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Virgin Mobile SHUTTLE 3G Music & Video phone with Bluetooth Wireless
Amazon.com Price: View Sale Price (as of 2010-07-30 15:50:03 GMT) Product prices and availability are accurate as of the date/time indicated and are subject to change. Any price and availability information displayed on Amazon.com at the time of purchase will apply to the purchase of this product.
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Customer Reviews
Don't get me wrong, they have some of the best plans I've ever seen (I pay $35 a month for everything I could ever need), it's just their phones that never appealed to me. I had the Wild Card a year ago, and let's just say that it kind of scarred me for life. :D
I was urging towards the X-tc, but too many reviews stating that it had all sorts of bugs turned me off. And then I discovered the Shuttle.
An affordable device that has almost too many features for its price (which isn't a bad thing, mind you), the Shuttle is a great phone that I'll never regret buying. The 1.3 megapixel camera with a camcorder ain't too bad, either.
Since this wouldn't be a review without a complaint or two (I'm a poet today), I'll admit that the camera quality isn't the best, especially for one that can take video. I mean, if I'm gonna take a video of something, I want it to look at least half-decent. The 1.3 megapixel makes your videos look like something on YouTube before they came up with the idea for high quality video support. In other words, videos don't look good on the Shuttle. This is minor, though. I mean, it has 3G.
I recommend this to any Virgin Mobile customer who wants quite possibly their best phone. Sure, the Rumor2 is nice, but that's for people who love to text. Even though I admit I'm a texter, I still wouldn't pay $130 for a phone that doesn't have as much as the Shuttle. And that's that.
The Shuttle is undoubtedly one of the most capable devices in Virgin's lineup. It's a 3G phone- the first one for this carrier, has a micro-SD slot, music player, stereo bluetooth, and touch sensitive keys. The screen is a respectable 176x220, it has a 1.3 MP camera and a neat slider design that looks pretty high-tech.
In terms of call quality, the Shuttle is pretty clear as long as you're not using a headset. I haven't tried a bluetooth set, and don't really want to after hearing how bad it was with the UTStarcom-branded wired headset. The sound quality with this is atrocious- and the microphone pickup is really no better. I don't know if you can get a third party set that will fit the jack, but if so it's not available from Virgin's store. The music player is effectively useless as a result. The speakerphone is average, but it has major problems (more on that later). The camera takes decent pictures, which you can save on internal or SD memory, and can also record video. There's voice memo, a simple calendar and address book, and other miscellaneous tools like a calculator and stopwatch. Battery life is superb- I can often get through a whole week on one charge, and when you browse the web it is pretty fast.
Now the problems... there's so many it's hard to think of where to begin. First off, the touch-sensitive keys. These are cool... until you try to pull the phone out of your pocket and it ignores the call because it brushed against something on the way out. Or until you push them and they flat out refuse to work... say when answering a call or (ironically) pushing ignore. This issue is inherent in their design, and after a few weeks I really wished they'd just put in old-fashioned regular keys. It didn't take me long to realize that the softkey to turn on the speakerphone was only sometimes working. After a while it stopped working altogether but for some weird reason (which I never did figure out) it sometimes activated by itself. So whenever I wanted to use the speakerphone it wouldn't work, but sometimes it would just answer a call on speaker mode automatically. Not sure what to say about that. After about two months of use, the phone occasionally froze upon receiving an incoming call. It would stay ringing, but opening the slider (even repeatedly), pushing the answer softkey, pushing the talk key, and even pushing the end key produced absolutely no response. After the caller gave up, I could only access my address book and had to remove the battery and replace it to get the handset working again. Even some basic functions like the alarm clock stopped working after a while, and it's clear that the firmware has some serious bugs in it. Additionally, while the web speed is pretty nice, Virgin's web plans are not. Also, the browser that comes with this device is horrible- really no better than what they've always been using. I've heard you can download Opera Mini to replace it, and if so that might be a viable alternative, but it still doesn't fix the fact that you're paying way too much for web access from the carrier.
I don't know if I just got a lemon or if it was because I got this device right when it came out, but either way these issues are totally unacceptable. The device was not dropped, immersed in water, or otherwise mistreated- I hardly even used the thing and these issues started surfacing after it was in service for some time (the other reviewers both look like new buyers; I'd be more curious to see how many long-term users had the same problems). What good is a phone that can't even reliably answer calls? Maybe as a paperweight. Virgin doesn't do firmware updates, so you're pretty much SOL if you run into any software bugs, and as far as customer service goes you get what you pay for. They're a very low cost carrier, but trying to get a replacement (or any kind of help, for that matter) is pretty much hopeless. They sent me the wrong car charger for this device, and after 3 useless calls to customer service I just gave it up and wrote it off. They also deleted an existing balance on my account, and when I asked them about this they said 'we can't do anything about it.'
After dealing with this $100 piece of junk for a few months, I just bought a new and cheaper Samsung model and am using that now. It hasn't had any of these issues so far and was half the cost to boot. While the Shuttle may be a bold new step for Virgin mobile, it is a device that's clearly got major issues and should be avoided at all costs.
Tags: bluetooth • mobile • music • phone • shuttle • Video • virgin • wireless • with