The Phone That Was

Talking of Chinese, there comes a certain level of discomfort in our minds. We have this preconceived notion that  Chinese products are made in china and are all so cheap. Well they are actually of two types-one made in China and second assembled at China.

Most of the well to do companies we see have their products assembled in china due to the readily available manpower and  cheap labor. Here i am strictly talking about made in china.

A mobile phone is as inseparable part of one’s life as food! From keeping in touch with family, girlfriends to music and not the least smsing-it is one full fun n frolic packed gadget-truly an all in one. With this craze comes the craze for features-the competition and the survival of the flashiest! And talking of flashy phones I got hold of a phone which is really flashy. Those of us know of it call it a Chinese phone. I own one for that sake and at just a Rs.4000 price, it was quite reasonable with the features on offer and in comparison to anything else I could get for that price.

I‘ll talk about it inside out-in every sense of the phrase. Starting with-the body is a thick fat steel-colored finish and the enamel (not actually steel) is quite strongly applied-it survived my sweaty pockets! On the back, there is a stylish Porsche logo which has absolutely nothing to do with the phone! Next to that, is written the stupidest thing ever written on a cell phone!-“multi-colored mobile”. Then, the camera-it proudly says 2.0 MP although it gives a maximum resolution of obviously VGA. The camera also has a dummy shutter which does not start the camera automatically as one would expect. On the front, there is a conference call camera which misses the actual camera hardware! Thankfully, the keys are well spaced for all finger types and the screen is a good widescreen (3’ diagonally). I’ll make a quick round-up on the pros and cons.

The touch screen offers a decent performance. The phone uses RTOS, thus offering multitasking. So you can listen to music while reading e-books (which are by the way only in text format). Support for file types is really poor and to make matters worse, you cannot install softwares-there aren’t any available.

There is support for handwriting recognition-which is really crude. It can ONLY recognize single letters against anything you write or draw on screen-a good utility to teach your little brother good handwriting. There is no support for T9. The inbox capacity is huge-I have 130 messages!

Then comes the best part-the sound. The speakers are just better than anything I have ever seen at this price of size. They are powerful enough and play a wide range of frequencies quite decently. The phone ships with ringtones from all reputed brands! MP3 ringtones are also supported.

The Bluetooth has A2DP for direct streaming to an audio device and DUN for either remote sim or modem mode (I’m not sure).

It has support for dual sim and with that huge a screen, you should see the battery! It is simply big and gives 4.2 V.
The manufacturer is a reputed cell phone manufacturing company in china-ZTC. But to my surprise(or maybe not!) I did a back trace of the IMEI number and found that the IMEI was for a certain cell phone manufactured by some Boway(it’s a PDA style phone manufacturing company in UK). Also the model with my IMEI looked different from mine! Another thing to surprise you readers-ZTC is launching its cell phones in India around 2nd quarter next year!

With all this confusion, I decided to live happily with what I got. At times I listen to music on it. It comes handy on travels for reading my ebooks. The battery backup is a respectable 5 days standby. Once i heard this joke of three people talking bout how long their fathers lived-first says my father pure Indian-100 years, 2nd-my father –pure American-78 years, third-my father-35 years! The other two said-must be Chinese!!
For the rest every morning I wake up and pray that this Chinese toy keeps running.