• It allows you to go into “create a message” even when the memory is full and there’s no possible way to send it. So you spend the time to write a text message, and you can’t send it anyway!
• When the battery is low, it lets off a loud shrill of a noise CONSTANTLY. It’s VERY annoying, VERY loud, and so unnecessary. There seems to be no way to turn it off either. The only times I seem to get this is either when I’m trying to sleep or when I’m with a client, neither times do I have a method to charge the phone.
• The camera is of very poor quality. Enough said.
• The “Flip” mechanism is flimsy and is practically broken.
• After a year the phone is starting to show signs of wear, the silver paint is coming off, showing a black under layer, the cover that covers the camera on the outside cracked, and consequently fell off.
• Trying to add a new word into the dictionary is near impossible. The damn thing is so difficult to use.
• When you get a message or a missed call, the phone will beep/vibrate every few minutes to remind you. This gets very annoying. On other phones there are more subtle methods such as an LED on the outside that remains lit when attention is needed.
• The HUGE blue fading light that has absolutely NO purpose other than to annoy me while I sleep at night, while it charges. WHY couldn’t this be used for alerts and such?
• To inset the memory card, you must take off the battery cover… WHY didn’t they just make a slot?
• This phone is unnecessary bulky and ugly.
• There is no signal to let you know that the call has ended, so you can continue to speak even though the call has ended. How difficult would it be to add a subtle beep at the end of the call?
• When the LEDs on the number pad are lit they make a very loud humming noise which is most distracting.
• This phone appears to get interference with EVERYTHING. If it has a speaker, chances are when you’re making a call you get a constant buzz. Even phones from the 90s didn’t do this as bad.
• You can’t set bluetooth to discovery mode for more than 3 minutes. This is annoying.
• This phone crashes often.

Good things…

• I can sync it with Outlook!
• It plays MP3s, and plays them as ringtones too!
• It takes photos.
• It can do videos, just not very well.
• You can do video calling.
• It can charge via USB.
• The screen is quite a good size, and pretty clear.

All in all, I hate this phone, but I did get it for free.

Anyway onto my next phone… the Nokia N95.

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This time I found a good one from a reputable website that sold items from China across the world, instead of eBay.

This device is also known as the Black Hawk MP4 Digital Player or mini Play Station Portable or IHTOOM personal media player.

The mp4 player is boasted to have the following features:

• NES games console
• 3.0 Mega Pixel lens
• digital camera/webcam
• video camera recording
• mp3/audio player
• mp4/video player
• 3″ TFT screen
• AV in and AV out
• build-in speakers
• 1GB internal memory
• SD card socket
• calendar/time/e-books/alarm clock
• microphone for voice recording
• hold button
• built-in rechargable battery

This device is fantastic. The only thing it doesn’t do is make phone calls, but for the price I cannot complain.

From the outset I liked this device, and looked forward to its arrival. One thing I am aware of is that it’s never going to be an amazing build, but this didn’t bother me.

It arrives and I immediately begin to examine the contents of the package.

The box contain: 1x pmp device; 1x white ear phones with a 3.5mm jack; 1x Male USB A to Male USB mini 5 USB cable; RCA to 3.5MM AV cable; 100-240V AC Main Charger (50/60Hz USA plugs 2 pin); GB travel power adapter; Driver/Software CD; English User Manual.

I begin by trying out the camera facility and took some photos. The photos turn out okay, but are somewhat grainy, but tolerable for a 3.0 Mega Pixel. I noticed there was what looked liked a flash, but it didn’t actually have the option for a flash, so I believe there is no flash, but then again it was never said there would be a flash, it was just assumed.

This photo came with the device, I guess they tested it before sending it out.
Another thing worth noting is that the date was wrong, when I received the device it said “2005.05.15″.

I also tried out the video recording, which was tollerable, only 320×240, but not bad. Apparently you can use the device as a webcam too, but I have yet to try this.

I also tried out one or two of the NES games, which seem to be slow. I think this probably is a problem with the device decoding the NES games. I could probably cope with that as I didn’t buy this to play games, even though it looks like a playstation portable (PSP).

I decided to plug it into my computer and load some media onto it. I discovered that the connector into the device was the same as my Motorola mobile phone which was fantastic as it means I could swap between the two without having more cables. One thing I did discover is that when you have your device plugged into USB it does not appear to allow you to switch to normal mode unless you unplug the device from the USB.

Also, the battery seems to wear down after a long period of time being plugged into the USB suggesting that it does not charge via the USB, having said this you can use the DC input at the same time.

I tried transferring some mp3s onto the device, in the form of files and folders, however when I turned on the device and looked for the files, they didn’t exist. I discovered that I must put the mp3s directly into the mp3s folder before I can view them on the device for playback. This was frustrating.

That aside the audio playback has some good features, including repeat, random, equalise and A-B. The bad features are that there is no search feature, files are listed in the 8.3 filename format (which is ugly), and as I said before, there’s no option for folders.

One of the most annoying issues with the video and audio play back functions is that there’s no resume. You can’t resume to the last track or video you were playing, let alone resume to the point you were listening to before you turned the device off.

