Post by DireWolf on Feb 13, 2007 1:17:43 GMT
Introduction
The long-awaited and long-delayed SXG75 is, at the same time, Siemens’ first and last in many aspects:
So, this can rightfully be considered an iconic model, alongside phones like the SL45 and the SX1.
Two variants are available: “Metallic White”, with blue keypad lighting, and “Metallic Black”, with white lighting. The latter is the subject of this review. The reviewed model’s variant is A101, with firmware version 22.
This phone’s most marking feature is the Brew operating system, adopted by Siemens for its UMTS phones, such as the EF81, the E81, the SL91 and the ill-fated SG75. This aspect is especially important because it sets the SXG75 apart from previous Siemens phones, and makes its usage different as well.
Packaging
The SXG75 comes in the standard Siemens box, without the SL75’s “see-through” window.
Included in the packaging, are:
For such a high-end phone, the inclusion of a data cable should be expectable, especially because it’s the only way to install Java applications (other than costly WAP).
Construction
The phone, being a function-laden UMTS pioneer, can’t exactly be called “tiny” (111.5 x 53 x 20 mm) or “featherweight” (134 g). This, combined with its straight and austere lines, shouldn’t appeal much to women. The Metallic White version could, nonetheless, attract some tech-oriented females. Its dimensions are about the same as the SX1’s, but, due to the fact that the SXG75 doesn’t narrow down in the lower area, it seems bulkier.
Despite being the inventor of the “slider” form-factor, Siemens has maintained a steadier tradition in the classic “candy bar” form, and the SXG75 is no exception.
Its construction is very solid and well made, with no cracks or backlashes. The front is made of matte plastic, with the lower corners in aluminium.
The dimensions aren’t the only SX1 heritage: the sides of the screen have keys, but instead of the main numeric keypad, here are only the already familiar “Call” and “End” keys, as well as video call and Internet keys.
Below the large QVGA display (240x320 TFT with 262144 colours), there is a 4-way directional key, which surrounds an “OK” button. Being a little raised above the rest of the buttons, the directional key doesn’t present any handling difficulties. The “OK” button seems a bit loose in its framing, but this doesn’t constitute any problem.
Besides it there are two softkeys, and, characteristic of Brew devices, task handler and “Delete” keys.
Further below, there is the main numeric pad. The keys are small and a bit hard, but they’re well spaced and comfortable to work with.
Keys 2 to 9, as well as the two softkeys and the four directions of the cursor key, can be customised for various functions or phone numbers.
In the black version, the main keypad is lit in white. All keys are evenly lit and well visible. The white version has blue lighting instead.
The screen keys are lit in white too, albeit with a much weaker light. This is because they probably are lit by the same LED’s responsible for the display; therefore the white version should have them in white too.
Above the display, there’s a CIF camera for video calls, and the main loudspeaker. The top of the phone has a depression for mounting on a car holder, and conceals the GPS antenna.
The right side contains the before mentioned “End” and Internet keys, as well as an IrDA window near the bottom and two volume keys near the top. These two keys serve only to change volume; they never act as “Page Up”/“Page Down”.
The left side contains direct access keys for the camera and the Media Player, as well as a hot-swap slot for RS-MMC cards, and the already mentioned “Call” and video call keys.
Both sides (the black strips in the pictures) are very slightly recessed in the phone, which makes holding it much easier.
Pushing one of its edges with a pen or similar object, the card holder comes out. It holds the card upside down, but it doesn’t present any problems, since it is snugly held and doesn’t fall down.
The bottom has a Slim Lumberg connector in the middle, two holes for a carrying strap below it, and the microphone to the left. The brushed finish is noticeable here, above the connector.
The battery cover dominates the rear. It is opened by sliding it down, a not easy operation, which ensures that no accidental openings occur. Two bits of rubber in the bottom prevent the phone from slipping.
The middle contains the 2 MP camera, as well as the grill for the external loudspeaker. It is responsible for playing ringtones and, when in hands-free mode, phonecalls.
Above this section, the GSM/UMTS antenna is hidden.
