I got this little Philips Savvy for my daughter about four months ago.
She’d been pestering the life out of me for ages, and for the sake of peace and quiet, I eventually gave in.
My niece got a special offer through her Student’s Union at University, which meant the phone only cost us £29, including a call card for £20 worth of free calls. I opted for the pre-paid method of payment, as otherwise we would have ended up with huge bills. With the pre-paid, she pays for the cards herself, which makes her that bit more cautious in her usage.
We had great fun working out all the settings together.
The first thing we did was to look at the different tones you can set for your ring tone and your number dialling tone.
The range of tunes for the ring tone is fairly good, with a choice of about 20 tones, but she was disappointed that it didn’t have the facility to download different ones from the web, as you can with my Nokia.
The ring volume is adjustable as well, the loud being very loud indeed, and it also has a silent mode with a vibration alert, if you want to be discreet.
The display itself is fairly small, just two lines and a clock, but is easy enough to read.
There’s a list of icons as well, showing you how much power is left in the battery, what your signal strength is like, and various others for voice mail, text messages and so on.
The main menu is easy enough to access, with a single compass type cursor allowing you to scroll simply and easily through what’s available.
There are main headings for names, calls, messages, extra, and setting and protection, and to navigate these you move your cursor right and left, and up and down, to scan through what each feature does.
The message section tells you all about what’s available when sending text messages, and my daughter loved this, as it seems to be all the rage with the kids these days. It had a selection of icons and smiley faces and so on, with which she was delighted.
You can also set up standard messages that you would use often, to save you having to fiddle about typing them in every time.
Off course, it also has the usual phone book feature, where you can store all your most frequently numbers, and there’s a speed dial facility that you can pre-set for numbers that you use daily, like work or home.
The calls section tells you the last ten calls you’ve received, which I think is terrific, because it can be really frustrating when you just fail to answer a call in time, and are left wondering just who it was that was ringing. My own Nokia has this handy feature as well.
As for the phone itself.
Well, I don’t suppose for one minute that it’s state of the art these days.
But it’s a handy size for fitting into a handbag or coat pocket, and has its own built in aerial, so you won’t have a problem with it snapping off.
The brochure says it will give you about two to four hours of call time, and over 150 hours of standby time before you need to recharge. We usually just leave it on charge overnight, so this is never a real problem.
I believe it’s also possible to change the cover as well, so that will be the next thing my young one will no doubt be pestering me for.
For £29, plus a free call card, how could it be anything but a bargain?