Gadget Phone! (Sharp GX30)

Member Name: angeelu

Product:	Sharp GX30
Date:	08/10/04 (1764 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Great gadget, Fairly decent built in camera and video camera, Good quality phone

Disadvantages: Can't add words to the text dictionary, Chips when dropped on the pavement

My Sharp GX-30 is not only my toy, but also a great gadget. When I bought it it was the first time I ever purposely set out to buy what was supposedly one of the best phones on the market, but so far, I'm fairly pleased I did!

The Sharp GX30 is currently only available on the Vodafone network, and at the time I bought it it was, on average, quoted at costing in the region of £100 (with a contract - it's still a lot more if you want to buy it without taking out a contract), depending on what tariff you opt for on the Vodafone network. As my boyfriend and I went shopping for the same phone at the same phone we hoped to get a bit more of a bargain, and fortunately we did! £23.97 each on the Vodafone Anytime 200 tariff from Phones 4U after negotiating with a very helpful salesman! Incidentally though, I recently saw on the Vodafone website that it was being given as a free phone with certain contracts.

I was a bit concerned about buying a Sharp mobile phone. It's not that I'd heard bad things about them or anything like that, in fact quite the opposite. My reasons for being a bit apprehensive is that ever since I first owned a mobile I've always gone for Nokia and I've never had any problems with them - they've always been reliable and easy to use, in particular for texting.

The Looks
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Silver in colour, the GX-30 is a clam shell style phone, with a small slightly bigger than a postage stamp sized screen on the outside. Folded up it looks neat and tidy, but it's not the smallest of phones (though not the largest either!) At 26 x 95 x 49mm it's definitely compact enough for the pocket, and at 110g it's not heavy, in fact it's much lighter than you'd expect it to be from looking at it.

Opened out it reveals a much larger internal screen in the top section of the phone. This is a nice large size, more than four times bigger than the external screen.
The bottom section contains the key pad, function buttons and directional buttons. These are metal buttons and they sit flush to the phone as opposed to sticking up. I first thought that this would make them more difficult to press and use, but it actually makes it nice and comfortable to use.

The Display
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I was instantly amazed by the quality of the display from the moment I switched it on and was greeted with the Vodafone welcome screen. (Seems sad I know, but I was also pretty taken with the way it displays 'How Are You?' when you switch it on, plus it gave my boyfriend a laugh when I said 'Fine thanks' back to the phone when I first switched it on!).

The screen is made of something called Continuous Grain Silicon (CGS) colour LCD. The images are crystal clear and are as good as the quality of the screen on my laptop! At the top of the screen are various icons showing what settings are in place and whether you've received a message etc. At the bottom of the screen is a tool bar that shows what the left and right function buttons will do.

The external screen is also colour but it's not quite so high quality. Both the internal and external screen can display whatever wallpaper you choose (background image) - this can be one of the images already on the phone or you can take your own pictures. If you like you can have a different external picture to internal picture. The external display also shows a clock (one with hands as opposed to just displaying the time in numbers), the day and date and icons showing the signal strength, battery strength, message icon etc.

Using The Phone
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The easiest way to navigate through the phone's functions is to use the menu screen - this is accessed by pressing the circle button. From here you select the icon that represents the menu you want to look at. In case you can't work out what the icon represents the name of the menu is also displayed at the top of the screen.

The first icon represents Games and More. Self explanatory really - here you'll find any applications (including games) and screen savers you have on the phone. It comes with one game - BombLink, which is a bit of a strategy puzzle type game, fairly easy but fairly addictive.

The next icon is for Vodafone Live! This basically connects you to the Vodafone Live WAP site - browsing the site is free, it just costs to download information etc.

Third icon is for applications. Here you'll find such accessories as Vodafone (help, information, leisure, answer phone and phone services), MP3 player, Calendar, Alarms, Calculator, Voice recorder, Melody editor and Phone help.

Fourth icon is for messages. Here you can create messages, access your media album and Vodafone mail as well as the Messenger service. You can also choose whether to accept cell broadcasts and decide whether to have the Area Info option on or off.

Fifth icon is for the camera. Here you can choose between the options of taking a picture or recording a video.

Next up comes My Stuff. This is where you can access your stuff! This includes your pictures, sounds, videos, bokmarks, text templates, memory status as well as your games.

Seventh icon is for your profiles - this is where you can switch between the standard profiles such as normal, car, headset, silent etc.

