Plastic, Phonerised Phillips... (Philips C12)

Member Name: bigbtommy

Product:	Philips C12
Date:	24/05/01 (64 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Very cheap., Doesn't matter if you lose it (well, not as much as a £500 Nokia...)

Disadvantages: Plasticy and slightly cheap, Hands free is useless.

This is a nice phone. I used to have one personally and have few complaints about it. It has a good amount of standby and talktime, especially for me (lots of standby) and the charge is good. Many slightly older phones require you to remove the battery to charge it up, which wears your battery cover out. But this phone you just plug in and your away! You can still use the fone while it is charging (which is quite handy...).

The phone's actual navigation is very easy to use. Everything is on the central menu which you navigate with the Circular direction pad. On the phone I am using (this on BtCellnet..) I have found a number of useful shortcuts. Here they are...

On the "standby" screen, press
Green phone... and it gets you to your calls list.
Down.... brings up your phonebook.
Left/Right... set volume / silence.
1-9... Hot Keys (see manual).
0... Language selection.
#... Calculator

Other shortcuts that I have found extremely useful (but are probably standard on most mobiles are...)
* After you type in a number, press down and you can store it, send a text to it, send a Usual Msg (default texts eg. Happy Birthday, I Love You etc...).
* You can also send texts after you find someone in your addr book.
* And you can include a pic from the picture set in your messages (dependent on service provider).

Also on the phone you get a number of useful "Extra" bits...
BioCalendar... not exactly useful, but good for a laugh. Bash in your date of birth and today's date and it works out your Love, Chance, Success and Energy.
Calculator... dead handy! Lets you do simple addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.
Alarm Clock... bash in a time, and it will ring.
Stopwatch... need I say more. (Use the Down key to start and stop.)

All together, this is a DAMN good phone, and with BT Cellnet and Virgin Mobile selling this for around £40
a shot, they really are affordable.

The only downfall is that it is made from cheap plastic and it does have a tendency for bits to snap off. eg. Don't buy one of the Dextra hands free kits! They are naff and will fall to bits! Mine broke in about 4 or 5 days after buying da kit.

UPDATE: YAWN! There are so many better phones! There are still a few good things: it doesn't have anything that's bad about phones (eg. group graphics, ringtones, snakeskin style covers etc) that all the Nokia addicts are constantly going on about. But that doesn't make it a good phone. For £50 you can get much better phones, and spend a bit more and you can get phones like the 3310 by Nokia, or my personal preference, the V100 by Motorola.

Summary: