During this summer’s vacation I left my cell phone on the top of the car roof and drove away… Needless to say I needed to get a new phone. I was very happy with my Qtek 8310 but in the small town of Karlskrona where we were at the moment, I had to visit several mobile phone stores before I finally found one that sold Windows Mobile phones. This time I bought the Qtek 8500 (aka HTC Str Trk or HTC Star Trek) which is basically the same phone as the 8310 but with a few diffrences:
1. Smaller form factor
Imo a better form factor – it’s a flip-flop model (or clam shell or whatever you want to call it) that is slightly smaller and lighter than the 8310 but it feels a lot smaller.
2. No Flight Mode
I wish it had flight mode but for me this is not a huge thing.
[Updated: It does have flight mode, see this post]
3. No Wireless LAN
Wlan was one of the major resons I bought the 8310 but it turned out I almost never used it anyway. If I kept it on it drained the battery quickly whenver there was no wlan available so I had to keep turning it on and off which of course got too tideous so I just left it off.
4. Shorter Battery Time
This of course is not good but I think it’s an ok drawback considering you get a better form factor. I charge the battery more or less every night and as long as I don’t have to charge it more often than that it’s ok.
Also none of the stuff I already got for the 8310 works for the 8500 – charger, headsets, data cables etc. It also uses the microSD memory card instead of the miniSD the 8310 uses.
Anyway I love the 8500, for me it’s a great phone.
I’m not too sure about the quality though – the screen stopped working after about two weeks or so. After almost three weeks at the service center I just got it back. During those three weeks they loaned me an old Qtek S100 and this made me even happier with my choice of phone – the Qtek S100 is a PDA with a phone function, not a phone. It has no keyboard so you have to use the stylus whenever you need to look up a contact or even make a call. When I returned the S100 I wanted to do a hard reset to erase all my passwords, contacts, emails etc. It took me awhile to figure out how – first I had to find out that it was also sold as the HTC Magician, another Google then got me the instructions:
HTC Magician / Dopod 818 / Q-tek S100 / T-Mobile MDA Compact / O2 xda II mini / i-mate JAM:
While holding down the power button press in on the reset button (reset hole) with your stylus for about 5 seconds.
The reset hole is a tiny hole located at the bottom right of the S100.
By the way, Qtek is now sold under the HTC brand worldwide and they have launched several new Windows Mobile phones including models with 3G (HTC MTEOR) and GPS capabilities.