After having a Motorola C350 for some time I decided that it was time for a change. I looked up the Siemens S55 along with its rivals, the Nokia 6610(i) and the Ericsson T68. And upon deciding on this one I searched on the internet. To my surprise there was a hefty £150 price tag on this phone. Upon realising the fact that my wallet was going to be empty if I bought it, I looked on eBay and found several S55s for around £50.
This phone was brand new and it came with a, camera, handsfree, neck strap, PC cable and 2 instruction manuals, 1 for the phone and 1 for the camera.
This phone is around the same size as its rivals and fits nicely into the palm of your hand. It is also quite light being just 85g in weight. The design
of the phone is a kind of elongated oval and the phone is very tactile. The shiny metal rims around the screen and on the speaker make the phone look classy.
The keypad is tiered and the star and hash keys are quite small, however I find that I rarely use these. There are 2 "soft keys" which are used to access the menu and you can program the left one with a shortcut of your choice. Also there is a navigation pad which consists of 4 arrows, left, right, up and down and are used to navigate the menus. On the right hand side there is a button which can be used to "mark" or select different items when in a menu or it is the key to operate the "dictation machine". On the left hand side there is the volume control which you can use in a call to raise or lower the speaker volume. When in standby you can select Profiles using these keys and when the camera is attatched you use those keys to take a picture. However the keypad is quite tactile.
The battery is under a cover which is easy to get off if you have fingernails and the battery is secured in place by a small clip. In my old phone when I dropped it the back cover came off and the battery came out. However in this phone the battery cover is securely clipped on and the battery is secured in place by the clip.
On the back of the phone there is a small hole which seems to appear on all Siemens phones and I presume is for an external aerial.
The phone has a wide range of connectivity options. It has email for the buisness user. You can send and receive email. It has MMS, which is Multimedia Messaging which enables the user to send text, sound and pictures to another MMS capable phone. It has text messaging. It has Bluetooth which I use with a Bluetooth headset when driving because there are no cables and it has infrared which can be used to connect to a PC or another infrared device.
The phone comes with a PC connection cable and the software. I have used this regularly and have found no flaws with it. You can syncronise MS Outlook or another similar program. You can also transfer files onto the S55's "Filesystem". Files such as ringtones pictures and games can be sent back and forth with ease.
The only problem with this phone is the screen can only display 256 colours, however, this is only a problem when viewing photos and does not affect games etc.
The S55 allows the user to download games, ringtones and pictures. Games are in the JAVA format, ringtones can be MMF or MIDI, and pictures can be Jpeg, Gif or Bmp.
The phone also features a loudspeaker for calls, you can turn this on and then put the phone on a nearby surface and you can talk to and hear the person from around 3 feet away, the quality of the speaker is very good and I find it better than the loudspeaker on the 6610.
All accesories either plug into the universal slot on the bottom of the phone or connect wirelessly via Bluetooth.
The Battery standby time is very good, I can leave my phone on standby for around a week and can talk on it for around 4 hours without the battery running out.
The reception quality is very impressive, in an Underground station I have four out of five bars of signal and the speaker quality is crisp and clear and the person at the other end had always been able to hear me clearly.
The camera clips onto to the bottom of the phone and has a maximum resolution of 640x480 and the pictures come out very well on the PC. You can select a screen sized shot or a larger picture that you can put on the PC.
The phone has a Dictaphone function which can be used to record memos or conversations.
The phone has extensive organiser functions including a calander, task list, notes, calculator, stopwatch, countdown timer, voice activated functions and a world time clock. With the notes function, you can choose to protect the notes with a code.
All in all, if you pay out £50 for this phone on eBay you are getting a LOT of phone and features for your money.
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Aug 19th, 2004
exceptional by (18%):
very helpful by (73%):
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