At A Glance:

Philips Xenium 9@9z is a small, practical text and call entry-level phone with unassuming features.

Design
The Xenium sports a candy bar design, it is lightweight and weights in at only 74.5 grams.

The 9@9z we have on hand has a red border on the screen covering what is essentially an all black phone. The black coloured phone is made from plastic material, and meanwhile the red border is a porous metal surface, which I guess is a design scheme to make us pay attention to the screen.

The colour scheme is simple and has that durable feel to it. We noticed that smudges are also less prevalent for this colour scheme.

The phone has a micro USB charger port at the bottom- it doubles as a port to transfer data.

Xenium¡¦s 9@9z keypad is a simple one with receive call/end call, cancel as well as an Ok button., iIt also has navigation pad. The navigation pad doubles as a shortcut key-from your home screen. uUsers can access their ringtones, SMS menu, contact lists and ringtone volume from here.

When you open up the back of the phone, there is the Philips battery and the SIM Card slot.

Features
The 9@9z has 512kb comes with 512kb of built-in memory, and has several preloaded MP3s and themes. There is also a picture section for your themes. However, with such little memory space however, one might have to budget on the number of their photos and music.

The phone features a 1.46 inch screen withsupporting a 65k 65K colours., The pictures are quite decent thought the screen brightness is a little dim.

The texting on this phone is aided by the T9 dictionary which Sony Ericsson and Samsung users should feel at home with. The phone relies on the SIM to hold messages, so I was only able to store 12 messages in my testing.

The call quality of the phone is good, so far we have not received any complaints from receivers. However, when receiving calls the 9@9z has a somewhat blown out and scratchy tone to it, but it is loud enough to compensate for that.

One qualm about the z is that there are no external controls for vibrate functions or silent mode- the volume shortcut key on the keypad curiously doesn¡¦t allow access to said functions. The CPU is slightly sluggish when scrolling through programs, and this itis most evident during texting- when texting words or when we tried to change the wording format to numbers and back.

Software
The 9@9z runs on the proprietary Phillips software, but the menu layout has been redesigned to a straight line instead of the 3x3 grids. It takes a little while to remember where everything is placed, when we are so used to the overview concept of the menu layout.

Meanwhile, the applications for this phone are basic -. Iit has an FM radio, calculator, and alarm. The phone also has two language settings- English, and Chinese.

Connectivity
The phone runs on a dual-band GSM (900/1800) frequency, which is rare for mobile devices these days.

The 9@9z relies on the aforementioned micro-USB port for data transfers.

Games
The 9@9z has two preloaded games- one is simply called brick Brick gameGame, which involves launching a ball from a pad, while trying to knock down bricks above you without losing the ball below you. Also, Snake also makes it way into the Philips, its it is almost similar to the Nokia version, where you guide a snake and grab as much points as you can without ¡¥crashing¡¦ the snake itself into a wall, there is however a new twist- this Snake has a limited number of seconds to swallow the object.

The phone curiously locks out the navigation pad when you play either game, thus forcing you to use the keypad as controls.