Get a photo phone for a tenner (Sagem MY X-6)

Member Name: sersha

Product:	Sagem MY X-6
Date:	24/09/03 (1944 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: excellent price, good photo function, lots of downloadables, light and compact

Disadvantages: no bluetooth, no java, and not the trendiest phone out there

I came back from a weekend away to find my husband had cheered himself up in the way he does best: by spending money on gadgets. He'd gone out and bought a Sony Ericsson T610 mobile, and then spent the rest of the weekend taking photos of the cats with it!

Not to be outdone, I decided it was time to upgrade my own phone, a - ahem - Nokia 6150 (yes, really, that old) so I went along to the Orange Shop armed with old phone, small budget, and big smile.

I came out with the Sagem MY X6, not a brand for a phone-label snob perhaps, and commonly viewed as a cheaper version of my husband's T610. There were some bugs with the older Sagem models meaning that people still think of them as unreliable, but they seem to have rectified this problem with the new MyX6. It has many of the top features of other bigger brand name phones at a cheaper price: exactly what I wanted. RRP was £99, but I paid only £10 by trading in my old phone (which frankly isn't worth the price of a text!) I also got 3 months free WAP with this deal, which was another incentive.

THE BASICS
The first thing I noticed about the MY X6 was that it had a really good size display (120 x 168 pixels) although to compensate for that, the buttons are really small and texting is not all that easy unless you have fingernails. I have got used to it now, but I still find it quite tricky.

My old phone was so basic it didn't even vibrate: this one does, which I find really useful when I don't want to disturb people on the train! When I do forget and it rings loudly and polyphonically, I like having the simple red and green phone symbols which I can jab at in a panic to shut it up.

It's a compact little phone which is very light: my 6150 was a brick in comparison. I think it looks quite stylish and pretty (always important ...)

Other useful features it has are a currency converter, calculator, alarm, and timer. I like the way I can set any r
ingtone for the alarm rather than just a standard beep: I like to be woken by a loud boathorn at the moment.

It has loads of memory for storing photos, ringtones, and your phonebook of stored numbers. The contacts feature allows you not only to store someone's number, but also their email, comments, and even a photo. If you meet a lot of people in your line of work, I suppose this could be one good way to put a name to the face!

And finally I like the fact that I can use it for up to 4 hours 40 mins without having to recharge the battery, (that's a very good gossip) or leave it on standby for up to 310 hours. Pretty good!


THE DIGITAL CAMERA
The other main thing I wanted of course was to be able to take photos, (and not only of the cats.) This model has an inbuilt 640x480 CCD digital camera. The CCD bit means that the camera can produce sharper images and has stronger sensitivity in dark areas than most other phone cameras. There is also a great zoom feature - you can zoom in at four levels which is really good. The picture is fantastic (in fact, husband admits its better than his, ha ha ha) and you can get up to 65,000 colours on the screen making for really good quality. Not only that, you can also spruce up your photo by adding a frame (15 to choose from) or special effects like embossing, blurring, or sharpening. It’s a sort of mini photoshop in there, which makes for hours of fun!

Because the phone has MMS (Multimedia Services), you can send people a sort of slide show - a text message with pictures and sounds, where you can choose how long a picture displays for and so on. I'm not a very technical person, but I can still appreciate this phone can do great things!

Unfortunately the only person I know with a photo phone at the moment is my husband, which limits the fun a bit…

You can choose the noise of your camera "click" when you take a photo, and then save it in
a variety of resolutions so that you can either email it or send a photo message to another phone. My husband's phone makes him choose the resolution before he's even taken the photo: which seems pretty stupid to me. You can choose from two resolutions, 480 x 640, or 120 x 160. Both sizes can be sent as an MMS message. (Currently 36p a go!)

There is even a small mirror on the back so you can take a self-portrait! Luckily for me the phone is even clever enough to tell me when I haven't opened the shutter and am trying to take photos of nothing!

WAP
At the moment I get the highlights of the Edinburgh Festival sent to my phone: you might prefer news, weather, sport, or traffic information. I can also scour the TV listings when I am on the train home (to find what I'll be missing since there's bound to be sport on the other channel…) You can also create your own wap page, so that you have all your favourite links right there where you can find them easily. I haven't got one yet, but I’m working on it. I don't use WAP very often: the only thing I like about it is being able to set up text alerts. But I don't know if I would be bothered to pay for that service.


RING TONES AND WALLPAPERS
I also wanted a phone with better ring tones than just beeps and naff classical music, and I certainly got that. I got polyphonic ringtones (posh ones) and I can download all sorts of cool tunes to play as well. The standard ones include animal noises like a cat miaowing, dog barking and cow mooing (I can now talk to the cows in the field by playing my ring tone at them. Don’t know what I'm saying though.) You can also record your own ringtones to use if you prefer. Another great feature is the hi-fi ring tones (up to 30): basically you can get any song you like, with real human voices, as your ringtone (if you know what you are doing. I haven't quite got there yet).

There are also lo
ads of wallpapers and screensavers and of course you can use any photos you take, or download extra ones to use. You can get animated screensavers, even 3D effect icons.

NAVIGATION
It isn't so very different from my old Nokia in terms of navigation: to get through the menu you simply navigate with the arrows and follow the instructions to back up or proceed. It's quite user friendly in that way and it didn't take me long to find everything I was looking for - so I would recommend it for a non-techie phone user, of which there must be plenty. I think even my old mum might be able to handle this one.


GAMES
The phone comes with two games: picture puzzle (dull jigsaw thing) and megabox conquest (quite cool arcade type-thingy). I've been able to download some much better and more modern looking ones from the orange wap site: even though games are not the strong point for this phone, you can get In-Fusio downloads, which means access to a wide range of downloadable games if you want them. It does have a joystick, but I find it very fiddly to use, so I wouldn't say it’s a selling point.

WHAT'S MISSING
So why is my phone so cheap - what doesn't it have? Basically two things: Java and bluetooth.
Java would mean I could have a much wider range of games to play, but I didn't buy a games console, I bought a phone: and while I like playing games on it, I wasn't making that a top priority.
Bluetooth, well. For those who are enthusiastic about it, its pretty much The Future when talking about communication and electronics. Bluetooth allows your gadgets to talk to each other without the need for cables or plugs: it works using radio waves. I'm happy to accept it's a Big Thing, but it's not a big thing for me, right now, and I can live quite happily without it thank you very much.

OTHER TECHIE STUFF YOU MIGHT WANT TO KNOW:
GPRS 4+1 and 3+2
Support for many fil
e formats: BMP, JPEG, PNG, GIF, animated GIF, Midi, iMelody, Wave, AMR
GPRS/MMS/EMS (version 5)

CRUNCH TIME: Would I recommend it?

Yes if you:
Are on a budget and want a simple photo phone
Use your phone mainly as a phone: but fancy a camera too

Not if you:
Want Bluetooth facilities
Want the best quality and most fashionable phone you can get


Would I have paid £99 for it? Would I hell.
Is it a bargain for £10? Oh yes indeeedy...

;-)

Summary: