Posted by axxxr
Smart Phones
Enter the faster messenger
The Sierra Wireless Voq Professional phone, a Microsoft Windows Mobile-based handset (so it features Pocket Internet Explorer, Outlook, Windows Media player etc), is to go on sale in the next few months. At first it looks like a traditional, if rather large, phone. Yet flip open its number pad and there's a Qwerty keyboard. Users are unlikely to smash the 30 words a minute barrier, but the domed keypads proved sturdy enough to halve the time it took this novice to bash out an email.
The Voq's other trump card is its My Voq software, which fires up each time the keypad is opened. As soon as the user types a couple of keystrokes, the system offers access to a range of contacts, applications and even websites sharing those letters. Despite this, the phone is too chunky for the consumer market. However, the keypad, software and compatibility with both virtual private networks and enterprise email systems such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes should make it a hit with business users.
Posted by mmsman
that's kinda old..... and ugly.....
Posted by axxxr
Hence the title "Professional Phone" not for general consumer use!
Posted by 50Cent
hmm...interesting design. as you say not for consumer use!
Posted by axxxr
No mate i did'nt say that i said "GENERAL CONSUMER USE"
Maybe u should read it again!!
Posted by 50Cent
oh soooooory! (v.sarcastic)
Posted by axxxr
Twista this Forum is for Grown Ups!!
Posted by 50Cent
Posted by axxxr
Posted by mmsman
ok guys you can make it! just three more posts like that and you are in garbage!
btw: i meant that this phone is actually old it's been announced at least 6 months ago.....
Posted by axxxr
Old but yet to be released!!...In a couple of months to be exact!!
Posted by 50Cent
why would they announce it ages befoe its released??
Posted by axxxr
Coz thats what mobilephone companies do!..For example the Neonode!!,,Announced 2 years ago still hasnt appeared on the market..But generally in most cases mobile phones are announced months b4 release date!!
Posted by 50Cent
wow 2 years, whats the point of waiting so long?? People will just loose interest and buy something else that seems to be newer...if you get what i mean.
Posted by axxxr
Yeh thats true!!..Even i dont understand why these companies do that!
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[ This Message was edited by: axxxr on 2004-03-06 19:38 ]
Posted by mmsman
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yeah but you also don't see people announcing z1010 or do you
Posted by 50Cent
yeah but the Z1010 is too good to miss.
Posted by mmsman
d'oh!
Posted by axxxr
Voq wins award
Sierra Wireless Voq Professional Phone™ wins Excellence in Product Innovation Award
British Columbia Technology Industries Association gives the 2004 award for superior innovation to the Voq Professional Phone at annual industry gala.
Vancouver, B.C. - June 9, 2004 - Sierra Wireless (Nasdaq: SWIR; TSX: SW) announced today the Voq Professional Phone was awarded the Excellence in Product Innovation Award from the British Columbia Technology Industries Association (BC TIA), at a ceremony last night in Vancouver. The annual award acknowledges a superior innovation or discovery in advanced technology and demonstrates an alternative solution or a next stage development in technology.
Click Here to read the full release.
Posted by axxxr
The Voq is now available for sale in NL through the carrier KPN. They are selling for only $120 with a two year contract for voice and data which is quite a deal. I have searched their site high and low and can't find it right now but I would guess it will be there soon or maybe it is just that I can't understand a think that are saying because there is no English version of the KPN site that I could find.
http://www.kpn.com/
Posted by axxxr
Product Review:
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Posted by 50Cent
i would expect it to be much more expensive! how come only $120! thats 65.1270 GBP (no i didnt do that in my head, currency converter
)
Twista
Posted by axxxr
Its a $120 when u sign up to a 2 year voice and data contract..why should it be any more expensive?its a good deal i reckon.
Posted by 50Cent
ahh right i missed that 2 year contract bit
silly me.
Twista
Posted by axxxr
The Register Review
It's the $64m question for smart-phone designers: where do you put the keyboard? Some, like Nokia, have dispensed with it altogether, falling back on the standard texting-centric numeric pad - or fitted it laterally inside the casing, a la the Communicator. Others have stretched their devices to accommodate a larger QWERTY pad, Blackberry-fashion.
When Sierra Wireless began showing off its Voq Pro handset, around about a year ago, it had one of the most novel solutions to this problem that I'd seen so far. The bottom third of the candy bar handset folds open right to left to reveal a rather good hard, calculator-style alphanumeric key lay-out: QWERTY with a separate numeric row above it - no need for a number-shift key here, I'm very pleased to say - and plenty of symbol characters just an Alt-key press away.
There's one major drawback: the keyboard's asymmetrically relative to the screen. With half of the keys poking out beyond the body of the handset, the Voq Pro keyboard isn't a good device for single-finger usage. It's rather uncomfortable to hold in your left hand and type with your right index finger. Swapping the phone from hand to the other is better, but still doesn't feel quite right - typing keys on the left-hand half seems somehow disassociated with what's going on on the screen. It's much better, however, when used for two-thumb typing, and here it almost rivals the various Blackberries and the Treo 600 family.
Having spent some time with a production Voq Pro rather than briefly playing with a prototype a year ago, I found that my impression of the handset's keyboard hadn't changed much. What has changed in the intervening 12 months is the number of alternative keyboard mechanisms that have come out of other handset makers' design departments. Nokia has shipped the 6820 with a more symmetrical keyboard, Sony Ericsson has equipped the P900 series with a small but serviceable QWERTY layout, RIM has its phone-sized 7100 series out and Siemens is about to ship the SK65 with is rotating keyboard.
