gdgt

I really wanted to love this phone. And I did, in fact, for the first 2-3 months. Easily the best phone I'd ever owned. Gorgeous screen, physical keyboard, the Panels interface that had some real novelty value - these were some great features. Sure, to get it only 4-5 weeks after it launched I had to pay a small fortune, but for those 3 months it so felt worth it.

Then the problems started to emerge. I'll go from the smallest to the biggest, to help give you an idea. First up, it has a recessed screen. This means dust continually gets caught in the edges, which for me was a big pain. In addition to that, the Panels concept is actually flawed, because I found myself using it less and less as time went on. I've been using SPB Mobile Shell 3 on the device ever since it was released, and haven't felt the need to use the Panels feature at all.

Now we come to some of the more serious build-related issues. First up, the metal cover on the back is a real pain to get off (it feels as if you are going to break the phone at times!), which you need to do a fair bit if the phone locks up and you need to remove the battery to reset it, or swap out the SIM or MicroSD card. Not only that, but the paint started to come off my backplate fairly quickly, so for such an expensive device it is a real shame the back of it looks so shoddy.

The next problem for me, and granted it could just be this is a trait common to all slider phones since this is the first one I've owned, but the more you slide the keyboard out, the looser the screen becomes. There's now a fair bit of give in the screen, which again makes the phone feel cheap. The give is now so bad that I can even start to give the screen some slight rotation, which really worries me. I preferred the screen when I first bought it - no give at all. So this is a sad development.

But now we come to the two biggest deal-breakers in my books, and are ones that I know have affected many X1 owners. The plastic moulds around the top of the phone (near the 3.5mm jack) are prone to cracking, and cracking in quite a big way. Mine has a massive crack, that is just getting bigger with each passing week. Am just praying the phone holds out until Christmas, when I plan on replacing it with a candybar (no more sliders for me!) HTC Touch device.

The other, and probably biggest, problem, is the sensor located inside the 3.5mm jack. You know the one - it is designed to know when you insert a handsfree headphone set, and switch the phone over to not using the in-built mic and speaker. This has a flaw - in that it'll just randomly switch over, even when there are no headphones plugged in. This basically means for a lot of my time, the X1 simply does not function as a telephone. Which sucks big time. The only way to fix it is to jiggle the stylus around in the socket, which does fix it (for a few minutes), but is also probably doing a fair bit of collateral damage to the socket itself.

So yeah, my advice - avoid the X1i. This is particularly easy now, given the device is nearly a year old, and has been superceded by newer phones running WinMo 6.5. But just remember these points in case you are thinking of getting one on the cheap. There are some real deal-breakers with this phone.