The S710 has Wi-Fi
I'll speak about the phone a little since I can be hard to actually catch online lol.
I had been looking at the phone for a good two weeks, drooling, without actually trying it. Then I held one off, still hadn't actually tried it out yet. Then I took one and tried it for a day and for the first half of the day I was like damn, maybe this was a bad choice, because I had been used to Sony Ericsson phones and the way the keys work and the structure of Windows Mobile is very different to Sony Ericsson's standard phone OS. Since you don't have a mouse I'd say it's not even comparable to Windows, only visually, and a few concepts like the file explorer etc. (Edit: Lol, Pittsey, remember the Etc thread? lmao
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During the latter half of the day I got into it and started to know my way around the phone. I subsequently fell in love with it. Granted, I have little real personal experience with PDA phones so my frame of reference is small, but I am very satisfied. The phone takes a little while to start up. When you flip out the keyboard, the screen flips sideways, and there is a .5 second delay. If you do this just as you open an application like SMS, or while you hit send after having written an SMS, the delay may be longer, up to a second. It has happened a few times that if i flip the keyboard in or out just as I execute a command on the phone, the image will freeze. There is a "Home" button on the numpad, very much like the Desktop shortcut on the quickstart menu in Windows, which takes you right back to the standby screen. If you hit that button in the same motion as pulling out the keyboard or pushing it back in, the image will freeze like i said. The phone will actually go to the standby screen though, and if you use the navigational keys you can highlight features on the standby interface and execute them, although you are still looking at the application you were last running. Hitting the home button again, or pulling the keyboard out and pushing it back in reverts it back to normal though. This is the only bug I have experienced with this phone so far, and all it takes is for you to wait for the phone to process whatever you are telling it to process before you shove it back together.
There may be some delay in the menu if you have several applications running on top of each other, but there is a task manager. Also, while watching the standby interface, hitting the "back" button on the numpad will take you to the most recently used application still running. Basically, hitting the back button a few times will open your applications and close them, one at a time. Or you can do it through the task manager. The phone's file manager also has a bluetooth function. You know if you install Nokia/Ericsson/whatever commercial non-PDA phone you may think off-software on your computer and try to transfer files from your phone, it's always limited, but if you access your phone through My Computer you are able to view all the system files etc etc? Well, the S710 has a bluetooth file manager that let's you access any other bluetooth-enabled device and browse all it's files and modify them. You would have to grant access on the other device first though.
The contact list is awesome. For every contact, you can store about six or seven different numbers, im names, emails, fax numbers, addresses, personal information, notes, you name it. When you browse your contacts, if you select one, it takes you to a menu where you don't see all the information for the person, but you get a list of possible actions. "Call contact", "send im", "send email", "call contact's work", "call contact's secretary", etc etc. The various available actions appear just like files would in Windows if you viem them as tiles. The "call contact" action has the contact's number underneath it. Basically, everything is laid out for you and it's easy to operate. Lot of PDA phones, especially SymbianOS ones, are some times hard to figure out in my opinion. Maybe it's habitual.
There is an EasyNotes application which basically takes you to a screen where you can create notes. Like txt-documents. They appear in a list and it is a nice but not very advanced or uncommon feature. I personally have long long lists of movies and music i need to check out, books, or other things i want to check out some time. On my old phone, I had to store them as text messages.
Whatever you are doing on the phone, the context menus are very helpful. Too bad operator services aren't integrated with this phone here, because on my old phone, if i was called by a number i didn't know, i could search the catalogue for it through a context menu and the owner of the number would get sent to my phone per SMS. I have found no such function for this phone. Although there is a very own menu item for my phone operator under which I have "Number search", but I would have to write down the number or remember it while doing all this.
The messenger function is very easy to use. When people IM you, while in the MSN interface, they come up as tabs, and if there is activity, the tab starts blinking orange. Depending on what standby-interface setup you choose, you can get notifications in the standby if someone has talked to you. First time you sign in, all your msn contacts are put in your contact list, and this is not an option you get, the phone tells you it will happen, and you will have to let it. It gets crowded with all my regular contacts in there as well. Most my friends I now had two entries for so I had to write down the phone numbers, delete the contacts, then add the phone numbers and names to the corresponding msn buddies. A hassle but oh well, it's all bygones now.
The phone has Microsoft Office Mobile. It won't let you create new documents, but it lets you view, and edit .doc documents, .xls sheets, .pps presentations and .pdf documents. Under the Office menu you also find a VoiceNotes application and a calculator, which I for a long time thought the phone lacked. The calculator looks VERY cool and is very easy to use. As for the Office applications, like I said, you can't create new ones, so all you do is copy a blank .doc, .xls and .pps to your phone, and every time you want to create a document, you edit it and use "Save as" instead of "Save". Wooptie.
There is a java console which let's you install various Java programs and applets. You can use your phone as a modem through the phone network. Since it doesn't have 3G it would be sucky speed unless your operators network supports EDGE, then it will be okay. Not good though lol, like a modem from the old days. The phone has Internet Explorer which you can use through WLAN or without. The MP3 player is similar to the typical MP3 player software, like the iPod. A list of features, "All Music", "Playlists", "Artists", "Albums", etc. Looks nice, haven't put any MP3s on my phone yet and don't know how well it runs in the background, can get back to you on that if you want.
The phone has Windows Live Update but I haven't got it to work yet. Not sure why. Hmm what other things does the phone come with. There's a flight modus. From the standby interface, once you learn how to use the phone and set up shortcuts, it is very easy to access whatever you need to access. There is a SIM-card manager, and just like the file manager has a bluetooth file manager, there is also a bluetooth SIM manager that lets you manage SIM-cards in other phones lol. The phone has Windows Media Player, haven't used it for video yet either. I'm swamped at work so I haven't had a lot of time to play around with some of the functions yet.
