Check out this Baby! - NEW Ericsson T29 (Ericsson T20s)

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Product:	Ericsson T20s
Date:	13/07/01 (86 review reads)
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Ericsson recently launched their T20 WAP youth phone but this failed to make much more than a dent in Nokia’s youth mobile champion crown. The T29 is blatantly little more than the T28 flip phone with some modifications, in fact, a T28 with some cosmetic changes and the T20 software it seems.

Ericsson recently attempted to breathe new life into one of its worst handsets - the 2618 - by adding a full WAP browser. It was renamed the 2628 but nothing could disguise the fact that this was a big ugly phone. All they created was a big ugly phone with WAP.

The T28, on the other hand, was a great little handset and in the T29 it just got better. But it is still far from perfect and all those people that shunned the T28 because of the well publicised problems with the flip, battery and sound quality are not likely to be converted by this incarnation.

You also get the enhanced messaging service (EMS) on this phone which allows you to send pictures and ring tones with your SMS to other phones supporting the service. At the moment that looks like most manufacturers apart from Nokia! Also behind the scenes you get some pretty start-up screens and sounds, mobile chat and four games instead of five. Previously you only had the admittedly addictive Tetris - now you have at least couple more options.

Ease of use


On one hand, Ericsson's software was never a match for Nokia’s beautifully simple and intuitive interface. On the other, Ericsson incorporated some great shortcuts and menu tweaks that give Nokia’s a run for its money. In the T29 you get a fractionally taller screen than the T28 and a few extra options, notably a WAP tab on the main menu. The navigation works well given the tiny screen and small size of the handset.

Any Ericsson user, particularly a former T28 user, will immediately have no problem getting around this phone. One of the major benefits to anyone using an Ericsson with mobile
Internet is the ability to have the major configurations sent to your handset. This is done from the Ericsson web site where you choose your options and the settings are sent to your phone as an SMS. Just accept it and there is no fiddly setting of IP addresses, dial-ups and proxy names.

Ericsson has not taken the opportunity to add any form of predictive text mechanism to this phone. This omission virtually defies belief when it is clearly an essential feature for anyone that sends SMS. Ericsson promises that future handsets will have some form of T9 as in Nokia or iTAP as in Motorola phones.

The useful slider on the top left side of the phone is retained. This still brings up the details of remaining talk and standby time with flip shut, adjusts the volume of calls while they are in progress and can be used to reject incoming calls with the flip shut (slide up twice in quick succession as the phone rings).

Design/Style


It is a testament to the Ericsson of old that this phone still turns heads. The T28 was truly a masterpiece of miniaturisation. However, for the purists, one of the benefits was the ability to put the phone into a shirt pocket and you would not notice it. However, this came at a price: the phone used a tiny lithium ion battery that realistically gave you at best two days’ standby. The T29 addresses this issue in a far-from elegant way: you get the long-life battery installed as standard. This bulges out of the back of the phone unlike the original battery design and adds a fair bit of weight.

The major revision on the T29 from the T28 is the removal of the sprung flip. With its predecessor you just pressed a button on the side and the flip sprang down. However, the clip was famous for failing so that your phone would spring to attention as soon as you put it on the table. Now, just as the T20, you manually push down the flap. This, as before, can be used to answer and end calls. For anyon
e fed up with switching keylocks on and off a flip phone is the only way forward.

To the uninitiated the chassis of the T29 looks much like the T28. Without detailing the differences, only the plastic front has changed. It is more curvy, arguably more elegant, although slightly more bulbous. The holes for the microphone and speaker are a different pattern too.

Beneath the flip is a more obvious change with the keypad inlay on our test phone a very stylish deep blue, which extends around the screen. Another purple one is available but they are not interchangeable between phones.

The buttons are now aluminium and better designed. They are slightly larger, flatter and raised, making them much easier to use. The layout is otherwise standard. A minor complaint is that the backlight on the keys is very poor and uneven, such that you cannot read the numbers and letters in darkness.

