Glance VX7100

I have noticed some quirks on several pieces of hardware that I own. So I thought I’d post them. I will start with my Dash Express GPS for my car.

My Dash Express has a few minor quarks that I’ve noticed. If I have it running on battery power regardless if it has a lock on GPS satellites to know its coordinates on the globe when it is plugged into the car it will stop attempting to route me to my requested destination. I’ve also noticed that it assumes whatever direction you are traveling in is always forward, not a major issue but it can be confusing if you just backed out of a parking stall & you forgot about this feature.

I have also noticed that when you do not have Internet on it as all Dash Express GPS units should now be, if you let it turn off on its own when it looses an outside power source it will have the wrong time most likely. The solution to this issue is when it asks you to “shut down” you tell it no & then go into settings & select the option “turn off and power down device”, then hit “ok”. It will take longer to boot back up, but if you want it to switch between day & night mode automatically it is the only way to do it, that I have seen or figured out.

On to my old LG Glance phone, which to my knowledge was only available on Verizon wireless. They decided it was a great idea to make a phone that can take pictures, but it can only share them by sending text messages to more capable phones. This causes several issues that I can think of. One is the pictures have to be relatively small to send as a text so they may be at a lower resolution then when you took the picture. Two if you don’t have a texting plan the text part costs 20¢ which can add up quickly, also they seem to think that this is competitive when Net10 only charges at most 5¢ for a text message. Third as it has a media attachment unless you have a data plan you get to pay an additional 60¢ for sending the picture. So you have to pay 80¢ for every picture you take that you want to get off of the phone & I have yet to find an easy & free way to get them off that phone. That’s right you can’t even use Bluetooth to send the picture to another Bluetooth enabled device. For sending media texts I’d expect Net10 to be cheaper as the data costs are 10¢ per minute you are online.

Talking about cell phones reminds me of my old Motorola C130 had a feature that I loved & I haven’t seen in any phone I’ve owned since, is that I could schedule it to turn off & back on at certain times of the day. This was really important for a period in my life when I was working graveyards & I’d have friends & family trying to call me during the day when I was trying to sleep. It is also the last phone I’ve owned that had a sensible set of keys to unlock the phone. I liked needing to press two keys that were far away from each other to unlock the phone. I liked this because it never was unblocked accidentally, while my LG Glance would not only unlock but the default configuration would have it trying to connect to the Internet frequently which was annoying as I didn’t want a data plan with that phone.

For the issue of not being able to schedule the phone turning off & on the best solution I could find was to either remember to turn the phone off everyday, or give everyone my Google voice number & tell them they can reach me at that number. I did that mainly because I can get voicemail for free with a transcribed version available & I can also tell Google to not ring certain phones at certain times of the day. It isn’t perfect as I currently can only tell Google Voice on weekdays & weekends for my schedule. Since I don’t work Monday through Friday their current offering lacks some of the features I want.

My thoughts on the Samsung T401G so far

Yesterday a package arrived with two Samsung T401G phones in it. Both are Net10 phones. I was able to activate them without any major issues other than they only received 10 minutes each when they said on their website at “Getting Started / Activation/Reactivation” in the FAQs. “Q. Will I receive any free minutes for Activating a Net10 phone? A. Yes, when Activating your Net10 phone you will receive 300 free minutes and 60 days of active service.”

Because of that in the FAQs I called them up to talk to support, which I’m afraid was sent to Mexico or they hire people who speak English as a second language with Spanish as their first language. At first they said that the 10 minutes is the way things were, but I pointed them to the FAQ that I just mentioned. After pointing that out they talked to a supervisor, after which they decided that they should see that I get the minutes that I was promised. They had me enter several codes into my phone, but none of them did anything that I could tell. So for both phones she had to add the minutes from their end.

While I was annoyed that I had to talk to them I was glad that they were willing to correct their mistake. So I did give her a nice review when we finished as she fixed the issue that caused me to call up.

On to the phone itself. Sorry but I thought I needed to included the earlier stuff as it does relate to this phone.

The phones had the SIM card already installed in the phone. (This was easier than my first Net10 phone as I had to find & install it myself.)
The battery was not installed in the phone. (I expected this as there are laws causing this to happen.)
They had a paper with the number from the SIM card on it in a font size that you could read.
I had to activate the phone online or over the phone. (I activated the first phone online & the second one on the phone. Trust me do it online if you can, unless you speak fluent Spanish that is than you might be just fine on the phone.)
Proprietary charging port instead of the common USB connector on most other brands of phones. (I expected this issue as Samsung is known to do this.)
The port for headphones & hands free uses the port I just mentioned so you need an adapter if you want to use the port or a device that supports it.
It does have Bluetooth. This allows you to use a Bluetooth hands free device as well as send various other items over Bluetooth. Just remember that when you have Bluetooth enabled you are using more battery.
It supposed to have approximately 15 days of standby & approximately 5 hours of talk time. (I just got it so I can’t say on that one yet.)
It has a mirror just above the lens so that you can have an idea of what your self-portrait will look like. (My wife thought it might be a flash when she pointed it out to me.)
It is thicker than my last phone which was the LG Glance. (This is because it has a “QWERTY” keyboard that slides out.)
It has a port for a Micro SD card on the side of it, which means you don’t have to remove the battery to access the card. (Since it doesn’t support SDHC you are limited to 2 GB SD cards, which unfortunately the only cards we had were either to large or only 512 MB. So we may have to get new cards at some point.)
It is supposed to have a speaker phone, but I haven’t found that yet. (I saw one comment on a blog mention that you had to be in a call to use the speaker phone.)
The camera is 1.3 Megapixel with no flash. (If you need a flash get a camera if you are going to use this phone.)
Also because it has such a low resolution for the camera I don’t expect it to have decent video output. (I’ve seen complaints about this, but I haven’t tried as I’ve never worried about taking video with a phone.)
You only have about 40 MB of internal memory. (So you can’t have all the apps, pictures, & ringtones you want on it without a SD card.)
As should be expected if your ringtone is larger than 300 KB you can not use the MP3 as a ringtone. (For me this has been close to 20 seconds, but at higher bit rates it has been shorter.)
In the calendar you can set up “Anniversaries”. (I was able to enter my birthday, my wife’s birthday, & the day we were married. What I liked about this is I was able to enter the years for out birthdays, while on my last phone I could only get a recurring event on those days as I couldn’t send the phone back to when I was born.)

That’s all that I can think of so far. If I find anything else out or make a discovery about these phones I’ll make another post.