Street Savvy
 Jan 24th, 2001
(Oct 24th, 2001)
Advantages:
Small and easy to use
Disadvantages:
Fiddly keys and small screen
Recommendable:
Yes
Detailed rating:
Look & Feel
Durability & Robustness
Battery standby time
Value for money
Range of features
more
  DiazX
About me:
I'm back Muwuhahahaha
Member since:29.09.2000
Reviews:99
Members who trust:68
Review rated by 19 Ciao members on average: very helpful 
This review received a counterstatement by a party concerned
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I’ve just started a new job, it means that I have to spend quite some time each day travelling. So it seemed a logical move to get a new mobile phone, the deciding factor above all else was cost. As it would be an emergency phone I wanted one that would be cheap to run, you can of course get phones for “nothing” these days, you just have to pay through the nose to keep it going so I wanted a pay as you go scheme. For my area, Salisbury, the network with the best coverage was Orange (at least it was when we bought our other mobile). As anyone who has been to Salisbury recently knows there are hundreds of mobile phone shops everywhere (at least a dozen, I’m prone to exaggeration) over the past year they have sprung up like mushrooms. I think just after the Christmas sales was probably the wrong time of the year to hunt for phones, as every man and his dog seemed to have got there first. The cheapest phones on any pay as you go scheme cost around £40 and they were all gone! I eventually found the last cheap display model in town in “mobile phones direct”
I chose myself a Phillips Savvy phone with a nice blue cover with £5 off for shop soiling
of course. Is it a good phone? Well I’ve been using it for a week and I’ve had no problems with it, it’s light (143 grams) it’s small enough (129 x 48 x 24 mm) to fit into the phone pocket on my coat (otherwise I’d be carrying pens around in it). I know it’s aimed at teenager but it was cheap!! It runs off a power cell which has 130 - 250 hours and call time of 2-4 hours, the power cell can be swapped for normal batteries, 4xAAA’s. I did a bit of research and found a road test report this claimed that battery life was closer to 140 hours of standby time and two and a half hours of calling time.
Now on to features.... The aerial is doesn’t extend so it wont snap (bitter experience talking here) and apparently it’s angled in such a way as to divert that nasty radiation away from your brain, personally my brain needs all the help it can get. You can choose from 20 different ringing tones ranging from your standard beeps to a number of tunes. This can be set at four volumes from embarrassingly loud to silent with vibration.
The display is small, two lines, a clock and an array of icons for battery level, signal strength, text messages, quiet ringing, roaming, and voice mail. There is your standard number set allowing you to enter every number from 0-9, handy eh?? There is also the compass which allows you to navigate the menus. All these buttons glow as soon as you press anything which I suppose helps in the dark. I’m easily impressed by that sort of thing. The menu is where all the fancy features are, the compass is easy enough to use and most of the features are pretty self explanatory, though after a long list of phone numbers or a frenzy of text messaging you might find you have a sore thumb. The menu headings are Messages, Names, Calls, Extra, Setting and Protection. To navigate you simply cursor left and right to move across a menu heading and down to enter the feature.
Messages deals with texting, personally I’ve never seen the point in text messaging, seeing people furiously fiddling with their phones when all they have to do is talk to each other!! But I know some people like it, that’s why Savvy comes with its own set of icons you can send these to other savvy users quite a nice feature but it doesn’t tempt me. If you don’t own a savvy the icons are converted to emoticons, to non net users that means using regular text to draw pictures for instance turn your head sideways and look at this :-) its a smily face, the miracle of modern technology!! There is also the facility to send predefined messages for instance “OK for lunch?”. Text messages can be up to 160 characters. Names is where your phone book is kept, you can add a name and number, the name length is limited to 11 characters which can be a bit of a pain. A tip I’d recommend to avoid having to search for numbers you commonly use is to start these names with an ‘A’ as the names come up alphabetically, e.g. Aa Home. Of course you can use the speed dial feature, numbers 2-9 can be used to store 8 numbers.
You can also add a voice dial feature to any of the stored numbers, handy for driving I expect, up to ten voice dial numbers can be stored. Calls, allows you to view the last ten numbers you rang and the last 10 calls you received, handy for checking those missed calls. A number of icons let you know if the call was a text message or if it was a missed call etc. You can also check how long you have been on the phone, this can be reset. You can also divert calls, but since I’m only a poor pay as you go customer I don’t get this feature.
Extra, is where the fancy bits are kept, for instance you can use your phone as an alarm clock or a stopwatch, dead handy for travelling types. You can also play the “new biorhythm horoscope game for fun anytime, anywhere” what a pitiful waste of time this is, basically you enter in your birthday and the day you want your “future” predicted for and hey presto you know how lucky in love or money etc. you are going to be for that day. Just how much fun this is depends on your attention span, I used it once, I doubt I will again. There is also a calculator feature, which may prove to be handy in the future, but it hasn’t yet. Settings allows you to change your ringer tone and number tones. The range of tunes is pretty good but you can’t program your own or download tunes from the web. This is also where all the features for setting the phone up are kept, the “nice lady in the shop” did this for me so I’m not gong to fiddle with it, but there are instructions supplied in the box for this kind of thing, so you can do it yourself.
The Security menu lets you lock your phone up. If the phone is turned off or the battery dies the security kicks in and you have to type in a PIN number to make the phone functional. You can also put in an additional PIN number, this means you can lend your phone to someone else. If you do lend your phone out and you don’t want them to access your numbers you can lock certain numbers out so they can only be accessed by the primary number. Quite a nice feature for somebody with a paranoid complex. That sums up the menu content. Using the phone is pretty simple, a downward click on the compass sends you directly into your phone numbers, a handy shortcut. The phone speaker is clear and loud enough to be heard on a railway platform. Talking into the phone makes it feel a little small, I feel as though I ought to have something to actually talk into but the mike picks up my voice perfectly well.
I’d say in conclusion the phone is pretty simple to use, the menu is logical and easy to use. Experienced mobile users might find the Savvy limiting, texters in particular might find the small screen a problem.
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by (5%):
26.08.2006 20:20
Good review (-:....................................Darko
25.10.2001 00:08
I am a sad girl who likes the colour of phones more than anything else. Mine is PINK!!!!!!! I like the look of this one but it ain't a Nokia and therefore I would never buy it. Great op. Clare
30.03.2001 15:15
Not bad phone really. Off-Op: I am an addict too!