After the cover is painstakingly removed, the Li-Ion battery is available. It is an EBA-750, capable of holding 1000 mAh. According to Siemens, it can provide power to the phone for up to 400 hours in standby on either GSM or UMTS, or 360 minutes (GSM) or 300 minutes (UMTS) while talking. Not enough testing was made to verify these claims.
Under the battery, there’s the label with the model number and IMEI. It is worthwhile noting that, at least in the device under test, the manufacturer is identified as “BenQ”, not “Siemens” or “BenQ-Siemens”.
The SIM card is also located here, and it’s even more difficult to remove than the battery; it has to suffer some serious bending to be disconnected. Therefore, users who frequently change SIM’s will have a hard life with the SXG75.
After a few seconds of start-up (reminding again the SX1), the main screen appears.
The QVGA display quality is very high, with no noticeable “grid” between the pixels. The image is very bright even at low brightness values, with rich colours. When the phone is tilted in any direction, colours fade a bit, but don’t get inverted.
The image stays well readable in the sun, even though light colours, like the background picture in most of the following screenshots, become indistinguishable.
Handling
The standby screen is different from other Siemens phones. The top line contains the network signal and battery strength indicators, as well as several status icons. In this case, they are, from left to right: active profile, GPRS activated, alarm clock activated, unknown feature, and USB connectivity.
Next, there is the time and date indicator.
Below it, there’s the operator identifier. It can be replaced with a logo image.
Finally, at the bottom there’s the softkey area, containing the currently assigned functions for the softkeys and the “OK” button.
The SXG75 has a multitasking operating system, Brew. It is the only Siemens with this OS, sharing it with the BenQ-Siemens EF81, E81, and SL91.
The “End” key closes the currently running application, while the right softkey usually allows the user to go back one level in menus.
New in the SXG75 is the task handler key. This key opens the feature of the same name, which lets the user open the main menu, switch between or close currently running applications, and return to the standby screen.
A welcome addition is the “Offline mode”, intended for airplane travelling and situations where radio signals can be hazardous. In this mode, all GSM/UMTS-related functions are deactivated, and the phone’s organiser, file manager, music player and other functions can still be used.
The “Delete” key, unlike in the SX1, only functions while writing text (and navigating the hidden menu, more on that later). Functions like file deleting and task closing have to be made via context menu. This is an annoying shortcoming.
Another irritating feature is the phone’s response time when an MMC is inserted. For about a minute, it takes about 1-2 seconds between pressing a key and it responding. Also, access to the MMC is denied. Once that period is over, however, the device functions normally again.
Menus
The main menu consists of 12 icons arranged in a grid, like other x75 phones. However, in the SXG75 the topmost status bar is visible in all menus.
The menus are, from top to bottom and left to right: Contacts, Call records, Internet, Camera, Messages, Organiser, Games, Media player, Video telephony, Extras, My stuff, and Settings.
Like other Siemens phones, all menus and submenus can be accessed through number shortcuts. But, in this phone, context menus can be navigated this way too.
Contacts
The Contacts menu, like others, is divided into tabs. Pressing left/right changes the active tab, while pressing up/down chooses an item inside that tab.
The first tab has all available contacts, SIM entries mixed up with the ones stored in the internal memory. This, combined with the inability to sort contacts by anything other than last name, makes this tab very irritating to work with, and severely cuts down its usefulness.
The second tab shows the defined groups. Four groups are already defined, and the user can create as many more as he/she wishes. Although each group’s icon cannot be changed, it can have its own ringtone and picture.
The third tab deals with the contacts present on the SIM. Regular entries are found here, and service and own numbers can be configured to show up too.
The fourth tab is perhaps the most useful: it still sorts contacts only by last name, but the user can choose which contacts are shown. The most frequently used setting here is most probably “On phone”, which hides the SIM entries.
Each contact can have the following information: first and last name, audio ringtone (video ringtones are not supported), picture, group, birthday, and displayed name.
The “Private” tab has space for fixed and mobile number, two e-mail addresses, URL, fax, address (street, city, postal code, state, country, and additional info), and notes. The “Business” tab has space for all these items, plus company name and job title.
Each number in a contact can have its own voice dialling tag. Tags must be pre-recorded, and are not speaker-independent.
The SXG75’s address book has space for 500 contacts. While this may seem a short limit, the amount of data a single contact can contain might compensate this.
