[General Topics] sliight:
Ok so right off the bat I'm not a professional phone reviewer. This is just me talking about a phone I'm excited about... I didn't post any pictures as I didn't take any yet, but I'm very pleased with the look and you can find plenty online.

So I've spent the last two weeks researching and looking for a good dual sim phone, with dual standby capability. Before I start, without a dual standby capability a dual sim phone doesn't let you take a call from one number, while you are talking on your other number.

This phone is the international version and is a triband 900/1800/1900 - as always be sure your service provider runs on the band before you buy a phone. It also has to separate IMIE numbers as well.

[This next paragraph is for entertainment only, so feel free to skip to the next one if you're not interested in a very good prank.]

I ordered this phone from Amazon and chose overnight shipping. Needless to say I've not been excited about a phone for a very long time, but this time I was. Unfortunately the last update was that it was checked into Memphis, which has all flights grounded. So, the 2nd day I check the tracking and I see that it's out for delivery, I hop in my car and start the 40 minute drive to my office to pick it up. 3 minutes out my manager calls me and tells me "it just arrived"... I arrive and I open my shipping box, upset that it's late but happy it's here. I pull out the phone box and open it up... only to see some piece of crap prepaid ancient mini brick phone. I instantly flip my lid, and for a split second I considered just snapping this piece of crap in half. I then dump the box contents on the floor, and then realize there is a group of people in tears laughing. Turns out my best friend cut the packing box open (from the bottom as not to damage the label) and put his crap phone in it. Anyways, on to my thoughts...

[Appearance] So, when I pull the phone out it's really quite nice looking. It has the shape and appearance of an Iphone, but it has the 4 hard buttons at the bottom. One nice thing comparing it again to the Iphone is that not everyone and their dog has one of these. Very slim form and smaller overall than the Iphone. I have not taken pictures yet, and have not completely tested it overall but I have already decided that it was well worth the $260 ($230 from another seller, but I paid the extra $30 for piece of mind).

The first thing I do is pair it with my windows mobile Smartphone and I then beam over all of my contacts. The windows mobile phone just sends them all, but I had to hit accept for every single file. Tedious, but much easier than actually re-entering them in by hand. After that I had to enter into the file explorer and choose reload for about 90% of them (one by one again). In the end they all transferred over, with attached photos. The only thing that didn't transfer was the ringtone assignments.

[Call Quality] Once I was able to get outside of work hours I placed both my personal and work sims inside the phone. I've tested it like crazy just on calls alone. First, the speaker phone is WAY louder and much more clear than my HTC Fuze (Raphael). In addition the call quality when not on speaker phone is quite nice as well. There were times when I thought I dropped the call because there wasn't that light hiss in the background. Next I tried calling out on the sim. When you dial a number, just to the right there are a couple of boxes and you just touch the sim you want and whalla, you're calling out on that sim. It also had no problem taking calls from one line while on the other. It's just like call waiting. The only negative to it is that the icon which identifies the sim is very small and in the top left of the incoming call, so it's somewhat hard to tell which line is ringing. Although I predict I will get quite used to it.

The touch screen is very responsive and is actually fairly easy to negotiate around with just using your fingers. The speed of the phone is nearly instant in everything you do, outside of accessing memory to change a ringtone or something (super slow). Granted I have a crapload of photos and ringtones on my microSD card.

[Features] It has some pretty cool features within the simple operating system. There are 4 hard buttons on the bottom, and 4 soft buttons at the bottom of the touch screen. The hard buttons are useful and make sense. The screen buttons are also good. There is one button on the bottom right that opens up a new menu on the right side of the screen. This menu has 4 long buttons that let you easily access everything you need within the phone. In addition there is a little rounded tab at the right side of the screen when you are in idle mode. The first tab allows you to access your "widgets" You can just drag them and drop them right onto the desktop, or drag them right back in. Out of the box the widgets are as follows: FM radio, round old school clock, Calendar, music, photos, world time, memo notes, missed calls, messages, and schedule. Really neat in that you can just place them where you want, and they all come out small but expand into the full featured widget. At the idle screen you can also slide your finger either right or left, and it makes the screen flip as if it was a cube. Your widget menu has not been replaced by a speed dial menu. Press any icon from 2-9 (1 reserved for Vmail) and it lets you choose a contact to associate. You can then drag that icon right onto the desktop of the phone as well. Overall very cool features so far.

The locking mechanism is quite nice as well. You can either unlock with a short hold on a key on the screen, or the lock key on the right side of the phone. About the only negative so far is that there isn't a slide to unlock, and you press the hard keys to answer or decline. I know at some point I will accidentally answer or decline someone while pulling the phone out of a full pocket.

Next onto the camera. 5M camera with a crapload of image settings. While the quality isn't nearly as good as my high end digital camera, it shares many of the same features. It has an LED flash, and you can really play around with the settings (assuming you are a camera buff, otherwise most will just confuse you). It lets you take quick action photos in sets of 3, 6, or 9 in fast succession too. it also has a video camera, but I didn't test it as of yet.

It has an FM radio which needs to have the dual earphone wired headset hooked up to it to use (typical). The headset of course has a microphone also for those of you who think talking on Bluetooth was invented by the "debil". (That's some high quality H20).

The PC suite that comes with it is pretty nice so far also. When you connect the phone you can choose between 4 options. One can be a music sync for all the music lovers out there, but my presumed favorite is that you can use the phone as a modem with the provided software (not tested yet). You can connect to your PC via USB or Bluetooth. I only wish my work computer would allow for me to install software! Oh well...

Text messaging and MMS is nice as well. You can choose most of the typical entry methods, but I've been having fun with the handwriting entry. Don't leave any gaps when you spell any letters, but it's cool to just write on the screen and have it put it right into a text. It's slower than using the on screen key pad, but a fun novelty for now. It doesn’t appear to have a full touch screen qwerty, but I also didn’t rotate it to landscape during testing so it could be there.

I did have one issue with my voicemail recognizing one number at AT&T, but after a long hold time they just reset my voicemail and both numbers worked like a charm in accessing vmail. One negative, and a fairly big one is that when I called both of my lines and left voicemails it still only put one voicemail notification at the top. It's not possible, or at least I've not figured out how to discern which line has the voicemail on it. Although when unlocking it puts a nice big box on the screen stating the calls I missed. In addition the missed call widget is nice to show missed calls as well.

About the only issue I am having so far is getting the internet to work. I want to test it just so I can verify it will work, and to mess around with the browser some. I intend to drop my dataplan as I only used it for my GPS previously, and since Santa brought me a full on GPS I know it's a wasted $30 a month.

[G-sensor] It also has what I think is called the G-sensor, or at least the thing that rotates the screen when you do. Also when you drag the widgets or speed dials onto the screen you can shake it to “snap them into place”. Personally I prefer to place them in the locations I want though.

So, in closing I love this phone so far. The last phone I was this happy with was the original Razr back when no one else but me and a select few had it (only a few other dummies willing to pay the $500 for it back in the day). I presume that I have missed a fair amount of things people may be interested in, so please feel free to ask for additional information and I will see if I can discern it from messing around with the phone. My HTC Fuze and Crap dual sim Chinese phones are officially retired. I’m sure I’ll snag another smartphone at some point so I can load up all of the tweaks from here, but for now it’s nice to have a phone that isn’t slow to respond and accomplishes my personal goals.