i-mobile 625  

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)
- i-Mobile Hitz 625
- MicroUSB
- Headphones
- Charger
- Charger pin converter

Thai mobile phone manufacturer i-Mobile just handed us the 625, the phone we have on hand is a preview unit.

Design
The i-Mobile 625 has a candybar design, looking rather reminiscent of Sony Ericsson’s T-series, especially its keys. The phone feels rather solid and has a nice grasp to it. At 90g, it is lightweight and easy to carry around. The front of the phone is covered in non-porous material that doesn’t attract fingerprints.

The device sports a 2-inch TFT screen, with 256K colour at 340x320 pixels. The screen does well and comes up quite clearly with some pretty icons. However, under sunlight the screen underperforms and is almost impossible to look at. The left spine has the volume rocker on the right spine you can see the universal micro-USB and a photo capture button. The back of the phone comes with a speaker and the Casio-Hitachi 3 megapixel camera.

The keypad is similar to SE’s penny-keys that are easy to use albeit a bit small. The separated D-pad and enter key is a nice touch, as both keys usually clash together. We’ll cover more about texting in the features section.

Pop open the rear of the phone and the 830 mAh Li-Ion battery lies there. Along with the 60MB internal memory, the phone has a microSD slot that supports up to 1GB of memory. The microSD does not support hot-swapping, due to the battery directly blocking the SD card.

Features
The engineering unit’s OS is proprietary i-Mobile and goes with a 4x3 grid, we liked how the content were all separated into their own menus instead of being lumped together under one folder with a bunch of submenus. Another plus for the OS is the ability to go into a scroll tab menu, which we really liked and feels a lot more intuitive.

The phone also sports a Body Mass Index counter, countdown, stopwatch and a fitness counter for exercise. The D-pad has shortcuts to various programs from calendars to messaging.

The device has a music player and FM radio, has a few EQ options, repeat, playlist and shuffling options. The 625 has a private data option, which hides your contacts and SIM messages.

PIM wise, the 101 has a calendar, to do list, world clock, calculator, unit converter and a currency converter. The home screen comes with local time and international time of your choosing, which we loved.

Texting here has a whole bunch of options, from T9 to Pinyin options. For those adept in Thai, will be able to take advantage of the Thai characters here. The FM radio will be your gateway to music here, and presets are available.

The motion control here extends to a shake to view, the music player and a dice game which we will explain further in the game section.

The manufacturer claims a whooping 250 hours worth of standby time and 3 hour talk time.

Camera
The 625 has a Casio-Hitachi 3.0 megapixel camera which shoots average quality shots, and with flash will have trouble defining some of the finer text within the frame. Macro shots don’t really render accurate colour and the objects are smudge together.

Another qualm is the long processing time on the device, which we hope will be gone when the actual unit comes in. The camera does feel natural when it comes to shooting, a trigger from quick camera button and the phone immediately enables you to shoot.

The video camera outputs MP4 or 3GP format videos.

Connectivity
The phone is armed with tri-band connectivity (GSM 900/1800/1900), the 625 also supports GPRS with Bluetooth 1.2 that supports A2DP and a micro-USB port.

Games
There are two games in the 625, Dice and Puzzle. Dice isn’t really so much of a game rather a virtual portable dice for your Dungeons and Dragons sessions on the go. You can roll the dice(s) by shaking the phone, and then of course pressing the D-pad. Puzzle’s a pretty straightforward game, moving a single block at any given time until you can realign all the blocks together.

Verdict
We suspect the i-Mobile to be a mid-range phone with a mid-range price, however, it’s a somewhat serious dig at the market from i-Mobile. We liked that the i-Mobile 625 didn’t try too hard to cram in a large number of features, instead tried focused mainly on multimedia features. We don’t have pricing yet, but we do expect nothing more than RM 1,000 for such a device.

• Related Articles