Audiovox XV6700 Handheld

This review is for the Verizon XV6700 (a repackaged Audiovox 6700).

The claimed talk times for this phone are close to accurate, but the PDA aspect of the phone uses substantial battery power. I charge my phone every night, leave for work at 8AM and frequently have a dead phone by 5PM even if I don't use it for anything at all. Some days I have a dead phone by 9:30 AM. Perhaps the reason is that any event (e.g. a calendar appointment) wakes up the phone, which then lights up the display, and then wakes it up again a few minutes later when you don't "dismiss" the event. This is often the case when the phone is still in the holster on one's belt and you don't realize the problem.

I called customer service and they gave me a configuration option to suppress this behavior (settings/ notifications/ reminders/ display message). It doesn't seem to work. But even if it did, it would compromise the utility of that feature, which is an important part of having a PDA phone.

If bluetooth is turned on, it's even worse still. I haven't been able to use bluetooth on this phone, except when in the car with it plugged into the car power.

Another serious problem is that the easiest to hit button on the outside of the phone redials the last number. Many times I have accidentally called someone (by bumping the phone in the holster), not realized I have done so (because I'm not looking at the phone), and then had them overhear a personal conversation. Customer support provided a fix for this, but it requires stylus-tapping an on-screen button every time you stop using the phone, then two more taps any time you want to start using it. This is so burdensome it rarely happens in practice. If it were just a button to "lock" the phone, that would be a bit better. The phone has to be "on" (it's always on, but the screen turned on) for the redial to work, but the aforementioned event pop-up problem causes the phone to come "on" unexpectedly, thus enabling the redial button.

The OS frequently freezes, especially when multiple events are queued up (I cannot compare it to a Treo though). Under heavy PDA use, it probably freezes once per day. Under ordinary phone use, almost never. I've had to remove the battery in a movie theatre just to turn the phone off because the UI for doing so was frozen.

Whenever I see other people with the same phone I ask them about their experiences. All have complained that battery life is way too short.

I use the phone to check various personal IMAP email servers. It works well for allowing me access to multiple email servers (not owned by Verizon) and properly synchronize with the IMAP protocol, as well as control large downloads.

The baby Internet Explorer is only fair. It views most web pages, but has a lot of problems, especially with web forms and executable content. A persistent problem is that it reports a narrow screen width which causes pages with frames to leave the fixed width advertising banner consuming 90% of the screen and the actual content squeezed into an unreadable 30 pixels or so. The screen _is_ narrow by desktop standards, but there needs to be some other left-right scrolling mode. The existing ones don't seem to do the job quite right.

The phone does have a lot of great PDA features, and many external programs are available for it. A trivial example is always having a cool game with me (on a screen big enough to actually play it). But when actively using the PDA, the phone will only last for 30-60 minutes. So, it's not much use but for a quick appointment or email check. As a car phone (when using the car battery), it's better if that's the mode you use your phone in.