Home > Consumer Reviews > i-mate JASJAR GSM/GPRS Pocket PC/Mobile Phone

its the most complete pda come phone i have owned to date well worth the money i spent

5 stars is for the product only. It was all I ever wanted:
* It was easy to use
* sychonisation with outlook was quick and simple
* a comprehensive user guide that was well-written so I could use all the features
* I could type in realtime and send it straight out in outlook for distribution.

Then it broke. No reason. I took it out my bag and the screen had gone. I had had it all of two weeks. I was devestated.

Suddenly all the failings of buying on-line come to the fore. The supplier pda-mobiles is running the business from cyber-space. No telephone numbner, no address, no response. Replies to email are slow, polite but with nil knowledge of consumer law or Amazon 'guarentee. WTen He claims it is not a manufacturing error but a 'human' error. How would human error stop the machine working? Pressing the wrong buttons too often? And how has he come to this convenient conclusion without seeing the machine? Then you find yourself wondering...well..it DID have a fault. Did the supplier get it from a legitimate source? You just do not know.

And Amazon. Well, bless them! Their procedures are adequate enough for CDs, books and so on - things that are not time sensitive or very expensive. Where it does not matter too much. The average of seven to ten days to investigate however is all too slow for a working tool that is so fab you became reliant on it the moment you unpacked the box. It's too dear to pop out and get a duplicate. Yet you cannot survive without it.

Things do go wrong with equipment. I accept that. If I had bought it from an O2 shop I could have received a replacement within hours of it going wrong with no questions.

So my advice would be:
1. Don't buy very expensive items from a third party on Amazon unless you know the company well
2. If you do, don't buy PDA/computers in particular. They break too often and you need more after sales suppoprt than can be provided
3. And if you choose to ignore my advice, pay by credit card.

All things considered I think that this is a very clever and generally well designed box of tricks

I have always used a keyboard clamshell based PDA right back to the introduction of the Psion series 3a, I stuck with Psion untill their demise, and then bought a Hewlett Packard Jornada 720, I have a genuine use for these devices and they are not just a toy. The embedded software on the Jornada was no longer supported and it is very big, so I bought one of these on a contract, and all in all, I am impressed.

As a phone it is a little alkward to use, but my main use of it is for data/e-mail/web, and as a PDA, and as a phone...its ok, but not as convenient as a little pat as you go

I cant agree that it is slow, I think that in the main, web browsing is very impressive, and the E-mail side of it is about as good as you can reasonably expect get given its size, I would give it 5 stars for E-Mail...the keyboard works very very well, and is in many ways a bit better than the larger k/b on the Jornada old 720/680 series, but still not as good as a psion series 5

The rotating screen worries me, as it is vulnerable when not completely rotated...be careful!!, but as a concept it is neat, and the image auto-rotates to fit when you flip it

I use a leather case zip which allows me to use it in situ without removing it...not the slip case supplied, as I would worry about dropping it

The Sim Free price is expensive, and you will cry if you break it, so get some accidental damage cover (houshold insurance ?)...oh and one more thing, as an MP3 player it is very very good because it accepts a standard size headphone jack (3.5mm I think)...not one of those tiny ones like on an XDA11 etc

I dont recommend gizmos for the sake of it, but if you can afford it, it is hard to think of anything else as useful as this, you can use it for Sat Nav as well with a kit...but just buy a Tom-Tom

I recommend this gizmo (almost without reservation)

As a phone it's pretty sucky because it's fairly slow. If you are going to make full use of the integration with your PC and use word, excel and outlook it is very cool. It is neat being able to have your documents and pictures automatically transfered to your machine and for you to be able to edit word and excel documents out away from the computer. The keyboard is pretty good for data entry and you can do handwriting too. Even the limited sketching can be quite cool.

Broadly speaking if you need to be able to enter data quickly and accurately quite often it's a cracker. As a smart phone it's not ideal. I have decided to switch to a smaller form factor when I renew my contract. It's been grand but I have found the cool bits don't outweigh the sucky ones.

Ups

o Can run quite a few applications
o Hot swappable memory card
o Proper headphone socket
o Office integration and syncing with the computer
o Keyboard means you can enter a lot of information quickly and accurately

Downsides

o General lag
o Large and heavy
o Media player user interface makes playing music a pain
o Treating the memory card a second class citizen. Applications like the media player don't look at it for music unless you point it at it.
o Can only use the handsfree with the set of headphones provided or bluetooth because if you plug in ordinary headphones there is no way to get the mic bit.
o Checking to see if you have had any calls is difficult because you have to take it out of the case, open up the screen and then turn it on. You cannot leave it in the case with the screen facing outwards because then it is not locked and cause those awkward trouser calling friends moments you hear about afterwards.
o Can only sync with 2 machines properly (you can transfer files with any number) and you need activesync installed on the machines.

Sorry, I can't agree with the others. This is just a waste of time. I had the XDAIIs previously and like this, they spent more time on the bad design and less on perfecting the flaws.

If you use it as a phone and twist the screen to face out, they put the answer/hang up button just where your thumb rests and you either cut off or put on hold the caller.

Performance is slow, compatibility poor. It constantly freezes and has to be reset, OK, it runs on the new Windows platform but it's neither a small computer nor a proper smartphone. It's extremely bulky and uncomfortable to carry in a jacket pocket.

If you want a compact PC/phone, wait for the XDA atom or whatever it's called by other suppliers.