Dopod 585

w00tZzZ! pH34r mY d0p0d 585!! 1t r4xX0RZz and pWnZ!




Wahaha! I finally got my Dopod 585!!

The given accessories in the box consisted of a charger, mini-usb cable, in-ear earphones, a white leather pouch and a small cloth bag which I do not know the reason for it. As promised by Dopod, it is an identical clone of the o2 xPhone IIm, albeit a cheaper one.

The Dopod 585 is clad in white plastic, an ever-growing trend setted by Apple for its iPods. It even has neat buttons dedicated to playing music. I am satisfied with its large 2.2" screen with 65k colours. Switching it on, the red Dopod logo greeted me with its fluttering butterflies and twinkling of sweet music. After around 3 seconds, the important part came in; Windows Mobile booted up with its trademark blue screen and Win Mobile in white. After waiting for 15+ seconds, the main screen appeared. The Menus and everything were quite clear cut and easy to use., though there was not a proper selection screen for apps. There is one screen which appears when you press the first round button on the phone. It shows some commonly used apps, and the 'Album ' file inside is basically a My Documents, but only view image files. If you wanted to search for other docs under my Documents, you had to use the File manager which will then show you all the files in the phone using a tree-branch format. The Bluetooth is a little puzzling, as you will need to switch on your Bluetooth and Beaming function. It does not have any problems receiving but I dont seem to have much success in sending files to my sisters.

The downsides of this phone is that the storage space of the Dopod is miniscule. It has an advertised 64mb, but after adding the Windows Mobile, it is left with around 24 mb. Furthermore Windows Mobile lags at startup just like its PC counterparts. Another badly designed part of Windows Mobile is that its applications dont close down, but gets pushed into the background instead, using up RAM. So the user will have to use the Task Manager to close down the apps. A pity this smartphone does not have Wifi capabilities, as that is the essential part of a smartphone: to be able to surf wireless.

The pros for this is that its sound quality simply rocks. Added with the in-ear earpieces, the music that blasts into your ear is guaranteed 100% good. There was also good support for synchronising files and Outlook information with the PC, through ActiveSync and mini-USB. The beauty of ActiveSync is that it allows you to drag-and-drop files directly into your Dopod. It does the rest of converting them for you. The keypads are soft for this phone, providing comfort when you message, though the T9 is a little slow. Last but not least, the Dopod comes with a 1.3 mp camera with X2 zoom and environment ambience (auto, daylight, flourescent, incadescent, night, grayscale, sepia and cool) and view options. (brightness, hue, saturation and gamma) The video function had the same capabilities. The pictures taken are rather sharp and good looking.

All in all, I have to say that the Dopod 585 is a cheap and good phone, though I would love it better if it had more clear-cut menus and came with WIFI.

It rained while it was sunny today so there was a rainbow.