At A Glance:

The i-Mobile 613 is part of the Camera range of phones sold by Samart. The key feature of this phone would have to be the built-in 3 Megapixel camera with a protective slide cover on the rear of the phon

In the box (Prototype)

• Handset Transceiver
• Battery (standard battery)
• Charger
• Headset
• USB Data Cable

The volume toggle is on the right, and so is the camera button. The slot for the MicroSD card is on the left side of the device, while the USB port to plug in either the charger or the data cable is at the bottom of the phone.

One thing we could not quite fathom was the presence of what appears to be two audio jacks, one on each side of the phone. However, without the user manual which was left out of the sales package, we cannot say for sure what either one of the jacks are for.

Buttons/Screen
The buttons are white on black with a white colour backlight. They are rather small in size, especially when viewed in context to the rest of the phone. The screen is rather large and takes up slightly over half the available space on the front of the phone.

The screen is a 262K-colour one, measuring in at 240 x 320 pixels which is much larger than the one on the 520 that we looked at previously. The screen is fairly brilliant and sharp, and the default screen shows an analogue clock and date.

Software/Messaging
The Operating System in use is a proprietary one. The menu is a 3x4 grid of icons, with extra icons for the Music Player and the Radio. The Camera also gets its own icon in the main grid.

Messaging options are limited to SMS and MMS only. There is no provision for built-in emails but one can always access web emails with the GPRS capability of the phone. The keypad is terribly small and as a result of that, the speed at which one can type in characters for SMS or emails are severely reduced.

However, we should add that the response of the SMS application is very fast and not at all like other budget phones that we have looked at.

PIM
The PIM Section has an Alarm Clock and a World Clock. There is a Calendar and a To-Do List but that is pretty much all there is. Frankly, there is nothing at all to write about this, so we shall leave it as it is.

Camera/Video
This 613 device has a built-in 3.0 megapixel camera on the back of the device. The slide protector feels terribly flimsy.

The camera carries much of the effects found in the 520 device too, but it is much harder to use due to a navigation system in the camera menu that is plain hard to use. The effects menu does not automatically exit when you select an effect, but requires that you press the back button to go back into the viewfinder mode.

Well, it’s ironic but I would have to say that the camera on the 520 was much better than the camera on the 613, despite the 613 being supposedly the camera phone. I didn’t feel at all comfortable with the unwieldy camera on the 613 and they should look at making cameras that are more user-friendly.

The maximum image size is 2048 x 1536 pixels for the camera. The video recorder appears to be a totally separate application found in the Multimedia menu. It can record videos of up to 352 x 288 pixels in frame size, which was much less than what we could reasonably expect from a 3 megapixel camera.

Multimedia/Voice
The specifications claim a TV-out function, but we could not find it while trawling through the menus. Again, we need to complain about companies that send us products without providing the manuals. How in the world are we supposed to know what your product does and how it works without the manual? Minus another five points for wasting our time.

There is a radio application and also a music playback one. Why they are not integrated into the same application is something we wondered about. I’m not even going to say anything about the “Free Datukships” ringtone in the phone and its political implications.

Connectivity
The 613 phone allows surfing via class-10 GPRS and hosts a WAP 2.0 browser built into the device and ready to use. There are 64 MBs of internal memory and a card slot hosts MicroSD cards as needed.

Local connection is via USB or Bluetooth, a fact which is not advertised prominently and only found by going to the connections submenu.

Games
There are six games in the 613. They are Bricks, Minesweeper and Tetris. Bricks is a variant of the old-school Block Buster game. Minesweeper is similar to the default Windows game provided under Windows 95, while Tetris needs no introduction at all.

Another three games - Dice, Extreme Water-Ski and Motor Hero are categorised under Motion-Games. The Dice game gives you some feedback via vibrations through the phone. Extreme Water-Ski wasn’t very playable but Motor Hero was a fairly simple game to master. I won on the first time out, so it wasn’t too hard compared to racing games on other phones.

Editor’s Opinion
For a phone that claims to be an imaging phone, the phone and video applications are terribly difficult to use, there is no camera hotkey and the bulkiness of this phone ensures that we have a lot to dislike about this phone.

It is still in the prototype stages, but we understand that it will be offered at a pretty low price against its competitors. Frankly, the phone is pretty decent to have. It’s just a little bulky and not very well designed. Fix it a little and the next generation of devices may be something that I would want.

However, there has been no official announcement on the price yet, so we can’t tell if it is worth the bother.

Conclusion: Performs a slightly better than it looks.

• Tags : i-mobile 613