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BenQ-Siemens officially released their new slim clamshell EF81 on the market. A lot has been said about it resembling Motorola V3x. Indeed, the new BenQ-Siemens does look like a RAZR and many people would definitely take it for a V3x by mistake when they see it in your hands. But EF81 has a lot more to show and as soon as you devote more time to it, you would definitely find original characteristics that would distinguish it from the V3x in many ways.
BenQ-Siemens EF81 official photos
Key features:- One of the slimmest 3G clamshells
- Brushed stainless steel and all-magnesium body
- 2 high quality color displays
- External display out of hardened mineral glass
- 2 megapixel camera
- MicroSD card slot
- 64 MB internal memory
- 4 external soft keys
Main disadvantages:- No FM radio
- No EDGE support
- No dial-up WAP via CSD
- No Infrared port
- Few camera options, no autofocus, macro or flash
- Inefficient file browser
- Mediocre media player
BenQ-Siemens EF81 tries to fill a market niche of classy and yet highly functional devices that strike with appearance and technical capabilities. This market niche is pretty much occupied with technically advanced phones, so the striving now is to work out a classier and slimmer design. You got to admit - 3G phones have always been somewhat bulky and uncomfortable to carry around. EF81 is meant to change that by being one of the slimmest 3G devices available to date on the European market. BenQ-Siemens tend to rely a lot on their marketing strategy because currently they have the know-how for producing quality mobiles, but their position on the market is currently rather shaken. As far as EF81 is concerned, they have put their efforts in a wide advertisement campaign featuring the football mega star Ronaldo. They also added a Star Wars theme in this model which includes a whole set of Star Wars sounds, wallpapers, and start-up and shut-down screens - all meant to warm the hearts of the Star Wars fans.
I suppose that you are already impatient to see how this mobile performs in real life and how it compares to the V3x in terms of design, so let's not waste any more time and get down to it.
BenQ-Siemens EF81 held in hand
Before we start, though, we should warn you that the phone we tested was a beta version so there are some bugs we found that we suppose would be fixed in the final version. Those bugs included strange radio interference in the speaker during calls, weak reception, camera being able to take only a five or six shots at a time after which it needed to be restarted, unexplainable warming up of the lower back panel during calls longer than a minute, as well as very slow menu response in the file browser. But those are far too serious bugs to be left unattended by the manufacturer so we are pretty sure they won't be present in the final version of the phone. Also, due to the reason we got a beta version of the mobile, we are not able to tell you what the retail package would include, not to mention that its contents are usually region or market specific. It is expected, though, that it would include a HHS-150 stereo headset, a DCA-140 USB data cable, and a CD including synchronization software.
Cool outfitThe first things that caught our eyes when we got the test phone were the clean lines and elegant design. Of course, it's a masculine piece of design and it won't attract many women. It's solid and a bit on the heavy side. A weight of 110 g and a serious width of 51 mm do require a man's hand to be operated with an ease. The phone is 94 mm long though with an incredible thickness of only 15.9 mm which makes it one of the slimmest 3G devices on the market. Just to get an idea of how thin it is, let me just say that it is 2 mm thicker than Motorola V3 and a good 4 mm thinner than Motorola V3x. And except for the somewhat loose battery cover, the all-metal construction is very solid and it boasts really impressive looks.
Full metal gearOne of the greatest things about this phone is the innovative all-metal construction. The front panel features brushed stainless steel, the body itself is made out of magnesium and the back panel is supposedly anodized black aluminum. Truthfully, the back panels looked and felt more like plain plastic to us, but we won't argue with the manufacturer on that matter. The phone's outside panels are pretty bare. The external display and the four keys below it take up a central part of the front panel. The keys are pretty convenient and are used for invoking the camera, the media player and the key lock. But we will say more about them later on in the review. We should point out that although the front cover is made of stainless steel it's not at all scratch proof. But the material being brushed stainless steel helps a lot in conceiving the tiny scratches.
