O2 XDA Zinc reviewed

We know that a lot of you have been following the progress of the XDA Zinc eagerly awaiting its launch here in the UK which is said to be later this month. Well to give you a quick Zinc fix the people over at Kaitech.hk have a review of the device for your reading pleasure.

XDA Zinc

Just before you head off to the review I should warn you that it’s not all rosy and that the device appears to be somewhat buggy:

Unexplainable crashes/freezes, resulting in frustrating soft resets

Character shift on keyboard is very slow: Shift+T reacts more convincingly than Chr+T (which gives you ‘5’)

During testing, I experienced a less-than-smooth 3G video calling experience. Picture was sometimes unlear (with full phone reception), or worse, the machine would hang and lock up

Does anyone miss the “metal, high-pitched” sound from the O2 Mini when it first shipped? If so, then you will be glad to know that the sound has made a comeback! I had to do a double take several times to make sure I wasn’t using a Mini.

No scroll wheel, and no “OK” button by default – the latter can of course be customized, but then you lose the Messaging key. This of course points to another problem: the lack of hardware buttons on the Zinc. But they do have that handy dedicated keylock button…

Bluetooth voice quality when paired with my Samsung WEP410 is noticeably worse than 838Pro. More hisses at close range and less distance allowed before static set in.

Phone application does not respond to hardware keyboard letters. You need to dial using the numbers which reside on the top row (‘1’ = Chr+Q, ‘5’ = Chr+T… which is a real PITA because of the slow Chr-key response time as noted above).

Matt

[Technorati tag(s): smartphone, Pocket PC, Tracy & Matt, XDA Zinc, O2, ASUSTek, Mars 2, SPV]