I bought this phone from Futurebazaar.com (it is the online reseller of
the India’s supermarket giant ‘Big Bazaar’). I got a great deal. The
actual street price of the phone as printed on the package in India is
Rs. 1655.00 (~ $41 /GBP 20 /EUR 30). However there was a 3 day discount
sale at Futurebazaar.com a few days back. The F3 was priced at Rs. Rs.
1140.00 (~ $28 /GBP 14 /EUR 20)plus there was a SanDisk 1GB pendrive
free. So the final effective price of the phone for me (after deducting
the cost of pendrive) comes out to be Rs 540 (that is, ~ $13 /GBP 7 /10
EUR). Isn’t that amazing. So it just costed my dirt cheap.
Its a great phone, great design, light weight, very slim, good voice quality. All in all it makes me feel geek and good!
However here are a few bad things about it:
- No SMS forwarding. This is something very crucial at times,
forwarding a text message. And f3 lacks this capability. Its too bad.
- Battery life is not that good as claimed. I have recharged the
phone 3 times in last 10 days (and have completed the ‘full charge-full
discharge’ cycle each time). On top of that the phone doesn’t warn you
that its gonna die. Each time it so happened that I checked the phone
(already low on battery) and found it switched off.
- I found a residual effect of the e-ink. For example after
unlocking the keypad, the lock symbol on the screen still ‘glows’ even
afterwards for a few minutes. I hope the electrophoretic screen
technology used here improves over the coming years and probably we may
have colour electropgoretic screens in future as well. That will be
interesting!
- “SMS received” tone too too faint.
Final verdict: A good phone for making and receiving phone calls and
for occasionally using SMS feature. Alarm is powerful to wake me up
even from deepest sleep. I hope the future versions of this phone will
have necessary rectifications.