Things I don't like about the P800

Its a cool phone, don't get me wrong, but I have a few pet hates.

Widcomm Bluetooth Drivers

The Widcomm drivers are just like the NVidia Graphics card drivers, generic drivers for all cards. This was the case until the latest 1.4.x drivers. Now the drivers are locked to specific manufacturers hardware through a license.dat file. If the manufacturer is slow to certify the drivers, or is no longer supporting the hardware, its not possible to use the latest Bluetooth drivers. This has pissed off a lot of people, hence there are some pretty detailed instructions on how to hack the bluetooth drivers to work with your hardware.

Bluetooth with Built in Browser and Email Client

The P800 supports bluetooth. Its possible to browse the internet sharing the internet connection from a computer, via bluetooth. This is faster that GPRS, and a hell of a lot cheaper. The only disadvantage is that you need to be within 10m of a PC with bluetooth.

In early releases of the P800 firmware, the built in browser and email applications worked with bluetooth, but now this has been disabled. The built in web browser and email clients insist on using GPRS. Opera (a 3rd party web browser written for the P800) works perfectly with bluetooth, and is a better browser. The problem is its not a replacement for the built in browser, which various applications installed on the phone integrate with. Its a bit like the early days of the Microsoft operating systems (with Internet Explorer built in) not playing friendly with Netscape.

The built in email client is great. When you get an email, a little envelope appears in the status bar and the phone vibrates. Its simply not possible to use this feature with GPRS, as its too slow, and very expensive. Bluetooth is the obvious solution, but it won't work with the built in client (as it was disabled). Sure its possible to get other email clients, but at the moment they don't integrate with the built in address book (requiring their own list of contacts), and there is no notification when email arrives.
Currently there is no workaround to this problem.

Firmware Updates

The only way to update the firmware on the P800 is to send it off for a couple of days (at best) to an Authorised Dealer. First, why aren't these firmware updates available on the internet, so I can easily download them to my phone. Second, they charge money for the privilege of having a phone with less bugs than when I bought it. Surely if they have bugs in their firmware, I should be entitled to a free update. Finally, I need my phone every day, and not about to send it off for up to two weeks.