Customer Reviews

PCS Pocket PC Phone Toshiba 2032 (Sprint)

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I tried 3 of Toshiba 2032 Pocket PC Sprint Phones, sorry to say I returned the 3rd one today for refund. My 1st phone was bought Nov 27th: It dropped calls and was replaced by 2nd on Dec 17th: It failed CDMA test at a local Sprint store and was replaced by 3rd on Dec 31st: By this time I spent all my holidays & over, just to set up my most wished pocket-pc based phone only to figure out the phone is not to the expectations and was returned for refund, here is why:

CONS:

> Very poor holding of battery charge: even if I did not receive a single call & did not use pc even once the time to charge was by 4pm. If I did use it mild-to-moderately, charge was due in mid-day. In-phone fixed non-replacable battery that needs charging every few hours by carrying its charger: THE ENTIRE CONCEPT OF WIRELESS POCKET PHONE PC WAS LOST HERE!!! HAFTY PRICE !!! NOT A LOT OF PHONE OR PC UNLESS YOU CARRY THE CHARGER WITH YOU ALL THE TIME !!!

> Poor signal catch, I could not go above one bar except at very few locations few miles away from home. Only one band on Sprint pcs meaning may not work out of digital network.

> Only speaker phone, no privacy available unless you use the earbud at each ring. The ear piece & mouth piece are placed in upside down order.

> Poor screen illumination when compared to new HP ipAQ 1910, higher you illuminate the faster it discharges the battery. Even at lowest power save illumination battery does not last. It reminds me of my Kyocera 6035 which I even did not care to charge for a few days easy & still had no problems.

> One can shut the phone completely but not the pc. When you shut the phone down there is no ringer alert for voice or text message untill you start the phone on.

> Phone screen digits are too small to use or finger as stylus to initiate a call.

> Typing is good, but handwriting on screen is of poor quality as compared to the palm os - many errors because of increased sensitivity.

> Internet link sensitivity is poor, needs too many attempts to log-on the links.

> Wished it had more RAM than 32mb

> Accessories like car charger does not come w/ phone & not available. The case is poor quality & increases load and thickness, The belt swivel is very slender and fear of loosing, dropping, breaking remains high.

PROS:

> Good Speaker Phone, allows handsfree receiving-talking if you set auto-on especially while driving and where cell-phones in car are legally prohibited. Clear voice.

> Excellent integretion of phone-pocket pc except that search on contact list is only by name of person not his phone # unless you use "find" feature on programs. Can take notes while talking & notes remain with that phone log for retrival later.

> Advantage of Window Pocket Pc & Internet Explorer. I feel Pocket PC is better than Palm OS, however I can't compare APPLES W ORANGES !!!

> Overall good internet surfing on the move & out of office or home as long as you carry charger with you all the time.

> Good screen color & resolution: 65000.

> Expandible Secure Digital Slot but only one of it.

> Excellent Sync between your phone & desktop pc.

> On-screen choices of typo input & advantage of one touch used word alert as you type as it auto memorizes your word.

> Overall & attractive look, feel & does fit in shirt pocket. DOES GET WORK DONE BUT NOT FOR LONG THROUGH THE DAY CONFIDENTLY WELL WITHOUT LOOSING YOUR DATA UNLESS YOU CARRY CHARGER WITH YOU AT ALL TIMES FOR ITS MID-DAY FUELING.

I got his phone because it had a great deal just before Xmas. $99 included the external battery, collapable keyboard and car charger. Without the price (at the time) and the extra goodies, I may not have done it.

I orignally wanted the Maestro. This gave CF and SD card slots. I wanted the CF to run my digiprojector, and CF offers a lot more expandability for modem cards, GPS and such(and when I was looking, SDIO was just surfacing).

But along came the Thera, and priced right. Bonus, it was a phone. Good! For after 10 years of owning Nextel, I *loathed* being Bleeped all the dang time. ANd for the extra $4.99, I can run it over with a car and they replace it.

Now, as a PDA, it functions. In fact, it's saving my life (so long Filofax!). Since it's PPC, it's seemless with my Office XP on both my desktop and laptop. Personally, Palm OS doesn't fit my bill. I can work anywhere with it, and it's made me much more productive. I do envrionmental surveys and inspections and use this to recond data in Excel, write the report in Word, and email it to my client or fax it to my office (acts like a printer). I don't need to return to the office for days, and I don't have to carry around a bulky laptop, looking for phone jacks or hotspots.

As a phone, well, okay. It bites. Never gets a signal as strong as my other Kyocera phones, even when side by side. The modem freezes sometimes and refuses to make calls unless I swtich the modem off and then back on. I like having the speakerphone and I drive mostly with my Earboom on, but wish I could hold it too my ear. While not advised, I found you can turn the volume down, flip the PDA upside down, and *kinda* use it that way (read: cheesy)

Now, the internal battery is limited if you leave the screen on all day (lasts maybe 6 hours). WAY LESS IF THE BACK LIGHT IS ON! With the external battery, I can use it all day. Having the modem on uses more power too, but with it off, you can't get phone calls, emails or surf the web.

But you must have the car charger and put it on as soo and you get in a car. That extends the days use.

Get the keyboard. It's very functional, and with a little warm up, I can do 60+ words a min.

Other accessories I purchased:

An Arkon PDA holder that mounts to the windshield so I can easily dial numbers or scoll my contacts.

Pharos GPS, so I don't get lost

Extra wall charger for travel.

Extra cradle, for use with my Laptop on extended trips.

Audiovox headphones (waste of money)

Bluetooth Ear boom with Bluetooth Dongle (no more wires).

Overall satified.

I have had 4 Sprint phones and this one is my favorite. It is a great PDA - much better than my old Palm. My only complaints about the phone are the fact that you must use the ear bud or speaker phone, the only way to have a private conversation is using the earbud; and the relativly short battery life. Other than that I think its a great phone and especially love the fact that you can use Internet Explorer to surf the web in almost the same manner you would from home at a desktop PC. All in all I am satisfied with the Toshiba 2032.

Toshiba 2032 with Sprint PCS plan was my first PDA phone and it's been 6 months since I started using it. I bought this item because I thought I need a multiple-purpose pocket PC. I am mostly satisfied with this PPC and sometimes I realize other usabilities with the PPC but there are of course things I wish to have.

As an experienced user of PPC now, I am waiting for a PPC phone with at least 300Mhz speed, 128M memory, bluetooth, megapixel camera, and maybe finger-print recognition. With that kind of PPC phone in the market, I think it would be silly to carry phone, organizer, camera, iPod, and DVD player, seperately because you can do more with the single PPC. I also dare to predict that PPC or different form of the kind will replace our purse and its content (credit card, identification, and money) in our (near or far) future.

I gave 3 stars mainly because there are currently several better PPCs than 2032. So here I write pros and cons of the 2032 PPC to help your decision.

Pros.

1. With $78, you can buy 1GB SD card which can be inserted to the PPC. I mainly use the 1GB disk space to store word or pdf documents, photos, and music files (I currently saved 12 CDs and about 100 documents to the card).

2. Graphics and Interface with stylus are no doubt great. As a computer geek for last 20 years, I hate to sit in front of computer to orgainize my thought and study things in my free time. (Maybe it's time to retire) Pocket PC solved the problem. Watching TV or listening music, I can now use PPC to organize ideas or read books in my sofa or bed.

2. Since PPC can store pdf and word files, as I mentioned, PPC can be literally a eBook. Using ActiveSync, I can easily download books and documents from desktop, and read them anywhere anytime.

3. Wireless web browsing or emailing are great too. I can read news, AOL emails, or google anywhere with the PPC. If you want to frequently surf internet, don't forget to sign up Sprint vision service. In first month, I didn't do that and ended up with $300 bill. It turned out every web browsing costs $.50-$1.00 per minute without Vision serivice ($15/month). I requested discount and signed up the service. (Sprint kindly gave me the discount)

4. Playing music with Windows media is higher quality than I thought. It's not exactly iPod because of PPC's weight but I cannot say any difference in quality of music while it's portable enough.

5. Speaker phone is loud and clear. With simple holder, it can be used as a car phone . Although it;s not safe to dial numbers with PPC while driving, receiving a call is no problem.

6. As a developer, I can easily develop your own software with Microsoft .NET Visual Studio. Sometimes, it takes 30 minutes to make a simple software!!

Cons.

1. In my opionion, one of weakest point with this PPC is that you cannot use Bluetooth technology. Thus, you cannot have (cool) wireless headset nor wireless data communication with printers/computers. Especially, I think wireless headset is indispensible because it is not convenient to talk with wired headset. (I don't want to use speaker phone for all calls) Also I cannot use the PPC phone as a modem to my laptop. Some suggested you can buy Toshiba Bluetooth SDIO card to enable it. Don't even think about it. I was a fool to actually try it. Whenever PPC goes power-save mode, the Bluetooth SDIO card makes PPC dead. I have to hard-reboot and lose all your installed software. In addition, I couldn't make the bluetooth card wotk with the PPC.

