Swish little phone (Siemens C65)

Member Name: playingcards

Product:	Siemens C65
Date:	13/11/05 (262 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Good value camera phone, stylish looking, easy to use, good joystick

Disadvantages: Occasionally freezes, pressing '2' can be awkward, poor camera resolution, poor battery life

I bought this phone just before Christmas last year from the Carphone Warehouse. It cost me £80, with £15 credit on Virgin Mobile. I was looking for a good value little WAP camera phone - nothing special - to replace my old obsolete Siemens A50.

GOOD POINTS:

What I found was a real gem for the price. An excellent design - which is both stylish and funtional, with really nice colours, are the most striking features you get as a first impression. It's compact, lightweight, and has good ergonomics.

The phone is very easy to navigate around with - you select by clicking one of the two option buttons by the screen, and move around using the joystick.

For its size, (approx. 12cm by 3cm by 1.5cm), there is an excellently sized screen, which has a resolution of 352 by 288 pixels. This is fine for the built-in graphics, although sometimes the photos don't look great when you use the zoom.

The camera is quite useful and very easy to use - simply point, and click the joystick. You also have the capacity to zoom up to 3 times, and the ability to change the brightness settings when you take the photos is good for adjusting the visibilty of the photos. There is also a realky nice little photo-editing facility, which lets you add in caricatures and morph your photos.

Texting using both standard SMS and multi-media messages are easy to use and show you the characters and number of messages used, althugh some people moving from Nokia phones often have trouble remembering that the '1' is a space, and '0' is punctuation on Siemens. I have the same trouble, but vice versa.

The games are another good feature in the phone. 'Bubble Boost' is a bit like Rayman or Mario, and is my personal favourite. There is also Stack Attack 2, which is a tetris type game, but complicated and difficult to get the hang of, and Photopet, a good concept - you adopt a pet and feed it and look after it - like Tamagotchi.

BAD POINTS

The main bad points about the phone are its' battery life and occasional unreliability.

Although you are meant to get a few days out of it, battery can easily be half gone with an hour of playing on the games, and the standby time is very poor, to the extent that if I'm using it the next day, even if it displays lots of battery, I'll put it on full-charge overnight, and I can expect most of it to be depleted if I've been texting that day.

The phone also tends to freeze if you take too many photos at any one time, and the only solution is to take the battery out.

I had to take the first model i got back to the store and swop it for this reason, and my new one is much better.

Ultimately, this is a good value first camera phone, with some very nice features and a good design. It's only bad points are it's reliability and battery life , but if you're willing to put up with these, then you won't be disappointed.

Summary: Good value starter camera phone

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