BenQ-Siemens Q-fi EF71

Sporting a stylish brushed aluminium exterior, the BenQ-Siemens Q-fi EF71 looks elegant and has a pleasant feel. The hinge of this ruggedly-built phone allows little play and feels very strong. When opened, it’s all jet black; only the 4-way rocker and the border of the keypad sport a metallic finish.

The blue backlit keys are well-spaced and extremely comfortable when SMSing. The icon-based UI is easy to use and the colour LCD is good, as is the external white OLED display used for various status messages.

The Q-fi range is music-focused, and this is one of the first phones in this series. Media playback keys are present on the lid, and there is also a music button at the side to start the media player. The 10-band equaliser makes listening to music a pleasurable experience. The 2.0 MP camera does not feature auto-focus, but still does a good job. You can’t zoom while taking still photos at the highest supported resolution.

The phone has a paltry internal memory of just 24 MB, so adding a microSD card becomes compulsory. The memory is not hot-swappable—you need to open the phone and remove the battery to access the slot. PC connection has three modes: mass storage device, Modem / PC Sync, or Webcam.

Nokia N96

Nokia’s N95 8 GB was, perhaps, one of the most balanced Symbian-based smartphones we’ve ever had the pleasure of reviewing. Most people look at such high-end phones as a sum of their feature set. For us, a cellphone is a more personal device, and the operation, ergonomics, intuitiveness of menus and ease of use are equally important as the features — especially when one is shelling out over Rs 30,000.

The N82 was thought to be a replacement for the N95, but without the slick two way slider, and a smaller screen, it was never an N95 killer. Now Nokia faced a dilemma — how to improve upon near perfection? Simple — improve the few noticeable flaws. And thus was born the N96.



Livered in a slick satin black facia with metallic silver all round the sides. The rear is satin black, with fine grey lines between — very similar to the finishes on the Nokia N82 and N78. Some may like such finishes — we personally don’t, and the N95 8 GB looked much more a serious phone than a rich boy’s play-toy.

The screen remains the same (2.8 inches) although it’s now become glossy, which gives the appearance of better contrast, but in reality this isn’t so. The speaker grilles are now much better looking. The revamping of the menu buttons isn’t successful however, and the four-way joypad is now much harder to use.

The menu button isn’t bevelled any more and its flush fit and closeness to the call accept button may lead to a few false key presses — very annoying. The volume and camera buttons on the side are now a lot harder to use, and feel tackier than the N95s keys. The number pad now has flat keys and their close spacing means using them is a pain — the N95 8 GB had bevelled keys — Nokia should have stuck with that.....

Nokia N96

LG KU990 Viewty

LG Touch?
Every company has a touch screen operated phone and the KU990 is a 3-inch, 3G touch screen phone from LG. The metal plate and the glossy front with chrome borders give the phone a stylish-yet-sturdy look.

You will soon realise that the main menu interface looks and feels a lot like the HTC / iPod Touch and iPhone. You can use either a finger or stylus to slide through menus. There’s no place to store the stylus on the phone though.

There aren’t too many buttons on the phone, primarily because of its touch screen functionality. There is a jog dial on the back of the phone around the camera lens which can be used to scroll through items or change sound volumes. However, this is inconvenient to use, and scrolling through menus using it is especially difficult. Scrolling using the touch-screen is a little cumbersome as well—those with shaky hands might accidently launch an application off and on. There’s a full keyboard on the touch-screen, and it works well with either your fingers or the stylus—our only complaint is the awkwardly-placed spacebar.

There is a 5 MP camera with a flash, and a standard VGA camera for video calls. The 100 MB internal memory is paltry, but can be supported by the Micro SD card slot. The earpiece is perfect, but the microphone quality is strictly average—expect some minor crackling. The speakerphone is fine, but gives out a high shrieking sound at times. The earphones that are bundled with the phone... err... just get the job done. LG KU990

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2

It’s been a long time coming with numerous leaks and sneak peeks, but now, Sony Ericsson has officially launched the new XPERIA X2, and the big news is that it will be running on Windows Mobile Phone 6.5. And Engadget has got some hands-on time with it, with a full video of the same.

Like its predecessor, this one is packed with so much stuff that the company probably didn’t have space to write ‘kitchen sink included’. The one big disappointment from the last model persists, though, as the X2’s 3.2-inch TFT touchscreen (65K colours, 800x480 pixels) is still resistive (probably to make a stylus work with WinMob 6.5) and does not come with an accelerometer. Switching from portrait to landscape mode is still activated by sliding out the keyboard. Really, Sony, what are you thinking with this one?

The Panel UI has gotten a makeover, and now you can go for a new bubbled layout apart from the 3x3 grid, as well as get the option of setting panels according to the time of the day. Aaron Duke, a product manager on the X2, has come out with a video explaining the changes:

Another significant change is that Sony has dropped the plastic menu buttons and gone with an optical trackpad for the same, giving the phone a sleeker, sexier look. Nice one, that!

The camera gets a huge boost as the X2 comes equipped with an 8-megapixel sensor with autofocus, LED flash, touch focus, geo-tagging, image stabilisation, face detection, smart contrast and video light for VGA footage. Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2 | Mobile Chargers | Sony Ericsson P1i