Made in China, and all the better for it (Sharp GX15)

Member Name: tomshanks

Product:	Sharp GX15
Date:	24/06/05 (1031 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Amazingly customisable, Huge wealth of features, Small and light

Disadvantages: Mediocre reception and battery life, No memory meter for text messages, Small built-in memory

Ever since the arrival of the Sharp GX10 in this country to launch the Vodafone Live service in late 2002, the British public has had a fascination with Sharp as a mobile phone manufacturer. However, all has never been exactly what it seems. The GX10 only became famous due to relentless promotion by Vodafone using the publicity of David Beckham to sell thousands of handsets. Underneath it all, the Panasonic GD87, also on Vodafone Live, was probably a better phone. The public is generally unaware that Sharp has brought a number of firsts onto the European mobile market, and we should be grateful for the co-operation between Vodafone and the Japanese manufacturer over the years, since this is the result.

The Sharp GX20 was the first mobile phone in Europe with a QVGA screen (240x320 pixels), which is only now starting to become commonplace at the top end of the market. It also featured a manual zoom and a video camera, both features which have taken a while to reach the masses. The GX30 introduced a huge number of firsts, such as a 262,000 colour display, a Megapixel camera, a memory card slot and an MP3 player to ignorant Europeans, who for many years appear to have been short-changed in relation to the Japanese, who have had mobile phones with these features for a considerable length of time. Sharp’s newest model, the 902, is currently the highest specified mobile phone on the market in this country, and introduced us to the world of the 2.0 Megapixel camera on a mobile phone, now copied by the Sony Ericsson K750i. The fact that it is also 3G and has a radio gives it the edge over everything else on the market. However, with a price tag of anything up to £240, even on a contract, it is beyond the reach of most users. So what have Sharp produced to meet the needs of the average consumer, someone who cannot afford all the latest features, but wants some of their high-tech expertise to rub off on a reasonably priced, mid-range handset? The answer can be found in the GX15, only the second conventionally shaped phone (as opposed to flip phone) the company has ever produced for the GSM market.

Manufactured in China for Sharp by a company called Xera, the GX15 features a surprising amount of functions in a relatively small package. The fact that this can now be picked up on Ebay for under £50 only seeks to sweeten the already rather attractive deal the GX15 offers the average consumer. Despite its diminutive dimensions, which are of an almost identical size to a Nokia 6100, the GX15 contains a surprise number of features, such as Bluetooth, video recording, Java games, a decent MIDI ringtone player and a host of other things. Granted, the Vodafone Live menu is not to everyone’s taste, but it all seems to work very well. The version I have is the black version, although the silver version probably looks better, but to keep costs down I decided to avoid it. Strangely, the keypad appears to have green backlighting, but having seen quite a few Japanese phones with colour screens which also have this feature, it would appear to merely be normal. The screen itself supports 65,000 colours, and is precisely half the resolution of the GX20, GX25, GX30 and 902 models at 120x160 pixels, the same as the original GX10. However, this does mean the screen is still superior to that contemporary best-seller, the Nokia 6230. Even if my other phone, a Siemens CX65, has better resolution, the Sharp screen overall seems to display pictures better, appear far less pixelated, and very bright. Known for making LCD televisions and digital cameras, it is clear that Sharp’s attention to detail extends down even as far as the GX15.

The camera on the GX15 is quite brilliant, and employs a similar module to the GX20. For the money, it seems that the pictures are just about the best which a VGA module can produce, and Megapixel cameras still appear to be around the £100 mark even in the first phones in which they appeared, so if photography is a major concern, then the GX15 certainly would do the job. The screen actually does a fairly decent job of displaying photographs, although as always the colours may look a little wrong when the picture is displayed on a computer. There is also video recording, although due to the distinct lack of memory on the GX15, no user will be able to store too many videos on their particular handset. This is something of a shame, given the excellent multimedia features which Sharp appear to have given their ‘cheap’ handset. It is possible to edit the photographs to make them look different in all sorts of ways, as usual, to associate the pictures with different contacts and to use the pictures as animations when the phone starts up or shuts down, for example. This is one of the ways in which the GX15 is shown to be a phone which it is possible to customise to an almost infinite extent, and came as a pleasant surprise when I had purchased it. However, the lack of memory is rather a serious issue.

Although in no way as bad as my old Siemens S55, which had less than 1MB of internal memory, Sharp (or Xera) seem to have thought it best to include only 1.8MB of memory with the phone. With no possibility of expansion, this may not be enough for some. Although it is possible to connect to other devices, such as other phones, computers or PDAs, with relative ease using any one of about four different methods, what can actually be stored on the phone is actually very little indeed. Strangely, the GX15 does not support WAV or AMR files as ringtones in the same way as many other phones these days, although it will store them and play them. An MP3 player is a bit much to ask at this price level, so perhaps it was thought that since MIDI files are so small, that not much memory was needed. In any case, the Sharp MIDI chip, which I believe is a Yamaha FM synthesis model, is excellent. The MIDI files have a raw edge to them which is reminiscent of the old FM-synthesis compatible sound card in the PC I had about ten years ago. The only trouble with this is that the volume of the ringtones is so quiet that the vibration alert is a must to prevent missing calls all the time. I am not sure entirely why this is.