BenQ-Siemens EF81 front
Another unusual solution this phone offers is the single camera design meaning that there is only one camera which is used both for taking ordinary pictures, as well as for making video calls. You see, the camera is located in the swivel bar of the phone and when the clamshell is closed the lens points towards the back of the phone allowing you to shoot whatever you like using the external screen as view finder. When the clamshell is opened the lens is pointing directly towards you thus enabling you to make video calls, or self portraits, for that matter. For the very same reason the clamshell opens in two stages. When it's halfway opened it locks into place allowing you to put the phone on your desk and hold your video call with a direct visibility of the camera lens and the display. You might call this a "sitting" position of the phone. When you want to fully open the phone you just have to press a bit harder and the clamshell opens to a full swing. Of course, when you are not interested in making video calls you can easily open the phone in one move without allowing it to stop at the "sitting" position. Generally it's a very nice feature. The clamshell opens with ease when using both hands by using the special slots on both sides, but opening it single-handedly surely requires some practice.
Side views opened • closed
Just below the external display there is a nicely shaped grill that covers the phone's external speaker. Let me tell you, this was one of the loudest phones we have tested. The sound is clear, crisp and doesn't have any interference in the high or low tone range - possibly because of the non-plastic construction. There is a certain bass line, but there's more to wish for. Generally, when playing music, you should better rely on the stereo headset that is supposed to come included in the retail package.
BenQ-Siemens EF81 back • Back lid opened • Battery taken out, SIM slot visible
The 950 mAh Li-Ion battery of the phone is hidden under the upper part of the main panel. By removing it, you gain access to the SIM card slot and the microSD card slot placed neatly side by side. In fact they are so neatly placed that it's almost impossible to reach them with bare finger. The securing mechanism of the SIM card, though, is a good one. You press once the SIM inwards and it stays there. You press it the second time and it comes out by itself - something generally seen in your average digital camera card slot.
BenQ-Siemens EF81 bottom end
On the bottom of the phone you can see the data cable/recharger/headset port which is well hidden and blends seamlessly into the phone's design. The phone uses a new type of slimmer connector and is not compatible with older Siemens accessories.
Upper strap fastening element is visible here
In the upper right and left corners of the phone there is a strap fastening element which is a direct copy of the RAZR design.
Fingerprints are all over the placeBeing all-metal really does make the phone prone to fingerprints. They are visible everywhere - on the external display, on the stainless steel front cover, and even on the magnesium body, too.
BenQ-Siemens EF81 keyboard
What is more, when fingerprints accumulate on the keypad surface, the rectangular keys tend to imprint themselves on the internal display when you close the clamshell. The only place that didn't catch any fingerprints was the matt black back cover, which, however, had the nasty habit of catching moisture from the user's hands.
Internals good as the externalsWhen we opened the clamshell for the very first time we noticed something that really looked like the familiar RAZR keypad. You have keys separated by thin lines of electroluminescent foil, a rubber-like material which glows in blue in the dark.
Keypad normal view • Keypad backlighting
In the upper part of the keypad there is a four-way navigation key surrounded in circle by 8 functional keys - two contextual soft keys, the green and the red call handling keys, two fixed shortcut keys for invoking the web browser and video calls, the correction C key, and finally the Task Switcher key. Now, I got to tell you, this is a very useful feature - this Task Switcher. It somehow resembles the Task Manager you have in other phones that are equipped with a fully functional operating system. A longer press of that key takes you to the main menu. But when you pressed it once, it takes you to the Task Handler (or Task Switcher) menu. Since the phone supports the use of multiple applications at the same time, this menu opens a list of all currently active applications. A really nice feature, in fact, - you can have the phonebook and the calculator running at the same time while you browse through the main menu for example.
The keypad itself is absolutely flat but when pressed, the keys distinctly sink inwards, so there shouldn't be any confusion when typing. We find the keypad rather big though and we find it hard to move your thumb from the four-way key to the numeric keys and back. It's just that the distance between them is too long. My thumb got tired in a couple of hour's usage. There shouldn't be any problem when writing SMS, though, because you only really need the numeric keys for that. And let me tell you, writing SMS is a piece of cake. No difficulties at all. Generally speaking, the keypad is great.
