PeriSoft
08-22-2008, 09:26 AM
I've had a trusty 8700 about 2.5 years (ish, I think), and it finally got to the point where it became unusable. After being beaten up by motion simulators, staircases, and Manhattan streets, the screen was cracked, the keys toward the edge of the keyboard were flaky, and the trackwheel tended to go down when scrolled up and up when scrolled down. It took a real pounding, but alas, it was time to say goodbye. :(
So, rather than getting an 8800 - I'm skeptical of the trackball, and in particular, the keyboard - I decided to sidegrade to another 8700. It took some doing to get AT&T to send me one, but I was victorious!
Now I have my shiny new 8700. But it's significantly different, and it has some serious usability issues. I'm presuming these are due to firmware changes.
In short:
- There aren't any themes with simple, text-based menus. (I presume I could find some, though...?)
- The backlight randomly gets dim (while in the middle of typing!) even when not in auto-backlight mode, and sometimes randomly reverts to auto-backlight mode for no particular reason.
- The browser is awful. Holding down 'alt' no longer allows page-by-page scrolls, the rendering is different in a way that breaks a lot of sites, and scrolling around will make the highlighted link be somewhere off-screen a large amount of the time. This happened sometimes on the older 8700, but on this one it's actually worse than having the click wheel going the wrong way some of the time!
The questions: Are there options for these behaviors somewhere, or is this just in the new firmware? And if it's the firmware, is there anyway I can downgrade to the version on my old device? Am I being an idiot and completely missing something?
I love the 8700 dearly, but if I can't fix the issues in this one I might as well give the 8800 a shot. Advice appreciated!
So, rather than getting an 8800 - I'm skeptical of the trackball, and in particular, the keyboard - I decided to sidegrade to another 8700. It took some doing to get AT&T to send me one, but I was victorious!
Now I have my shiny new 8700. But it's significantly different, and it has some serious usability issues. I'm presuming these are due to firmware changes.
In short:
- There aren't any themes with simple, text-based menus. (I presume I could find some, though...?)
- The backlight randomly gets dim (while in the middle of typing!) even when not in auto-backlight mode, and sometimes randomly reverts to auto-backlight mode for no particular reason.
- The browser is awful. Holding down 'alt' no longer allows page-by-page scrolls, the rendering is different in a way that breaks a lot of sites, and scrolling around will make the highlighted link be somewhere off-screen a large amount of the time. This happened sometimes on the older 8700, but on this one it's actually worse than having the click wheel going the wrong way some of the time!
The questions: Are there options for these behaviors somewhere, or is this just in the new firmware? And if it's the firmware, is there anyway I can downgrade to the version on my old device? Am I being an idiot and completely missing something?
I love the 8700 dearly, but if I can't fix the issues in this one I might as well give the 8800 a shot. Advice appreciated!