Audiovox CDM-8300
Average Ratings
Good looks, poor quality
A very classy looking phone and very slim. The soft non-slip rubber keys are very nice to work with. A decent sized screen for surfing and SMS. It holds a strong signal even better than previous audiovox phones, I've never had a dropped call. But that's where the good features stop.
The audio quality on this phone is the worst I've ever heard. Upgrading from my first generation analog/dual mode phone was a huge step down in sound quality. Both incoming and outgoing sound very gritty and compressed. I'm often embarassed having to make people repeat things. People often sound like fogs through this phone.
My phone was loaded with the Canadian Telus firmware. No normal ring tones to be found. Many bugs exist that cause you to get bumped out of an SMS message during incoming call, stuck in circles when going through menus and volume issues. For such a classy looking phone, why load it up with ring tones like jingle bells? All I want is one normal ringer.
The joystick is very hard to use, you end up pressing it in when you mean to press it left or right, causing you to select things you didnt mean to. Audiovox has removed this useless from future phones (thank you)
Overall this phone LOOKS great, has good signal, and is a wonderful device to hold and use for sms (when you're not bumped out of sms by an incoming call). But when used as a phone, it just doesn't cut it. After all making phone calls is it's primary function and if it can't do that well, then I can't give it a good rating. I'll be getting a new phone this month.
pretty good...
pros
light, very sleek, charges pretty quickly and keeps it for a long time, volume is good, speacker phone works nicely, screen is nice and big, not too expensive.
cons
voice dialing is so complicated i didn't even set it up, the joystick toggle is a major flaw... i keep on pushing it down when i want to go up or something, the menus are a little complicated and take getting used to, buttons are a little small, when in the phonebook you have to click the send button you can't just click the joystick and if you do click the joystick you have to go and find the person all over again.
Looks Great on Paper...
I bought this phone three months ago to replace my (also unreliable) TM-510 from verizon in Denver, CO.
Phone looks great on paper- slim, small, and light, nice features (speakerphone!).
Feels great when you open the box, too- the most solid feeling phone I have used. And, for the most part, this phone performs very well.
PROS........
-Solid as a rock- no squeaks, nice buttons, feels solid.
-Great battery life, lasts for days on light use, nearly two days under heavy use.
-Speakerphone is cool
-Built in answering machine is nifty, but is a pain in the ass to use regularly- no convenience.
-Menus and Interface are good
-Joystick, once you get used to it, is nice.
-Speakers are loud
-Other caller sounds great.
CONS..........
-The SCREEN SUCKS. The display updates so slowly it should be arrested. It changes slow enough in reaction to buttons that it interferes severely with my use of the phone.
-The rings are positively *awful*. Verizon has disabled BREW functionality, and I have not been able to find any way to download new rings so far.. Maybe a PC connect?
-BREW downloads disabled by verizon. No doubt because the screen so ------- slow it cannot play games, etc..
-Other callers frequently complain that I sound like I am calling from very very far away.
Overall, a nice phone to look at, works well and feels nice. Not smooth, though.
NOTE- Yesterday, for some reason (tower or phone.. don't know) digital service was unavailable here at home (this has happened before..) so the phone was in analog- My 8300 began 'crashing'-- clearing the screen, showing a filename, followed by a screen-full of garbage, a black screen, and then a phone reset like I had just powered on. It was doing this approx every 2.5 minutes until I turned it off. Digital today, working fine again.
Not too bad for, what, $69 now? I'm sure it'll be free soon. I'd wait for that if I were you.
Audiofake 8300
Verizon will push this phone as the BEST in their line. It is worthless in Palm Beach County Florida. I would never trust audiovox or thier word.
Ok phone
Overall this phone is good but it has no games and it's joystick is a serious design flaw. It does not perform as intended.
Great Phone!!!
Before purchasing my Audiovox 8300 (Hyundai) I previously owned an Audiovox 9155 (Toshiba). The 9155 is an OK phone, but horrible phonebook, and has an unusable speakerphone. The reason I needed a different phone was when I found out that the 9155 is incompatible with the Jabra FreeSpeak Bluetooth headset that I bought. Jabra tech said cause the way the earjack is designed.
So I had to get a new phone that would work with the Jabra. Not only did I want it to work but I wanted the headset to answer and hang up a call without having to interact with the phone (which the Jabra does through an emulation setting).
So I went to VZ to test some phones for that feature. What I found out was the Samsung A310 didnât (darn). I donât really care for the LG or Kyocera phones so I didnât even test them. All of the Motorolas did though but I donât like Moto phones for three main reasons, their volume isn't very loud, I canât stand iTap, and worst of all there send and end buttons are reversed from just about every other phone manufacturer that Iâm used to.
Then I found the 8300 and it WORKED with my headset without having to hit SEND/END.
Pros:
- Very nice small sized phone, feels durable, I donât care what you Hyundai haters say!
