What a Siemen Stunner! (Siemens SL45)

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Product:	Siemens SL45
Date:	16/06/01 (163 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Cool phone.

Disadvantages: Expensive

This is the niftiest little phone Siemens has produced to date. In fact it’s the cooler phone any mobile company has produced. The SL45 is super-sleek and incredibly stylish. It is ultra slim and incredibly light, weighing in at a tiny 88 grams, which is absolutely nothing.

There is even a MP3 player built in, which is arguably the best phone on the market. With the tiny MultiMediaCard you can download music from the Internet or from your own personal collection. The headset doubles as the remote control making life that little bit easier. The MP3 sound is perfect but the tune will not continue where you left off if you are interrupted by a call and choose to answer, though it is supposed to. There are variations in downloading times, for the avid audio fiend it may be worth investing in an external MultiMediaCard as downloads are up to three times faster.

As you’d expect the SL45 is enabled with the obligatory WAP browser, easy to surf around without having to scroll through list after list of superfluous options.

On a more serious and grown-up note, synchronising the SL45 with your PC will allow you to download Microsoft Outlook, addresses and appointments. It has a digital voice recorder that will tape up to 5 hours of speech, which can be transferred to PC files and then e-mailed to friends and colleagues in a wav.format. If this isn’t enough, the blurb attached promises the data exchange software (installed within the handset) will allow users to transfer saved files in various applications (Word, Excel and Powerpoint) from the MultiMediaCard to a PC or laptop. Admittedly the serial transfer is slow, but this is the nature of serial protocol generally. Be aware, Siemens seem to have forgotten to put a backup on the CD and, according to the laws of life, systems do crash, limiting your chances of retrieving the systems files.

All this is well and good, but unless you are blessed with an abundance of patie
nce, photographic memory and/or any technical skill you may find frustration gets the better of you and you don’t progress from the basic phone functions. There lies the rub, the phone is so advanced it deserves more than phone status but doesn’t quite live up to anything else.

It has a high-resolution LCD screen with amber illuminated display, pleasantly different from the run-of-the-mill grey/green mobile phone users are normally subjected to. The menu command is incredibly interactive and can be customised, though it does take a bit of work. It has funky animated start-up graphics that you are able to pick and choose from. Even the operator logo can be drawn from scratch using the standard Microsoft Windows painting programs.

This phone plays a happy medium between the swanky poser and the business smart but is certainly far from ordinary. The bottom line? Think carefully about what it is you want from your phone, it’s a lot of money if you are not going to take full advantage, if you decide its for you it’ll be worth every penny.

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