After some time I realised that the beep noise when you scrolled between items on the menu was getting very annoying. At first I could not figure out how to turn this off, but soon discovered that you can turn this off via the Setup, under a section called “Sleep Off”, its simply a case of setting BEEP to OFF.

Despite this, I decided to convert a video clip to ASF format. I was very impressed by the quality of the video. There was no ghosting, and the picture was very clear. I was very impressed. So impressed I had to say it twice.

A subtle feature I liked was the stand on the back of the device which you can pull out and use it to make it stand up but slightly leaned back, meaning you can stand the player on your desk and watch your favourite TV program or whatever you decide to put on your device.

I decided to then try the bundled ear phones, which are standard fit (3.5mm not 2.5mm). My initial problem was that if I was using the stand, I could not use the ear phones, as the socket is on the bottom of the device, this is simply down to bad design, but tolerable.

The next problem with the ear phones was that when I had them plugged in, the built-in speakers were still being used. At first I thought that I would be unable to use this device in public. However, I soon discovered that there was an option to turn the speakers off under Setup -> Sleep Off.

In terms of physical design, the only “bad ideas” are the rubber “flap” for the SD card, which I can imagine will fall off at some point. I am also under the impression that the stand I mentioned above would probably be very easy to break off.

One of my pet hates is power buttons that you have to hold down to turn the device on. I wish it was simply a switch, similar to the hold button, this would make it far easier to turn on and off.

I also wish this device had better volume control. I find with all of these devices that the volume control is digital, you have to turn on the device to control the volume, yet my walkman tape player from years ago was able to have a physical volume control, why can’t we have these on our new devices?

I’m surprised this device doesn’t have is an FM radio, most of the other MP4 players have a built in FM radio, but not this one, I’m not sure why as it’s a simple feature to include.

Conclusion

This device is worse than I expected. I was hoping that some of the issues experienced with other imported devices would have been resolved, but it seems that is not the case.

If I was to improve this device, I would do the following:

• Change the power button to a switch (on/off state)
• Better volume control, such as a scroller
• Better SD card cover
• Charge from USB
• Better display of mp3 filenames
• Ability to search MP3s
• MP3s should be able to playback from folders
• Playback resume
• Better game decoding
• More game decoding (GBA games?)
• AV in/out should be more accessible, not on the bottom
• Speakers should turn off automatically upon plugging the ear phones in

It sure is no Sony PSP, return to sender.

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I decided to get this phone as I had a Siemens ME45 before and that was great for it’s time.

In my opinion, this phone had a very stylish design. It was one of few non-flip phones on the market as they appeared to be becoming the norm. I have always been under the impression that like small convertibles, they are girlie.

The features I particularly liked when I purchased this phone were the custom polyphonic ring tones, vibrate, IRDA, build-in camera for photos and video, navigation joystick, integrated antenna, loudspeaker, “dynamic lights” for alerts, full colour display, video playback, silent mode and the ability to sync with Microsoft Outlook.

At the time of it’s release cameras were begining to become established in phones and were now the standard, as such this phone even came with an optional flash which plugged into the bottom. Quality of photos and video is reasonable.

Obviously it also came with standard features such as SMS, MMS and Internet/WAP, oh and of course the ability to make and receive calls.

As you can tell, this phone is pretty feature-tastic, the only thing it is missing from it’s elegant design is bluetooth. To begin with this didn’t matter as no one had bluetooth either, but as more and more phones came with bluetooth as standard, this phone got left behind.

Regardless, this is a fantastic phone. One of the best things is the navigation. Finding anything was easy, and once you were in it, it was easy to use. Text messages supported T9, which was really simple to work with, compared to other phones.

I also loved the management options such as copy and paste, and the phone number highlighting so you can dial a number you are sent with ease.

One of my favorite features was the dynamic lights. These are used when you receive a missed call or a text message to continually alert you that you have to attend to it, without continuously releasing a distressing noise like other phones, otherwise known as silent alerts. You are able to turn off the dynamic lights feature.

This phone also comes with some useful applications such as calculator (which is difficult to use), calendar, notes, task, dictating, stop watch, count down, unit converter, alarm clock, media player and all sorts of other software functions I would probably never get around to using, but at least I know they are there.

Another great feature of this phone was its ability to run java. This meant you could easily get hold of, and install new applications and new games to extend the possibilities of this phone.

Although this phone has quite a bit of storage space, for some strange reason, it could only seem to manage 100 text messages on the phone, and the standard 10 on the sim card. I never worked that out.

One thing I did find useful, was the ability to sync with outlook. Although to begin with the software that came with the phone wasn’t very good, Siemens released new software which was far better. Also the data connection was serial not USB, this meant your power was drained very quickly.

The benefit of this though was that I was able to use SCMxx, which is command line based communication software which I used for sending text messages from my computer without having to type with my thumb on my phone or use bulky software.

However, I think this is going to be the last Siemens I buy, and is almost definately the last of its kind, as on 07/06/05 Siemens AG (Siemens Mobile) announced it was being bought by BenQ (formerly Acer), but it all spells trouble for me, and as far as I can see it is a struggling company, and is having difficulty competing in today’s market. It is only a matter of time before its is bankrupt.

Conclusion: This was a great phone and simply lacked bluetooth, it’s time to move on.

More: Siemens CX65

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