Vital statistics



Screen size:
- 33 x 13mm

Dimensions -
- 95 x 51 x 22mm
- 105g
- 85 mins talktime, 150 hours standby

- GSM 900/1800
- 100-memory phone book/10 bookmarks (plus 5 homepages)
- WAP 1.1 browser

- other features: vibrate alert, over-the-air configuration, 100 phonebook memories, 5 games, voice dial, 9.6k data speed, alarm clock, stopwatch

WAP browsing



Given the limitations of the tiny screen, WAP browsing really is surprisingly satisfying. The screen has no grey scale so you will not really see pictures to their best. You can easily turn off images in the menu to speed up downloads and avoid lots of heavy scrolling.

Despite the tiny screen, you get a full three lines of page to view. However, pages occupy the whole three-line screen and there is no room for any status icons. Depending on how you look at it, Ericsson can be seen as rather clever allowing the “page loading” icon to juxtapose the page on the top right
of the screen, or this can be regarded as a shortcoming.

The two up and down keys look almost like left and right keys. As soon as you get used to the fact that they are up and down keys, navigation is easy enough.

An extensive list of menu options comes up when you hold down the yes key, however this is the same key that is used for opening links in pages so you have to be carefully when and how you press it. An excellent option is to be able to send WAP links automatically in an SMS. This should allow the user to open it, launch the browser and see that page (on compatible phones).

The large on-off button can also be used to go back a page. A long press brings up a prompt asking if you want to disconnect.

WAP-related features


This phone supports OTA (over-the-air) which means that settings are easy to get into the phone as long as you use the Ericsson web site. If you are on a network not shown on the site or you want to use a different service provider, entering all the settings is the usual difficult slog. At least Ericsson labels the different settings logically so a patient person can work through them systematically.

You can set five WAP profiles which is pretty generous by most WAP phone standards. This means that you can have a different dial-up if you use a different SIM card. Alternatively you can have Mviva, Ericsson’s service as well as your network’s own portal plus two more. And each has its own homepage.

In addition to this you actually get ten easy-to-access bookmarks. That is ten in all, not ten per profile. Thoughtfully, you can edit these addresses offline. On many phones - the few that even allow you to make WAP bookmarks on the phone - you have to open the browser and be online to do this. Ericsson does warn that bookmarks are associated with profiles so you may have problems accessing some bookmarks from some profiles. In practice we did not find this to be
a problem. It is worth noting that the manual tells you that you also cannot enter bookmarks offline and this posed us no problems. Strangely you could not access the bookmarks offline if you did not have a network signal.

The T29 includes a number of improvements when it comes to text messaging. A normal SMS can be up to 160 characters long. Using the “long messages” option you can link up to three that will arrive at the recipient and be linked up again, effectively creating one long message. Not all network operators and phones support this function yet.

The mobile chat function allows you to send SMS messages to groups and see the thread, just as if it was an Internet chat room. This is a great way to build up a massive phone bill since you will be charged for each reply that you send. You also have a choice of 10 message templates and you can store. A nice touch is the ability to store e-mail addresses in the phone book for use with SMS-to-e-mail services.

One major advantage over Nokia phones is retained: although you can only store 10 SMS, the eleventh will delete the first and so on. Nokia phones still tell you “memory full” and you need to make space for additional incoming messages.

OVERALL


The T29 features a lot of improvements on the T28, which was already a classic phone. The screen is bigger, the sprung flip is gone and you have WAP plus a load of SMS improvements. You also get the bigger battery.

However, this phone cannot hide the fact that it is rather dated. Add to the fact that the sound is still very harsh and poor quality while the phone still does not hold the signal well in areas of poor reception, you have style over substance. More than ever this is a posers’ phone since a lot of advanced data and organiser features in many more modern designs are absent.

Despite the criticisms, this phone truly is charming and Ericsson has updated a clas
sic and held down the price. This is a stylish and value-for-money package but there are many better handsets for serious cellphone users out there now.

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