BenQ-Siemens EL71

I got an EL71 last December when I changed my mobile contract and my phone. I must admit that the EL71 looked quite attractive and I was tempted by the fact that you could upgrade the phone memory to 2Gb by the insertion of a MicroSD card so I decided to go with it.

The phone itself is a nice concept. Siemens are trying to get back into the mobile market and this collaboration with BenQ has so much potential to rival Nokia and Sony ...
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In a word? No.

As I've said, it looks nice enough. Decked out in a sexy silver brushed metal effect it's quite attractive front on, but at the back it's just black plastic. Even then this undertstated effect is quite nice so you can have the phone and not worry about it being ugl. It's also a slide phone which means that the keypad drops down when you need to use it as opposed to being a flip or "candy bar" phone. ... more

I got an EL71 last December when I changed my mobile contract and my phone. I must admit that the EL71 looked quite attractive and I was tempted by the fact that you could upgrade the phone memory to 2Gb by the insertion of a MicroSD card so I decided to go with it.

The phone itself is a nice concept. Siemens are trying to get back into the mobile market and this collaboration with BenQ has so much potential to rival Nokia and Sony Ericsson. The question is does it pull it off?

In a word? No.

As I've said, it looks nice enough. Decked out in a sexy silver brushed metal effect it's quite attractive front on, but at the back it's just black plastic. Even then this undertstated effect is quite nice so you can have the phone and not worry about it being ugl. It's also a slide phone which means that the keypad drops down when you need to use it as opposed to being a flip or "candy bar" phone. As it's pretty small then you can pop it in your suit without it ruining the line of the suit or keep it in your jeans pocket and not worry about it impeding your movement too much. The main problem with the fascia is it does scratch quite easily if you have coins or similar items in your pocket. It's also just right on the weight side as well. It weighs in circa 90grams so its heavy enough to know you have it, but light enough for you not to feel like you're carrying a brick.

Inside the phone is a different matter. It's NOT 3G compatible so if you're looking for something that is then this is not the phone to go for. The display is quite bright (resolution 240 x 320) and the main screen is quite attractive although I don't get on with the sidebar that it uses. This is intended to make navigation easier and it can be customised, but there is something that annoys me about it. I have a liking for scooting through menus which for some weird reason I can do quicker that I can use this sidebar thing. I think the delay between tabbing down is too long as opposed to me hitting the menu button and a few extra key presses.

All the standard features are there. The contacts, calendar, camera, to do list, unit converter and a few more all make this a robust phone but where it really should shine is the MP3 player and the video features.

It's upgradable to 2Gb (the internal memory is a paltry 16Mb). It uses the MicroSD card format and if you've not seen these you're in for a shock. They are tiny and I mean tiny as in smaller than a postage stamp. These slot into the back of the phone next to the sim card and what you can fit on these can rival an entry level ipod. I've tried to ignore that fact that I like the MP3 format and fought against buying an MP3 player, but eventually relented and then decided that I wanted one in my phone so this helped make the decision for me with this phone. The problem is the phone can't pull it off in the media department.

The media player is woefully inadequate. It's ok if you're sat on the train and can leave the handset alone while you play some music, but if you want to use the phone while mobile then forget it. You can throw the unit into what it calls "background mode" where it plays the music and reverts to the main screen, but the end result is the complete inabiliy to turn it off. You can either jump back into the media player when you need to turn it off and then select another tune to play and then stop it and slip back to the main screen, but this causes no end of problems. Some of the time it keeps the icon up saying it's still playing something or the vast majority of the time it crashes. It got so bad that in the end I just decided to turn the phone off and back on again rather than risk it dying.

The same goes with the video function. I encode video a lot of the time so I'm at home with most of the formats and the main format this phone uses is the 3gp format. Given the size of the screen I decided that I could encode some programmes that I watch and have recorded so that I could watch them on the move. I encoded them correctly, dumped them on the card and went on my way. I had either no sound, no picture or a plain old crash! If you want to record video on your phone then keep it short. I used it to record several shots (each around 10 minutes in length) at Chinese new year in Liverpool. On 4 of these it crashed before I managed to save them. The battery (I'll get to that soon) was fully charged and the memory card pretty clear so that annoyed me to say the least.

While we're on the subject of crashes even the call and SMS software isn't up to scratch. Several times the phone crashed while I was mid-call. One phone call was while myself and a colleague didn't see eye-to- eye on something and it decided to crash at just the point where it seemed like I'd hung up on him. I had to ring back and apologise and it almost caused a bigger argument from that. It also had the added advantage of just dumping all my calls to voice mail even when I was in an area with full signal and not even telling me people were trying to call me.

SMS wise it had a habit of receiving a SMS and then not letting me know. The little sidebar has a notification feature where it would pop a little icon next to the SMS icon. None appeared. I was waiting for a particularly important SMS to confirm a meeting in London and in the end I got quite irate about the fact my friend hadn't sent me a text to confirm. When I called him he said he'd responded immediately and when I looked in the inbox (which said 0 unread messages) there it was unopened. Argh!!!!!

Oh and we must forget the night of doom where the phone decided to completely lock up and refuse to operate for several hours (I eventually got it working again by pulling the battery out and leaving it out for a few hours) at a point where home was trying to call me as a stressful situation developed. Maybe the phone has psychic capabilities where it knows when stress levels will go through the roof and it tries to protect you from them!?!

Battery wise. Well pretty much the same really. It allegedly has 300 hours of standby time and 5 hours talktime. The talktime is pretty accurate and I managed about that (believe me my phones do get hammered), but standby you're looking at around 24 hours or so. Weekends tend to be the days when I chill out and I was having to charge the phone at least once a day. If you let the phone die completely then you get a couple of charges that will last maybe 36 hours, but after that it decreases dramatically.

I would like to be able to recommend this phone as it's has a nice interface, but the bugs in the interface and the crashes make it a real chore to use. You tend to get a feeling of "I hope this works..." and flying by the seat of your pants as opposed to actually feeling secure in the knowledge that it is doing it's job. Unless BenQ Siemens really go back to the drawing board then they're going to fail in cracking the mobile market.  

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