The Philips Azalis 218 is the Toyota Camry of mobile handsets; Philips's product developers have taken a list of common features and functions, ticked them off with care but little charisma, and wrapped them in a sporty, modular shell. That's not necessarily a bad thing - there's lot of Camries on the road and Philips know this.
When mobile phone manufacturers design new handsets they don't rely on cues from consumers alone. Mobile manufacturers need to mindful of both end-users and carrier providers.
Mobile service carriers draw revenues from a finite market making which has a negative effect on profit growth after the market starts to reach saturation point. If you can't increase the number of subscribers using your service, the most obvious way to enhance profit growth is to extract more revenue from the users you already have. You don't have to look far to get an idea of what that entails; carriage providers promote SMS and other non-voice services frequently and loudly.
This is why features like enhanced messaging and WAP--despite its poor uptake among mainstream mobile customers-- are starting to make their way into the feature sets of entry-level and mid-range mobile phones. Mobile manufacturers need to make sure their range covers all these features to increase the likelihood that their phones will find a place in a service provider's quiver.
If there can be such an item, the Azalis 218 is Philips's no-frills GSM, WAP-enabled phone and that's the what will make it attractive for service providers. It's feature set prepares it for mobile Internet access but, seemingly, with the value or entry-level users in mind. Whilst Philips's high-end WAP phone, the Xenium, has a sleek, light chassis. The Azalis has a bulky, practical body that is less friendly to the pocket but cheaper to manufacture giving it an RRP almost half that of the Xenium.
The Azalis carries Philips unique carousel style user-interface (UI). Rather than scrolling through menus in the conventional style, the carousel UI requires the user to navigate menu options by rotating them through the screen. The Philips UI works well and it's a valiant challenge to the common Nokia-type UI. Unfortunately, it still has a few shortcomings. For instance, it doesn't provide any function to collect caller or sender details from incoming sources and store them in the address book.
Another item Philips's product developers ticked off their checklist of popular features is voice dialling. Limitations in the SIM card we used in to test this review prevented us testing the voice dialling system but it's noteworthy for its presence alone. Voice operation has, till recently, been a luxury only found in high-end phones.
Apart from the melody composer --which will please ring-tone fanatics-- there's else little else to recommend the Azalis and some aspects of the handset are inexplicable. Its screen offers a generous resolution but the phone doesn't support the kinds of messaging services that could take advantage of it (for example, animations and sophisticated images). The screen is also difficult to read in low-light conditions, employing a reasonably antiquated rear-illumination method found in older digital watches.
In our opinion the phone's aesthetics also let it down. Someone inside Philips industrial design really wasn't on their toes when they stamped the Azalis for approval and sent it off to production. It seems that incorporating screen's generous size required that the head of the phone be far wider than the base. However to prevent it looking like a wedge the phones thickness has been exaggerated throughout its length. The result is bad; it resembles what you might imagine the paddle-pop lion's coffin to look like.
The Azalis can be thought of as a high-end phone with ordinary features or a low-end with a few high-end features. We think the latter is more accurate and the phone is best understood for its value to carriage providers rather than consumers. At AU$432 it provides them with a way to deliver mobile Internet service in a solid, mid-range phone, cheaply.
Philips Azalis 218
Company: Philips Consumer Communication
Price: AU$432
Distributor: Philips Australia
Phone: 1300 360 696
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