A little box of tricks (Siemens S45)

Member Name: rickosky

Product:	Siemens S45
Date:	26/01/02 (1775 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: User friendly, Powerful, Well-designed

Disadvantages: Poor battery life, Unclear sound, Games not good

The Siemens S45 is a curious phone. It's not particularly pretty. Its speakerphone is, at the best of times, frankly unclear. You can see the mould marks on the case. But what is it that has made so many people go out and pay good money for something so flawed with design faults, cheaply made and ugly?

To some people, a phone is nothing more than an emergency call device, stashed in the glove compartment as a cheaper alternative to membership of the AA. Put the S45 in that position, it should be humanely re-homed. It caters for so many different walks of life: from the hardened txter to the busy businessman and everything in between. It's so clever that I swear it would get bored in a glove compartment. It would, simply, be wasted. Its organiser features won't just give you gentle reminders; let this baby out of its cage and it will organise your life for you. It is amazingly powerful.

One letdown of the S45 is the choice of games. They are, frankly, uninspiring. There is a limit to how much fun you can have trying to move 5mm square 2D crates into a line on the floor. Even I got bored. However, there are much more diverting games available on the Mobile Internet, such as roulette and Trivial Pursuit is you know where to look. The battery cover looks like it would break if you breathed on it, a genetic fault inherited from the C35 and every Siemens telephone since.

The GPRS facility is one of the major selling points in the phone. It is fast, reliable, and easy to access. Once you've moved on from WAP, you'll never go back, and rightly so. You will never need to go through the time-consuming dialling process again, as GPRS offers a permanent connection for no cost. All you are charged for is the information you receive. It can prove costly as, although 2p per kilobyte received sounds little, the average WAP page is 30kb. 60p for a web page is the only pitfall to the otherwise inspired idea.

The S45 is so easy t
o use that a child could work it. Its menu system is easy to navigate and, best of all, obvious. It is very easy to learn how to use it, and you soon get the hang of it.

Not many networks have okayed this excellent phone for use on their frequencies; a surprising omission from a repertoire of the supposed, 'best phones'. This phone boasts an array of features that certain other handsets would give their aerial for. They might not all have a use; the useless 3-minute dictaphone may be among these, but Siemens obviously didn't skimp on the features in designing. A lot of attention has gone into this phone.

The standby time is something of, well, a lie. The specified time is only applicable if the phone is doing nothing. Absolutely nothing. Every minute of backlight operation reduces the standby time by half an hour, a huge reduction and a nasty selling trick on behalf of Siemens. The battery life is pathetic, and Siemens should have perfected this before it left the factory.

The phone also comes with a PC link pack, which is incredibly useful. Here you can turn text documents into SMS documents stored on the phone, VMO files from the useless dictaphone into WAV files for the PC (but why you'd want to that is left unexplained), and edit your address and phone books from your computer. You can design your own screensavers and operator logos on a program as simple as Paint. The software does all the rest. The kit works in conjunction with MS Outlook, which means that you can synchronise your appointments with those already stored on the PC. The phone even thinks it's a PC, having a low-tech version of your old enemy Windows Explorer programmed in.

The phone boasts 'Flex memory' which is yet another deliberate con by Siemens. The phone's user guide proudly says that you can store '500 names and addresses, 3.5 minutes of dictaphone recording' and hundreds of other things. What it actually means is
that the memory is shared between them; if you use half of the 500 names and addresses, you've only got 1 and three-quarter minutes of useless dictaphone left and vice versa. This is an outright con, advertising a downfall as a good thing! Crazy! But then, it's a German phone, and they're the ones with the lederhosen, which must say something about the sanity of its design team.

The phone is too small by half. It pains me to think how many times I've reached into my pocket, and thought, 'Oh me! Oh my! £250 down the drain again!? only to discover, after a frantic search of everything on my person, that it was there all along. The weight is another factor in my ongoing 'misplacement problem'. This is one of the most annoying aspects of the phone.

However, I like it, all my friends love it, even the mediocre games, and, despite its numerous flaws, I give this little box of tricks 5 stars. But, even though it?s rated highly, I would only suggest that you buy it if you have a real use for most of the functions, otherwise your money will have been wasted.

Richard Moore

rmoore1987@hotmail.com

Summary: