Category: Cell Phone Talk
So I've had the Haven for about five months now. Okay, so it's not the Swiss army knife of phones. So it's not lightning fast. So who cares? It calls and texts and talks. Right?
Right, except that I may have found a way around a few things that might make everyone's life easier and minimize frustration. For those of you who have Havens, here are a few tips:
1. Don't have an extended battery? Get one. If not, here is a partial fix that will increase your battery life. Since few to none of you can read the display, turn the backlight off. To do this, press Left Soft, 6 for Settings, 2 for Phone Settings, and go from there.
2. Tired of texting so fast your phone can't keep up in announcing letters, thus causing you to make embarrassing typos you didn't even do? This may sound crazy, but get an earpiece or an adaptor that will convert your earbuds or headset into a mini jack that will fit your Haven. For some reason, I can now type much faster (and with much less errors) than I can when the speech channels from the speaker phone.
Hope this helps! If you have any interesting tips and tricks to share, post them here.
How is this phone better than say the LG 5300 which I'm still useing from Verizon?
Other then the fact it can read text messages, what other differences are there?
Honestly, I've never seen that phone. I am a new Verizon customer. But part of the reason I switched was because getting emergency alerts from my school, bank, and transit authorities I use would have helped a lot. And it does. You may have to ask someone who has used your same device...sorry I can't be of more help.
First, thanks for the tips Melisa! I have a jack that plugs in for a device I use for my hearing aids, and this helps the responsiveness of the phone.
John: it does a lot the LG phones can't do, though the speech is rather odd. First of all, the phone is entirely accessible with speech once you enabled it. Among the features this phone has that your 5200 doesn't are a calendar, some soret of reminders feature, the ability to assign ring tones to contacts, and a hole hoste of other features. The draw-back that I see is that the phone doesn't seem to have the reception of the LG phones, and the battery life isn't all to great because of this, but beyond that, it's quite a nice phone. It is a bit sluggish from time to time, but as long as you have good cell service, I think it may be worth a look.
yes, the speech is at times unclear. But what screenreader isn't? Lol. I wish they would make it possible for you to cursor through texts so you can figure out what the hell someone has said when you can't understand it all at once hah. I wish I knew who to write to...I have tons of suggestions lol.
My mom has a Samsung that she baught about a year ago. I've also checked out the Verizon flip phones last year, and the speech isn't understandable to me very well. Even the newer LG uses a different speech codic then the 5300. I kinda went overboard when i baught this phone on ebay and baught 3 of them... It seems the flip phone is dieing a slow and painful death.
As I understand it, even though this is a TRI-Mode phone, the newer ones that are 3G or4G all that is for data. It has nothing to do with audio.
Have you tried Star 228 option 2 Scott?
The other phone that peaks my interest from Verizon is the HTC Ozone.
There isn't a lot of speech that I can understand, though I've heard the new Narator voice and the Seary ladie's voice and I can understand that. Though to be honest I haven't heard it in a lot of settings, just as a few sample bits which doesn't give an acurit picture IMO.
rzion
I hope flip phones aren't going out of style. I love them so I don't butt dial people hahhaha. And I hate touch screen and miniature keyboards argh. But I will agree with you that thspeech can be extremely difficult to understand. I haven't heard the new Narrator, I don't think. What does it sound like? Lol.
Last time I checked the store it has4. GSM Arena only had 6 listed for flip phones.
Some dude posted a windows 8 review ages ago, and tha'ts how I heard narator. Not sure ware to find it now.
I just realized something: My boyfriend's family recently switched to Verizon and his LG reads a few things. Like it can read caller ID, text notification, and even read text, but it definitely is not aas advanced as the Haven in what it can read. I will say I think it can read longer messages than the Haven. Don't you hate, Scott, when you get a multipage message from another Verizon user and it won't read it? Yargh.
Mine's so old-school it doesn't read text messages, but since we dont have any texting on the plann we got, its somethin like $0.75 a message?
I am sorry to say but flip phones are headed to the past and will slowly go away. I am not saying that as a android user just beeing up front.
tech and I do well in the past together. lol
Okay, so for those of you who use the Haven and have to grab a sightie for longer text messages, I have a slightly annoying but relatively workable fix. So you know how, when writing a text message, you can read through it if you arrow through it one character at a time? Well, some of you may have noticed that when reading forward, if you catch the space before a word, it will read the whole word. This will also happen if you are reading backward, and you hit the last character in a word. For example, say there is a space before the word "my." If you have hit this space, it will say, "My." If you are reading backward and you catch the Y, it will say, "My." Quite tedious, but if you already know what you wrote, you can anticipate howlong a word is and rush through it until you hit the end (or the beginning) of the next word. Also, if you think it's a longish message, you can up and down arrow through it to get to the top or bottom, though when going to the top, be careful not to revert to the contact screen--that's annoying. I hope I am making sense so far.
So let's say a fellow Verizon user sends you a multipage message. You open it, and voila--you hear nothing. Hit Right Soft and forward it to yourself. But don't send it. When you're in the edit field, cursor past the word "Fwd" and read your message forward the way I justhorribly described. Doesn't work well when you're on the go, but if you're stuck by yourself with no other options, this is agood fix. Replying to the message will not work well because you are provided with a blank slate, whereas with a forward you can see the original quoted text.
Do you type fast? Don't have earbuds on you? Use Word Mode. I don't have it set to my default because I go back and forth, but play around with it in a text to yourself. Press Right Soft, 1, and 1 again and start typing. For example, 4 will be "I," which automatically comes up, so press SPACE (or Pound), then 9-3-6-8, "went," and so forth. If a word doesn't come up immediately, hit 0 until you hear the match you want. For example, 6-3 will prioritize "of" over "me," so watch out. To cycle through punctuation, press 1 once, then hit 0 from then on to find the symbol you want. Pressing 1 twice and 0 afterward will cycle through common smileys.
Okay, so this weekend my boyfriend and his brother's fiance taught me the art of the word-guesser, or what is commonly called T9. The Haven doesn't appear to have as extensive programming as T9 does, such that you cannot add a word t a dictionary, at least that I'm not aware of. But if you change the entry mode to word, you can both write and dit faster. It cn be annoying, though, when Haven doesn't know what word you want and you momentaily have to change entry mode back to ABC.
So here's another fix for long Verizon texts that the Haven won't read. If you have a Google Voice account, forward it to that number. You could also forward it to your e-mail just in general, but those end up truncated. GV sometimes delivers them out of order, but hey, it's something. Also, if you happen to use the aforementioned T9-type feature and the aforementioned forwarding but not sending fix, you can finally read the text word by word instead of character by tedious character. If that didn't make any freaking sense at all, you can forward a long message to yourself but not send it and then arrow through it to get the jist of what's going on.
And now a question. Not that I need to password lock my phone, but I'm curious. Does Haven have that capability? And what about just locking the phone, period? Not that it needs that feature, since it's a flip phone and butt-dialing is unlikely, but hey, shit happens.