All of them, like the Voq Pro before them, cram a working QWERTY layout into a standard candy bar form-factor, but they've made a better job of it. In short, the Voq Pro has been out-evolved already.
It's not helped by its retro styling. The Voq Pro is a large handset fashioned from straight lines, angles and a shallow curves. It looks and feels like a handset circa 1994 not 2004, an impression reinforced by the metallised plastic material from which it's made. There's no camera, though the phone ships with MMS software. And while an infrared port is provided in top of the device, the absence of Bluetooth is a big drawback.
So too is the memory card slot. While the opportunity to boost the Voq Pro's 32MB internal memory - just under 25MB of which is available to the user for both RAM and storage - is clearly a good thing, the design of the card slot leaves a lot to be desired. Located on the left-hand side of the handset, the slot sits amid a tight curve between the narrowest part of the handset and the thickest. The result is you've got only half the width of the card to push against. Worse, you have to push the card so far in before it engages the locking mechanism, it takes an age to get in or to release it for removal. Indeed, I had to push my card in with a flat-bladed screwdriver to extract it.
Given the slot's proximity to the battery hatch, heaven only knows why Sierra didn't just put the memory card connector under the power pack, next to the SIM slot, the way everyone else does. The battery itself is moulded onto the hatch and is easy to remove. It's a 1050mAh job and yields a decent smart phone-standard charge duration. No complaints there.
Inside the phone is a 200MHz Intel XScale PXA262 processor. It's getting a little long in the tooth, this chip, but the Voq Pro didn't feel sluggish. My recent review of HTC's 'Blue Angel' PocketPC phone was criticised in one quarter for failing to point out that the machine's use of a 400MHz PXA263 processor rather than more up to date PXA270 was a major drawback. I disagree, and I don't think the Voq Pro needs a significantly faster CPU either. Sure, they'd be nice to have, no question, but do they need them? They do not.
The Voq Pro's software goes a long way to compensate you for the failings and idiosyncrasies of the hardware. The Voq Pro runs Windows Mobile 2003 for Smartphone, first edition rather than second. But it still provides the crucial personal information management and phone tools that the more recent version offers. To the standard Inbox, Internet Explorer and MSN Messenger comms applications, Sierra has added an MMS client, jMMS Messaging; and it's bundled Westtek's ClearVue Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint, image and PDF document readers, ready to cope with email attachments.
Opening up the keyboard or pressing the blue tick button beneath the phone's navigation joystick and between the usual Home, back and call make and break buttons activates the MyVoq utility. It's essentially a smart search system that simultaneously compares what you're typing - numbers or words - against your contacts, notes, Internet Explorer Favourites and the results of previous searches. As you type, MyVoq lists matching database entries on the screen, pruning the list as you enter extra characters to narrow the search. It's a very fast way of getting to the right information without knowing, say, someone's full name. It's also got a built in calculator.
There are flaws: MyVoq doesn't search on all the fields of the contacts database, alas, so you can't search by email address or phone number, for example. And it's not smart enough to check against contacts stored on your SIM card. Nor does it peek into your calendar to help you quickly find that meeting you've got with your boss, but you can't quite remember when it is. It doesn't scan emails either, at least not the ones grabbed via the OS' own Inbox app.
Alongside MyVoq, Sierra has installed VoqMail, its corporate-oriented push-style email service that requires an IMAP4 mail server rather than POP3. The handset ships with the personal version of VoqMail, though some corporate-oriented VoqMail Pro will run for a short period, in a demo mode. VoqMail in either form is geared to deliver email continuously, push-fashion, and to minimise bandwidth at the same time, limiting not only how much you spend in GPRS fees but reducing the how long the radio is running for, thus conserving battery life.
VoqMail neatly tied into MyVoq, which can be used as a quick email composer, but since I was using a generic POP3 account, which VoqMail doesn't support, I couldn't use MyVoq for writing one-line emails either. Despite MyVoq's lack of integration with Inbox, that's nevertheless where you read mail coming in via VoqMail.
Verdict
I tried to like the Voq Pro, but while the handset won my applause for its keyboard, VoqMail and to a lesser extend MyVoq, its clunky, crude look and feel as a phone - it's as if Sierra ran out of time and had to ship the prototype rather than the refined handset it hoped to offer - raised a veritable chorus of disapproval. The lack of a camera doesn't bother me much, but the missing Bluetooth is certainly a deal-breaker.
If you particularly want a phone the offers a keyboard and a candy bar form-factor, the Sony Ericsson P910i, Siemens SK65 and Nokia 6820 offer better-designed handsets and, bought through a mobile phone network, at a much better price. If it's just the form-factor you like, try the Nokia's 6600 or the Orange SPV c500/i-mate SP3 - both compensate for the lack of a QWERTY keypad with Bluetooth.
The Voq Pro is flawed, but it's not a terrible product. The trouble is, as these examples show, it's too little, too late. ®
Sierra Wireless Voq Pro
Rating 60%
Pros — Good keyboard with separate numeric row; quick, cross-application searching system; bandwidth and power efficient email software
Cons — Crude, retrograde handset design; no Bluetooth support; no camera; limited memory
Price £360/$600 without connection
More info The Voq website: www.voq.com
Posted by axxxr
Voq smartphone is dead