Eten G500 review

After bad experiences with Nokia 9300 my hunt for the perfect business phone continued. I decided to give Windows Mobile a try. As usually I read a bunch of reviews and comparisons, and it came out that a nice choice would be the Eten G500. I thought it would be nice since it has a big and nice screen (unlike the HP iPaq 6915), has all the features needed nowadays except Wi-Fi. And it has a GPS receiver so I thought it would be neat to use it in my car when driving around the city/country.

And here's why I'm going to sell it ASAP and never buy such a device again:

1. The stylus is located at the bottom of the device. NEVER buy such a device. Every other time you take it out of your pocket or bag, the stylus will automatically jump out and get lost either in your bag or it will be loosened and fall out on the floor at some random moment. I don't have to say that this is very annoying.
2. The touch screen is a curse. Whenever you receive an SMS or someone calls you, the device turns itself on and activates the touch screen. It will add some random entry into your calendar, contacts list or whatever. So.. another annoying thing.
3. The voice quality is really poor. Everyone I called was complaining that they can barely hear me. I asked some support person about this and he told me to update the firmware. It didn't help, and he ignored my email stating that.
4. A phone is not a GPS navigation device. Some people may be satisfied with a Pocket PC or Palmtop based car navigation device, but I'm not. The screen doesn't give enough light, the loudspeak mode isn't loud enough and the software I used (AutoMapa) had a really unintuitive interface. I've never used a real navigation device built into the car's console, but I bet it's better than a phone-based navigation device.
5. Windows Mobile is a PC system. I've been using the latest version (5) in this device, and it's basically the PC windows with phone software added. Some things that were annoying about it: unability to add more than one mobile phone to a person because the outlook-like contacts list only has one such field and you can't add another (it was possible in Nokia 9300), when you get a call from a number that's not in your contacts list - you can't add it to an existing contact but you have to make a new one (it was also possible in the Nokia 9300). These things don't render the phone unusable but are simple bugs which could be easily fixed if the vendor gave the software a bit of tests. I guess they don't care, and I know I won't buy Windows Mobile (until perhaps the next version if they fix such bugs) again.
6. Windows Mobile hangs a lot. Sorry guys, you have to write really clean code if you want it to run for many days on such devices.

So if you want to buy a Windows Mobile phone even though the system sucks, be sure not to buy Eten.

I wonder why the biggest players in phone OS software release such crappy software. Do consumers really not want their phones to work uninterrupted over 30 or more days? Do they not mind rebooting them every 3 days? I recall having a Palm Vx, which was only a Palm and didn't have a phone integrated, but it did everything I needed (email, web, calendar) and I didn't reset it for ages and it never hung.

Any hints for a usable business phone? Someone suggested a BlackBerry so I guess I'll go for that phone next (within 2 weeks or so), and for now I guess I'll downgrade to Nokia 9300i.