O2 X3 Mobile Phone

...the Nokia 6260 or the O2 X3. The Motorola, although by far my favourite, was going to cost £150 even with a new contract and the other two were free so that was out the question. My next choice was to stick to my faithful Nokia, however this phone was not in stock yet, and again being the typical lad, I did not want to wait, I wanted my new toy now. So I was left with the O2 X3, it had every feature I wanted and I was still reasonably happy with ...
...The phone is made by O2 and is the newest in their range of mobile phones; it is the follow on from the X1 and X2. The phone is predominantly silver in colour with a black front panel, the buttons have a very bright blue light and the O2 logo is clearly visible on the front. The overall look of the phone is very simple and basic, but quite nice none the less. The durability is another matter, I do not exactly look after it well but its been abused ... more

INTRODUCTION
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I have a contract phone and with this contract I am allowed a new phone every year. In October my years contract expired and I was on the search for a new phone, being a typical boy I wanted the new gadget with all the latest things I would never use. After weeks of searching I narrowed it down to three phones, The Motorola RAZR V3, the Nokia 6260 or the O2 X3. The Motorola, although by far my favourite, was going to cost £150 even with a new contract and the other two were free so that was out the question. My next choice was to stick to my faithful Nokia, however this phone was not in stock yet, and again being the typical lad, I did not want to wait, I wanted my new toy now. So I was left with the O2 X3, it had every feature I wanted and I was still reasonably happy with this choice. I have used the phone for about 6 months now and my experience has been mixed to say the least but I will talk about that later.

THE PHONE
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The phone is made by O2 and is the newest in their range of mobile phones; it is the follow on from the X1 and X2. The phone is predominantly silver in colour with a black front panel, the buttons have a very bright blue light and the O2 logo is clearly visible on the front. The overall look of the phone is very simple and basic, but quite nice none the less. The durability is another matter, I do not exactly look after it well but its been abused no more than any other phone I have used and already looks badly damaged with the silver paint now being white in many areas.

The phones dimensions are 81 x 42 x 26 mm. This is relatively small for a flip phone, especially one that comes with a camera and video recording function. It is small enough to fit in your pocket and not too heavy at 96g.

The screen quality is a treat. With 256k true colour the definition is so sharp and this makes the scenic preloaded backgrounds look even better. The size of the screen is 128 x 160 pixels, which equates to approximately 3.1cm x 3.7cm, this is maybe slightly on the small size in relation to the size of the phone but is perfectly adequate for normal usage.

As with all new phones the memory is large to start with and add-ons can be bought. The phone book will take 500 names and it can store a fair few hundred messages, not sure how many I have in their. As well as the phone memory it has a slot for an external mini SD disk. This memory is used to store photos, MP3s, games, and/or videos. The supplied mini SD disk is only 32Mb; however a larger card can be bought. These larger cards vary so dramatically in price, from £11.99 for a 128mb miniSD Memory Card to £92.99 for a 1 GB miniSD Memory Card.

The phone's battery is not a strong point. It has a claimed standby time of 150hrs, but the claimed talk time of only 3hrs shows that for anyone that actually uses their phone will find themselves charging the battery everyday. This cannot be good for the battery and already after 6 months I am finding that the battery is weaker now than when I first got it. I have always used my phones for a year and the battery has never been a problem until now.

FEATURES
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Now this is where the phone really shines and is the reason this was my phone of choice.

The first of the features I will talk about is more novel than anything, that is the moving backgrounds. The phone has two screens, one on the front and one on the back, and both can have different backgrounds and both of these can be moving ones. The phone comes with some preloaded backgrounds both moving and not and the 256k true colour screen makes these look so sharp and true. The preloaded moving backgrounds are very basic and for me the original one is the best with the blue background and moving air bubbles. It is possible to upload more backgrounds and I presume that moving backgrounds can be uploaded, but do not quote me on this as I have never tried it.

The phone comes with an in built clock and alarm clock (which phones don't really). The alarm tone can be selected from any of the phones ring tones. Four alarms can be set to go off at any time and can be set to go off daily, on all weekdays or just once. The alarm is very reliable and is very loud, it can even wake me up and I'm the heaviest sleeper ever. A big problem is if the phone is on silent mode the alarm is now rendered silent. Not useful if you need to be up and forgot to switch your phone off silent, trust me from experience.

The phone also comes with T9, commonly known as predictive text. Being a regular Nokia user I was surprised to find that not all phones had predictive text and the thought of texting without was causing me worry as I send over 500 texts a month. It does have the feature however anyone sued to Nokia T9 will struggle to adapt to this phones predictive text and it will slow you down, but it is still faster than traditional text. Another major annoyance is the fact you can't add words to the dictionary, this means if you have an unusual name or place names you often use you will find yourself having to split the word up into smaller words or using traditional text for the one word. Definitely slows down your messaging.

The phone comes with 10 preloaded polyphonic ring tones. A polyphonic ring tone is said to be able to accurately reproduce complex music using several notes at once. It is definitely better than the original monophonic ringtone but that is a bit of an exaggerated claim. It is possible to download extra tones but these cost more and being a poor student I have stuck to the one of the original ten, originally named melody 1-10. The text tone will drive anyone insane, the tone is that of a door bell and so far I have not found a way of changing this.

