Ich fühle mich enttäuscht (Siemens C60)

Member Name: tomshanks

Product:	Siemens C60
Date:	05/06/04 (689 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: One of the cheapest phones with Java, MMS and Tri-Band capabilities, Menu system easy to use, Polyphonic ringtone speaker excellent

Disadvantages: Hideous standard cover and lack of standard background pictures, Nasty keypad and slow response to key inputs, Lack of even the most basic organiser functions

At the end of last year, there appeared to be a whole flood of new models coming onto the market from Siemens? Munich headquarters. These included the A60, A52, C62 and the C60, up for consideration in this review. It seems that Siemens are trying to cater for every market at present. With the release of their now defunct Xelibri fashion-phone brand a couple of years ago, they were attempting to appeal to the fashion-concious who wanted style over substance. The customers, however, stuck to their Nokias and Sony Ericssons, and Siemens was forced to close their loss-making subsidiary. The S55, which came out at the beginning of last year, had all the features of a top-end business handset, but was plagued with an appalling screen and very little memory. Now, with the launch of their 65-series phones (CX65, C65, M65 and S65), they are trying to sew up the middle and top-end ranges of the market, but these will not be out for some time, and are far beyond the reaches of anyone who would be buying one of their ?budget? series of handsets. The C60 is just such a phone.

Although currently selling alongside the C62 in Carphone Warehouse, the C60 does not seem to have made any impression at all on the British market. In Germany, however, one glance at Ebay will prove that at home, at least, Siemens is on course not to have to stockpile too many handsets until they reach give-away prices. Amazingly, the C60, despite some of its rather surprising features, which I shall come onto later, is selling for just ?80 (about 58 GBP) in the shops with an O2 Germany Pay As You Go SIM card. That really is cheap, considering the Carphone Warehouse price is 99.99 GBP SIM-free. I went one better in obtaining my particular example, picki
ng it up on Ebay Germany for just ?76.80 in brand new condition. When it arrived, however, the bubble of illusion burst rather dramatically.

The Siemens C60 has to be the handset with one of the worst standard fascia sets I have ever seen. Mine, as in the picture provided by DooYoo, is bright blue with silver keys and a white stripe running down the middle. What makes this worse is the grey bottom, where the Microphone and charger are located, which clashes horribly with the rest of the ensemble. The C55, which I still have, has a much better design than this, and to top it all, is a lot smaller as well. Personally, I do not really mind about the size, since the phone which the C60 replaced, a Mitsubishi M320, was actually bigger, but since it is the same size as my Sagem MYX-6 camera phone, which has a huge screen as well as the integrated camera, this may put some off. What seems worse is that the battery is absolutely tiny. Clearly, the phone does not need all the space at the top that it has with such a small screen and tiny battery. However, it does feel comfortable to hold in the hand, and is about the same size as the old Siemens C45, which I considered to be the perfect size for a phone for quite a while. Those changing from the aforementioned earlier model will also appreciate the massive decrease in weight, probably due to the small size of the Lithium-Ion battery. Strangely, the covers for the A60, which is basically the same phone minus a couple of the features, are far better, being a pleasantly conservative black and grey. However, the silver bezel around the screen, common to both models, is a nice touch. Things continue in the same rather mixed vein when the phone is turned on.

The first thing to notice is the keypad itself. I do not think I have ever been so disappointed w
ith a phone keypad in my life. The C55 has a lovely keypad, which makes for comfortable, fast text messaging and dialling, and the A52 I used for a couple of weeks earlier this year was a similar story, but the C60 is different. Despite being made in Germany, whereas the A52 is made in China, the difference in build quality is not at all noticeable. If anything, it appears to be worse. Although in no way as bad as the Sagem phones I have owned, or the old Trium Mars which actually used to wear the contacts on the keypad out if you texted too much on it, I really did expect better. The keypad is loose in its mounting, so if the phone is tipped from one side to the other without touching the keys, the whole keypad will slide around. Worse is the fact that the action of the keys is not as positive as might be expected. I frequently found myself having to press buttons twice in order to perfom simple menu actions because I was not sure if the phone had registered my keypresses when I first got it. Of course, it is easy enough to get used to things like this, and now I find that this is not really a problem. It still should not be something that one needs to become accustomed with, however. What is more, the phone suffers from something which seems to affect the vast majority of colour screen phones this days, and that is keypress delay.