That said, there can be just about any ringtone set for any kind of event on the phone. Start up, shut down, incoming call, incoming message, keypad, low battery alert and alarm can be set to anything which is required, which is probably the greatest degree of customisation I have seen on any phone. However, it is quite confusing going through the plethora of options to simply get a loud ringtone which vibrates and an audible message alert. Maybe a phone which allows its user to adjust how long the ringtone sounds when they get an incoming message is going a little bit too far! Equally, the wallpaper can be set to any number of different things, although there are only three standard schemes. It is a shame that the menu scheme cannot be changed from the standard Vodafone one, however. It is all very well having these alerts, but they are useless if the phone itself does not function properly. Fortunately, basic operations on the GX15 are swift and simple to carry out.

The main menu in all Sharps (and other Vodafone Live phones for that matter) seems to be laid out in the classic 9x9 grid pattern, but with some really uninspiring icons, and only using about three or four colours. No wonder a lot of people want to get the ‘non-branded’ version of the software on their phone. That said, the GX15, unlike so many modern phones, operates very fast indeed, maybe even faster than the old Nokia 3310, which did not have many features at all. Sharp has certainly invested in a decent processor for the handset, and it makes everything a much more pleasant experience than on something like the Sagem MYV-75, where things seem to take a long time. Strangely, things appear a lot more logical and easier to get to on the Sharp than they do on something like a Nokia 6230, where the menu switches from central D-pad to softkey for no good reason. The controls themselves on the GX15 are simple to operate, and the flip-phone style D-pad is a joy to use, rather than the vague joysticks of so many of its competitors. Certainly there is no problem with changing from another make of phone to this one. The only other phone which was this quick and simple to use was my old Mitsubishi M320, which I loved, and regret I ever sold! The only problem I can see is that the two softkeys cannot be changed from their original functions from the standby screen, which on a modern Siemens phone, for example, is one of the joys of having it.

Text messaging on the GX15 is normally very good, but there are one or two unusual things about this phone that I have not come across anywhere else before. The first is that there is nowhere which says how much storage space has been used for messages. On every other phone I have had, there has been a ‘memory meter’, as Motorola calls it, which shows how many messages are on the SIM card, and how many are in the various folders of the phone. I expect that the storage capacity for text messages is quite large, but there does not appear to be any way of finding out just how large that is! Similarly, on every other modern phone I have had, the handset will not break up words between lines, but keep them as a whole. For some reason, the GX15 can have half a word (or even only a few letters from a word) on one line and the rest of the word on another, which does look a little messy. This only appears to be when writing a message as opposed to reading one, however. There is a character counter, too, but it is helpful to remember that each message is about 160 characters, since the phone does not automatically tell the user when each new message has been started. The keypad is a great help to fast messaging, being responsive and of just the right size. Making calls on the GX15 is also generally very pleasant.

The phone book is easy to scroll through, and has many fields for contact information. Unlike the original Sharp phones, this can also store up to 750 numbers on the phone. Having a conventional keypad, unlike many other handsets these days, also makes for fewer mistakes when trying to dial phone numbers. The call quality seems to be good enough, although the reception is not as good as my old Sagem MYV-75, and this is helped by separate buttons on the side of the phone for volume control. Unfortunately, there does not appear to be a speakerphone mode on the GX15, but since the phone supports Bluetooth, a compatible headset is certainly an alternative.

In fact, Sharp appear to have made this phone with more connectivity options than any other handset before. The Bluetooth not only supports the headset profile, but can be connected to anything one cares to mention, the infra-red works fine between different phones, and can transfer ringtones, pictures and videos as well as contacts, and there is also the option of MMS and a fairly cheap data cable. Internet is also particularly good on the GX15, and seems much faster than on my Siemens CX65 for some reason, which is probably why my bill was so large last month, after trying out E-mail access whilst on holiday. It is a shame, however, that two of the games provided as standard on the GX15, which supports Java to a good standard, so I am told, are only demos. Invader Groove is one of them, and seems to be a Space Invaders clone. I appear to be too reticent to pay for the full version, however. There also appears to be a version of the old Wall Breaker game from In-Fusio on the phone, which is called Arkanoid for some reason, but this again is only a demo. The full game on the phone is called Trance Pinball, and seems distinctly average. I can only hope that my next phone has better games than this. Thank you, Vodafone!

As mentioned before, the GX15’s reception, although not as bad as some other phones I have had, appears to be nothing like as good as my old Sagem MYV-75, and this is something I do miss. The battery life, like on the fabled Sony Ericsson K700i, also appears to be alarmingly substandard, and appears to last for an absolute maximum of three days. This is certainly not a phone to have when a power socket is not available every night! Admittedly, it is not the worst I have ever had, but given that my old Sagem MYV-75 could manage four days without any problems, this is quite poor. Also poor is the fact that although there is an energy-saving mode, it appears to have little effect on conserving the battery, and does not display anything other than the time. It also does not show if there are any missed calls or waiting messages unless the user interacts with the phone, which is something of a drawback.

The GX15 also has basic functions, such as call lists (although not as detailed as those from Siemens), a calendar, a rather good alarm clock which can about six different alarms in a day with different ringtones, a currency converter and a calculator. These all appear to work as they should without any problems, and it is even possible to customise what kind of picture is in the background when the alarm goes off or when there is an incoming call. All this is quite unnecessary, but rather splendid at the same time.

Overall, the GX15 is one of the best phones I have ever had. Even its build quality seems to be good, which is not something I can say of many of the phones I have owned. It may not have very good reception or battery life, lack a speakerphone and have some strange quirks which one would not find in any manual, but for £56, I find it hard to complain. This is certainly one of the best phones I have ever had, and I look forward to future offerings from Sharp if they can lose a little bit of the Vodafone branding!

Joseph Lloyd

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