Nov 26, 2008 08:25 AM
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(Updated Nov 26, 2008 08:29 AM)
For a full description of specifications and features, see: https://beetel.net/?page=parts_large&filter.common.parts.id=30
This award winning phone from Beetel has something unique - a SIM Card Reader / Writer to read / write numbers from / to GSM SIM Cards.
As we have a couple of mobiles in the family and a landline, and we always seem to land up in a situation where the number we want is not coded in the phone we're trying to call from, synchronization across phones has always been an issue. I keep dreaming about a central address book that you update only once, which automatically refreshes all address books on all devices(wirelessly, obviously!) and maintains a replica accessible through the internet, for those occaisons when you're away from home. Till something like this comes up, I had to be content with the next best thing - a phone that can synchronize numbers with a mobile - or so I thought!
The Beetel Trend is a Caller ID phone with all standard features you'd expect - incoming / outgoing calls memory, speed dial, address book, date/time, alarm, etc.(for a full list of features, refer link above). I will not dwell on these as these are standard and work pretty well. I'll limit myself to the unique feature - GSM SIM Card Reader / Writer.
Bought this phone from the SPAR hypermarket here in Bangalore(discounted price: 959.00). Eagerly got the phone and started setting it up, impatient to get to the numbers synchronization part. After setting date/time and other basic setup, I took the SIM Card from one of our mobiles which had the most numbers(had actually trawled through the mobile address book and updated it with missing numbers - a task that took me about an hour) and proceeded to do the synchronization. Far from being a magic wand that would ensure all my phones were up to date with the latest numbers, this process proved to be something quite different. Here're some of the hurdles I faced:
1. The phone reads numbers stored in the SIM Card. Thus, in your mobile phone all numbers have to be stored to SIM Card memory. As with most phones, we were using phone memory, this proved to be a major issue, necessitating a painful process of copying each number to phone memory(my mobile phone - samsung x640 - doesn't have a function to copy all to SIM memory).
The phone memory format and SIM Card format are different. Whereas the phone memory allows multiple numbers per address book entry(Home, Office, Mobile, Fax, etc.), SIM Card memory is a simple 1 number per entry list. Thus, where we'd stored multiple numbers for a single entry, there was some clunky reentry required - e.g. Dr. D stored in phone memory with landline and mobile, would have to be entered as Dr. D Landline and Dr. D Mobile in SIM Card memory.
Next came the actual synchronization - there are some wierd rules employed for actually updating the phone address book. Mobile numbers are updated after stripping the prefix+91 off. Landline numbers, which are stored in the mobile with STD code, are updated after stripping the initial 0. So, while there's no issue for mobile numbers, there is a problem for landline numbers - 08028578890 becomes 8028578890 - which is unusable as it is. Thus, for every landline number you have to manually edit the phone address book and put in a leading zero or for local numbers, remove the remaining digits of the STD code.
Synchronization is a all or nothing process. There's no prompting for overwrite etc. It simply reads all numbers from the SIM card and updates the phone address book - if it runs out of memory, it overwrites existing entries. Again, this means that practically, this cannot be an ongoing process, but is more of a one-time only process.
Because of all this, the key feature for which I'd bought the phone - synchronization with mobile - was practically really not as useful as I thought it would be.
An unrelated drawback is that the sound volume is quite low, even at the maximum volume setting.
My recommendation: understand all nuances of the GSM SIM Card Read/Write feature and decide whether it's useful for you, before making a choice. If this feature doesn't work for you, there are better Caller ID models from Beetel that you could go in for.
