GFA7605 (Black with Silver) 125 Watt, 5 Channel Power Amplifer

GFA7605 (Black with Silver) 125 Watt, 5 Channel Power Amplifer
Manufacturer: Adcom
Product Type: CE

Editorial Review:
Product Description
ADCOM has a long history of designing great sounding amplifiers and the new GFA-7605 continues that tradition. The foundation for good performance in an amplifier is power - and the GFA-7605's toroidal transformer, independent channel power supplies, and 100,000 mF of capacitance ensure that you hear every detail in the performance. Combined with an ADCOM preamplifier like the new GTP-860, the GFA-7605 makes your home theater sound better than the real theater. Also available in a seven channel version (the GFA-7607), the GFA-7605 continues ADCOM's tradition of bringing high-performance separates at down-to-earth prices.

Average customer rating: 3.0

Good if your company doesn't allow camera phones

i-mate JAQ Smartphone (Unlocked)

Manufacturer: i-mate
Product Group: Wireless
Binding: Wireless Phone Accessory
ASIN: B000KI71BS
2006-11-10

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Customer Reviews:

Good if your company doesn't allow camera phones.......2006-12-15

Overview
This phone is large and somewhat bulky. It is optimized for use in email and web browsing. It does read / type / web browse very well. However, it has unexpected limitations due to design decisions and firmware errors. My last phone before this one was an Imate Jam with 64 Mb memory.

I cannot recommend the phone at this time for a couple of major reasons:

1. Unreliable and poor implementation of Bluetooth, especially the headset.

2. The phone disables some Windows Mobile standard features, namely screen rotation and backlight controls.

*********************************

The Good

- Absolutely excellent keyboard. It is a pleasure to use. It has some design quirks that one has to get to know:

*The Fn key is pressed once and stays on; this activates the alternate characters as well as the numeric keypad.

* The shift key works with a single tap to capitalize the next character, or

* By holding the shift key for a couple of seconds, the caps lock is on until SHIFT is pressed again.

* The keyboard clicks are very loud - don't plan on using this too much in a conference!

- The joystick in the middle of the phone is excellent, and for most WM 5 applications such as navigating menus, etc, the joystick does just fine - no stylus needed!

- Backlit keyboard with separate intensity control.

- No Camera. This is the primary reason I purchased this phone. My company does not allow any cameras inside the work areas. At the moment there are very few phones that use Windows Mobile 5 (Pocket PC) and do not have a camera. I think most device manufacturers are pretty stupid for not providing models with or without camera. All it would take is a different back plate on the phone, which would prevent the camera hardware from working.

- Really good for Internet and other reading. The Internet runs faster on GPRS than my old phone (also GPRS).

- Very good application to set up Internet connections for many different wireless companies.

- Capability to run EDGE for higher speed connections. I do not have EDGE on my phone account, so I don't know if or how well it might run.

- Email is included for Club I-Mate. I don't use it because Pocket Outlook has all the capability I need to connect to email servers, but it is still a nice feature. Note that the service is free only for the first year. They include a configuration application, but it did not work on my device.

- There is an mail capability to connect to MS Exchange Server, which would allow sharing of calendars, etc. My company does not use this kind of server, so I didn't test this.

- Windows Mobile 5. I particularly like the capability to completely power the phone off and not lose the content of the memory. Pocket versions of Word, Excel, Outlook, and Powerpoint.

- There is a "blacklist" application to allow one to automatically reject calls from certain numbers. I did not check this functionality.

- There is a Windows key and an OK key, as well as two soft keys. These all worked well in standard WM 5 navigation.

-The phone application has a quick dial feature, where one can assign phone numbers to numbers on the keyboard.

- There is a Photo Contacts application that allows one to put a picture with the contact, which will then be presented on the phone when that person is on the phone. The same application allows one to dial by clicking on the picture.

- The phone is surprisingly light to hold, and fits my hand well. It seems to be mostly plastic, but sturdy.

***********************************

The Bad

- The soft keys use up about 5% of the screen at the bottom, and cannot be disabled.

