At A Glance:

In The Box
- Baixing TV200
- Headphones
- Travel Charger
- Baixing USB Cable
- Two 3.7V Batteries
- Phone user manual

The Baixing TV200 is the type of mobile device that has everything in, and is armed with an abundance of feature and options-including a TV antenna.

Design
To start off, the TV200’s design is quite reminiscent of the Nokia 6680, it has a candybar form factor and the phone is covered in plastics and lightweight metals. The front of the phone has a 3.0 inch 240×320 pixels 262K TFT coloured full touchscreen with five shortcut touch keys at the bottom of the screen, reminiscent of many Chinese phones. Meanwhile, the front of the phone has vanity VGA camera.

The Baixing is heavy and bulky- the dimension comes in at 58mm x 120mm x 18mm and weights in at 155g making it a heavyweight among cellphones. The phone is a bit tough to handle, and it much larger than the palm of my hands.

Opening the rear cover you’ll see the 3.7v battery, Baixing has also seen fit to provide users with an additional battery as a back up. Removing the battery will reveal a myriad of slots, with the two SIM cards and MicroSD slots, its design might be a prelude to future dual capable phones. The SIM card slots are easy to use but the SD slots need a little fitness to unlatch due to the close proximity of slots.

The keypad is little small and ungainly for our liking and was a peculiar design whereby the 0, star and hash keys are skewed to the right side. This keypad arrangement is somewhat confusing and takes some time to get used to texting with it.

The rear of the phone is somewhat peculiarly designed, with the camera and an extra port that serves nothing more than to balance the camera. The 64 chord polyphonic speaker wraps around the camera and has a 3D sound.

The left spine has a camera button and on the left lays the volume rocker and the money checker on/off button- which runs even when the phone is off. Meanwhile, the stylus is also located here. On the right spine lies the quick camera button, meanwhile the USB port lies on the bottom of the camera. The retractable TV antenna is parked here. From what we have heard from Chinese phones, we would have preferred the stylus doubled as an antenna.

Dual Features
The TV200 is a feature packed phone with the dual prefix on the SIM Card, MicroSD card and even on the Bluetooth. But first off, the Baixing’s OS starts off with eight main icons in the home screen- Phonebook, Call log, Profiles, Messages, Multimedia, Net Services, Tools and Settings.

The phone features full touch screen, with five shortcut touch keys available at the bottom- home screen button, messages, phonebook, dial touchpad and multimedia shortcut key. Touch the home screen once will also automatically bring us to the touch pad dialler. Considering the amount of function however, couldn’t the manufacturers at Baixing made the 1st touch access the main menu instead? Instead the only key to access the main menu is aptly titled menu on the home screen. The other key is the Phonebook key.

The Dual SIM system supports both on standby mode, however, you have to switch to a particular SIM to read you messages. While we are on messaging, the TV200 is one of the most challenging SMS-ing we have encountered, as every word that has been typed has to be re-selected and re-entered into message making it extremely tedious and unfriendly to text.

The phone itself has 50MB of storage and support two microSD slots. Baixing has conveniently provided a 256MB microSD card.

The Phonebook function is diverse and has a number of preset groupings within your contract list. From family, friends, colleagues, classmates and to other contacts, it even allows you to blacklist your ‘undesirable’ contacts.

Dual Bluetooth is an interesting little feature which allows two Bluetooth connections to run simultaneously, meaning we could listen to our Bluetooth headset and Bluetooth someone our music at the same time. However, this does not extend to file transfers as the TV200 only allows one transfer at a time.

The PIM on the Baixing is quite easy to manage, with Alarm, Calculator, Calendar and World Time. The money checker button is a bit of an enigma, as it shoots out a blue beam which we assumed would validate our notes somehow, but so far out notes will just glow blue.

Multimedia
The TV function is a little disappointing, and we should clarify that it is not DVB-H that powers the TV200 rather a pullout antenna which allows us to view local channels, so far we have manage to coax out a few channels without getting hit with fuzzy snow.

Setting up the TV function is pretty simple, switch to local frequencies and the will phone auto detect UHF and NTSC frequencies (depending on your location) until it displays a channel.

The FM radio also requires an extended antenna, to receive a proper signal, but so far the radio has been quite reliable even in enclosed environments. The phone also supports recording and e-books.

The MP3 player will play anything from MP3s to WMA files, furthermore the player also has six equaliser settings - regular, classic, odeum, jazz, rock and soft rock.

The Baixing media player is limited to playing .3gp and Mpeg 4 video files.

Connectivity
The TV200 sports dual-band connectivity (GSM 900/1800), which is rather underwhelming seeing the amount of features the phone sports. The device also has a GPRS, and Dual Bluetooth connectivity. There is also a USB connector.

Camera
The 2.0 megapixel camera located behind the phone is decent and has a string of options ranging from- Image Size, Image Quality, Image Effect, Brightness (called Lighteness here) and Contrast. The vanity camera has a 0.3 VGA camera, with the touch toggle between the vanity camera and on the upper right screen.

The video camera shoots in VGA quality and stores videos in .3gp format. The video camera is similar to the photo camera when it comes to

Games
The Baixing has up to two games, Links which is a pair up the animal picture game, it does however, has a new twist -the pictures can only be paired when the pictures are adjacent or has a line of sight within each other.

The second game, Boxman which involves a snail manoeuvring boxes to cover up well…uh excrement, the games gets challenging after the initial levels and excrement is always funny.

Verdict
While the phone is loaded with features, it hardly has a strong point with all features being merely adequate on its own. The phone is catered to those who want an abundance of features but not too concern with functionality. For the week it’s been with us, you can’t help but feel Baixing is trying too much at a go, though we are not faulting them for it.

One thing for sure the Baixing is certainly affordable, at RM 550, and with TV functionality it is certainly a bargain phone.

• Tags : Baixing TV200 Dual Sim