- For itâs size, it has a good battery life, I actually got 206 minutes of talk time; believe me, I tested it, off-peak of course
- Excellent Speakerphone, much louder than my 9155
- Excellent phonebook
- High resolution screen excellent for wireless web or SMS
- Voice Memo recorder (10 memos of 1 min each)
- Although I prefer using the vibrate mode because I hate ringers⦠it has a nice feature where it will vibrate twice and then ring
- Price
Cons:
- Weak vibrate mode
- While Iâve gotten accustom to the middle joystick button, I still make mistakes (e.g., pushing in while meaning to go up, left, etc.) but not too often
Need a new feature rich, inexpensive phone, then go to the store and check out the 8300!
Great Phone poor quality.
Pro:
I like the design; the big LCD gives me excellent viewable area. Light, and easy to use, great features.
I like the voice dial and speakerphone, very hand when my hands are full.
I work in construction and I found this phone to be very durable...
Cons:
The little joystick... I got blunt fingers. Trying to move it around usually end up with me pushing it in. The vibrate is weak, I usually don't even feel it and miss a lot of calls.
I had a problem with the LCD as well. As great as it is, it was flawed. Warranty took nearly 3 weeks, because I am in construction they didn't want to warranty it. Saying it took impact damage, with out a scratch on the phone. I don't wear it on a belt clip, or in a pocket. It's usually in my truck in my holder, my brief case or my jacket pocket when I am not working just browsing the mall or at a movie with my wife and kids.
I got it fixed, under warranty, but it was a battle.
Other wise, it's a great phone. I have not had any problems since. Just a faulty LCD.
It's a cool phone but still a lot to be improved (I)
I just got this phone from Staples for 179.99Can$ with Telus prepaid services.
I'm a software engineer who is doing embedded software design. Also I worked for Motorola about 2 years on cell phone software and I know how tight the schdule could be based on "Time to market" requirement. Audiovox CDM-8300 just came out this August. So I understand why there are so many problems or discomforts in the phone software. I just hope oneday Audiovox can come back to the users to update the firmware for me to make it a perfect phone.
Likes:
- Stylish, light weight,
- Big LCD screen with 4 grayscales. Good for web browsing and picture displays.
- 4 way joystick. Tricky at the begining, feels pretty good after you get used to it.
- Good animated menu system, easy to navigate.
- Good battery life.
- Using new Qualcomm MSM5100 3G CDMA2000 chipset.
- Customizable turnon, turnoff, idle screen.
- Downloadable ringtones and pictures.
- Speakerphone is a pretty good feature.
- Build in Answer machine
- Voice memo and voice dialing.
- Nice calendar with event reminders.
Don't likes:
- None of the 10 ringers are comfortable in case I don't want to set music as my ringer.
- When doing "search by name" in Phonebook, the highlighted item scroll too slow when I use the 4 way joystick to navigate the name list. If I enter a letter to search, the search is so slow.
- Even if there is only one number (like mobile number only) under a name, when I hightlight the name in phonebook and hit "SEND" key, I still have to go into the number list to pick that number manually. Suppose I only have an office number for an entry, I would have to go through 4 presses to call that number. That is is too much. I think the right way to do this is that call the number directly by pressing "SEND" key if there is only one number in that entry. This is really annoying when I want to call my wife at her cell phone.
So far, so good
We just got a new Audiovox CDM8300 (Verizon) and so far we're quite pleased with it. Unlike reports I heard about earlier models, the menus are quite easy to understand. Important functionality, like turning on the speakerphone and speed dialing, are available with just a few (or one!) keystrokes. The speakerphone sound quality is better than I expected, although you do need to speak up a bit if the phone is more than a couple of feet away. The only negative so far is that the keys are little bit mushy and the 'joystick' takes some getting used to before you can 'click' vs. 'toggle' accurately.
I'll file an updated report after we've used it for another week or so. So far, however, I have to admit that it looks like it'll be entirely adequate. Unless something bad pops up, I'll probably trade in our Motorola v120e for a second 8300.
Just got it, jury's still out...
OK, I've had the Motorola StarTAC in one form or another for about 7 or 8 years now, I think, so this is new for me. I haven't had to learn how to use a new phone in all those years, but I just got married and they had a two-for-one deal on the Audiovox CDM-8300, my wife thought they were cute, so now I have one.
I must say, it was pretty damn easy to use, right out of the box. I'm an instruction-reader, so I did sit down with the manual (can you say "typos?" - they must have been in a hurry) for about half an hour before I started playing with the phone. Even so, the learning curve is pretty low... the toughest thing to get used to is the little "thumbstick" used for directional plus confirmation (like a joystick, sort of, for directionals, but presses like a button as well). For the first little while, I kept pressing when I thought I was directing, and vice versa.
First thing I did was program the "greeting message" in both phones, since they're identical, we needed some way to tell them apart. Now the idle screen on each of our phones shows our respective names and the current date and time. There are also "animations" available for the idle screen.
Then I started in on the phone book. Name entry was pretty similar to the StarTAC (use the numbers, separate key for case, etc.) so I did pretty well there. I haven't played with the voice dialing or recording yet, so we'll have to see about that.
I like the form factor, it's nice and small. I am going to have to get a belt clip for it, and the PC sync. The antenna seems decent, and well-guarded (I went through 3 antennae in about ten months on my last StarTAC). Haven't used the speaker phone feature yet, or the web browser.
All in all, as they say, "I'm cautiously optimistic." I'll let you know more after I've used it for a while.
