This much-anticipated handset sets a new benchmark in Internet-capable phones. The most difficult thing was finding anything wrong with it.
Ease of use
With so many functions this phone could easily have been a handful. But working with the excellent manual, any patient user can work out how to get the most from this device. Firstly you get a quick reference guide that is ideal for the impatient gadget freak. The bulkier user-guide seems a little thin until you realise that the CD-Rom enclosed with the phone also incorporates a detailed user-guide.
As if that were not enough, the phone includes a fantastic help facility within it. This is no one-sentence-per function affair. Strangely branded Phone.com (the supplier of the browser) you have full-graphic representations of several functions, detailed descriptions of every menu item, all held together by active page links. You could literally take this phone out of the box, throw away the paperwork and learn how to use it on the train in a couple of hours.
The four-way joystick works brilliantly to get you around the various phone functions: scroll up and down, enter a menu level by clicking right, go back a level by clicking left. In combination with the sophisticated soft-key system below the screen (which is user-customisable)and the short-cuts on the keyboard, even the most obscure functions are only a couple of keystrokes away.
Design/Style
It almost seems heresy to have to describe how stunning this silver phone looks. That said, it is rather a matter of taste whether you like the strange round ear-piece detailing. But this is nit-picking since absolutely no-one we showed it to said they disliked the exterior design.
The matt texture resists scratching from even the sharpest keys in the pocket and all the keys are well spaced. One criticism would be of the * and # keys that are tricky to press when you hold the phone with one hand. They are important to get to because they offer single-press access to the keylock and silent mode.
The subtle animations on start-up (not always that easy to work out what they all are) and for the various menu options are beautifully understated. The keys offer a reassuring click and sturdy resistance and work best when pressed on their contoured ridges rather than the fingertip-accommodating dips.
The screen is truly what sets this phone apart at first sight. One observer called it “Star Trek-like” and, frankly, it seems to offer more than the average communicator employed by the venerable Spock. The huge expanse of screen is well used and unsurprisingly never cramped. Oddly, in the address book, it seems almost over-spaced and you wonder why a smaller typeface was not used.
One of the neatest touches is the way the orange illuminated screen fades out on standby. Soon you find the sudden switching on and off screen backlights on other handsets almost vulgar. Several of the games are fiendishly compulsive (check out the craply named Move the Box) and a joy to play on the large screen.
The phone is featherlight, the weight kept down partly by a relatively small 540 mAh standard battery which still seems to deliver a respectable talk and standby time, even occasionally using energy-sapping WAP and MP3. Despite the lightness, the phone feels sturdy in the hand and is well contoured, as long as you ignore the flat grey plastic aerial.
Everything is customisable from the ring tones through the startup animation, main screen image (just import the bitmap into any picture editing software on the PC and copy it back to the MMC card).
Vital statistics
Screen size:
Dimensions:
105 x 42 x 17mm (4.1’’ x 1.6’’ x 0.6)
88g (3.1 oz)
60-170 hours standby/1-4 hours talk time with standard 540mAh battery (1000mAh option available)
900/1800 GSM bands
32Mb standard memory on MMC card. Expandable to 128Mb
9 bookmarks
5 WAP access profiles
UP 4.1.19i Phone.com WAP browser
other features: modem (9.6kbs), vibrate alert, infra-red, 500 contacts (14 fields each), 7 games, currency converter, Dictaphone, combined charger/synchronisation station, T9, voice dial (20 numbers), MP3 player
The four-way joystick works well to take you backwards and forwards through the successive pages by pressing left and right or scrolling smoothly and positively through the cards by pressing up and down. A press of the dial key brings up the well-structured menus for manipulating the bookmarks and browser. It is difficult to tell exactly how many pages the system is caching but we had no problem loading five news pages, disconnecting from the gateway and then reading them offline. This feature could potentially save a lot of money.
In caching the pages the phone remembers them for you when you revisit them (as long as you have not switched the phone off since your last visit). Entering the Internet option again brings up those pages and you have to remember to press the dial key and select the “reset” option to reload the page.
WAP-related features
The battery seemed to provide a remarkably large amount of power despite a lot of wapping. Five gateway settings is useful but it is unfathomable why there are only 9 slots for favourites, with such a huge memory in the MMC card.
The two greatest features of this phone must surely be its MP3 music player and associated dictation facility. Sure, Samsung’s recent phone had MP3 and even the ancient Motorola CD920 has a voice notes function. But the MultiMediaCard capacity of this phone pushes that into a new dimension. The capacity is potentially huge: with an 128Mb card (admittedly costing almost as much again as the phone will be at around GBP200!) you could have 5 hours of dictation. Even the supplied 32Mb MMC card holds around 40 minutes of music.
A major disappointment here was that the cradle used the PC’s serial port only and not the USB. My PC needs the sole serial port for the 56k modem, as would many other people’s while I had spare USB ports. It is just not practical for most users to keep swapping the two devices over and USB would have provided power to the cradle. Admittedly it would not have been enough to charge the phone, but that is a separate problem.
OVERALL
By current standards it is genuinely difficult to fault this phone. Every technical aspect of it seems to extend our expectations of mobile phones, let alone WAP phones. The software was stable and well designed, the user interface intuitive, the received and transmitted speech quality stunning, the memory capacity for SMS, addresses and other media laughs in the face of any other mobile phone and even the memory is easily changed.
We have no qualms in saying that this phone deserves to be the first we have ever given 6 marks out of 6. Even the price seems reasonable. Our advice: sell your PlayStation2 and buy the SL45