Microphone pinpoint hole visible
Just below the numeric keypad you can see a little pinpoint hole. That is the phone's microphone which is incredibly sensitive and can catch up your voice even if you intentionally whisper and mumble - which is something we, of course, did during the tests.
United colors of… BenQ-SiemensWe should admit that both the external and the internal display BenQ-Siemens integrated into the phone are very good.
BenQ-Siemens EF81 quality external display
The external one is a 1.3 inch 262K colors TFT QQVGA display which translates into a resolution of 120 x 160 pixels. You can choose an image for its wallpaper separately from the wallpaper of the main display. When active, it displays time, carrier, battery status, signal strength, missed calls and the soft menu. When inactive, it shows only the clock and a missed calls icon if there is any. You can choose whether it should show an analog clock, a digital one or any screensaver picture. The interesting thing about the external display is the simple soft menu operated by the soft keys positioned directly below it. The soft menu allows you to invoke the still camera, the video camera, the media player and the key lock.
BenQ-Siemens EF81 external display during a call
The keys are also useful for call handling without opening the clamshell. In the soft menu the left key is used as an OK key, the middle two-way key is used for navigation as LEFT and RIGHT, and the right key is dedicated to the KEY LOCK. And let me tell you, you surely need the key lock, because without it it's very common to take random pictures of your pocket's insides. Another good thing is that when you open the clamshell, the key lock disables itself automatically. There is a possibility to enable the auto-locking of the keypad - a feature we turned on without hesitation.
BenQ-Siemens EF81 external display as camera view finder
The solution of using the external display as a view finder is an intersting one. It has always been awkward to take pictures with an opened large clamshell phone. But with this one, taking pictures is like using a slim digital camera - very nice. The external display colors are a bit pale and it has some legibility problems under direct sunlight, but hey, after all, nobody's perfect.
BenQ-Siemens EF81 main display in the dark
The main display, however, is entirely a different matter. It's clearly legible even when the sun shines directly on it. It's again a 262K colors TFT one, but a 2.2 inch one with a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels. It's a great display with wide viewing angles. You can tell its high quality by the crisp and vivid colors it offers.
And all those colors are in vainOne of the bad things about the user interface is that it fails to employ the full capabilities of the high-color display, which is a pity. Otherwise, the interface itself is almost a copy of that of Siemens SXG75 but with improved menu icons and themes.
BenQ-Siemens EF81 start-up question
One thing that made bad impression to us was that every time you turn on the phone it asked specifically weather you want the telephone functionality turned on or not. It's really bugging because, after all, you don't happen to fly on an airplane every day.
Red key menu
Besides, pressing the red key on the keypad during standby invokes a short menu which allows you to either turn off the phone, to disconnect a GPRS data call if you have one, or to turn on the Airplane mode. So this startup question is rather pointless or at least its presence should be user configurable.
Main display standby
In standby mode of the main display the two soft keys of the keypad correspond to the Inbox and the My Menu which is a set of shortcuts which are user defined. All our efforts to change the functions assigned to these two soft keys were in vain. The four ways of the main navigation key, though, have their own functions which can be customized to the user's preferences. A single press of the central key takes you to the Main menu.
BenQ-Siemens EF81 main menu
The main menu itself features a 3 x 4 icons grid. When selecting an icon from the grid, it gets zoomed in and animated at the same time. The icons are crafted in a nice way and are far better than the ones used in RAZR V3x.
BenQ-Siemens EF81 submenu
The submenus are shown in list view. The font used though seemed rather large for the display and the longer filenames in the submenus have to be automatically scrolled. The response of some of the items of the main menu was pretty slow - especially the response of the file manager called 'My Stuff' here, but again, we think it has something to do with the phone being a beta version, so hopefully that should be fixed in the final version.
