I promised a while ago that I would post a review of my phone out here….its a Docomo Foma N2701 (which might be otherwise known as an NEC WCDMA (I think) phone).
The main objective was connectivity, everything else is bonus. Its got two data modes, packet and switched circuit, packet mode allows burst rates of up to 384kbps charged by the packet while switched gives you a 64kbps loop charged by the length of session. I’ve not used the switched mode – I use the phone mainly for email and web surfing, both ideal applications for packet mode. It connects to the computer via USB, but I’ve not figured out if that connection can be used for any other transfer, such as video files from the phone.
It has two cameras, one inside and one outside, so you can video yourself or what you can see – I think it can do video conference calls, but I don’t know anyone else with one to call and I don’t know how to make a call like that anyway. I’ve only used the internal camera for silliness and as a crude mirror replacement, not for anything serious. The outside camera has seen more action, mostly in the way of video clips of various things. The video it produces is poor quality 3fps .3gp files with sound, these can be played, after a little manipulation, by Quicktime and after considerably more hassle by WMP (1. IR transfer to PC 2. Minor text modification to base64 format 3. uudecode 4. conversion to raw avi 5. conversion to mpeg2 stream – raw avi doesn’t play in WMP for some reason). I don’t know what the limit of video clip length is, but I recorded two minutes without hitting it.
Thats it for good stuff, there are some deep problems with the software (and possibly hardware) design of this phone – it has obviously had a preallocation of resources so while it does do multitasking you can only run certain applications together – they are grouped into four sets, only one from each set can be run at any time. Also the IR and phone network cannot be used at the same time, which suggests they share some resource and also that the IR link was never intended to be used as a modem, which is a shame. I’ve also crashed the phone stack a couple of times, something it doesn’t notice and will only return cryptic error messages for – resetting will fix it, but it took me a while to figure what had happened first time, everything else seemed to be working so I thought it was a network fault…shoulda know.
The UI is quirky, but I mainly put that down to it actually being a Japanese phone and the translation to English being its second language. It doesn’t support T9 for English either, which I find quite irritating, I’m never buying a phone without it again. Answering a call, also, seems to be a bit random, there are two buttons on the side of the clamshell which will drop a call through to the answerphone, these are both vulnerable to being hit accidentally as you fish the phone out of your pocket. There is an option in the convoluted setup menus to turn off these keys, but it doesn’t seem to work.
In conclusion: I don’t think I will be buying another NEC phone.
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