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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: slacker711 who wrote (12105)	6/26/2001 3:34:02 PM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 196863

A review of Docomo's video phone.... appelsiini.net Hello All, This is the first time for me to post here, although some of you will know me. I was fortunate enough to get two P2101V FOMAs to test and thought I would share my initial impression of the it here. I haven't had the time to do any thorough examination of the units yet, since I just got them yesterday The phone is big, like some of the older keitai, which may turn some people off, but once they see the screen and look at i-mode on it, I think they will change their minds. I don't know the screen resolution offhand but the pixel granularity appears similar to that of the new Zaurus or the new Sony Clie. The color is also very bright. Definitely the best screen I've ever seen on any mobile. You can change to a smaller font size in the browser which increases the viewable screen width. About 19-20 Japanese characters across max. Almost twice the width of the browser on P503i The download time of i-mode pages is faster, although not as fast as I was expecting ( I understand that the maximum download speed for data is supposed to be 384kbps but is doesn't feel any faster than 64kbps, maybe someone can someone clarify?), and although we are only still looking at regular i-mode pages, the experience feels completely different. Mostly due to the improvement in screen resolution and download speed. I think this slight improvement will appeal to those like myself who demand some level of aesthetics when it comes to viewing contents on a mobile. The interface of the phone is more or less exactly the same as the P503i with the exception that there are menus for the camera and multimedia player. There are two new buttons, one functions as the camera shutter release and another to turn on/off the camera. Using the TV phone is easy enough. Just input the phone number, press the camera shutter release button, this will give you a choice of speed 64K or 32K (64K is the only option with this Beta version) and then press the camera on switch. When the other side gets the call they have to pickup using the camera on/off switch otherwise you will only get voice. Even so, they can turn the camera on or off with this button. This is convenient when you don't want the person you are talking to to see where you are etc. You have to use the ear phone while talking with the TV phone although I haven't tried it with the handsfree function yet. The sound quality is at par or better than CDMA-One, very clear although a bit "tinny". The quality of the TV phone is much better than I expected. There is of course some distortion and if you move the mobile around too much the image gets distorted and breaks apart, but recovers quickly if you keep it still. You can configure the video camera to put priority on rendering image detail or reduce distortion during movement. It is rather stable and I was only cut off once or twice. It was a hit when I brought it to the office yesterday. I showed many people the video phone and their first reaction was. "When can I get one?" which leads me to expect that this type of phone will be more popular than predicted. I suppose for the average person who isn't really interested in mobile technology for technology sake, the reality of seeing and using a video phone like this has more impact than just hearing about the concept. You can use the camera for taking stills and short movies as well. I think there is something like a 300K limit to the amount of data you can save. Unfortunately, you can only attach pics to email taken at the lowest resolution which is 176X144 ( larger size is 352X288 ) and normal quality ( the file size needs to be less than 3K, I think. So if you set the picture quality to high you can only view the image on the phone and can't back it up anywhere else. In the future they should make it so you store all data on the FOMA card. One interesting feature was that when you take a snapshot with the camera, it beeps fairly loudly. Even when you set it to manner mode you can't turn off the sound. I guess this is to prevent perverts from using the phone to take obscene photos on the train. On the down side, The connect time is longer, when making a call it takes about three times longer to get the ringing tone. It also takes more time to connect to i-mode initially as well. Some iAppli could not be downloaded either. When I went to pick up the phones they gave me a three page, double-sided list of all the features that weren't available or ready yet for this release and said that in the final version it would be fixed. I think the iAppli issue was one of them. Also, I had to sign a document to agree that if I damaged or lost the phone I would have to pay 100,000 yen each. DAMN! I'm wondering how much this is going to cost when they actually release it. Regards, Roy Tseng