The only handsets I have had with colour screens which did not have some kind of delay between the pressing of a key, and the phone actually registering the user?s input, have been from Mitsubishi. The M320 I had before this was a prime example of how this does not need to be a problem if software and processors are sufficiently developed to eliminate it. The C60 is by no means the only phone I have owned to have this problem, since both the Sagem MYX-6 I have at the moment
and the Ericsson T65 I used to own were plagued by it, but this is the first time that I have experienced it on a Siemens handset. I am not sure whether this is due to a slow processor, or just bad software, but given that mine is a factory fresh example, where I have only downloaded a couple of ringtones, things can only get worse when the considerable customisation options of the phone are used, and things like Java games and extra wallpapers are added. This is a problem I hope to see resolved on future handsets. Once this delay has been taken into account, however, and it is by no means the worst I have ever seen on a phone, things do improve.

The colour screen, although by no means the best I have seen, does a fairly good job for most of the phones features. However, in bright sunlight, the distance between the cover and the screen itself means that the outside plastic shell reflects light terribly, so it can be quite hard to see what is going on under strong lighting conditions. The Mitsubishi M320 did not have this problem, and to boot, had a much bigger screen as well, although it supported the same number of colours (4096). Sometimes I wish that I had my old phone back when looking at this, but then, when I actually look at the menus they do appear to be rather good. It is possible to skip through entire menu sequences if the number on each different menu is known (for example message settings is menu-5-9), and even assign a different number key on the phone to whatever menu option is required. For example, number 3 could be Games, number 4 could be Calculator, and so on. Added to this is the ability to customize the left soft-key to whatever is wanted, ending up with a total of at least nine menu options available without ever using the standard system. Also, when selecting an option or going back a step in the menu, it is possible not o
nly to use the one of the two soft-keys and then the red button to go back a step, but also, by moving the central D-pad left and right, it is possible to move forward by going right, and then backwards by going left. I think this is a feature which Siemens have copied from Mitsubishi phones, where it is identically utilised, but it is useful nevertheless. But all this would be useless if the phone had no features.

It may have taken some time to arrive in a Siemens phone, but the C60 does actually feature Multi-Media Messaging. This is in addition to the ability to connect the phone to an attachable camera, which is the same as used by the S55, but is unfortunately not included in the package with the C60. Surprisingly, given the much more limited connectivity options offered in comparison with the S55, there is about twice as much space on the phone for ringtones, pictures and Java applications. It seems to be around 1.87MB on a completely empty phone, which given that my Sagem MYX-6 has only about 2MB of memory and can store about 50 photographs, should be enough for most people.
The inclusion of Java technology also makes the C60 a viable candidate for gaming, but with such a poor keypad, this might prove a little difficult. The standard games in the phone are not particularly inspiring either, being an updated version of the classic Siemens Stack-Attack game or Picture Puzzle, which is something requiring coloured tiles to be reassembled in the correct order to make a picture, but only being allowed to move one at once. I am not sure if these are Java games, but these are apparently ?hard-coded? into the phone, as Silje Brevik from Club-Siemens (www.club-siemens.net) has described, so if you do not like them, it is impossible to delete them. I would like to download some more, but i
t would probably cost me too much of my precious credit, so I will leave that until I get a Java phone on my contract back in Britain. The rest of the phone?s features are not quite as disappointing, however.

