i-mobile 520

At A Glance:

The i-Mobile 520 is part of the Multimedia range of phones sold by Samart. At the time of writing, the RRP for this device is RM 448.

In the box

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

Exterior
The 520 is a simple candybar device with the buttons on the front and the camera lens on the back. The surface of the casing appears to be brushed metal, but tapping upon it with other metal items did not produce a metallic ring, so it appears that this is merely a very well done paint job.

There is a volume toggle on the left, while the camera button is on the right. Also found on the right side is the USB port and the slot for the MicroSD card.

Buttons/Screen
The buttons are white on black with a white colour backlight. They are pretty small in size, so messaging would be a little difficult for thick fingers.

The screen is a 262K-colour one, measuring in at 176 x 220 pixels for a rather small but fairly bright effect. We liked the default wallpaper which displayed two clocks. One clock showed KL time while the other showed Sydney time.

Software/Messaging
The Operating System in use is a proprietary one. The menu is the usual 3x3 grid of icons, save when you go into some of the submenus, the main level of menus is displayed as a row of micro icons on the upper part of the screen.

There is no support for emails, but MMS and SMS functions are present in the phone, as is to be expected. As we mentioned earlier, it was a bit difficult to use the small keypad keys, and SMS is one area in which this is immediately apparent.

PIM
The Dictionary has a unique talking function, but it was quite difficult to hear what was said as the speaker crackled quite a bit. However, once you get used to the funny voice, it should be no problem to understand what is going on. It should also be noted here that the talk function of the dictionary is limited to the English language only, although the dictionary itself supports English to Bahasa Malaysia, English to Bahasa Indonesia and English to Simplified Chinese.

The other applications found inside the phone are the Alarm, Calendar, To-Do List, Memo, Calculator, Converter, World Clock and a Dual Clock function which displays the two clocks on the desktop as mentioned earlier.

Camera/Video
This 520 device has a built-in 1.3 megapixel camera with the lens on the back of the device as mentioned earlier.

The camera has plenty of effects such as the sepia effects shown in the pictures. There is a night mode option and you can also play with the white mode effects. There is a delay timer if you wish to use it, and you can shot single pictures, or 4-shots and 6-shots in sequence.

However, we found the sequence shots to be rather slow when going from the first to the second shot and so on. The viewfinder also wasn’t very fast to respond when we moved the viewfinder around.

The maximum resolution for pictures that can be recorded with this camera is 1280 x 1024 pixels. In video mode, there was no limit for the file size or the recording time. This means that the video clip recorded should be simply limited to the amount of storage space available to store said video clip.

Multimedia/Voice
The talking dictionary would be the key voice application in the phone. The 520 supports MP3 ringtones, so by extension it also plays MP3 ringtones, but we found that the battery ran down rather quickly when we did so.

The video camera records in the MP4 format by default, so it serves to reason that the phone should also be able to playback MP4 files. That was exactly what happened, although the video quality is rather limited but it should do just fine for recording the short MMS video.

Connectivity
The 520 phone allows surfing via class-10 GPRS and hosts a WAP 2.0 browser built into the device and ready to use. There are 56 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 ony found by going to the connections submenu.

Games
There are two games built into the phone. They are Panda and Robot. Robot is a fairly simple platform game where you move the protagonist robot around a series of rising platforms while avoiding traps and spikes. It was a little difficult to progress in this game because the robot seemed to respond and move rather slowly compared to the faster platforms.

Panda is similar to Donkey Kong where you move the panda around three poles or bamboo plants while avoiding all sorts of creepy crawlies that are coming up the pole.

Editor’s Opinion
This is a fair handset for the asking price of RM 448, and it may just surprise you with what it can do. Although by no means a major brand, it seems to indicate that the Asian makers are catching up with their Western counterparts in making fairly good phones.

The only reservation I would have is whether Asian phones would last long enough, but obviously we would not be able to tell from a short review period of a few weeks.

Conclusion: Fairly good as a talk-and-text second phone.

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