Call records
Call records store the last calls. The first tab shows all calls, while the others show only outgoing, missed and received calls, respectively. The last tab deals with call duration and costs.
Internet
The Internet browser is pretty standard. It wasn’t thoroughly tested because of lack of settings availability.
One useful aspect is that, after closing, it displays the data and time totals for that session.
Messages
The SXG75 can send and receive SMS, MMS and e-mail. Concatenated SMS messages (up to 755 characters) are possible. The user needs to be aware that, if any double-byte character (most accented letters) is entered, the message will considerably grow in size.
The number of stored messages is limited only by the available memory space. SMS messages can be configured to be stored on the SIM card instead of the internal memory.
Like mentioned earlier, the phone supports concatenated SMS. However, the other EMS functions, like pictures, sounds and formatting, can’t be entered. When such an element is added, the phone prompts to change the message to MMS.
Although the SXG75 doesn’t support sending EMS images, it converts standard emoticons into pictures, like “:)” into “”. However, x35 images such as “%Shark” aren’t converted.
The MMS editor does its job, even though it’s more limited than in x65 or x75 models. The disposition of items in the page, as well as text and background colour, can’t be configured. However, multiple pictures, sounds and texts can be sent, and non-standard types of files are accepted too.
Organiser
The organiser is perhaps the SXG75’s biggest Achilles’ heel. There is no Notes function, and the calendar only supports one kind of appointment, and fixed alarm times.
Games
Four games are pre-installed on the phone: GPS Spaceshooter (which can use GPS to select the next target zone), MarbleCrossing, Super Bomberman, and SuperStackAttack. The selection of genres is varied and should appeal to most tastes.
The phone supports MIDP 1.0 and 2.0. Games and other apps can’t be sent or received directly via infrared or Bluetooth; instead, they must be either downloaded via WAP or installed via cable, with a dedicated program.
A strange thing happened when testing the compatibility with the JSR-184 (“3D”) API, with JBenchmark 3D: during around the first second of running, the image was normal. Afterwards and for the rest of the tests, the phone seemed to enter some kind of “low resolution mode”, with 75% of the pixels darkened.
Media player
The Media player shows, under different tabs, music, pictures, videos and favourites.
Several music file types, like MP3, AAC, MID, WAV and MMF can be played.
The music player is quite basic. It can use playlists, but has neither shuffle nor repeat functions, and doesn’t show extended music information.
Pictures can be viewed either in normal view or fullscreen. In this mode, if a picture is in landscape format, it will be rotated 90º counter-clockwise. A “Slideshow” feature is also present, which cycles in fullscreen all pictures.
The phone can play 3GP and RealMedia videos, both in standard view and fullscreen. 3GP landscape videos are rotated when in fullscreen, but not RealMedia ones. Neither format is stretched to fill the entire screen.
Video telephony
Having UMTS and a front-facing camera, video calling is a natural possibility. During a call, the screen can be set to show either of the parties in a bigger window or fullscreen.
Other settings such as white balance or mirror mode are unavailable, but not crucial.
Video call recording is not possible.
Extras
This menu contains several items that don’t directly fall under the other categories. This includes the Mobile Navigation program (more on this later), the operator menu if the SIM card has it, “My Menu” with a configurable list of shortcuts to favourite functions, alarm clock, FM radio, calculator, unit converter, sound recorder (also available at the Organiser menu), and stopwatch.
Worth mentioning is the FM radio. Like all other radio-equipped phones, it can only work when a wired headset is plugged in, to function as an antenna.
RDS is supported, as well as auto-search. The user can save up to 10 favourite stations.
For some reason, after activating stereo mode, the phone keeps jumping back to mono. It is believed to be a bug in the firmware.
The alarm clock is extremely flexible. Each day of the week can have its own wake up time, or can be simply deactivated.
The calculator, unit converter, sound recorder and stopwatch are the same as on previous Siemens phones. They do their job without too much frills.
The sound recorder can store a maximum of two and a half minutes per file, in the phone memory or in the storage card.
My stuff
This is a simple file manager, less functional than in other Siemens phones. Tabs separate internal memory and MMC.
