A small vibrator! (Motorola T191)

Member Name: kimgraham

Product:	Motorola T191
Date:	11/02/03 (1751 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: small, good reception, good battery life, lots of features

Disadvantages: keypad a bit small

I have been a proud owner of mobile phones for about the last 9 years. As a general rule I happily stick to Nokias with the odd foray into Ericsson.

Unfortunately, my sixteen year old daughter also has a penchant for mobile phones. Her favourite hobby for the last two years has been to see how far she can run up the phone bills in a short a time as possible! She doesn't care whether it is her mobile phone, mine or the house phone. She has run up £3,000 of phone bills in eighteen months.No, that is not a typo, it really does say three thousand pounds!

It doesn't matter how carefully I hide my mobile phone Caroline always finds it!

My very first mobile phone was a Mitsubishi analogue one. This had a very useful feature that you could programme it so that you had to input a code before making any call.
At Christmas yet another bill came for my Nokia and I could take no more. You could lock the Nokia but this was only any use if it was turned off. Once the phones are turned on anyone can use them, seemingly. This seems to me to be a very dubious security lapse. After all, if your phone is stolen the thief can have fun on your phone at your expense, until the battery runs down!

Bearing this in mind I paid a visit to several mobile phone suppliers in my local town over the Christmas period. I said that I wanted to buy a phone that needed a code before ANY call could be made. Most looked at me blankly until I got to the "Carphone Warehouse". I was assured that the only phone that they had which would do this was the Motorola T191.I purchased one for £89 on Pay as you Go, on the understanding that it would work if I placed my contract sim card into it. It did!

I excitedly set off for home with my rather smart new phone.

I read the manual from cover to cover but could not find a way of locking the phone to all outgoing calls. If anyone knows how, please tell me as I am now desperate!
I decided to
take the phone back after Christmas as it did not do what I asked for.
Then I became attached to it!


On the whole this is a super little phone. It is small and lightweight. It is about the length of the palm of my hand not including the stubby rubber aerial. It weighs 99 grams and mine is quite a smart silver colour. If you are into changing fascias then this is not the phone for you, and that was a slight disappointment for me. I believe you can get this phone in other colours, but I have yet to see one!

It has quite a large screen and is easy to read. There is a green backlight which you have the choice to enable or switch off. I find that the backlight makes reading the letters and numbers on the buttons very difficult indeed.

KEYPAD:
The keypad is my one real gripe with this phone. The buttons are very small. I have a very small hand and I have difficulty manipulating them. My other half, who has a much larger hand, commented that he also found the keyboard difficult to manage.

BATTERY:
I find the battery life on this phone quite reliable. It has a standby of 120 hours and 5 hours of talk time. I have found this to be adequate for my needs.

RECEPTION:
I have found it to be excellent with very few dropped calls.

WAP:
The phone is WAP enabled and has an integrated link to the main email ISP's, such as Hotmail, Yahoo, Freeserve, BTinternet and AOL. I found this really useful. WAP is slow, however, and expensive. It took me ages to find out how to log out on the couple of occasions I tried it. I will not be in a hurry to use it again. On the integrated AOL you can even access your buddy list. When I first had the phone I had arranged a time to IM other half on AOL and was delayed. No problem, thought I! I will briefly contact him via the 'phone and explain that I was running late. It was useless, it took ages and there were too many stages to go through to get to the IM window. T
hat put me off using it again. You could almost see the pound notes flashing before your eyes! This was a particular problem also, due to the too small buttons on the keypad. I like the 'phone, but I won't be in a hurry to avail myself of it's Wap facility!


PHONEBOOK:
There is a large phonebook with space for 200 numbers to be stored. You have the choice of saving them to the sim card or to the phone itself. Once you have entered the numbers into the phone book you have the option to assign a voice tag for voice dialling. Some people find this very useful. Me? Oh, I am an old fashioned girl and prefer just to dial the
number!

SCREENSAVER:
The phone comes with a couple of inbuilt screen savers, mine is a large smiley face, or you can download others from the Motorola site using your WAP service.

THE MENU:
The menu is fairly straightforward. I got muddled to start with as I was so used to a Nokia, but I very soon adapted to this style of menu. It has a large menu bar on the front of the phone and you scroll around the pictorial menu by using the up and down arrows, pretty much like any other phone.

SMS:
These days you can send text messages from all mobile phones, and it is utterly commonplace to see people frantically typing messages on their mobile phones! My beloved is a bit of a dinosaur and does not own a mobile phone, so I restrict my texting activities to my children and one friend. Sorry John- don't really think you are a dinosaur!! Actually I am rather glad in a way that he doesn't own a phone, as continual texting can become incredibly invasive very quickly. I have a friend at school who is in a relatively new relationship and they text each other all day! Fortunately she has it on silent, or her pupils might complain!
There are a choice of alert tones for receiving text messages, and these are not as irritating as some I have heard! You can have SMS chat on the T191, this
is a bit like ' conference texting', i.e. to multiple users. There are icons you can display in your messages as well as the usual emoticons. If you like it you can use a predictive text setting, but I have a pathological loathing of predictive texting, preferring to use the standard setting. In case anybody doesn?t know, predictive texting is when you type a letter and the phone tries to guess the rest of the word! It is supposed to be quick, but I find it so difficult that it takes ages!

There are also a useful selection of quick, ready printed messages available, such as ' I am going to be late!' etc.

POWER SAVER:
This is a very useful feature, which slightly helps me to keep Caroline off the phone! You can set the T191 to switch off and on again at pre -designated times. I have mine automatically switch off at 8pm and not come back on again until the following morning. This means that she can't make calls between those times unless she knows the code. Cunning, eh?!
I would imagine this would be really handy if you have to keep your phone turned off for any reason, perhaps at work or in the cinema etc. How many times have you forgotten to turn your phone back on and missed a vital call? I believe its real function is to preserve battery life, but it has other redeeming features, as I have described. I have never come across this function on a mobile phone before. I expect you are all going to tell me it is very common nowadays!

GAMES:
Everyone seems to enjoy a game on their phone to waste a few boring minutes! This little phone has five games to choose from: Snake, Numbers, Tetris, Brick, Five Stone, and Box World.

ADDITIONAL FEATURES:
You can use the calendar, calculator, stop watch and alarm. The alarm clock is useful and I use it daily. There is the option to set it to go off daily or just as a one off . It is very loud, so not much chance of oversleeping! The phone can also bleep on the h
our as a reminder, and it bleeps once a minute during calls. I found this quite useful as it is easy to stay on the phone rather too long when you lose track of time!


RINGTONES:
There are twenty seven ring tones and two empty slots into which you can compose your own ring tone, if you have a bent that way! There is also the option oh having the call ring, vibrate, or do both. It can vibrate first and then ring, which is useful if you don't want to miss a call but don't want a loud ring if you are in public, for instance. If you really think you might miss an important call you can set the phone to vibrate and ring simultaneously.


QUICK ACCESS MENU:
There is an easy access button so that you don't have to trawl through the menu for regularly used features, such as message inbox, vibrator on or off, ( Ann Summers eat your heart out!) or last missed call.

Obviously the phone has all the standard features, such as a call registry, volume control etc. You can obtain a hands free kit for it, for which there is a special profile. It is also possible to buy an in-car charger and spare batteries. I was quite impressed to see an automatic time zone adjustment for when you are travelling abroad. The phone is dual band, by the way.

COST:
This isn't a particularly new phone and so you can pick it up with a contract for nothing. If you want it Sim Free, then you are looking at approximately £119. I bought mine on Pay as You Go and use my contract Sim Card in it. That cost me about £89.

On balance I like this little phone, and I did not take it back! It is small enough to fit neatly into a pocket without making a bulge. It won't do much for your lunch box- sorry guys!
It is discreet and easy to navigate, the reception and battery life are good and it has a very good range of features for the price. I am never going to like the keypad much and it lets the phone down just a little. If you ca
n get used to it, then it is a very good little phone.

I will leave you with a tip- the green and red buttons for answering and hanging up calls seem to be the opposite way round from most phones! Until I got used to this I was continually hanging up on people when trying to answer incoming calls!


If you are looking for a mobile phone that will not break the bank, or if you want to be that little bit different and not own a Nokia, then it might just be worth taking a look at the Motorola T191.

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