2. I think PPC needs at least 64M memory to run various software without bumpiness. This PPC has 32M memory. Because of this, I have to kill some applications by hand in order to run a heavy-computation application. I thought about upgrading but I don't think there is a safe way to do that.

3. I thought I could use this PPC as portable movie player too. But playing video with Windows Media is not up to my expectation. There is no smoothness at all between actions. I think it's something to do with memory size or CPU speed. With analogy, I guess this PPC may not be good for full-graphic games. (I am not sure because I didn't try any game)

4. Battery life is too short. I can talk via phone only for 1 hour. And for some reason, there is no way of soft battery exchange. Only way to extend battery life is to buy a battery pack (4 AA batteries) and recharge PPC battery with the pack. (bulky!)

5. Quality of connection (wireless phone and internet) is not that good comparing cingular. (But we all hate crazy customer service gang at Cingular, don't we)

6. No thumb keyboard. I don't want to type with full keyboard looking at small screen of PPC. But it's not easy to type with touch-screen keyboard and stylus either. So attachable thumb keyboard would be useful.

7. No camera. I think adding camera to PPC makes it more complete portable PPC. I wouldn't mind quality of picture from PPC. But from time to time, you may want to keep something into picture.

I'm so tired of carrying so many things - laptop, cell, pager, pda, pocketbook. I was looking to consolidate. Having a text messaging/PDA/Cell all in one neat little package is VERY convenient. True, Sprint needs to take up their service a notch. True, battery life is little less than desired (I just leave it plugged in when I'm in the car, which is alot and at my desk) PDA is great. For the convenience of carrying one item, instead of three, it's worth it's weight in gold.

I've only had this Toshiba 2032SP from Sprint for a few days now, and I'm really regretting it already. It is a rather poor cell phone (speakerphone or wired mic/earbud ONLY - no option for holding the phone to one's ear), and a so-so PDA. The dim, powerhungry screen is shameful. The Toshiba 2032SP won't last more than about 36 hours on a full charge of this new battery. Horrible performance from a cell phone (and don't forget, this is a cell phone). The TFT screen is dim and fuzzy even at it's most intense brightness setting. At it's lowest, power-saver friendly setting it is so dim and illegible as to cause headaches. Despite the bulk, a full-featured PDA (iPAQ anyone?) and a well engineered cell phone (nearly any Motorola anyone?) are a far better option than this paperweight.

I have had this phone for 6+ months now an I love it. Its a pretty good pda and a pretty good phone. I bought a 256mb SD card and use it as my MP3 player most the time. Sprints service does suck but hay, I paid the extra $5 a month to roam all I want so it ends up ok. I purchased a power kit off ebay for it for about $30 bucks, it was need and ever since getting it, Ive had no power problems.
UPDATE: It turns out the first phone I had was flawed. I had always wondered why I could barely pick up the Sprint signal. After talking with them no more then 4 tiems over 6 months I finnaly got a new one and wow... Its GREAT! I still love this phone!

I tried so hard for a week to make this phone work for me, because I liked the features, finally I am giving up. There is not enough power in the battrey to make it last a complete day.

If Toshiba/Audiovox was in the construction business, they would have developed a city with no power supply!

With the rebates I got lured into buying what other recommended not to. I thought I will make it work for me, against odds. The phone is so bad, I would not take it for free (considering the 2 year contract)

STAY AWAY FROM THE TOSHIBA 2032 !

I've had mine several years. Pro: It takes a beating! From dropping it to spilling coffee on it, it still works. Great to have so much in one item. The handwriting recognition is great, it really works.

Con: The mp3 player is not loud enough, I can still hear people talking around me, even with the volume all the way up. Battery life is terrible. Phone never actually rings, it keeps re-setting itself for no ringer. It also keeps turning itself on, and when I'm listening to music, keeps beeping. The sound quality on the speaker phone is awful, and there's no way I'm going to ba able to get the headphone plugged in in time for a phone call. I hate that you have to use the headphones or speaker phone, you can't just use it like a regular phone.

It may have some cool features but I would not buy it again.

This Pocket PC works for me..... when i bought it i was wondering if it was good only due to the fact of its low battery life. So far i am having no problems what so ever with the phone/pda/pocket pc. the only thing that could be better would be the battery life when you charge it but it still lasts long for me and it does do what i want it to do so i am happy i would recommend this product!!