File operations like copy or move between folders and deleting are extremely slow, with speeds comparable to Internet downloads. Specific types of files can only be copied/moved to the same kind of predefined folder, or to a custom folder. So, a sound file in the internal memory can’t be copied to the “Pictures” folder on the MMC.
Applications
Strangely, this menu is only accessible through “My stuff”, or from a keypad shortcut.
Pre-installed applications are BT MS Control (control mouse buttons on a PC; this couldn’t be tested), DocViewer (view Word and Excel documents), MyPhotos Online (upload images to a Web server), Navigation (the same program accessible through the “Extras” menu), PDFViewer (view Adobe Reader files), PhotoEditor (apply simple effects to photos), and SurvivalDictionary (many kinds of phrases in many languages, for travel purposes).
It is possible to install third-party Java text editors to mitigate the lack of a “Notes” function. However, text input implementation in Java is much different from the other phone functions, like SMS. One has to learn by trial and error how to enter text.
Settings
As expected, the Settings menu holds the important configurations of the phone.
Among other things, the profiles can be configured here. Four pre-defined profiles are available, plus two user-definable, and two related to accessories (Car kit and Headset). The active profile is shown as an icon at the top of the screen.
All profiles can be configured for vibration, volume, tones on/off/beep, and key tones. No individual configurations are available for brightness, font size or call filters.
The phone comes with five themes, which change the colours and background pictures of the menus. More themes can be created on the computer with a specialized editor, or downloaded from various sites.
The display brightness can, however, be configured, but it is the same for all profiles. Also configurable is the time the backlight remains on, and the time before the display shuts down completely to conserve power.
Bluetooth connectivity is also worth mentioning.
The user has the choice of storing newly received items on the internal memory or the MMC; this is also true for items received via infrared. On the other hand, casual transmissions are more difficult than in previous Siemens devices, and bluejacking has been made completely impossible: before sending or receiving anything, the phone requires pairing.
Continued on the next post
The long-awaited and long-delayed SXG75 is, at the same time, Siemens’ first and last in many aspects:
- First with UMTS (the U10 and U15 were developed by Motorola);
- First with the Brew platform;
- First with integrated GPS;
- First with RDS radio;
- First with QVGA display (the PDA-phones weren’t developed by Siemens);
- Last high-end model;
- Last with infrared interface;
- Last with the old naming system.
So, this can rightfully be considered an iconic model, alongside phones like the SL45 and the SX1.
Two variants are available: “Metallic White”, with blue keypad lighting, and “Metallic Black”, with white lighting. The latter is the subject of this review. The reviewed model’s variant is A101, with firmware version 22.
This phone’s most marking feature is the Brew operating system, adopted by Siemens for its UMTS phones, such as the EF81, the E81, the SL91 and the ill-fated SG75. This aspect is especially important because it sets the SXG75 apart from previous Siemens phones, and makes its usage different as well.
Packaging
The SXG75 comes in the standard Siemens box, without the SL75’s “see-through” window.
Included in the packaging, are:
- Phone;
- Battery;
- HHS-700 wired stereo headset;
- User manuals in several languages;
- Addendum to the manual;
- CD with documentation, Mobile Phone Manager, example pictures and sounds, and Adobe Reader.
For such a high-end phone, the inclusion of a data cable should be expectable, especially because it’s the only way to install Java applications (other than costly WAP).
Construction
The phone, being a function-laden UMTS pioneer, can’t exactly be called “tiny” (111.5 x 53 x 20 mm) or “featherweight” (134 g). This, combined with its straight and austere lines, shouldn’t appeal much to women. The Metallic White version could, nonetheless, attract some tech-oriented females. Its dimensions are about the same as the SX1’s, but, due to the fact that the SXG75 doesn’t narrow down in the lower area, it seems bulkier.
Despite being the inventor of the “slider” form-factor, Siemens has maintained a steadier tradition in the classic “candy bar” form, and the SXG75 is no exception.
Its construction is very solid and well made, with no cracks or backlashes. The front is made of matte plastic, with the lower corners in aluminium.
The dimensions aren’t the only SX1 heritage: the sides of the screen have keys, but instead of the main numeric keypad, here are only the already familiar “Call” and “End” keys, as well as video call and Internet keys.
