Small, graceful and reliable - the Sharp GX10 (Sharp GX-10)

Member Name: leatherpatches

Product:	Sharp GX-10
Date:	27/11/02 (8937 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Small, Colour screen, Java & Polyphonics

Disadvantages: A bit quirky to use, SIM locked to Vodafone, Can't communicate with PC directly (other than as modem)

Updated: 5/5/03 - see end.

My last phone was a Nokia 8310, which had all the usual gimmicks of a high-end mobile phone plus an FM radio. Whilst this is a good looking phone, the software was awful and it was still going wrong after going back to the factory twice. I hear this is not an unusual state of affairs with Nokia phones. So high up on my list of criteria was reliability. Also I need a small phone as I keep it in on vibrate my trouser pocket!. This is partly for convenience and partly because I am a schoolteacher and it is practical to keep my phone out of sight.

My vodafone contract was coming up for a year and I was studying the back of papers and other companies as the upgrade options for vodafone were much more expensive than in other places. I could not see much that improved significantly on my 8310. I was interested in a telephone that could take digital pictures, but the Nokia with integrated camera was HUGE and the Ericsson T68i required a separate clip on camera ? the cheapest of which cost £60. I decided to wait for a few months when camera phones have become smaller, cheaper and are linked with good contract packages.

My mind changed when I had a leaflet through the post from Vodafone announcing their new service ? ?vodafone live!? which is specifically designed for the newer generation of phones with colour displays and polyphonic ring tones. Along with the literature about the service was an offer for existing long-term customers to get a Sharp GX10 picture-taking phone for £159.99 instead of the usual £199.99 (contract) or £349.99 (pay as you talk). They also offered a payment scheme, interest-free over 10 months. This phone appeared to offer what I was looking for: Small; Camera (built in, not clip on); Polyphonic ring-tones; Colour display and so on. So I went and bought one.

The size of the Sharp is 94x48x26mm. This is small compared to the other two phones with integrated cameras ? the Panas
onic GD87(98x49x23mm) and the Nokia

7650 (a whopping 114x56x26mm). It is a flip-up phone, with the screen, camera and earpiece in the top section and the buttons and mouthpiece on the bottom. It is a fairly deep phone, but nothing like as bulky as you would expect with a digital camera inside it.

The camera itself is fairly versatile, although picture quality is not superb. It is a bit of a gimmick; useful for taking snaps when out on the beers and suchlike, not serious digital photography. The resolution is not as good as the Nokia phone. But when the pictures are downloaded onto a computer, they are good enough for on-screen applications such as web pages. You wouldn?t want to print them out for the photo album, though. There is a zoom feature, which is fairly limited, and three different picture sizes: Small (60x80 pixels) and medium (120x160 pixels) give you storage room for about 38 pictures in the memory. Only 32 large (288x352 pixels) pictures will fit. You can have a combination of these and there are warnings when the memory is getting full. Taking the picture is easy ? point and click and a pleasant shutter sound announces that it is stored. There is a slight delay between pushing the button and the picture freezing and being stored, but this is less than on many standard digital cameras. The phone has an infra-red port, so if your computer has one of these, downloading photos is easy. Mine doesn?t, however, and no cable is included, unfortunately. I have the option of a cable from phone to computer for £34.99 or a USB port infra-red adapter for the same money. I think I?ll go for the adaptor as this can be used for other things.

The display on the phone is delightful. The colour and relatively high screen resolution makes previous generation phones such as my 8310 seem positively boring. There is a range of inbuilt pictures and wallpapers. But of course, with an integrated camera you can create your own. The
menu system is easy to use and the amoun
t of
information that can be shown on the screen is enormous, without looking cluttered. Connection to the ?vodafone live!? service is via a single button press and operates using GPRS, which is digital always-online connection that operates independently of WAP or phone calls. There is a small indicator to show when the phone is communicating via GPRS, and this has not been off yet, despite me living in an area notorious for bad signal.

The ?vodafone live!? site itself is fairly simple, but allows you to download many polyphonic ringtones and pictures for free. This service is free to use until February 2003, but after that you pay for data transfer at the usual rates. I downloaded a couple of ringtones quickly and easily, then looked at the memory status, expecting it to be nearly full. 1%. Since then I have downloaded about 100 tunes and a java game and the memory is still under 20% used. The phone itself will hold details on 500 contacts and it came with an upgraded SIM card which holds 199.

