Anybody Speak Klingon? (Siemens S35i)

Member Name: kenjohn

Product:	Siemens S35i
Date:	08/11/01 (421 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: See opinion

Disadvantages: See opinion

~ ~ I changed my mobile phone about four months ago from a Nokia 3210 to the Siemens s35i.
I have to be honest and say that I didn’t change over because I was unhappy with the old Nokia, but simply because my service provider, Eircell, offer their customers an automatic upgrade every year or so.

~ ~ And not being one to pass up a chance to buy something at less than retail, I thus found myself sniffing around the “Carphone Warehouse” and other mobile phone retailers. (see my opinion, PLUG, PLUG) I eventually ended up buying the Siemens for £79. (Irish Punts, minus approx. 20% for Sterling) Included in this deal was a free Sim pack to transform my old 3210 into a pre-paid phone, along with £15 worth of call credit. As I was looking out for a mobile for my wee lass in any case, this offer killed two birds with one stone, not to mention saving me a bit of dosh. (always a good thing!)
my intention had been to buy another Nokia for myself, but I decided on the spur of the moment to go for the Siemens, simply on the principle that “a change is as good as a rest”. Not the best of reasons, you might say, and to be honest, you’d be right, as I now wish I’d stuck with my original decision and gone for another Nokia.

~ ~ Don’t get me wrong.
There’s nothing inherently wrong with the s35i, and in fact it comes with a barrowload of extra features that weren’t on the old Nokia 3210. But as far as the “mad cabbie” is concerned, it’s these very features that I actually don’t like about the phone, and which make it damned awkward to use.
The single biggest difference is the Siemens is WAP enabled, which put simply means that you can access the Internet through your phone.
OK. In principle this sounds like a wonderful idea, and indeed it could be said (with some degree of truth) that I’m a bit of an Internet addict these days, using it as I do for bot
h work and pleasure.
But it’s so difficult to input any information into the phone that you would nearly need a degree in Computer Science to work out how the stupid thing works. As far as I’m concerned the claims that WAP is the way of the future are greatly exaggerated, if for no other reason that WAP makes even an ancient 28K modem on an old PC look like the very latest technology in terms of speed.
It also has an infra-red port, which again put simply means that you’re supposedly able to integrate it with your home PC, and share information between the two, like your address book, emails, etc. This again sounds wonderful in theory, but in practice it is nigh on impossible unless you happen to be good at quantum physics. And the instruction manual is about as much use as if it were written in Klingon!! (anybody have a phrase book?)
So there’s one of the Siemens supposedly great selling points and features totally blown out of the water as far as I’m concerned. A sound idea WAP may well be, but until Siemens start to produce an instruction manual that is understandable to the layman who knows next to nothing about the technology, it’s about as much use as a raincoat in the Sahara.

~ ~ Likewise the much vaunted voice dialling feature.
I was really looking forward to using this, as I thought all I would have to do when driving my taxi was to stick my earphone in, hit a button, and tell the phone what number to dial. Hah! If only! Again, I have the phone about four months now, and STILL haven’t managed to figure out exactly how to use this “handy” feature.
Any other moans? Well, yes actually. The text screen, while being able to hold up to five lines of information, is so small in comparison to my old Nokia that I practically need a portable magnifying glass with me at all times in order to read it. And the definition is no great shakes either, being very difficult to make out cle
arly, especially in strong sunlight.
If I happen to want to send a text message, which I’ve been doing more frequently since my wee lass started to have fun with MY old Nokia, and send her daddy half a dozen messages a day, then I’m again in real trouble.
With my old 3210, I simply typed in the message and then pressed “send”. With the Siemens, I now have to fiddle around for ages to get even the simplest of messages on the phone, as it has this supposedly amazing new feature called “T9 predictive text input for SMS”. This is again supposed to make your life simpler, by predicting the word you are attempting to type and inserting it for you. Sounds great, but again I think they have the phone programmed in some weird and wonder foreign language that no one, least of all me, has ever heard of. It’s got to the stage where I actually dread having to attempt to send a message, so difficult is the task.

~ ~ All is not doom and gloom.
It does have a handy little feature called a “voice memo”, that allows me to make a 20 second recording if, for instance, somebody tells me something on the phone that I want to make a note of.
It also has a vibration alert, that means I can turn the ring tone off, and instead be told I have an incoming call by a not unpleasant vibration instead.
It’s light and portable, and in fact at only 105 grams weight, is one of the lightest mobiles on the market, and it’s silver colour is pleasant on the eye.
And with an integrated antenna, it fits snugly and unobtrusively into any pocket, without leaving an unseemly bulge.
That said, the actual number and text buttons are a lot smaller than on the Nokia, and I find that I now make far more mistakes when dialling, and end up calling wrong numbers a lot more than I did in the past.
Returning to the ring tones for a moment. It has a fair few, (40 in total) but I had the Scottish National A
nthem (Flower of Scotland) on my old Nokia (alright, don’t say it!) which I liked, and it simply isn’t available with the Siemens. And I can’t download it off the Web either, at least not that I’ve been able to discover. You’re supposedly able to compose your own ringtones, but again, I’m afraid my middle name isn’t Beethoven!

~ ~ Other features include a calculator, a currency converter, and a few non-descript games, none of which I’ve ever used.
The battery life seems to be good, but as I have a cigarette lighter charger in the car (cost a £5 in the local market), it never gets to the stage where it might run low in any case. Siemens quote 360 minutes talk time, and nine days on standby.
And it does have a decent phone book function, allowing me to store as many numbers as I need.
I have also managed (eventually) to preset my half dozen or so most used numbers into the speed dial function, so that all I have to do is hit a single button in order to make a call, but even this doesn’t work first time all the time.
There’s probably a plethora of other features as well, but the menu is so damned difficult to get the hang of, you’d have to take a week’s holiday just to work it out.

~ ~ And just to finish things off, I can’t even manage to palm it off on my wee lass in exchange for my trusty old Nokia 3210 back again, as she doesn’t like the Siemens either. (or should I say the games)
Not high marks for this phone from the “mad cabbie”, and I wouldn’t recommend it unless you are a total whiz kid at working out how all the needlessly complicated features actually work.
Now, has anybody out there in dooyooland a Nokia they fancy swapping?

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