Below the large QVGA display (240x320 TFT with 262144 colours), there is a 4-way directional key, which surrounds an “OK” button. Being a little raised above the rest of the buttons, the directional key doesn’t present any handling difficulties. The “OK” button seems a bit loose in its framing, but this doesn’t constitute any problem.
Besides it there are two softkeys, and, characteristic of Brew devices, task handler and “Delete” keys.
Further below, there is the main numeric pad. The keys are small and a bit hard, but they’re well spaced and comfortable to work with.
Keys 2 to 9, as well as the two softkeys and the four directions of the cursor key, can be customised for various functions or phone numbers.
In the black version, the main keypad is lit in white. All keys are evenly lit and well visible. The white version has blue lighting instead.
The screen keys are lit in white too, albeit with a much weaker light. This is because they probably are lit by the same LED’s responsible for the display; therefore the white version should have them in white too.
Above the display, there’s a CIF camera for video calls, and the main loudspeaker. The top of the phone has a depression for mounting on a car holder, and conceals the GPS antenna.
The right side contains the before mentioned “End” and Internet keys, as well as an IrDA window near the bottom and two volume keys near the top. These two keys serve only to change volume; they never act as “Page Up”/“Page Down”.
The left side contains direct access keys for the camera and the Media Player, as well as a hot-swap slot for RS-MMC cards, and the already mentioned “Call” and video call keys.
Both sides (the black strips in the pictures) are very slightly recessed in the phone, which makes holding it much easier.
Pushing one of its edges with a pen or similar object, the card holder comes out. It holds the card upside down, but it doesn’t present any problems, since it is snugly held and doesn’t fall down.
The bottom has a Slim Lumberg connector in the middle, two holes for a carrying strap below it, and the microphone to the left. The brushed finish is noticeable here, above the connector.
The battery cover dominates the rear. It is opened by sliding it down, a not easy operation, which ensures that no accidental openings occur. Two bits of rubber in the bottom prevent the phone from slipping.
The middle contains the 2 MP camera, as well as the grill for the external loudspeaker. It is responsible for playing ringtones and, when in hands-free mode, phonecalls.
Above this section, the GSM/UMTS antenna is hidden.
After the cover is painstakingly removed, the Li-Ion battery is available. It is an EBA-750, capable of holding 1000 mAh. According to Siemens, it can provide power to the phone for up to 400 hours in standby on either GSM or UMTS, or 360 minutes (GSM) or 300 minutes (UMTS) while talking. Not enough testing was made to verify these claims.
Under the battery, there’s the label with the model number and IMEI. It is worthwhile noting that, at least in the device under test, the manufacturer is identified as “BenQ”, not “Siemens” or “BenQ-Siemens”.
The SIM card is also located here, and it’s even more difficult to remove than the battery; it has to suffer some serious bending to be disconnected. Therefore, users who frequently change SIM’s will have a hard life with the SXG75.
After a few seconds of start-up (reminding again the SX1), the main screen appears.
The QVGA display quality is very high, with no noticeable “grid” between the pixels. The image is very bright even at low brightness values, with rich colours. When the phone is tilted in any direction, colours fade a bit, but don’t get inverted.
The image stays well readable in the sun, even though light colours, like the background picture in most of the following screenshots, become indistinguishable.
Handling
The standby screen is different from other Siemens phones. The top line contains the network signal and battery strength indicators, as well as several status icons. In this case, they are, from left to right: active profile, GPRS activated, alarm clock activated, unknown feature, and USB connectivity.
Next, there is the time and date indicator.
Below it, there’s the operator identifier. It can be replaced with a logo image.
Finally, at the bottom there’s the softkey area, containing the currently assigned functions for the softkeys and the “OK” button.
The SXG75 has a multitasking operating system, Brew. It is the only Siemens with this OS, sharing it with the BenQ-Siemens EF81, E81, and SL91.
The “End” key closes the currently running application, while the right softkey usually allows the user to go back one level in menus.
New in the SXG75 is the task handler key. This key opens the feature of the same name, which lets the user open the main menu, switch between or close currently running applications, and return to the standby screen.
