So How Does The i-mate Ultimate 8502 Handle?

It’s finally here. The last and final installment to the Ultimate 8502 review. If this is the first time you’re reading about this review, I’d recommend you check out the unboxing post that discusses the contents of the box and the article after that which covers a tour of the hardware and software.

If you can’t wait to find out how the Ultimate 8502 fares, I’d recommend you sit back and grab a nice cold drink. It’s a very informative read…

Phone

I like to cover this area first because it’s one of the more important features I look out for when purchasing a Pocket PC. No point having great specifications if you can’t even carry out a decent conversation I say.

In the case of the Ultimate 8502, it works great as a phone. I had no trouble carrying out phone conversations be it walking pass a construction site or on a train ride home. Callers could hear me clearly (I didn’t get any complaints) and I could hear them well enough without having the need to cover my other ear.

Bluetooth Calls

Using a bluetooth headset (in this case the BlueAnt Z9i), I had no problems as well. Call quality, while dependent on the headset mostly, was good. I had no noise in the background when the phone was in my pants pocket which is always a good thing. Answering and ending calls as well as calling up voice command from the bluetooth headset worked just you would expect.Unfortunately I do not have a car with bluetooth technology so I am not able to test that out. Maybe someone would like to sponsor me one?

Data Connection

3G

I am on the T-Mobile USA network and where I am (Philadelphia, PA), there is no 3G connectivity as yet. That means I was not able to test out the 3G connection on the Ultimate 8502. However, if it is of any consolation, I have not heard of any problem with regards to 3G connection so I suppose you should get expected speeds.

WiFi

When connected to my home network, I had no problems surfing the web from the Ultimate 8502. In fact, connection to the router was really quick, in under 2 seconds most of the time. I did not experience any dropped in connections and while the device did warm up slightly after some time of surfing the web with WiFi, it’s rather normal on such mobile device and nothing to be concerned about.

Camera Quality

I always say a picture is worth a thousand words so here are some photos that I took with the Ultimate 8502’s camera:

Outdoor

It was a really bright day when I took these photos. We were actually experiencing a heatwave at that time but that’s still no excuse for the pictures to appear as washed out as they did.

The colors were not as rich as I expected and I am not sure what’s the cause of it. Too bright a sunlight? I did not choose the right setting? I just pointed and shot these photos which is how many of you use your device’s camera. If there was a way to get richer and slightly sharper pictures (I think the sharpness for these photos are of decent quality, don’t you think?), I did not find it.

Macro

Well before you ask if there is a secret macro mode, I’ll clarify that there is none. The reason I still decided to take a photo up close is to see just how well the device would handle. As you can tell from the picture on the side, it did not handle macro shots well (which is expected).

Which got me thinking: if the Ultimate device is catered to mobile professionals, why isn’t there macro mode capability? These users would find great convenience in snapping photos of instructions or directions instead of writing it down. I know I would.

Conclusion

The i-mate Ultimate 8502 has a lot of options when it comes to taking photos, from the usual resolution and quality to being able to choose the white balance and contrast as well. While one could argue that I could have tweaked the camera settings to get even better picture quality, this is what most users would encounter if they just point and shoot. I did try out several options but the photos above were the best I could come up with from the ones I took. I was hoping for more from the camera of the Ultimate 8502 but unfortunately, it fared just over average.

Video Quality

Like the camera quality test, here’s a short video captured using the Ultimate 8502’s system:

This was the highest resolution at 320×240 and which is not that great. The reason why it looks blurry is because YouTube stretches the video to fill the space. When you view it in it’s original resolution of 320×240, it’ll turn up fine and not look blurry like the one above. The video is captured in MP4 format in case you are wondering.

Again, for an Ultimate device to only be offering qVGA video is really disappointing. I would have expected it to be at least VGA and higher. Wouldn’t mobile professionals want to take a much better quality video? I know I would.

Screen

The screen is really bright and you’ll really come to appreciate this, especially when you use your device a lot in the outdoors. You see, even though the heatwave brought with it washed out pictures as we saw earlier, it provided a great situation to test out the readability of the screen under such extremely bright conditions.

What can I say but that it works great. It might look slightly washed out but it is readable. There was no need to cover the top of the screen with my other hand to see what’s on the screen because at maximum brightness, you can do it unaided. Pretty impressive I must say.

However, one thing I noticed about the screen is that it sometimes does not register the taps I make with my fingernail. I am not sure why but it only happens when I use my fingernail. Stylus taps work fine all the time. Compare that to fingernail tapping on my Glofiish X500 where I have no problem and I wonder if the Ultimate 8502 is too sensitive (or not sensitive enough, I’m not sure which) to pick up fingernail tapping. There were even times (though rarely) that when I use fingernail tapping that it registers wrongly. For example, if I tapped on Programs, it would select Settings. Did screen alignment several times but that still did not solve the issue. Any other suggestions?