- The screen is absolutely useless in sunlight, even at the brightest setting. My old phone could be tilted such that the sun caught the text and one could at least see it, but this one simply cannot be seen in sunlight.

- The touch screen on the phone is difficult to use on the left and right edges. The right side is particularly difficult, because it is VERY hard to use scroll bars.

- There is no WiFi capability. This is a major and inexplicable design choice. The only reason I can think of is that the designers felt that some companies might object to WiFi for security reasons. I can see their argument, but I still think the phone would be better with WiFi. For one thing, many business users have national WiFi accounts, so they can connect at the airport, etc.

- This phone firmware is very buggy:

* I have seen the keyboard backlight come on when the display is off. The keyboard should turn off when the screen turns off.

* The phone will not respond to standard commands to change the screen intensity. I use Sbp Plus on my phone, and it normally has a "slider" control for the screen, that allows the user to change intensities. It has worked on three previous phones, but no longer works on the JAQ. Instead, I have to bring up the program that controls both the screen and the keyboard backlight.

* The bluetooth will sometimes lock up the phone, requiring a soft reset to regain control over BT. This appears to happen when the device is paired to a BT headset and one walks away from the headset, but I am not really certain exactly what causes this problem. However, I have seen a number of times that I can click on the BT icon and it does not bring up BT controls. I use a BT hands free device from Motorola, but I suspect it would be the same with a headset.

* The BT will sometimes disconnect from the BT headset, but the icon will still be displayed on the Phone screen. I have had a number of occasions when I had synced the BT to the headset, but the phone connected via the JAQ instead of the headset. In some cases the "headset connected" icon was present on the phone page - until the call connected, at which time it disappeared and the phone used the JAQ equipment, instead of the BT hands free!

* There is no section of the Settings / Screen program to set the device to enable ClearType.

* The Internet Icon on the task bar will not show a "Connect" capability, even if GPRS is correctly set up. When one clicks the icon, a message is displayed that the user needs to add a connection. However the connection is already there. Ordinarily, a user can tap this icon and connect to GPRS manually. The only way to connect to the Internet is to launch IE or Messaging.

* The phone does not activate the Internet for third party browsers. I prefer NetFront 3.2 as my browser, but the phone did not launch GPRS when a web address was entered. Since I could not manually connect to GPRS (see above problem), I am unable to use this browser.

* Several times the phone has locked up due to software errors, and when I reset it, the device did not come back on. Other times it has come back on briefly, then powered off and refused to come back on. In these cases I have had to open the back case and pull the battery, at which time the device will reset by hitting the power switch.

- The "Headset Connected" icon appears on the phone application screen, and not on the title bar. This makes it difficult to know at a glance that the BT has connected with the headset. This is apparently a design decision, but it makes no sense; the title bar is displayed in the phone mode as well. The way it is implemented doesn't allow me to realize the phone is on headset until I answer the call. That is a bit late to realize the phone is not connected to the headset!

- For some unknown reason the stylus is on the BOTTOM LEFT, instead of the industry standard TOP RIGHT of the device. It isn't too bad once you get used to it, but why do something like that? Note that the stylus collapses to ½ it's normal length. Occasionally it came out of the case short instead of extended.

- There is a battery icon on the title bar when on the Today page, that cannot be removed. This is a Microsoft "feature" of WM 5. There is a registry hack to fix this: Place DWORD value called ShowTitleBarClock that is set to 1 in HKLM\Software\Microsoft\Shell. But why don't they have an application that applies or clears this registry value?

- It would appear that the BT stack is from Microsoft, which is vastly inferior to the one from Widcomm. It must be cheaper to license, because it certainly is much worse to use. The biggest problem I have with the MS stack (which I had on my old phone) is that it will not route the audio from my voice dialing to the phone. So my voice prompts to input a phone number come from the phone, instead of in my BT hands free device.

- Poor battery useage. It would appear that the phone really drains the battery. It is a good sized battery, with a 1440 power rating. But I cannot leave this phone on overnight; it will use too much battery. So I power the phone down at night. This isn't much of a problem for me, since I am at home and available via land phones, but it is disappointing. Ether plan on recharging every morning or leave the phone plugged into the wall at night. Or turn it off, which is my choice. My old phone (PPC 2003 SE) went for 3 days before I needed a recharge.

