Review GSM phone Alcatel C552

The company of Alcatel is known as a maker of balanced solutions standing out for unique design. It seems that middle level models should have the maximum adjusted design targeted at a dull and faceless crowd of customers. But the Alcatel representatives think oppositely, and thus produce vivid products with original design, which sticks into memory at first sight.

And the C552 is not an exception; its design will attract mostly young men than elder people. And the main body colour proves this suggestion - it is light green with lacquered surface. Eclecticism reveals even in traditionally left-shifted navi button. And the keypad is made of white transparent plastic. The black body edging adds to the general view.

The back can boast with originality - here you can find holes painted in a colour different to the main body, and divided into two colour zones. The plastic quality is good, phone's design is unusual and suits youth and children perfectly. However even second and third-year students will hardly like the phone.

The dimensions form 99x48x18 mm, while the weight is 80 grams, which is average for modern devices. The handset is comfortable to hold in hands and pockets.

Alcatel's designers follow the tendency to make a phone look like a digital camera the most. The left facet features a camera button, which is moved to the top, and a coupled volume button is nearby. Also this key is responsible for zoom. That means you can use a VGA camera with its objective placed on the back of the phone only after you rotate the device horizontally, and that is the main shooting mode.

This model is equipped with a 128x160 pixels screen, which shows 65K (STN). Screens have always been a weak point of Alcatel's phones of this class. It fades in the sun; however you will still make the picture out if you wish. At the same time, image quality on the screen is good, and that is especially good for preinstalled pictures and the phone's interface. The screen's physical resolution is 28x36 mm, and it holds up to 9 lines (four of them are designed for service use).

The keypad is backlit in blue, and characters of two languages are inscribed on the buttons. You will experience no problems with the keypad, their motion is acceptable, and entering messages quickly will not be a problem.

If you press the handset in your hand, it will creak; however the back cover doesn't move and has no backlash. The battery is 650-mAh Li-Ion. According to the manufacturer it is capable of working for up to 290 hours in the standby mode and up to 4.5 hours in the talk mode. In Moscow the device worked for about 2 days with 35 minutes of talking and up to 20 minutes of using other functions. The battery life should be considered equal to 2 days, since it works more only with significantly less talks. Full recharging takes about 1.5 hours.

Menu

The main menu is shown in the only way (while previous phones provided three) - all the menu items are shown as small icons, with three rows with four icons in each.

The device has 3.2 MB of dynamic memory shared among all the applications when necessary. Fast navigation using number series is present, tags may be assigned to functions, and then they will be available by one touch.

The functions are represented as lists in submenus and, by the way, gathered in groups. It is better to explain using the example of Messages. On entering the menu you see a row of icons with Create a message distinguished on top. You can choose a message type from a list by just moving the joystick horizontally to see received or sent messages and another list will appear. At first sight this organization looks quite complicated, but it is fast easy to get used to, it is logical and helps relieving the menu, thus there are no conglomerations of items opposite to other manufacturers. In general the organization of the menu impressed well, they are all thought over. There is a special bookmark for images in a library and the one for icons.

Unfortunately, the localization remained the same. Russian characters became clearer, but the Cyrillic inscription greatly differs from the English one. Russian letters are light and thin and the font is hard to make out. The combination of Russian and English looks weird because of the difference in the characters' drawing.

Phonebook. The phone's memory is divided into several directories. There is a separate directory for the contacts kept on the SIM-card, in addition to that, there exist three more folders by default-a General, a Business and a Personal one. The user can create directories of his/her own; they serve as different groups of users in this phone. You can assign a call melody to some of the folders; however, you cannot do it for single files.

Up to 26 fields may be filled for a name, they are Name, Surname, up to 7 numbers, two e-mail addresses, home page URL, Nickname, Birth date, Company name, Position, Address, City, Region, Post index, Country, a field with notes and up to 4 fields with extra information. The only drawback is when entering a new contact you'll have to scroll all the fields gradually to reach the necessary one, you can't do it at once. Voice marks may be assigned to separate entries, and then voice dialing is possible for those names. There is a search by the first letter of a name.

It is possible to assign a picture or a video clip from preset ones or loadable ones to every entry in the phone. The phone supports work with files of: JPG, GIF, aGIF, PNG, BMP and WBMP standards. Video standards supported are 3gp (H263/AMR, MPEG4) and .mp4.

There is no limitation on the number of entries, everything depends on the free space (however not more than 500 considering the memory size).

Messages. Besides working with SMS, the device also supports MMS. Working with all the message types is ordinary and rouses no problems. You can't operate with EMS, however can add smiles, pictures, melodies and/or wap-browser tags into the body of a message.

Several slides are possible to create for MMS, the capacity limit forms 100 KB. A message may be sent to a single user or a group. There are Russian and English T9.

Personalization. Almost everything concerning the phone settings is here. Choose a melody, a call type, adjust the menu appearance, set a picture for the main screen, adjust "hot" keys etc. You can set vibra only, vibra and a melody at once or vibra then a melody. In short, there are many signal type settings that will be up to you.

You can set a picture or a video for the screen, choose the way the main menu is represented and set color schemes. An interesting function is Atmosphere (a set of pictures, interface color scheme and a melody). While viewing, you not only see the design but hear a call melody selected, and of course, nothing prevents from doing it all separately.

Call log. A list of calls - missed, incoming and outgoing. Everything concerning voice dialing is also here.

