Philips Fisio 820
The first thing you notice about Philips' new Fisio 820 is the large screen, which boasts 256 colours. While this does not allow photos to be displayed at a high quality, it does give the screen a nicer look than the two-tone colour scheme common to cheaper phones.
This 85g phone seems to be primarily for communication, having GPRS, WAP, Bluetooth, two e-mail accounts and so on. What it doesn't have are any games, so for some people this phone is useless.
We found the features to change the colour scheme of the screen and add wallpaper to be of no real practical use, but like everyone else we like the opportunity to customise our phones.
The menu system is a series of icons in a rotating circle, which you navigate using the arrow keys. We found this a little slow, until we figured out how to turn off the animation. If you're the impatient sort, go for this option.
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The final tick in the navigation box comes with the phones use of hotkeys and voice tags. The phone can store up to 40 voice tags, which can be used to dial a number or to access specific functions, and eight of the keypad numbers can be converted into hotkeys for the same purpose. We can definitely see the benefit of spending a few hours customising the phone for activities you commonly use.
At first it looked like we wouldn't be able to charge the battery at all, since the review phone came with an overseas charger that wasn't compatible to our power points. Fortunately, a replacement was found. The battery is advertised as having 385 hours standby time with up to 4 hrs 20 min talk time. We found the battery lasted from being fully charged at 9.30am Friday to beeping in protest at 5.30pm Tuesday, a total of 104 hours of normal usage, which is quite respectable.
Many people use mobiles for SMS more than for voice, and we consider this function to be one of the most important. We initially had trouble writing an SMS, mostly because the instructions on text writing are hidden in the -Add names in the phonebook" section of the user manual rather than the SMS section, where we expected them to be.
We found the SMS functionality offers a great deal of control and variety, but at the expense of fast writing. With practice you may be able to speed things up, but we found the week we had to review wasn't enough to become proficient. However, there are some cool features such as -signature" and -add icon". The phone comes with 50 icons you can add to your message, including -Goal!" and -Red card", which is very useful during the world cup. Of course, the receiver needs a Philips GSM mobile phone; otherwise they get a series of punctuation marks.
The phone comes with a stack of extras, most of which are standard but a few stood out. The alarm clock can be set to go off once, every day, or on weekdays, so you don't have to continually remember to set it. The memory function allows you to see how much memory you have left (from the 273Kb in the phone), and where that memory is being used. It doesn't measure the SIM card, so if you're storing your phone-numbers and SMS on there you'll still run out of space pretty quickly.
All in all, the Fisio 820 is a great phone for communication, and the customisable shortcuts will please a heavy mobile user. It's up to you to decide whether you use your phone enough to justify the AU$999 price tag.
Fisio 820
Company: Philips Australia
Price: AU$999
Availability: Q3 2002
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I have read mainly positive reviews and comments about the V70. I decided to buy one. What was I thinking?
The phone is a disaster, if it were not for its looks, I would never have bought it.
For an expensive phone, the features are shocking!The phone book is hard to use, the key's on the keypad have become almost unuseable (from only 6 months of use), the screen is hard to see and the 2 or three lines of text is just not enough.
The games, well, can you actually call those applications games? And I have found that no ringtone download sites will download to a V70. There are no web pages which show you the notes to put in your phone, for a V70. 30 spaces for your own ringtones wasted!
The V70 is no where near loud enough as it should be. Even on the maximum ring volume setting, I and everyone around me cannot hear it ringing if we are in a medium density area, such as a mall. And the vibrating alert just makes a sound, you can barely feel it vibrating when it is in your pocket.
The last awful feature I have found since I started using the phone 6 months ago, is that that stylish rotator, blocks the antenna. My phone is constantly dropping calls, people I am calling sound robotic, as do I they tell me. All because the rotator sits in front of the antenna!
Better luck with the new V70i Motorola!