- The phone can accidentally unlock it's keyboard, in which case it invariably tries to dial the last phone number dialed. A lock mechanism is available via the hardware keyboard, but there is no capability to lock all keys except the power key via the WM 5 settings for Screen. Such an absolute lock would be preferable to the one included in the phone, because it (apparently) is quite possible for the phone to hit the Fn key and then the ENTER key while in the supplied pouch.

- On a related note, the "lock" function does not include the phone. So an incoming phone call will automatically enable the phone keys - which then invariably answers the phone when it is in the supplied pouch. I'm not sure how to get around this, but my old phone did not automatically pick up the phone calls from the pouch. And yes, I did ensure that the phone was not set to automatically answer after a set number of rings.

- If you make a call and then close the phone application, when you use the phone again the phone application does not display the last called number on the screen. This would be useful because then one could see at a glance which number could be redialed by pressing the "call" key. One can redial, but you do not know which number will be dialed until you dial it. This makes redial less useful. If you do not exit the phone application, the last dialed number is displayed, but I almost always exit the phone application after a call - this is a PDA, after all, and I need to see the screen.

- The screen will not rotate. This capability is native to Windows Mobile 5, but the phone designers deliberately disabled the functionality. They don't seem to realize that road warriors sometimes like to relax by playing the occasional game. But most of the available games are designed for a screen that is longer than it is wide. The JAQ screen is wider than it is long, but it still registers to games a "portrait" mode - and prevents the game from rotating the screen. It also inexplicably prevents the user from rotating the screen manually. I am assuming this is a design decision and not a firmware error. I suspect that the screen designers want to protect the soft keys - to ensure they are on the display at all times, which would be difficult if the screen were rotated. However, the included game (Blackjack) covers the entire screen, including the soft keys.

- There is no included application to backup the memory to a storage card. They do include a 30 day license to their "I-Mate Suite", which backs up the device to the Internet. But who wants to do that at GPRS speeds? I was forced to buy a backup program of my own.

- The phone has only one programmable key. Most phones have four.

- About 1/2 the time when I plug in the phone to sync, it will not sync unless I change the USB port of the computer. The phone comes with Microsoft ActiveSync 4, which may or may not contribute to this problem.

- The phone came with a European travel charger. Since it charges off of a standard mini USB, this isn't too big a deal, but still, it should have been a US charger.

- The photo contacts feature uses VERY small pictures on the phone application. It is so small as to be almost useless. Also, pictures have to be assigned from the photo contacts application; I am used to a version of photo contacts where one can launch the standard Contacts application, find the desired contact, and hold the stylus on the contact name and assign the photo contact information in this manner. Having to launch Photo Contacts and go from there is a very clunky implementation.

- Factory reset is accomplished via software in the "Settings" folder. There is no provision for a hardware "hard" reset. This means that if the device won't boot for some reason, you are out of luck. Most devices have a certain sequence such as "Reset + Power + Volume" or some such, to allow a factory or "hard" reset if the device is locked up entirely. Removing the battery will not perform a hard reset. As a matter of fact, this exact situation occurred; my JAQ would not respond to the Settings -> Factory Reset Icon. I discovered that the device can be reset by pressing RESET, IMMEDIATELY followed by pressing the Fn Key + the right-hand soft key for 6 seconds. This will force a hard reset.

- The speakerphone is very faint, and is useless in this role. I don't understand this; the ringtones sound nice and loud.

- The phone will not synchronize my "Files" folder correctly. The synchronize function is supposed to transfer the newest file to the other device, so that the most current file is shared. Instead, it keeps overwriting my phone files with whatever is on the computer. As a result, I have lost many of my mileage entries for the cars I drive. I have had to move the "XLS" directory to my root directory on the JAQ, to avoid it being overwritten every time I sync. This may have to do with Activesync 4.2, but I think it is the phone.

**********************************
The Ugly

One look at the JAQ will tell you what the "UGLY" is all about. The keyboard juts out from the front of the device, and the battery juts out from the back. This phone looks OK from the front but awkward from the sides.

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