BenQ-Siemens EF81 themes menu
There are several preinstalled visual themes which are quite large, by the way. All of them were between 2 and 3 MB in size, but, frankly, changing the theme didn't change much really. The font and the menu icons remained untouched as we went through all of them one by one. The only things that changed were the wallpapers of the main and the secondary display, the menu background and color, the default sounds, and the startup and shutdown screens.
BenQ-Siemens EF81 Star Wars theme element • External display wallpaper • Main display wallpaper • Main menu background • One of the start-up image sequence
We suppose that the main reason for the theme files being so large is the long startup and shutdown screens which in the case of the Star Wars theme featured a number of actual photos and sounds from the new trilogy. On our screenshots you can only see the Star Wars theme we used the whole time.
Here are some of the preinstalled Star Wars wallpapers.
Star Wars wallpapers
During the opening and the closing process the phone gives off nice polyphonic sounds which are again theme related, but are also user configurable.
Profiles submenu • Types of vibration alert
There are several profiles which are user configurable. I must add that the mobile has 6 types of vibration varying in intensity and frequency.
The phone features 64 MB internal memory, but strangely enough it reported of having a total of 72MB. Never mind, the more, the better, we would say. We didn't have a microSD card available at the time we did the review so we couldn't test the phone's functionality and speed with one. We suppose there won't be any problems in that department, however.
Your casual phonebookIt seems that as far as the phonebook is concerned there isn't much that the manufacturers can improve so we are already used to the phonebooks of the current mobiles like a bunch of spoiled children and there's little that can impress us. The phonebook of EF81 has a capacity of 500 contacts.
BenQ-Siemens EF81 phonebook • Contact's general info • Contact's private info • Contact's business info • Contact's personal info
There are a lot of fields that can go under a specific contact and they include the usual first and last name, 2 regular phone numbers, 2 mobile phone numbers, 2 emails, 2 URLs, a fax, an address, notes, a company job title, a company address, an audio ringtone, a video ringtone, a picture, a group, birthday, a display name /nick/. The last one is of interest to us because you can assign your contact a nickname that appears instead of his full name in the phonebook list. That is really good because after all, we rarely put down our contacts' full first and last names, especially when they are close friends of ours. With this feature you can type down their full names in the phonebook, but use their regular nicknames in the phonebook list.
Contact's video ringtone
Another interesting thing is that you can assign a video ringtone to a contact, which practically means, that instead of a picture as a caller ID, a short video plays when you receive a call from a given contact.
SIM contacts tab
You can order the contacts list by first or last name. The search is performed either by filters /distribution lists, groups, video call capability, SIM contacts or any other/ or via letter-by-letter typing of a contact's name. Now, an interesting thing is the difference between distribution lists and groups. Distribution lists are shortcut lists for communication with more than one person /up to 50 per list/. A contact may belong to several distribution lists, while a group is a category of contacts sharing similar call settings such as a common ringtone and a contact can belong only to one group at a time. It is kind of funny, because a distribution list can also have its own common ringtone, which is totally illogical.
Voice dialing works only for numbers stored in phone's memory. You can record around 100 voice tags - you can have separate voice tags for the several numbers of a given contact. This feature works well.
Another good thing about the EF81 phonebook is that when you enter a contact's birthday, the phone transfers it to the organizer and reminds you of that birthday annually.
Call recordsCall records are a separate menu but can also be accessed from the main screen by pressing the green key on the keypad. The menu features 5 separate tabs: All calls, Dialed Calls, Missed Calls, Received Calls, and Duration/Charges. Each of the three call lists can contain up to 100 items. The last tab shows the total duration of calls made and received and their respective number, i.e. 15 calls.
Funky messaging machineThe keypad of the phone is well suited for typing messages. The phone has a built-in email client and when you start a new message you are asked whether you prefer it to be a SMS, a MMS or an email.
This is kind of strange because after you start a SMS, you could easily turn it into a MMS by attaching stuff to it. Email works well with large attachments - for example I managed to attach pictures each 500KB large. I didn't try anymore than that so I am not sure what the email attachments size limit is. The email client itself supports SMTP, POP3, and IMAP4.