GPS

Here’s one quirk about the device. When you run an application that can tap into the device’s GPS system, such as a navigation application, you’ll need to turn the GPS on first before you run it. Otherwise, the application will not be able to use the GPS of the 8502. It’s really weird because all the other devices that had GPS on them functioned well without the need of a switch. Due to my habit, I found myself in many situations where the navigation application I was running did not work because GPS was not turned on. Nothing major but definitely troublesome.

No GPS Update

If that was not enough, there’s no GPS update utility available for the Ultimate 8502. So if you have not been using your GPS for a while, expect it to take a pretty long time to find a fix. In some cases, it took me as long as 20 minutes to get a fix from a cold start which is really 18 minutes too long if you ask me. The lack of an update utility is really bewildering as other devices using the same chip does have it. Maybe i-mate can provide a reason behind this?

Navigation

When it’s all said and done, navigation was pretty good on the Ultimate 8502. So after remembering to turn on your GPS and spending 20 minutes waiting for it to find a fix, you’ll be navigating smoothly with it. At no time did it lose signal after getting a fix and comparing it to my Glofiish X500, they were both fixed at the same position while inside a moving car. So I’d say that it’s pretty good.

Multimedia

As a multimedia device, the Ultimate 8502 works pretty fine. It plays videos and music as expected. A2DP works on it though I did experience some skips when I had other applications running in the background. Other than that, it was smooth so you want to keep that in mind when usingyour bluetooth stereo headsets.

With regards to videos, I did some testing using TCPMP 0.81using 4 videos in various combinations of WMV, XVID, VGA and qVGA. Below are the results:

So what do these numbers mean? Well the most important one would be the one in the first row that shows you average speed. As long as it’s at least 100%, it means the video file will play smoothly on your device. From the looks of it, it has no problems playing videos encoded in qVGA resolutions, be it in WMV or XVID. Anything of higher resolution, as you can tell from the table above, will result in choppy viewing. Don’t fret because I have yet to see a qVGA device be able to reach 100% for VGA video files.

TV Out

This is a pretty novel idea to have but I can see how mobile professionals will find it useful. The TV Out function works great, even allowing you to transfer audio as well. So whatever is on your device will be on the screen as you see below:

The one on the left is when the 8502 is in portrait and the right is when it’s in landscape.

I’d say it’s pretty good. I was expecting the text to become blurry when I transferred the image from a 2.6″ screen to a 42″ one. Thankfully that did not happen. However, if you notice the icons at the top, it did get a little blurry so if you are looking to project a lot of images from your device, you might want to use higher resolution graphics.

Spb Benchmark Tests

For those of you who like numbers, here are Spb’s Benchmark tests results:

I, for one, take this with a pinch of salt because I have encountered many times when a device does not score well on this benchmark but still performs above expectations. So if you are making your decisions based on this set of results alone, I would highly recommend you think twice.

Response

Alright so we have the numbers in terms of Spb’s Benchmark tests above but numbers can only say so much. I once had a Glofiish M800 that got pretty bad results on the Benchmark but it was very snappy from personal experience. So if you are interested in finding out if those numbers are indicative of expected results, you’ll have to read on.

The i-mate Ultimate 8502 is very much comparable to my ETEN Glofiish X500. Now before you get all excited because I have been saying that my Glofiish X500 is one snappy device, remember that the Ultimate has twice the ROM and RAM of the Glofiish X500. If anything, it should be significantly faster than my Glofiish X500.

Unfortunately, that is not the case. Even after a hard reset, you get just under 90MB of ROM but what’s even more disappointing is that you only get 33MB of free RAM. 33MB! Even my Glofiish X500 with only 64MB of RAM gives me 33MB of free RAM after a hard reset.

Honestly, i-mate needs to optimize this device a lot more. It has huge potential to be even better than it currently is. At the moment, it feels snappy but there are times when the wait icon comes up for no reason (like after a soft reset) or I have to wait slightly longer than usual. While not often (save for the soft reset), it should not be the case for a device that packs 256MB ROM and 128MB of RAM.

Keyboard

The keypad is a real joy to type. The first couple of days, I was wondering if I could ever adapt to it but I kept forcing myself to use the keyboard a lot (sending emails, writing reviews and notes using Mobile Word and so forth). After a week of usage, I can safely say that I was pretty comfortable with it.

I have my own system of entering data with the keyboard where I use the tip of my fingers and you might come up with your own. Based on my system, I can now pump out text pretty fast, even faster than I used to be able to with SIPs. And the best part is that I seldom make mistakes now because I am pretty familiar with the keyboard. If you have the 8502 and still experience problem with it, I’d recommend you spend a couple of days just getting familiarized with it. After that, you’ll enjoy it just as much as I did.

Other Issues

Here are a few other issues that I encountered when using the Ultimate 8502 and chances are you are too if you are using the same ROM that I’m on:

No microSDHC Card Support

Can you believe it? I didn’t think there’s a device that’s released in 2008 that does not support microSDHC. Apparently i-mate has just proven me wrong. Tried using my 4GB microSDHC on it and it did not work. So if you’re looking to expanding memory on the 8502, 4GB would be the maximum you can go and make sure it’s the older microSD version (and n0ot microSDHC).

Google Maps (including My Location) Does Not Work

This is more a fault of Google Maps than that of the device because a lot of other users of Windows Mobile devices are experiencing it as well. However, I wanted to give you the heads up on it in case you are a heavy user of it.

Trying to run Google Maps over WiFi will give you an error but it’ll work fine on your mobile data (GPRS/EDGE/3G) connection. Also, My Location does not seem to work on it when I tried. Hopefully Google will find a solution to these problems soon because it’s bothering a lot of people as well.

Covered Soft Reset Button Is Really Troublesome

I have mentioned this before but I’ll have to bring it up again as it deals with user experience. The soft reset button that is located under the battery cover is a real pain. Thankfully I am using SBSH’s iLauncher which allows me to put a soft reset icon on my Today screen but for users who do not, you’ll have to find an alternative. I took for granted the ease of just pulling out my stylus and doing a soft-reset and I can say without a doubt that I am missing it.

Wireless Manager Does Not Work From Time To Time

Here’s something weird: the Wireless Manager that handles all your radio connection (Phone, Bluetooth, WiFi and GPS) did not activate from time to time. I am not sure what’s causing it but it happens randomly and thankfully not too often.

I’ll be trying to call it up using the Fn + sym key shortcut but nothing happens. The only way to bring it up again is to do a soft reset. Oh wait, it’s under the battery cover. Darn it.

No Mass Storage Mode

If there’s one thing that mobile professionals do, it’s carrying around data with them. With that in mind, I would have expected i-mate to have built-in a mass storage feature into the Ultimate 8502. It only seemed right considering that the storage card slot is hidden under the battery cover which makes it troublesome to access. By having a mass storage mode, users can easily and quickly transfer files between their computer(s) and device. That would have averted some of the inconvenience don’t you think?

No Copy And Paste From Keyboard

My last gripe with the Ultimate 8502 is the lack of cut, copy and paste functions from the keyboard. Sure you could use the traditional cut, copy and paste by tapping and holding from the touchscreen but I was hoping that i-mate would have added that feature somewhere in the keyboard. My assumption is that this lack of feature was due to the compact size of the keyboard and they had to compromise something. Either way, I think i-mate should have figured something out for this don’t you think?

Conclusion

When the Ultimate 8502 was conceptualized, it was truly deserving of the Ultimate tag. But throw delays and problems into the mix and what would have been a best seller ended up being just a normal device. If it indeed was released in 2007, this would have definitely been on a lot more consumer’s list. Right now, there are a lot more devices out there with similar or even better specifications and the Ultimate 8502 has definitely lost its shine.

I guess the reason I am being so critical of the Ultimate 8502 is because it promises so much but fails to deliver many times as discussed above. I guess I might be forgiving if it was just calling the i-mate 8502. Never over-promise and under-deliver, i-mate. It’ll just come back and bite you.

However, it seems that a new ROM is on the horizon and while it does not fix a lot of the problems highlighted above, it does bring it support for microSDHC and that you no longer need to activate GPS before using a navigation program. It’ll also pack Windows Mobile 6.1. A step in the right direction definitely but is it too late?

The Ultimate line of devices is a great idea dreamt up by i-mate and while it has been tarnished by countless problems at the moment, I think if they went back to the drawing boards and came up with some new devices AND bring them to market quicker, the i-mate brand might just get the rejuvenation it’s seeking.

For the time being though, the Ultimate 8502 is nothing Ultimate but a great device nonetheless. It packs a lot of features and with the new WM6.1 ROM installed, it looks to be a lot better than the one I currently have. Unfortunately they’ll not be able to move the soft reset button to a more visible location.

Those interested in the i-mate Ultimate 8502 can purchase it for a recommended retail price of $699. It’s currently not available in the United States due to the Nokia-Qualcomm lawsuits but you can always get it from one of those international retailers like those in Canada.

Related posts

• It’s Finally Here, The i-mate Ultimate 8502 (4)
• Unboxing The i-mate Ultimate 8502 (1)
• Looking Around (And Inside) The i-mate Ultimate 8502 (4)
• Your HTC Questions Answered (11)
• You Comment On The Layout, We Give You Prizes (2)