The Motorola i580 is NOT my phone of choice

Nextel now sells the i580. It looks nice at first... it's very rugged, and comes equiped with a 1.3 MP camera. After playing with it for a while, I came to the conclussion that the Motorola iden group is heading in the right direction, but still isn’t anywhere near where they should be.

...Major Points:

The Record Store Is Much Faster.

In older iden phones (even ones with higher model numbers) always had a very sluggish record store. Any time you had to write data to the memory store, especially when you store lots of data, it would always run super slow. CDMA phone always had iden phones beat. The i580 is much faster, and is finally competitive on Record Store performace.

The Up stream network IO is HORRIBLE!

I loaded up an app onto the i580 and the i870, and I found that the network upload speeds on the i580 were about 4 times slower, and that’s a generous estimate. The download speeds seem to be competitive (at least with other iden phones). In addition to the slow speeds, you can not usually make it through a large upload without being interrupted by a random socket error, so really we shouldn’t even worry about the fact that it’s slow, instead we should just try to get it to work period.

The i580 does have widen, iden’s high(er) speed data, support… but I haven’t tried it yet, that may help getting around this horrible performance.

There are a lot of new bells and whistles on the i580, but the network IO is enough to make me say that I would advise against buying this phone until it is resolved.