A welcome addition is the “Offline mode”, intended for airplane travelling and situations where radio signals can be hazardous. In this mode, all GSM/UMTS-related functions are deactivated, and the phone’s organiser, file manager, music player and other functions can still be used.
The “Delete” key, unlike in the SX1, only functions while writing text (and navigating the hidden menu, more on that later). Functions like file deleting and task closing have to be made via context menu. This is an annoying shortcoming.
Another irritating feature is the phone’s response time when an MMC is inserted. For about a minute, it takes about 1-2 seconds between pressing a key and it responding. Also, access to the MMC is denied. Once that period is over, however, the device functions normally again.
Menus
The main menu consists of 12 icons arranged in a grid, like other x75 phones. However, in the SXG75 the topmost status bar is visible in all menus.
The menus are, from top to bottom and left to right: Contacts, Call records, Internet, Camera, Messages, Organiser, Games, Media player, Video telephony, Extras, My stuff, and Settings.
Like other Siemens phones, all menus and submenus can be accessed through number shortcuts. But, in this phone, context menus can be navigated this way too.
Contacts
The Contacts menu, like others, is divided into tabs. Pressing left/right changes the active tab, while pressing up/down chooses an item inside that tab.
The first tab has all available contacts, SIM entries mixed up with the ones stored in the internal memory. This, combined with the inability to sort contacts by anything other than last name, makes this tab very irritating to work with, and severely cuts down its usefulness.
The second tab shows the defined groups. Four groups are already defined, and the user can create as many more as he/she wishes. Although each group’s icon cannot be changed, it can have its own ringtone and picture.
The third tab deals with the contacts present on the SIM. Regular entries are found here, and service and own numbers can be configured to show up too.
The fourth tab is perhaps the most useful: it still sorts contacts only by last name, but the user can choose which contacts are shown. The most frequently used setting here is most probably “On phone”, which hides the SIM entries.
Each contact can have the following information: first and last name, audio ringtone (video ringtones are not supported), picture, group, birthday, and displayed name.
The “Private” tab has space for fixed and mobile number, two e-mail addresses, URL, fax, address (street, city, postal code, state, country, and additional info), and notes. The “Business” tab has space for all these items, plus company name and job title.
Each number in a contact can have its own voice dialling tag. Tags must be pre-recorded, and are not speaker-independent.
The SXG75’s address book has space for 500 contacts. While this may seem a short limit, the amount of data a single contact can contain might compensate this.
Call records
Call records store the last calls. The first tab shows all calls, while the others show only outgoing, missed and received calls, respectively. The last tab deals with call duration and costs.
Internet
The Internet browser is pretty standard. It wasn’t thoroughly tested because of lack of settings availability.
One useful aspect is that, after closing, it displays the data and time totals for that session.
Messages
The SXG75 can send and receive SMS, MMS and e-mail. Concatenated SMS messages (up to 755 characters) are possible. The user needs to be aware that, if any double-byte character (most accented letters) is entered, the message will considerably grow in size.
The number of stored messages is limited only by the available memory space. SMS messages can be configured to be stored on the SIM card instead of the internal memory.
Like mentioned earlier, the phone supports concatenated SMS. However, the other EMS functions, like pictures, sounds and formatting, can’t be entered. When such an element is added, the phone prompts to change the message to MMS.
Although the SXG75 doesn’t support sending EMS images, it converts standard emoticons into pictures, like “:)” into “”. However, x35 images such as “%Shark” aren’t converted.
The MMS editor does its job, even though it’s more limited than in x65 or x75 models. The disposition of items in the page, as well as text and background colour, can’t be configured. However, multiple pictures, sounds and texts can be sent, and non-standard types of files are accepted too.
Organiser
The organiser is perhaps the SXG75’s biggest Achilles’ heel. There is no Notes function, and the calendar only supports one kind of appointment, and fixed alarm times.
Games
Four games are pre-installed on the phone: GPS Spaceshooter (which can use GPS to select the next target zone), MarbleCrossing, Super Bomberman, and SuperStackAttack. The selection of genres is varied and should appeal to most tastes.
The phone supports MIDP 1.0 and 2.0. Games and other apps can’t be sent or received directly via infrared or Bluetooth; instead, they must be either downloaded via WAP or installed via cable, with a dedicated program.
