had "Glide keyboard" enabled by default (swipe instead of tap to text). After I disabled this, I could at least type out a few names (barely). I did find another 12-key keyboard, and switched to that. It's much better, but still not a good experience. I doubt my Dad can use it with his carpenter hands.
The physical loudspeaker button (I assume that's what it is), does not turn on the loudspeaker during calls. It doesn't seem to do anything except move the cursor focus.
The hang up button doubles as the power button, which is fine, but the icon for it is so small, I can barely see it.
Getting a list of all installed programs was difficult (swipe up on home screen). I found it because I used to work with smartphones a lot. My Dad would never find it. That's not a very friendly feature of Android.
The physical keyboard doesn't seem to be able to type letters out like the old T9 keypads of yesteryear. I would have appreciated that instead of or in addition to the tiny virtual keyboard.
Since I just bought this, I don't know the longevity of it, or the quality of the battery. Batteries do need time to have their charge/discharge characteristics learned by the software. But, in the time I had it, it seemed okay. I cleaned up this phone, and set it up, so it's basically just a cell phone. I think it'll be okay just for that.
Update: My Dad didn't like it. So I used it for a few days and realised, I don't like it either. It's too cumbersome for anything other than phone calls. The operating system is quite slow by today's standards. Webpage load time is slow, viewing pictures is slow. This feels very much like they took Android and slapped it on there, and called it a day. It would have been so much better if they just tied the buttons into the OS somehow.