The inbuilt games on the phone are high quality and playable, with a penalty-taking game that is pure chance, but curiously compelling. The real strength of the phone is that it will run java games. This is a cut-down version of the java that is used on the www to run applications on almost every website that you visit, including the gaming sites. There is one java game built into the phone ? a space invaders type thing, but it is simple to download other java games from the internet. These mostly cost money, but if you are a keen phone-game player (I?m not), they provide versatility and alternatives when you are fed up with the games that come with the phone. I downloaded an old favourite of mine, Pacman, for £5 which was added to my bill. The game itself is very playable and remarkably true to the original.

Battery life is not as good on this phone as my last. Heavy usage seems to r
equire a charge every night. However, if you
have ever
used a digital camera you will know the rate they chomp through batteries, and the Sharp does remarkably well in light of this. With low usage, the phone needs charging every 2-3 days.

Another great feature is the ability to send messages via the MMS (like SMS) system. This uses the GPRS technology and means that in addition to text, you can send pictures, sounds and recordings (the phone has the ability to record 20 seconds of speech or the like) to people with compatible phones. I have successfully sent colour pictures to the Samsung and another Sharp, but Ericsson users don?t seem to receive theirs. This may also be to do with the providers, who are only just getting on board with sending multimedia via phones.

I was disappointed to find there is no countdown or stopwatch on the phone. I used these a fair bit at work and when cooking! Also, the calendar will let you add notes, but there is no facility to make these timed or sound an alarm 5 minutes before you are due somewhere. I used to use this to remind me of meetings and duties by buzzing in my pocket, so I will miss this.

Reliability was high up on my list of criteria for buying a phone. I have only had the phone a few days, so I can?t comment on this yet. There are no immediately obvious problems with the phone itself or the software, unlike my old Nokia (which my girlfriend now has, incidentally :). It did take a phone call to Vodafone to work out how to assign numbers to the speed-dial. I was really impressed with their service. They seemed very knowledgeable about what is, after all, a brand new product. The staff in the shop were also helpful. They said that they had been giving their demo model a ?bashing? for a month and it had shown no problems. I will update this review when I have had the phone a few months and can comment more fully on reliability.

In short, this product appears to
be at the leading edge of phone technology. It is
expensive, but
if you can get a good deal, it is a worthwhile buy. All the essentials for a good phone are there, and it excels in size, interactivity, clarity of display, games, the ability to take photos and huge memory and storage capacity. The polyphonic ringtones are loud and interesting enough to bring a smile to anyone?s face. I?m a bit worried that I?ll forget to silence it, though and it will blast out The Muppet Show theme tune at volume 5 during a meeting or lesson. The camera gets all five stars from me, but then loses one for limited battery life, lack of alarmed scheduler and stopwatch/countdown facilities.

Update: since I wrote this review I have bought a cable to connect the GX10 to my computer. It turns out that the phone is locked so that the only use for a cable is to let the phone act as a modem. It does this rather well, providing a reliable 9kbps connection speed. However, it does not allow management or communication of:

* Phonebook and contact information
* Ringtones
* Java
* Pictures

As this is why I wanted the cable, I am very disappointed. The same is true for the infra red facility.

So, the only way to get your pictures onto your computer is by sending them as MMS attachments. This is fine while MMS is free, but after January it becomes around 36p a time. You can only add one attachment at a time, so this is 36p for every photo you want to transfer to your computer.

I believe the phone is perfectly capable of transferring this information and this is just a ploy by Vodafone to ensure you use their MMS services and don?t freely distribute games, pictures and ringtones and so on. But in my opinion it counts as a serious weakness and takes my vote for this phone from 4 to 3 stars. Other phones such as the Nokia have the facility to transfer to computer via either cable or infra-red. Annoying.

Update 4/12
/02: I have discovered that the GX10 is SIM-locked. Th
is means that I can only use a vodafone SIM card in it. This is the first phone on a contract that vodafone have SIM-locked and it could be to ensure exclusivity to vodafone until March 2003, which is what their literature claims.

However, a call to vodafone customer services resulted in a call-back 2 days later with a code to unlock. I was not charged for this, although I have heard of people paying a £20 charge to vodafone for the same thing.

For reliability, I cannot fault the GX10 so far - there have been no problems with the phone (maybe Japanese build quality). I wish the same could be said of the newly developing vodafone live! services.

Update: 5/5/03 - Okay, I've perservered for nearly 6 months with this phone. The novelty of taking snaps has completely worn off, especially now I have to pay 36p to send EACH ONE to my computer. It is too deep for the trouser pocket of my suit and the lack of calendar function is annoying. I'm bored of the games and not going to download any more at £5 a pop. So I've sold the thing to my little brother so he can show off at school. With a few chips on it (it marks REALLY easily) and a car charger (extra £16 to buy) he gave me £70. Back to my old 8310, thank God!

Summary: