The ringer volume on the phone seems plenty loud. Most of the time, level 4 to 6 out of 8 is fine for an indoor setting. A weak vibrating alert though was disappointing for me. I tend to keep my phones on vibrate most of the time, so a weak one is typically not good as I tend to miss calls when walking around. The speakerphone also sounded fine, and callers stated that the conversation was good to them on the other end even when it was enabled. Enabling it though is buried in the in-call menus, which can be frustrating to find when on a call.
Battery
The battery of the A900 was probably my biggest complaint overall. Within the first 36 hours of having the phone in my possession, I charged it 4 times. One caveat to this is that I was spending a fair amount of time using the phone to learn about all it could do. However, this did not in my mind make up for the lack of “oomph” for general use. With average use, I saw 2 days of battery life. This included 30 minutes of calling, a few text messages, a few hours of standby time digitally roaming and 20-30 minutes of Power Vision services. With heavy use, the battery was dead in 5 hours. The battery indicator however is about as reliable as the gas gauge of a mid-90’s Pontiac dropping from 3 bars, to 2, to 1 very quickly. Then either on its own or by turning it off and back on, the battery meter would jump back to 2 bars. As with many CDMA devices, the standby time is much better than their GSM counterparts. If left unused, the battery will last for many days. My test left the phone on my dresser for 60 hours without making or receiving a call and the meter still showed all 3 bars.
Texting
Texting on the A900 is very easy to do, but those that rely on T9 be warned. The included T9 dictionary is decent, but does not allow you to go back and choose a different word after you have hit the space key when entering text. So, if you want to go back to change a word when T9 defaulted to the wrong one, you'll have to scroll back and erase the word, re-enter it and then switch to the proper choice instead of just scrolling back, selecting the word and finding the right choice.
Camera
The camera on the A900 can be activated easily from a button on the right side of the phone. After about 3 seconds, the screen displays the image seen by the lens, only upside down. Hitting the volume button will flip the image around to the right configuration. Also, if you tilt the phone sideways, you will see that the camera rotates the photo to a landscape view. Hitting the rocker button from this view turns the image backwards. Very comical if you don’t know how to change it back! The quality of the photos taken by the 1.3MP camera came out quite good and in outdoor settings, are definitely usable for web pages or small prints. The camera application offers resolution, quality, color effects, as well as adjustment of flash, white balance and brightness. Video clips can also be taken, but only in QCIF format with a 144 by 176 size
Sample interior photo with flash.
Sample interior garage photo.
Sample outdoor photo.
How the camera takes photos backwards if not set correctly.
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