Nov 25, 2008 10:51 AM
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Exteriors:
Built with a glossy plastic and measuring 104.0 x 47.0 x 15.0 mm, its quite nice to hold but somewhat big when compared to a ordinary mobile phone. Weighing 95 grams, its quite ok to carry. The stainless steel trim coupled with the glossy plastic makes the handset smudge prone. The wine on black looks sleek but I would have preferred silver on black or cyan on black. The body construction was quite solid but still the battery case squeaked when pressed at a angle.
Phone
The signal receptions was excellent with good voice quality on both sides. The battery was able to hold for 3 days (with 1 hour of calls, 5-10 sms / per day & switching off in the night). The ringer volume was also nice & loud but havent yet checked out the handsfree speaker and vibration strength. All in all a good phone to talk with a nice address book with 1000 contacts ( Multiple mobile no's, work, home no's, email, address, birthday etc)
User Interface
The main feature which attracted me about this phone was the A200 platform coupled with 240 x 320 262K resolution screen with flash lite 2.0 support. The phone was slightly slower when compared to my K550 and accessing address book & call logs was slower than normal making it a tad irritating. But features like "Smart search" ( as you type the number the closest matching from the address book are displayed), media player was good. The keypad system is somewhat changed from the A100 platform which confused me a little at the start. The 3 x 4 grid is almost same except the "Alarm" is at the grid now with the 'File manager' inside the 'Organizer' menu which I didn't like.
Messaging
The messaging app is almost as same as that of K550i , but due to the A200 platform there is no "More" option but there is a "Pop-out" menu key below the top left key. The keys are quite comfy to type with and the T9 dictionary is very handy and there is no lag while typing (which I can't say for the whole working of the phone). SMS, MMS, Email are all supported. Now messages can be sorted and stored under different category. A "thread" like message system would have been a welcome addition
Multimedia
I knew this is a non-Auto focus 2 megapixel camera with no flash but in nice bright conditions the snap was quite crisp and color reproduction was nice other than else the camera is quite a mediocre one. The PSP style media player function was excellent able to handle pictures, music (mp3, aac, wma, ra) & videos (3gp, mp4). It can be used in horizontal / portrait mode. A FM radio with RDS is also present. Memory expansion is via Memory stick micro (M2) cards.