Next is your Contacts - basically the area for your phone book. You can record up to 500 entries, each with up to 3 phone numbers as well as e-mail addresses, address and the likes.

Finally is the Settings icon, where you can change (quite obviously) the settings on your phone!

It would be pointless, and boring, for me to go into detail on every single function on the phone, so I'll just cover the main points that I think most people are interested in!

Texting
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I'd been concerned about how easy it would be to text on the phone, having become accustomed to Nokia phones. I was pleased to find it's just as easy to use! You can choose whether to have T9 (predictive text) on or off, and it work's in pretty much the same way as the Nokia texting works, only you use the up and down buttons to change the word you've written if it hasn't come up right. The only downside is that you can't seem to add words to a dictionary like you can with Nokia phones - if they added this feature then texting using this phone would be just the same as with a Nokia. It can be frustrating when you've got predictive text on and you're trying to write a word that's not in the dictionary as you have to split it into shorter words, for example imagine the word caring wasn't in the dictionary, you'd have to type in the word car (which it would understand) then press ok, then type the word ing and press ok. Only a minor niggle though - I've got used to it now.

The Camera
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The camera is excellent quality (for a mobile phone camera), in fact it's the best quality camera you can currently get on a mobile phone at 1 mega pixel (as far as I'm aware). Using the camera is really easy - there's a button on the keypad that will activate it, or you can go through the menu screen.

To take pictures of other people or objects you just look through at the main screen of the phone then press the circle button to take the picture. If you want to change the viewfinder to take pictures of yourself, you choose that option then point the small external screen at yourself - the external screen shows you the image it's looking at, so once you're happy with it you press the circle, and easy as that you've taken a piccy or you!

Using the video camera is just as easy - once you've selected the option to take a video you press the circle to start and stop the recording. The recordings you can take are only short, but they do include sound.

There's a light on the front of the phone that you can use as a flash. You turn it on using the option buttons. You change the colour of the light giving a different effect to the pictures you take - colours include red, green, blue, violet as well as many others. When you press the button to take the picture the light flashes much brighter like a flash would.

Once you've taken a photo you can add effects to it, such as making it look embossed, adding various frames, changing it to sepia tones, or adding 'stamps' to it, such as speech bubbles, moustaches, light bulbs, crowns, lips, kisses etc.

Photo's can be saved to the handset or the SD memory card. If you've got the right sort of adapter you can then use the SD memory card with your PC - this means you can put the photos from your phone on your PC and things from your PC onto your phone!

Quality
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Both sound quality and picture quality really are excellent. The phone can play true tones, as well as polyphonic and mono tones. It also plays MP3's to a high quality.

The battery life is really good, though as you'd probably expect it runs out quicker if you spend a lot of time playing with the digital camera and video recorder... still, on my first day of having the phone I spent a long time playing with it (a good few hours) before the indicator suggested it needed charging, and even then it never actually went flat, it just eventually went to the last indicator on the battery icon to show it's about ready for charging up again.

This is the first time I've owned a clam shell style phone, and I was also a bit worried that it would be a bit flimsy and likely to break. Fair enough, I haven't had it long, but it seems plenty sturdy enough and unlikely to be easily damaged. My only gripe here is that if you drop it (which obviously you should try not to) the silver paint it's coated in does chip slightly - the phone doesn't break or anything, but if you're prone to dropping your phone then it can look a little bit more battered than other phones might do! Mine's been dropped a few times, and has chipped a little at the corners - you can't really tell unless you're looking for it, but it does disappoint me that they didn't give it a more robust coating or use plastic coloured all the way through rather than coating parts of it with this satin silver paint like finish. Saying that, it's only really if you drop it on the pavement that it chips.

Summary
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I'm extremely happy with the phone and would certainly recommend it. If you can get it at a reasonable price (or free!) it really is a suberb quality phone, and the extras such as the camera and video clip recorder make it a really useful and versatile phone / gadget! It will never replace my digital camera, but it will certainly increase the number of digital photos I take as I'm more likely to have my phone with me when I'm out than my camera. The video camera feature is also handy to catch some funny moments on!

There's so much I could write about the specification of the phone, but to be honest you can read that on somewhere like the Sharp website. Hopefully this review has given you a good overview of the phone!

Definitely worthy of high marks, though one start knocked off for the fact you can't add
words to the dictionary and the fact the paint can chip slightly if you drop it on tarmac!

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