In the Inbox there are 3 tabs: SMS, MMS, and CBS share one tab, email messages occupy the second tab, and the third tab is for WAP Push messages. However, strangely enough the settings for receiving WAP Push messages are found in the Web Browser menu and not in the Message Settings sub menu.
There is an Auto Header and Auto Signature options in the SMS settings which allow you to create custom headers and signatures that are going to be used in every SMS, MMS, or email message.
There is also a T9 to assist you in your typing, but again, oddly enough, its settings are not found in the Message Settings menu but under the general settings of the phone.
Playing around…The Media Player is a separate menu and is also accessible through the secondary display soft menu, as you should know by now if you follow this review carefully.
Media player operated via the external display
The phone's media player plays AAC++ and MP3 sound files and MPEG4, Real Video 8/9, h.263, and 3GPP video files. The video files can be played full screen. You can create your own playlists, but you cannot shuffle the files and there is no equalizer. The Media Player menu has 4 tabs: Music, Pictures, Videos, and Bookmarks. Under the Music tab you can create Playlists or view all files. The strange thing here is that you create playlists in one of the submenus but you cannot add any tracks to the Playlists from there. For that purpose you should go to the other submenu, which has a listing of all available tracks.
The Pictures and the Videos tabs are pretty self-explanatory. The Bookmarks tab is used for bookmarks of streaming content.
All tracks submenu • Pictures subfolder • Wallpapers subfolder • Picture on display
As far as the file browser is concerned, it has its own flaws, too. You can find it as a separate menu called My Stuff. Sounds, pictures, videos, themes, games, and the applications, are set into subfolders but share the phone's memory. The microSD card is shown as a separate tab.
You better forget about quickly going through the pictures you took today on your family picnic and pick the best ones. You have to open each picture one by one. What is more, the picture isn't resized to fit the screen. Instead, some of the picture is left hidden. In order to fully see the whole picture, you should press the central key and choose Full Screen - so, you can do your own math, but according to me, that means at least 5 clicks for viewing a single picture, not to mention the waiting time needed for the picture to open. There isn't a possibility to zoom the picture, either. As far as the pictures are concerned, the media player offers functionality not available in the file browser, and namely - Slide Show. The slide show opens the picture in full screen so you needn't worry about missing something, right? Yeah, exactly, but the slide show is awfully slow and there isn't any way to decrease the time between the slides. So, I suppose that up until now you should have got 'the whole picture' - the EF81 file browser simply sucks.
Another feature of the phone is the DRM or Data Rights Management. It means that the provider of certain content downloaded by you - for example a ringtone, a wallpaper, or a game, might make that content impossible to be transferred to another mobile or a PC. Certain mobile carriers are already doing that, but what can we say, it's a way to protect their multimedia products and we can't help it.
Just shoot me…The EF81 features a 2 megapixel camera without a flash which is quite good on its own and deals well with outdoor shoots when there is enough light. Indeed under poor lightning conditions the pictures turn out with a lot of noise and color artifacts. You can't take macro pictures with BenQ-Siemens EF81, in fact if you are closer than 80 cm from your subject you will end up with out of focus photos.
External display used as view finder • Using the maximum zoom • Using the exposure compensation
In camera mode when using the external display as a viewfinder, the soft keys on the front panel are used for shooting, adjusting the brightness /exposure compensation/ and zooming. Generally, the camera action is fast and quick to save the pictures taken. The camera menu, though, fails to impress. There are rather few options here. You can choose the desired resolution among 1600 x 1200, 1280 x 960, 640 x 480, 320 x 240.
There is a setting for the white balance - Indoor, Outdoor, or Auto. And there is also a Flicker adjustment setting which can be set to Off, 50Hz, or 60Hz. What lacks in this menu is more important and those are settings like image compression/quality, a night mode, a macro mode. There aren't even basic image effects like sepia or black & white, which we are used to see even in the low-end devices nowadays. Of course, there is no image editing or cropping application whatsoever. The shutter sound is quite loud and cannot be turned off.
Sample photos
BenQ-Siemens EF81 sample photos in full resolution
BenQ-Siemens EF81 photos downsampled to 800 x 600 pixels
All this goes to the video camera just as well. The only available options are MMS or Unlimited mode of video recording, Audio Recording ON/OFF, White balance, and Flicker Adjustment. You can choose a resolution of 176 x 144, 128 x 96, or 96 x 80, and a frame rate of 7 or 15 fps. At the maximum resolution and frame rate the videos look good on the external display, but turn out rather pixilated on the main display or a computer screen. Sound is recorded well, though. The total amount of the unlimited recording mode is in fact limited to 5 minutes. Videos are recorded in .3gp format.
Another weak point is that the video zoom doesn't work during recording, you have to preset it before you start recording. Otherwise the video boasts a 7x digital zoom, and the still camera 5x digital zoom at the highest resolution.
BenQ-Siemens EF81 video sample
Generally, the camera quality equals the one of Siemens SXG75. Unfortunately, we had to take our test pictures in overcast weather which really had an impact on the final results. In order to correct the effects from the overcast sky we had to use the Exposure Compensation and the results from that left us with a good impression.
The Video calls are positioned as a separate menu and when you open it up your real-time video image appears along with a field below it to enter a phone number for the video call. There is an option to hide your live video signal from the other call party and to replace it with a still image of your choice.
SynchronizationPC synchronization is seamless through Bluetooth or data cable. The EF81 features a slimmer jack that is not compatible with older Siemens data cables.
Synchronization options are offered under the Organizer menu and allow you to synchronize phonebook entries and calendar events with MS Outlook, Lotus Notes and other Siemens phones.
For that purpose you would need the Mobile Phone Manager software, though.
UMTS on the flyThe EF81 is a fully equipped 3G device supporting UMTS /W-CDMA 2100/ and GPRS Class 10. Besides that, the phone has a tri-band GSM support of 900/1800/1900Mhz. Unfortunately, the mobile doesn't support EDGE or the older dial-up WAP via CSD. You can easily turn off the UMTS functionality if there isn't any UMTS coverage and you want to save battery life. The phone also lacks an IrDa port.
HTML Browser • Opening GSMArena.com Homepage • Opening GSMArena D800 review
The integrated WAP/HTML browser is an average one. Works flawlessly and does a good job in transforming web pages into the screen format. The bad thing about is that it doesn't employ the hi-resolution display to its maximum since the large screen font size make the browser fit in only a small portion of the actual web site. It would have been wiser to use a smaller font in order to fit in more information on the large display. As usual, it features a KB and time counter for both the current connection and for the total connections made. Time is really irrelevant here, though, since the phone doesn't support dial-up WAP which is usually the only one that is charged per minute.
A very nice feature that the phone offers is the firmware updates through WAP at the dedicated site http://global-repair-management.com
Nothing more than a calendarThe Organizer features a monthly, weekly, and a daily view and uses the phone's memory so there's practically no limitation of its capacity.
Calendar monthly view • Weekly view • Daily view
As I already mentioned, the birthday dates of the phonebook entries are transferred automatically to the calendar and are set as an annual reminder. The Organizer menu strangely enough accommodates a Dictating machine which allows for 150 minutes of recording.
Dictating machine
It records in .amr format and the recordings can be used as a voice call melody. There is also a world clock with a general map of the world.
The Organizer can be set to Remote Synchronization via the SyncML protocol.
Packed with toolsWhen you open the Applications folder in the My Stuff menu you can easily see that this mobile really means business. There are some really good applications, which I must add, are not demos and are fully operational.