As with most new phones it comes with GPRS. GPRS is short for General Packet Radio Service, often referred to as the 2.5G mobile telecommunications system. It is like broadband for phones, as in it is always connected and you pay for what you download and view. The O2 service provided is good and contains the usual news, sport, entertainment, games, etc. I only use this for football scores on a Saturday as I have always believed that the internet on mobiles is too expensive. I cannot talk much on the price of download as my weekly football scores cost a minimal value. The cost per MB works out at £2.35. This sounds a lot but you can view a lot of web pages in less than 1 MB of download and if your on contract you may get 1MB free, I do.

The phone also comes with one preloaded java game. This is called caveman and if anyone remembers dig dug for the Atari, it is definitely a rip off of that game. The basic concept involves getting all the rings without dropping a boulder on your head, being killed by a creature or getting trapped. This game is not great but can be used to waste time and using GPRS you can download endless amounts of other games at around £4.50 per game. Examples of these include penalty and Splinter Cell: Pandora Tomorrow. The graphics are excellent for a mobile and the gameplay obviously depends on the game itself.

The camera is again a big selling point for the O2 X3. It comes with a 1.3MegaPixel camera, with a flash and video recording function (this is the same as my digital camera). The phone comes in different modes. The first of these is known as size; the original setting is simply the screen size and should be sued for everyday pictures. These pictures are perfect for using as the background on the inner screen. The other mode that should be used often is the 1.3MP mode; this cuts the top and bottom off the picture but puts so much more detail in the photograph. This should be used for selective photos as these are demanding on the phones memory. These pictures are perfect for using as the background on the outer screen. Other sizes include VGA, Media and Portrait; I have only tested these and do not use them regularly. The camera also can be used in indoor mode or outdoor mode. The camera quality is weak in the dark and it is slightly, but only slightly, improved by indoor mode. Indoor mode simply lightens the picture and this will ruin any picture with a bright light involved, e.g. the TV. Another feature of the camera is a flash, this is effective over a short distance, but is more novel than anything. A nice feature is the camera can be used when the screen is closed using the side button, however this has meant I have endless pictures of the inside of my pocket in the gallery.

The phone can also be used to record video using the camera. The video that can be recorded is only short, about 10 seconds, and the quality is poor but many videos can be kept and it is as good as you could expect from a mobile phone. If you want to record video buy a video recorder, not a mobile.

The phone can also act as an MP3 player. However, to do this an extra cable is needed to connect the miniSD to the computer. The miniSD is not a connection in normal 7 in 1 card readers so a specific cable has to be bout at extra cost. If you do decide to use the phone as an MP3 player, as well as the expense of the cable, you will need a larger memory card. The 32MB card will hold around 10 songs and this excludes pictures and videos you may have stored in the memory. I can not talk about the quality as I use an actual MP3 player and didn't bother to pay the extra expense for this feature. If you have, I would be happy to hear your opinion on the sound quality.

The phone also comes with a range of other novelty and quite useless features to keep everyone amused and to pad out this section. These include a currency converter, stopwatch, countdown timer and calendar, as well as many more.

EXTRAS
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The best thing about any new gadget is what comes with it in the box. It's a pretty poor show from the O2 X3 and all it comes with is a charger. This is a Standard English 3 pin socket charger, no in car charger included. It comes with software, this is used to download pictures, texts, phone numbers, etc to the phone and upload things to the phone. Something's you will be restricted from uploading, e.g. games. The software is simple and basic but easy to use, unlike some mobile phone software I have used in the past. Another thing that you get in the box is a USB cable, used to connect your phone to you PC. USB cables are plug_and_play and save you shutting down your computer every time you want to plug something in or unplug something. The final accessory contained is some headphones, used to listen to the MP3 player with. I haven't seen these since the day I got my phone. Hmmmmmmmmmm!!!

MY EXPERIENCE
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I have had terrible experience when using this phone. From the first few days I had this phone it started to turn itself off. It would randomly switch itself off during conversations or when sending a text and occasionally when not being used. When phoning O2 they said they had never heard of this problem and said I must not have charged it properly. After explaining I had left it to charge overnight before first using it they admitted it must have a fault and agreed to send a new phone with a courier, who would pick up my old phone. This seemed very fair but did mean I lost my downloaded game, but for £5 I wasn't going to argue.

The replacement phone seemed fine at first and then went through a spell of switching itself off again. It then after a while decided to reset itself, resting everything to factory settings and lost everything on my phone memory. This meant I lost my downloaded game again, ok it annoyed me this time, I'm just pleased all my numbers were on sim memory. After this major crash it has stopped crashing and being as lazy and English as I am I have not complained again I'm still with the same phone. I can't argue with the customer service I received but I have lost trust in the phone and I'm definitely not downloading that game again.

PRICE
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I got this free on contract, however they do not offer this anymore as they offer the 02 X4 free now, the upgrade of the same model.

It is still available on pay as you go from the O2 shop for £179.99, but if you shop around I have found it as low as £157.95 at Comet. (There must be places cheaper than Comet)

OPINION
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My overall opinion on the phone is it is definitely one to avoid. It looks excellent on paper and the features sound great but are realistically no better than most new phones. O2 do sell it cheaper than others as it is there own brand but the reliability problems have put me off O2 phones forever. I have asked around and it seems my problem is a common one at the O2 X4 was brought out to solve those problems but I will not trust them again and next time I'll stick to Nokia.

Thanks very much for reading this. It's much longer than I expected but I hope you found it useful. I look forward to hearing your comments.

Andrew Leighton
 

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