Fast access. Create a personal menu for accessing the necessary menu items, phone book contacts and Internet addresses.

Tools. This menu holds an organizer. You can view either weekly or monthly or in a list that shows all planned events. The monthly view is quite handy as events are divided by dates, for instance, 14.03-20.03, 21.03-27.03 etc. The events are the following - a meeting (date, time on and off and text note), a birthday (date and name) and a call (there are also reminders which has priority and time off).

Two alarm clocks are present. One is set for a precise date and another one is everyday. A timer is also here.

A plain calculator and a currency converter are present.

You can create a personal melody by notes or record it on a Dictaphone from an external source. The limit is 60 seconds.

Voice commands are assigned to a necessary menu item.

In the Signal item a list of meetings, notes with a signal assigned and an alarm clock are shown.

Here you can activate IrDA.

Tips & tricks. Holds pieces of advice for work with the phone.

Services. Provides an access to SIM menu and WAP - to My One Touch site.

WAP. The browser in the phone is of 2.0 version, there are no particularities here.

Games. The phone is equipped with two games, one of them being Queen of the Mole (you hit appearing faces with a hammer, nothing interesting), and the second game is Twin Spin (quite pleasant for time killing). You can download new games (only using the wap).

Multimedia Album. All the pictures and melodies are here. The range of the pictures and melodies is very large and in this sense, the phone is great. The selection of droll and funny pictures is such that you just do not know where to start choosing from. Several funny video clips are also preset in the phone.

Camera. The pictures can be taken in the resolution of 640x480, 352x288, 128x128, 64x64, 32x32, 16x16 pixels. There is a panoramic shooting mode for which the image is scratched horizontally. In any case, the picture format is JPEG and there are three different dimensions and quality types available (high, standard and economy).

The phone's display is used as a viewfinder. The interface has been thought through in all the details so while shooting you can change almost every image parameter with several presses. The function of the number keys 1, 2, and 3 is to tune in the quality of the required size of the screen. The left soft key is there for the color choice (color picture, white and black, Sepia, Negative, Thin or contours).

With the # key you can quickly switch the picture resolutions, while the * key offers a set of several special modes. One of the modes is the option to create a GIF file using four shots. This means that you take four sequential shots, which then immediately turn into an animation in your phone. One restriction here is the resolution of 128x128 pixels that the developers found mostly convenient to save memory. The function is truly unique and adds to the phone's exclusivity especially since other manufacturers have nothing similar to offer yet.

Another special shooting mode is mosaic. This mode allows you to take four pictures (32x32 pixels) and then pleat them into one complete image (128x128).

The phone is equipped with a timer for the shooting with a delay. You can adjust Exposure. This function controls the lighting conditions by default although you can identify them manually. In most cases, the automatic Exposure is sufficient.

You can choose the folders where the pictures will be saved and can be taken out of for the MMS screen savers, by default.

You can use frames for pictures with the resolution of 128x128 pixels. This is a sort of an effect when you border the picture with a frame while shooting. Another exceptional feature of the phone is that you can download the frames' files (PNG format) from PC, which means that you can create the special effects of your own. No phone has a similar function although the frames are used in many of them.

The phone is also empowered with a digital eight times zoom that you can activate by moving the joystick away from you. The zoom function is followed with a sound resembling the one the objective in digital cameras produces when moving - sounds rather funny.

The pictures look not bad on the phone screen and quite acceptable on a PC. The only disadvantage is that the corners are degraded.

Sample photo outdoors, 640x480, 55.1 KB, JPEG

Sample photo outdoors, 640x480, 40.7 KB, JPEG

Sample photo outdoors, 640x480, 42.3 KB, JPEG

Sample photos with effects in an archive, ZIP, 139 KB>>>

Sample photo with zoom in archive, ZIP, 262 KB>>>

Video is recorded in 3GP format with a limitation of 93 KB or 9 seconds for MMS messages. You can also record video with no limitations, to be precise, until the memory is empty.

Video sample (3GP, 298 KB)

Video sample (3GP, 93.7 KB)

Video clips are shown not full screen, slight slow down is observed when playing them, probably, the processor can't cope with this load. Though the clips are of a normal quality.

Impressions

The device has no problems with the connection quality and the loudspeaker volume and microphone sensitivity are enough for a conversation in any condition, either in an office or on a noisy street. The signal volume is enough and it is heard well even from under winter clothes. The vibra signal is average in power and may be missed. The speakerphone function is on a high level.

Mp3 files are not supported, only midi, SMAF and wav-files and AAC (as a variant of mp3). The lack of mp3's doesn't look logical in the phone and cuts the functionality. The 40-tone polyphony sounds typical for a segment. The handset appears a complete copy of Alcatel C651 or Alcatel Elle, however designed as a candybar.

Now the phone costs 170-180 USD, which is quite more expensive than Siemens CX70. However functionally the Siemens' solution wins and both models lack mp3. The success of the Alcatel's model wholly depends on the price, however it is spread too little to reduce the cost, so we get a vicious circle. The absence of EMS should be regarded as a disadvantage, as this is a good replacement of MMS (and costs less). Software for synchronization with PC, which was available in 2005, did not support Alcatel C552, and many users experienced problems. Now a corresponding program is available on the company's site.

Eldar Murtazin ([email protected])
Translated by Maria Mitina ([email protected])

Published — 30 January 2006

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