QTEK 9000 Smart Phone – A Critical Experience Report

As an owner of the Windows Mobile 5.0 Smart Phone QTEK 9000, you will definitely live on the bleeding edge of portable communications technology. Here is my personal opinion after nine months of use: Why I think that it is a great device on one hand and why I would not recommend it to all consumers.

Edit: Thanks a lot for the emails from readers who sent in different brand names for the QTEK 9000. The device seems to be available from different mobile carriers under these names: Dopod 900, E-Plus PDA IV, Grundig GR980, HTC Universal, i-mate JASJAR, T-Mobile MDA Pro, O2 XDA4, O2 Xda Exec, Orange SPV M5000, Vodafone v1640, Vodafone VPA IV.

The QTEK 9000 is a mobile phone and a PDA, rolled into one “PDA Phone”. Its big advantages are a large display and a keyboard that makes writing short to medium texts easy. If one considers the device’s operating system Windows Mobile 5.0 as a bonus or a hindrance will depend on the point of view. In any case, it guarantees the availability of a large number of add-on applications.

Features
The device has all the Personal Information Manager (PIM) categories built-in, like calendar, contacts, task scheduler, notes, and email, and these can be synchronized with Outlook by connecting the PC and the QTEK 9000. You can communicate to other devices via WLAN, Bluetooth and USB, as well as UMTS, GPRS or GSM for your mobile phone provider, supporting SMS and MMS. A 1.3 megapixels built-in camera with flash for taking photographs or videos (or – in theory – for video conferencing), a headphone plug and a SDIO / MMC card reader for mass storage top off its hardware features. You interact with the device by either pressing one of the hardware buttons (e.g. to accept an incoming call), or by tapping elements of the Windows Mobile 5.0 user interface with the enclosed pen, which works as a mouse replacement.

Technical Background for Report
So that you can compare your milage with mine, the basis for this experience report is:
- 1200 contacts
- 1200 calendar items
- 150 tasks
- 100 notes
- synchronization of the device with one PC (Outlook 2003) with ActiveSync 4.2 via USB
- no email synchronization (I do not need this)
- no old SMSs stored on the device
- no media files stored
- no additional software installed

For this setup, the free memory as shown on the QTEK 9000 is:
Free program memory: 16 MB (of 50 MB)
Free data memory: 23 MB (of 44 MB)

The free memory shown is misleading to some extent. With 23 MB free data memory, you would expect to have a large reserve. When trying to sort my tasks by a different column header, though, it happens that I receive an “out of memory” error.

 

Display
The display has a high resolution for a Smart Phone, with 640 x 480 pixels and 64k colors. It appears very bright, as long as you use it indoors and have the backlight on. Do not try to read the display outside, though, when the day is slightly sunny, or when it is even just a bright cloudy day. You will not be able to distinguish anything on the screen, even with the brightness maximized.

Keyboard
The QTEK 9000’s keyboard has very small keys, but due to their round tops, they are very easy to use when you take the device in both hands and use your thumbs for typing. One-handed use of the keyboard should be pretty difficult, due to its size. International versions of the device are available which have provisions for typing special characters (like accented characters or umlauts), by pressing certain easy-to-learn key sequences.

Size And Weight
With a weight of 10 ounces (285 grams), the QTEK 9000 is as heavy as a mobile phone and a PDA combined. The screen can be opened like a laptop screen, you can rotate the opened screen horizontally by 180 degrees, and you can make phone calls with the screen closed (flat with no display visible) or opened and rotated (flat with display visible); you will not choose the last option, though, as you have to clean the screen after having it pressed to your cheek during a phone call. The size of the device is that of an extremely bulky PDA. Better plan ahead how you will transport your device, as it is too heavy to be comfortably worn in any of your pockets, be it shirt, trousers or jacket. Leather cases with belt pouches are available from third-party companies.

Correcting Temporary Hardware/Software Problems
When something goes wrong, in many cases you can solve the problem by doing a soft reset (essentially a reboot, taking several minutes), keeping all your stored data, or in bad cases by executing a hard reset, which resets the state of the flash memory to factory conditions, erasing all stored user data. These reset processes have worked flawlessly for me in all cases. Obviously, though, even a good reset funtion cannot fix persistent software problems.

Synchronization With PC Outlook
The synchronization with Outlook, using Microsoft’s ActiveSync, scores highly on my list. Although changing, adding and deleting calendar items and tasks on both the QTEK 9000 and on the PC, I noticed only one case were one task was lost, and very few duplications. The synchronization never failed, and only once the synchronization hung, which could be corrected by doing a soft reset on the device. I consider this an outstanding result, compared to other comparable sync hardware and software, like Sony Ericsson’s P800/P910i sync.

