For the last two years I have had a UTStarcom PPC 6700 Smartphone. It was great, I enjoyed it and I would recommend it to anyone. Mine finally developed terminal touch screen failure. Certain parts of the screen would no longer react to being touched no matter how hard.
It came with Windows Mobile 5 and I had added a half dozen or so must have utilities that I always seem to find. AIRoboForm for PPC, SplashID for PPC and Battery Pack Pro were on top of the list, as well as Windows Live Search. The phone happily sync'd with Outlook and other programs keeping my appointments, tasks and contacts in order.
I was also able to use the Spring EV-DO network, or any handy WiFi access point to surf the web or send and receive email when away from my office. All in all I was pretty satisfied with the phone. So I was sad when I realized that the screen failure was rendering it less than useful.
Off to Sprint I went, after all I was paying 7 bucks a month for the "Total Equipment Protection" plan right? Well much to my surprise the Sprint rep took one look, said yep, "It's broken", and "we don't sell those anymore, is it okay to give you a PPC 6800?"
"Of course!" says I, with a grin from ear to ear! So now I am the proud owner of an HTC Mogul PPC 6800 with Windows Mobile 6.0 Professional, all Vista looking and shiny! A quick zap of my data off the old PPC
6700 and a sync with my 6800 and I was right back in action!
The new phone sports a few other improvements, like WiFi G and B instead of just B, my home router is now happily set to "G Only" and pumping much faster connections than when it was running in mixed mode. The form factor is nicer too, no more stubby antenna to worry about. And the keyboard slide is spring loaded so when it opens it does so with a satisfying "thunk"!
It came with Windows Live out of the box, and had a newer version of Messenger as well. So now I can happily IM whenever I want again! And lo! The screen works! Everywhere! It, like the 6700 has Windows Media Player, and can play music just fine. But I mostly use it to listen to podcasts. The audio quality is fine for me, and it paired easily with my Bluetooth headset.
All in all, the 6800 is the 6700 done right in my opinion! A great device that combines the best PDA features with a decent phone. And as a bonus I can easily write my own programs for it so it is a geek toy all the way. Oh yeah, it came with Java pre-installed as well and I still have over a Gig of RAM/ROM left counting the storage card, so plenty of room to add programs in!
Cheers,
Robert Porter