Windows Phone Thoughts: Hands-On With the Gigabyte gSmart Phone

If you don't feel like talking to a particular individual (i.e. annoying friend, boss, spouse, or debt collector) and need a digital alibi, the Background Effects feature adds a looping ambience of being in a car, airplane, concert, meeting, movie theater, and more.


Figure 11: "I can't talk right now... I'm in the middle of [insert your excuse here]..."

Lastly, you can record your own telephone conversations just by enabling the checkbox. Note that you can only activate one of the three Handset Applications at a time, so if you want to use the Background Effect, you have to uncheck the Recording and Answering Machine features.


Figure 12: Recording telephone conversations couldn't be any easier with the gSmart.

I noticed a bunch of .PAT files sitting in the Windows folder of the gSmart which are wavetable synthesis files for the "192 Polyphonic Ringtones" that is advertised with the device. So, in case you don't want to use WMA files for ringtones, MIDI files (which are comparatively smaller) make for a neat, great sounding alternative.


Figure 13: Sample MIDI ringtone files I found on my test gSmart phone.


Figure 14: Additional settings for phone use. I particularly like having the screen turned off automatically in a call.


Figure 15: The section where you can find your IMEI and firmware versions.

Other integrated features include an incoming call filter, a call history lock, and Smart Dial, a feature similar to the IntelliDialer on the HTC devices where you can start to type a number and matching contacts will automatically filter in on the screen.

One issue that I did have with this pre-release firmware version is that the voicemail notification didn't disappear after I listened to and deleted my voicemail messages on Cingular. Only a soft-reset was able to make them disappear.