MTNL Delhi, in tie-up with Micromax is offering this handset . I purchased from a MTNL West Delhi dealer on 31st March 2010 for Rs5500+ (Rs250 for 2 GB Sandisk Memory card) with free SIM and activation Coupon (worth 150). The Box contained Phone, USB cable, Headset, Instruction Manual and Drivers CD. Surprisingly there is also a stylus in a slot behind the phone.
Good Finish with neat keyboard and touch screen. Nice Metallic finish for back surface. The same detachable cable is used for charger as well as USB cable to connect to PC. The 1000mha battery also gets automatically charged when you connect to PC. So, you can be connected to the web without worrying about discharging the battery. For normal phone usage, the battery power is ok. The Driver CD contains PC suite for Phone and USB drivers.
Good entry level touch screen set. Not a full touch screen phone. Not all functions can be through touch screen. No Motion sensor. You can not scroll down the web page using your finger. Hand writing recognition also available, if you write on the screen with stylus. I did give it a try, but I was afraid to use it for fear of damaging the screen. There are no Pre-installed games. Every thing is to be down loaded. I downloaded two java games, but they didn’t work for this phone. I found no games compatible with this phone on the micromax website as well. There are two browsers provided to access the internet. One is Net Front Bowser V3.4 and another Opera mini V4.2.0 It is very painful to browse the net on the phone as there is no track ball and no motion sensor to scroll down the pages.
The settings are pretty straight forward as given in the MTNL website and I connected it to my PC via USB port it connected superfast to the net with download speed of 40KBPS. FM Radio reception is poor and Mp3 player is OK, but not as good. Speaker sound quality is good .Back Camera 3MP and front VGA camera are available for occasional use. The Media player supports 3GP & Mp4 files but no support for .avi and .dat video files. I converted .avi movie file to .mp4 file and tried to play, but it showed error saying unsupported screen resolution.
The supplied headset is good. But pressing the button on the headset does not take you to next Radio station (in FM Radio Mode) or Next song (in MP3 player mode). No shortcut to FM radio, although, other applications like Camera, Web browser, MP3 player etc can be assigned to one of the navigation buttons and they can also be displayed on the screen for touch commands.
Internet Data Coupons are available at MTNL snachar huts (only) in denominations of Rs50 (60MB+Rs14 TT) Rs 99 (130MB+ Rs4 TT), Rs250 (500MB+Rs5 TT) , Rs450(1GB+Rs6 TT) (All for 30 days validity. ) Compared to TATA and Reliance data cards, they are dead-cheap with equal if not more D/L, U/L speed. Call charges 1p/sec for all type of calls. Separate talk time coupons are available with the dealers. When you make balance inquiry, flash message appears with your talk value balance & expiry date and immediately you get a sms indicating the data balance in bytes. But expiry date of free data will not be available in that sms. You have to keep track of that your-selves.
Overall, a good 3G phone only if you use your PC/Laptop to browse the Web.
//Rajasekharam//