A strange thing happened when testing the compatibility with the JSR-184 (“3D”) API, with JBenchmark 3D: during around the first second of running, the image was normal. Afterwards and for the rest of the tests, the phone seemed to enter some kind of “low resolution mode”, with 75% of the pixels darkened.
Media player
The Media player shows, under different tabs, music, pictures, videos and favourites.
Several music file types, like MP3, AAC, MID, WAV and MMF can be played.
The music player is quite basic. It can use playlists, but has neither shuffle nor repeat functions, and doesn’t show extended music information.
Pictures can be viewed either in normal view or fullscreen. In this mode, if a picture is in landscape format, it will be rotated 90º counter-clockwise. A “Slideshow” feature is also present, which cycles in fullscreen all pictures.
The phone can play 3GP and RealMedia videos, both in standard view and fullscreen. 3GP landscape videos are rotated when in fullscreen, but not RealMedia ones. Neither format is stretched to fill the entire screen.
Video telephony
Having UMTS and a front-facing camera, video calling is a natural possibility. During a call, the screen can be set to show either of the parties in a bigger window or fullscreen.
Other settings such as white balance or mirror mode are unavailable, but not crucial.
Video call recording is not possible.
Extras
This menu contains several items that don’t directly fall under the other categories. This includes the Mobile Navigation program (more on this later), the operator menu if the SIM card has it, “My Menu” with a configurable list of shortcuts to favourite functions, alarm clock, FM radio, calculator, unit converter, sound recorder (also available at the Organiser menu), and stopwatch.
Worth mentioning is the FM radio. Like all other radio-equipped phones, it can only work when a wired headset is plugged in, to function as an antenna.
RDS is supported, as well as auto-search. The user can save up to 10 favourite stations.
For some reason, after activating stereo mode, the phone keeps jumping back to mono. It is believed to be a bug in the firmware.
The alarm clock is extremely flexible. Each day of the week can have its own wake up time, or can be simply deactivated.
The calculator, unit converter, sound recorder and stopwatch are the same as on previous Siemens phones. They do their job without too much frills.
The sound recorder can store a maximum of two and a half minutes per file, in the phone memory or in the storage card.
My stuff
This is a simple file manager, less functional than in other Siemens phones. Tabs separate internal memory and MMC.
File operations like copy or move between folders and deleting are extremely slow, with speeds comparable to Internet downloads. Specific types of files can only be copied/moved to the same kind of predefined folder, or to a custom folder. So, a sound file in the internal memory can’t be copied to the “Pictures” folder on the MMC.
Applications
Strangely, this menu is only accessible through “My stuff”, or from a keypad shortcut.
Pre-installed applications are BT MS Control (control mouse buttons on a PC; this couldn’t be tested), DocViewer (view Word and Excel documents), MyPhotos Online (upload images to a Web server), Navigation (the same program accessible through the “Extras” menu), PDFViewer (view Adobe Reader files), PhotoEditor (apply simple effects to photos), and SurvivalDictionary (many kinds of phrases in many languages, for travel purposes).
It is possible to install third-party Java text editors to mitigate the lack of a “Notes” function. However, text input implementation in Java is much different from the other phone functions, like SMS. One has to learn by trial and error how to enter text.
Settings
As expected, the Settings menu holds the important configurations of the phone.
Among other things, the profiles can be configured here. Four pre-defined profiles are available, plus two user-definable, and two related to accessories (Car kit and Headset). The active profile is shown as an icon at the top of the screen.
All profiles can be configured for vibration, volume, tones on/off/beep, and key tones. No individual configurations are available for brightness, font size or call filters.
The phone comes with five themes, which change the colours and background pictures of the menus. More themes can be created on the computer with a specialized editor, or downloaded from various sites.
The display brightness can, however, be configured, but it is the same for all profiles. Also configurable is the time the backlight remains on, and the time before the display shuts down completely to conserve power.
Bluetooth connectivity is also worth mentioning.
The user has the choice of storing newly received items on the internal memory or the MMC; this is also true for items received via infrared. On the other hand, casual transmissions are more difficult than in previous Siemens devices, and bluejacking has been made completely impossible: before sending or receiving anything, the phone requires pairing.
Continued on the next post