Refine search for Mobile Phones

  Discuss this article      Email this to a friend TrustedReviews Newsletters

Physically this is a stubby little handset when its slider mechanism is closed. It is 96mm tall, 49mm wide and 15mm thick. It weighs 101g. It is tri-band GSM. There is 25MB of memory built in and a microSD card slot for adding more. The slot is under the backplate and you need to remove the battery to swap cards.

I've already mentioned some of the software that is built in. There is a fairly good range considering the price of this phone, and it's bolstered by some unusual features. You can set the handset up to receive POP email from up to three different accounts. There is a photo editor for images you shoot with the camera. And the touchscreen extends to offering handwriting recognition to assist with text entry.

Don't get too excited about this, though. I found it failed to work if I wrote whole words on screen. It wants to recognise one letter at a time, and you'll probably find it slower than using T9 unless you are r-e-a-l-l-y, r-e-a-l-l-y s-l-o-w a-t t-e-x-t-i-n-g.

I've already noted the FM radio, and you can timetable recordings from it. You can compose ringtones too. The phone can also send the screen's contents to a TV and you get a TV out cable in the box for the purpose. This connects to the phone using the same proprietary connector that the headphones and mains power adaptor share.

When it comes to being organised, there is a calendar, to do list, alarm, calculator, currency converter, unit converter, stopwatch and, rather bizarrely, a calculator for your body mass index.

The camera shoots stills at resolutions up to 2-megapixels and proved to be disappointing. Serious shutter lag made it impossible to take photos of anything that moved. I had to wait till she was asleep to photograph the cat.

Framing photos was very difficult. Take the coloured dish, shot indoors under normal household lighting as an example. Its two ends were in opposite corners of the image when framed on the phone, but the actual shot doesn't reflect that at all. The cat filled most of the phone's screen when framing the photo, yet the final result has a lot more border area all round. Meanwhile, the white flowers lack detail and depth of colour.