Here you find a Bluetooth PC mouse remote control; a funky Cocktail Manager /includes 20 cocktail recipes along with their pictures, allows for user created cocktails/; DOC viewer /displays WORD and EXCEL documents/; Emergency Phonebook /A world wide phonebook of emergency numbers in different countries/; Mobipocket Reader /An e-book reading software, comes with two demo books 'The Da Vinci Code' by Dan Brown and 'The Third Secret' by Steve Berry. The e-book reader offers access to an online bookstore but you can also download e-books of your choice from your PC/; Navigation /A GPS Navigation software although the phone doesn't have GPS capabilities/, News2Mobile /a RSS feeds reader/, PDF Viewer /pretty self-explanatory/, Survival Dictionary /translations of everyday phrases from and to English, German, French, Portuguese, Italian, Spanish/, Thin Print /Print to a Bluetooth enabled printer/, Weather Forecast /Weather forecasts for more than 60 000 locations world-wide plus marine weather forecasts for 5000 locations/.
Much like the web browser, the applications do not use the full potential of the hi-res screen since the font size they use is too large to fit in any substantial volume of information into a single screen, so the user has to scroll a lot.
But there are even more useful goodies that are to be found in the Extras menu.
Alarm clock • Days of the week view possible only
There is an Alarm Clock, which strangely enough, only allows setting an alarm according to the day of the week - if you want to set an alarm for tomorrow you better remember what day it is tomorrow. And let me tell you, some of us have some problems in that department. Once the alarm has been set, you can apply it to every day. Unfortunately, it allows one alarm per day only.
Calculator basic mode • Unit converter
There is also a good calculator which opens rather slowly, though. From inside of the calculator or from the dedicated menu under the Extras you can also open a rich Unit converter which allows conversion of units such as length, temperature, currency, energy, velocity, mass, area, volume, power, time and pressure.
Another application among the Extras is the Sound Recorder which is exactly the same as the Dictating Machine under the Organizer menu. Bad thing is that the Sound Recorder is not an available option during a call. We tried to cheat it by entering the main menu during a call and running the Sound Recorder manually, but it gave off a warning that it cannot be turned on during a call.
And then, of course, there is also your ordinary Stopwatch.
There is even another application hidden inside the phone and that is the Memory Assistant Application. It is found in the Settings menu and is supposed to come up when you run out of memory and assist you in deleting unnecessary items or move them to the microSD card. Great idea, but poor realization, I must add, because this application is just a plain copy of the infamous file manager.
And now for the fun part…The phone supports Java MIDP 2.0 so you should be able to play the most advanced 3D Java games available today. The preinstalled games have nothing to do with 3D, though. There are five Java games that come with the phone.
GemJam Fever Game • Seabattle Game • Star Wars Game • Super Bomberman Game • SuperStack Game
First one is GemJam Fever - a Tetris like game, nice graphics, nothing special. The second one is Seabattle - your ordinary Sea Battle Game. The third is Star Wars - a nice space shooter where you play on the Empire's side. It has awkward controls and aiming is very hard. I think that spoils the fun of an otherwise potentially good game. Next game is the Super Bomberman - the well-known Bomberman game with nice graphics. And last, but not least, there is the SuperStack - a Siemens game with nice graphics. It's easy to play. Your goal is to move boxes around your dockyard. Points are given for adjoining boxes of the same color. Once you adjoin 3 or 4 boxes of the same color they disappear. It's amusing, and personally, we found it the best of all five.
Final wordsOverall, the BenQ-Siemens EF81 is a good phone. Whether you would like it, depends mainly on your expectations. If you want functionality combined with great looks and you are willing to put up with the lack of FM radio, EDGE support and with the ascetic camera options, you would definitely find this phone among your favorites. It's definitely neither a camera phone, nor a music phone.
The interface is average and, I must say, the menu options are rather redundant. Almost all features appear twice in one or another form in different menus. I find that unnecessary and bugging.
Nevertheless, I'm sure that this phone would serve you well day in and day out as long as you are ready to put up its known flaws.
The direct competitor of EF81 in its class and form factor is definitely RAZR V3x, but despite the wide disputes around the EF81 being a copy cat, I think we managed to prove that both phones pack in some great and interesting features and it's up to you to decide which one of them is going to meet your personal preferences.
BenQ-Siemens EF81 photos
Display screenshots
Pictures taken with EF81 |
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发表于 2007-7-22 18:50:36
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