QTEK 9000 As A Media Device
The QTEK 9000 supports the usual media file formats, as it has Windows Media Player 10 pre-installed. The display restricts the size of a video, obviously, but for a Smart Phone, watching a video is comparably comfortable, and watching digitally broadcasted TV would definitely be attractive, for one or two spectators. The speakers produce a sound that allows to understand speech very well, but only the desperate would want to listen to the tinny sound when playing music. Connecting headphones is an option, but even there the sound is extremely flat. The device cannot compete with even a low-cost mp3 player.

Software Performance And Software/Hardware Interaction
Sometimes, when software does not work, and what does not work is related to some hardware component, like a speaker, a hardware button or the device’s flash memory, it is difficult to judge for a user what causes the problem, hardware or software. So, I am summing up all possibly hardware related aspects under this topic.

The overall performance is unreliable: often the QTEK 9000 will work with adequate speed, reacting immediately or within a second, at other times it takes up to thirty seconds for the display to even show that a tap on a part of the user interface was recognized; this is with no processor load for applications started in the background, like calendar, task list etc. If this slow-down happens when you are trying to accept a phone call, the caller may already have hung up until he hears your “Hello”. One of the more or less repeatable defects: when a number of event notifications have popped up and you have not acknowledged them by tapping, no further notifications of any kind will be shown or heard. So, if you want to use your QTEK 9000 as an alarm clock for waking up in the morning, you better make sure that you have acknowledged all old messages when you go to bed, or you may be late for work. This stopping of notifications sometimes happens for no apparent reasons, as well, and suddenly you get flooded with notifications when tapping some part of the user interface or when accepting a phone call. Sometimes the clock display decides to no longer update: the time display freezes, and only hours later, after PC syncs, closing and opening the screen or making phone calls, the clock’s display will go back to showing the correct time.

These malfunctions and slow-downs do not happen often enough to make the device completely useless, but often enough to characterize its functions as unreliable.

Hardware Stability
Within nine months of use, I had to send in the device twice for repairs: The phone’s speaker stopped working, so that I no longer heard the caller’s voice. This defect or the opposite (the caller not hearing me speak) is something that still happens now and then, even after the repair, without a clear pattern. A few months later, I opened the screen and saw that a branching crack had developed which left only a small part of the screen readable. It may be that this was the result of a manufacturing problem – I have seen notebook LCD displays crack when you touched them gently, caused by tensions that were introduced during the manufacturing of the display. Or it may be that the display cannot stand repeated light bumps against desk edges, cushioned by a leather casing, in which I am transporting the device when not in use. A third defect, none of the hardware buttons working any longer, could be resolved by a soft reset.

Battery Life Under Real-Life Conditions
The designed way of using the device seems to be: either have it connected to your PC whenever possible, or recharge the battery each night. Especially in cases where your WLAN or UMTS/GPRS connection is shaky, the battery will otherwise be drained very fast. My own experience is that when I travel in my car (thus losing and re-establishing the connection to my phone provider every few miles), I can count on being able to make calls of an overall duration of half an hour to an hour during the day, and still have a sliver of battery charge left at night. If I forget to recharge the device after such a day, though, the device will auto shutdown sometime during the next morning. During my holidays in a region of the world where I could use neither the phone nor the WLAN function, I switched off both and used the QTEK 9000 as an alarm clock and notepad only. Under these conditions, the battery would last for more than a week. Still, as a simple alarm clock, one might find the QTEK 9000 slightly overpriced.

Experience Reports Of Other Users
I have seen raving reviews for the QTEK 9000 written by other users, admittedly quite a lot of them based on the paper specs or a first impression. Also, I know some QTEK 9000 users who are very pleased with their device. Their usage patterns differ from mine, though, in that they all have much less Outlook data stored. Another point is that some users judge the device’s weak points not as harsh as I do, e.g. they may not care if they have to reset the device now and then, just as I consider rebooting my always-on PC now and then as acceptable.

Summary – Your Milage May Vary
My overall summary for the QTEK 9000: If you decide to buy this device, I would suggest:
- you soft reset the phone once a week, to keep it working a bit more reliably
- you are prepared to suffer slow performance, if you have many Outlook data stored
- you make sure that you have a backup phone available, in case your device stops working
It was a painful process for me learning to live with the device’s shortcomings, but in the end I coped with the weak points. After all, would we even notice that we are living on the bleeding edge of communications technology, if it did not hurt a bit now and then?