I recently swapped phones with my sister in law, as she didn't believe me that my motorola a1000 was worse than her phone, and I didnt believe her that her BenQ P50 was worse than my phone. So we agreed to swap phones for a week so we could have a rigourous trial of each handset and just out of curiosity noted down all of the specs, what I liked/disliked etc. about the handset so whe I saw this review available, I thought I'd go for it and let you know how I found it. I wouldn't actually recommend it by the way, absolutely abismal as a phone. Not too bad as a PDA though if that's all you want.
This phone uses the standard GSM networking 850/900/1800/1900. It is roughly 120x60x20mm in dimension and weighs in at 170g making it 10g heavier than my existing phone and slightly larger in dimension.
It uses 65k colours on a 240x320 pixel TFT screen measuring rougly 40x60mm
It has a built in QWERTY keyboard, a blessing compared to the horrible graphical keyboard I have to use on my existing phone, and comes with a handful of wallpapers, with the option of downloading any extra you may want.
The phone has vibrate mode option or 64 polyphonic ringtone channels. There is also the option of MP3 customised ringtone downloads.
The phonebook in the platform allows advanced calls and Photocalls. The phone can also record the last 10 dialled, missed and answered calls.
Memory wise, there is a spare slot for a MMC/SDIO memory card but the phone has on board 64MB RAM, 64MB Flash and uses a 416MHZ Intel processor.
The phone is not 3G, but it uses wireless standard 802.11b, bluetooth and infrared and has a GPRS option for accessing WAP.
It has an OK operating system because it uses Pocket PC 2003 from Micro$oft and browses with WAP2.0 XHTML.
It allows Gaming, SMS, MMS, and has an in-built 1.3 Mega Pixel video camera
As well as the above features, I made great use of the MP3/MPEG-4 player. I also found the handwriting recognition useful and think its a good feature that the phone comes with Office applications, because I've been able to work on my university work whilst out and about then sync with my PC via bluetooth (do you see why I think it's better as a PDA).
There's also a photo album, built in handsfree so yu can use it in the car and voice commands.
The battery is standard Lithium ion 1240mAh. It has a standby of upto 120hours and Talk-time of around 4hours.
I think my sis in law paid about £300 for this phone not locked to any network.
So all in all, whilst this phone does actually make phone calls and send text and media messages these to me seemed to be somewhat added features to a standard PDA handset. I thought it was a great PDA, but like my existing phone, it feels like a brick, and it's really tedious having to stand in one place writing text messages. I suppose that at least there's an in-built keyboard so there's no need for stuggling with a graphical keyboard and a stylus.
If I was reviewing this phone as a PDA, I'd probably give it about 8.5 out of 10.
But this is a mobile phone review so I'd only give it 6. Not realy the phone for me at the end of the day.
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I think phones should be mainly left as phones and PDA's left as PDA's.. yes we want more features, but not at the cost of the main function of the item your buying. Great review ~Geoff~
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