May 28, 2011 11:40 AM
3024 Views
Whatever God giveth, he giveth for a reason.
In my case, he gave me a curiosity for low budget handsets so others can learn from my mistakes.
I bought the Spice QT 52 about a year back, seemed too good to be true at that time. A branded qwerty handset with an year's warranty for just 2200/-. Isn't it surprising how marketers fall into traps they design for others :)
I checked it out online, the reviews were all good (the imbeciles, must've been trolls). Went to a spice store and bought it. Now let's see
Build Quality: Not bad, looks solid, fits in the hand well and the buttons aren't flimsy like the QT 44 which lies one price point below the QT52.
UI: Extremely slow, in fact I found that if I typed at a reasonable rate (which is why we buy qwerty keypads in the first place) the set fell behind and hanged. Every application takes ages to open. Although the layout is simple enough to get used to, the menus are counter intutive and I found myself wondering many times why everything seemed jumbled up and hastily put together.
Features: Just the usual which you'd expect from an entry level phone. the E-mail2SMS solution sounds a lot better than it actually is, the apps are nice once they have been set up (spoiler: the setting up is the real pain). Especially the Reuters app gives easy access to good news items from around the world.
Multimedia: The VGA camera is what you'd expect (wonder why they bother with it at all). The MP3 player UI is good but the sound quality is atrocious with the default headset(once you change the headset, it improves)
Battery Performance: Reasonable (lasts a day on a full charge with average usage)
Reliability: None whatsoever, has crashed three times and every time all my data was deleted, including contacts. A simple reset solved the problem, but there was no way to recover the data.
Overall: An entry level handset that you should buy only when no other options are available.
The most important reason for me when I buy a qwerty handset is ease of messaging, and this was sorely missing in QT 52. It's slow to the point of being frustating.
I would not recommend this product to anyone.
Cherrios
CS