All that memory makes for a lot of pictures and ringtones, and here the C60 does not disappoint in its capabilities. There may be just ten standard ringtones available, but they all seem to be perfectly acceptable. The C60 has the best speaker for playing ringtones I think I have ever had the pleasure to hear, and makes everything I play on it sound exactly as promised on the website, which is sometimes not the case. Within 30 minutes of switching on the phone, I had downloaded both Beverly Hills Cop and Billie Jean to the phone, and they both sounded fantastic. With a data cable and software, it would just be a case of dragging MIDI files from their source and dropping them into the appropriate folder. I would imagine that the software would be the same as that for the S55, which is apparently very good. Needless to say, that apart from downloading ringtones from the Internet, this would be the only way to get them onto the phone, since it lacks both an infra-red port and Bluetooth. Bluetooth would not be expected on such a low-end model as this, but infra-red would be nice, especially considering that this is supposed to be a camera phone. At least when it rings it can be heard, given the fact that Siemens have finally woken up to the fact that their customers do not like missed calls through not being able to hear the phone ring, which was always a problem on the old C45, MT50 and the like.

There is also the ability, as on a great number of handsets with colour screens, to have whatever picture takes one?s fancy as the background, although this depends on first getting the picture onto the pho
ne using the data cable or Internet connection. Unfortunately, the selection of standard pictures on the phone is so poor that this will be necessary. There appears to be just two or three, with one animation. This is quite inexcusable, and is clearly a cost-cutting measure so that people will pay to visit the official Siemens site and get the nice selection of backgrounds that is there. I myself can cope without this. What I cannot cope without, however, are some organiser features on a phone. The C60 is significantly lacking in this area. There is no calendar and no currency convertor on the phone. Although some might find this no inconvenience, having to remember to multiply everything by a strange number with lots of decimal points in it every time I want to know what the price of my shopping is in pounds when I go to the supermarket is a bit of a hassle. There is, however, a stopwatch, a calculator and an alarm clock. It feels very much as if this phone was designed for teenagers, if this is taken in isolation. That said, one thing which teenagers do have a passion for is text messaging, and on those grounds, the C60 is not too bad.

With predictive text, the ability to display five lines whilst reading a message and four whilst writing one and a good, clear font, the basics are certainly there for this phone to become rather good for writing messages on. However, the aforementioned problems with the rattly keypad and the slow response to keypresses mean that this is not exactly the joy which it should be. This is a shame, as with better buttons everything would seem rather perfect. The ssame is true for WAP browsing. Although I was not able to access the Internet via GPRS, one of the C60?s standard features, standard dial-up seemed to be fine. The screen is not ideal for web-browsing, given its size, but it does displ
ay the relevant pages in colour, and the software did not seem any slower than any other phone on which I have used the Internet. It?s ability as a phone, however, seems to be without question.

The battery life and reception of the C60 are better than a lot of Siemens phones of old, and certainly compare with much more expensive phones on the market. This means slightly better battery life than my old Mitsubishi M320, and equal reception, which is rather good, I do not think I have had a problem with it yet. Certainly, if a cheap tri-band phone is all that is required, and text messaging is not a top priority, then this could be a worthy candidate. However, there are too many things which I feel are lacking about the C60. More attention should have been paid to key areas such as the keypad, the speed of the phone and the standard set of pictures. These days, it is not possible to neglect things like this, even on a low-end phone like the C60. That said, it does have an excellent polyphonic ringtone speaker, some nice features like Java and MMS, but given that it also lacks even the most basic of office functions, it is hard to see just who exactly this phone was aimed at.

The worst thing for the C60 is competition from within. At ?80, the phone is almost twice the price in Germany of the most basic phone in the range, the A52, and for most people who are after something basic, the A52 will fulfil their needs. Given that the A60, which is essentially a C60 without Java and MMS and some more sober covers, is priced very closely underneath it, and the much smaller and better C62, which has a proper organiser and a screen, but lacks Java, is only about ?10 (or 10 GBP in Carphone Warehouse) more expensive, then I do not feel that I can give this phone any more than three sta
rs. I will be changing to the C62 in a couple of months time, but for now, I will continue to enjoy the C60?s rather nice polyphonic ringtone abilities, and good basic phone functions.

Summary: