Confusing Buttons, not very exciting (O2 X1)

Member Name: madpiano

Product:	O2 X1
Date:	10/03/04 (1005 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Free, Good sound quality, Funky LCD display

Disadvantages: Inconsistent Menu, Lack of Features from O2, Plain looking

Ok, this phone comes for free, if you hav an O2 account. That's good. It looks quite neat, very similar to the Samsung phone. It has a big colour screen, java enabled, polyphonic ringtones and a swivel camera. There is no bluetooth. It is datacable enabled.

This phone is made by a chinese manufacturer which produces really exciting cool looking phones - for the german market..... This is the only phone of this manufacturer available in the UK, and is not their best model.

The camera has very neat functions: several zoom levels, brightness, contrast, saturation can be set. There is even sepia and b&w mode. Frames can be added and the lens swivels. But it is kind of difficult to use and it is rubbish indoors (outddors in bright sunlight the picture quality isn't bad). Taking the picture is easy, but you have to press several buttons afterwards to actually save the picture, otherwise it gets deleted.

The menu in itself is really weird as well. There is one ok-button and one green phone button. Sometimes you have to press the ok button to confirm an action, sometimes the green phone button. There is no consistency though. It can be either one at any one time.

2 games come installed. Mini-Golf is good, the jumping bear is boring. But more games can be downloaded. Now this is O2s phone, so you would expect to be able to download most of O2s offerings. Not so. The availability of games for this phone is very limited and none of the "cheap" or "special offers" games are available for this phone (from the O2 Wap-Site). Same for the ring-tones. Polyphonic tones can be downloaded, but so-called "real tones" can not, even though the phone is enabled for those.

I downloaded Solitaire and it is ok to play allthough a bit complicated, but it also crashes the phone regulary.

The phone is datacable enabled, but there is no data cable available. That may not bother a lot of people, but it m
eans only a limited amount of photos can be stored. You can e-mail the photos to you from the phone, but that reduces their already small size. Via Data Cable the photos can be downloaded to the PC at double the size (sorry not sure what it is. Something 640x? )

The alarm clock is temperamental and there is no "snooze" button. It doesn't allways go off, but when it does, it will wake up the dead. Very loud and the LCD display on the outside goes into disco-mode. But I wouldn't rely on it. It didn't ring several times for me so far. You can set 3 different alarms and each can be set to either weekdays, weekends or self-defined.

Another thing is the limited text-message storage. You can only store 20 messages (in and out-box together), then the memory is full. I had a Nokia 8310 before and I could store about 100 (or more ? not sure) messages. Again it may or may not be bothering you, but I like to keep stuff. Especially if someone sends me an address or a phone number. Texting in itself is not that brilliant either. The keypad isn't very comfortable and one-handed texting is near impossible. To enter a symbol or a smilie it is a complicated button combination, same for numbers: You have to press the green phone button to open a seperate menu, scroll up to "symbols or numbers", press the ok-button to enter that menu, then scroll along until you find the right symbol, then enter the corresponding number.... If you text too fast, the phone will crash (only happened to me once so far, but it does happen).

The build quality isn't too great either. I have had the phone since just over 1 month now and the "ok-button" is not working properly anymore. I have to press it really hard now.

All in all I am not very impressed with the phone and can't wait to be able to change it again. For the fact that this is O2s own phone and that the waiting list was so long, that I had to wait 2 month
s for the phone to be delivered, the lack of games, ring-tones and data cable is disappointing. The inconsistent menu and lack of text-message space is annoying. The camera is a nice toy. The look of the phone is ok, but nothing special, not exactly outstanding or different from many other clamshells.

The phone does actually also take video, but I haven't tried that feature yet, so I can't comment. Sound quality and reception is very good.

Summary: