Review GSM phone Enol E400S

Standard kit:

• Handset
• Charger
• Wire headset
• Strap for a hand
• Manual

Enol phones were demonstrated at SvyazExpocomm 2004 for the first time. And in the autumn they appeared in the market. The devices are mainly middle-class clamshells. And in the end of 2004 the company took a brave step and released E400S in a still rare slider form-factor.

The dimensions of the phone are typical for this form-factor and are 84x43x23 mm and the weight is a bit smaller than 100 grams. The design was partly copied from Samsung D410. That may be noticed by the disposition of the camera, the loudspeaker and keys on the front panel, the way the camera is rotated and here are all the coincidences. The body is made of a thin almost transparent plastic and that makes no feeling of reliability. The body cover is silvery (the only colour solution) and smooth by touch. Abrasions and scratched will certainly appear but they won't be noticeable.

The construction is rather standard and to the developers credit be it said the guiding rails are metallic and that adds to the reliability of the opening mechanism. There is automatic finishing and the parts slide apart fast with a click. There is a catch for opening under the screen and to tell the truth I don't understand what it is for since that becomes clear from first sight that opening a slider is more comfortable setting a finger against a side surface. In the opened mode a slight horizontal backlash is seen and may be the absence of any experience in manufacturing sliders tells upon.

The phone is equipped with 1.8" TFT display with the resolution of 128x160 pixels (30x37 mm) and capable of showing 65K colours. The screen is bright but the quality is on the level of the first 65K screens. And compared to the displays integrated in Samsung it really looses.

A camera rotating for 180 degrees is on the front panel, a loudspeaker is near it. You'll have to get used to the disposition of the loudspeaker since the volume is low and you'll have to put your ear properly in order to hear anything. I succeeded in getting used to it in about a week of using the phone. An opening catch is under the loudspeaker, two functional buttons, call and end call buttons and a cancel button are a bit lower. 5D joystick takes a central position, it doesn't match the whole appearance of the device a bit but is very comfortable in work.

A camera button and a coupled volume button are on the right side surface. This disposition seems questionable since the majority of the devices have a volume button on the left.

And here on the left side you'll find only a headset connector closed with a rubber shutter fixed to the body.

An interface connector is traditionally on the bottom of the phone (it's also closed with s rubber shutter fixed to the body) and a strap hole and a connector for attaching external antenna are on the top end.

The battery serves as a back panel at the same time. It's firmly fixed with no backlashes. The battery is 700mAh Li-Ion. In Moscow the device worked for 2.5 days in case of 20 minutes of talks and 15 minutes of using other functions a day. If other functions are used longer for about 30 minutes a day then working time gets about 2 days totally. Full recharging takes about 1.5 hours.

The keypad is of plastic, the keys are small and well-distanced that prevents accidental pressures. Cyrillic characters are inscribed besides Latin ones. The backlighting is not even thus brighter in the center and duller on sides. Right vertical row of buttons is lighted worse than others and characters are almost not seen in the dark.

Entering the menu is possible by pressing the left softkey. The main menu is a row of animated icons. Three icons are shown on the screen at the same time and the selected one is the biggest and placed centrally, moving to the left and to the right is possible. When moving along the main menu the phone slows down a bit and let's shift the blame onto the animation. Submenus are vertical lists. You can use number series for moving along the menu. Localization is not well-taken with letters of different size and words divisions.

Phone book. Up to 500 entries may be saved in the internal memory. Each entry may contain a name (14 characters) and up to 3 numbers. A user may be referred to one of the five groups that also may be adjusted by you. Thus you can set the name for a group, assign a melody and an SMS signal. Search by name (numbers from the internal memory and SIM-card one are shown together) or by a group are possible. Up to 10 numbers are at your disposal for fast dialing.

Despite all the ascetic possibilities of the phone book it still has a thing that is very rare for other phones. That is a black list. Up to 10 numbers you don't want to receive calls from may be included into the list. If the number is in the list then when trying to call you the caller will be cut off (before the hootings start).

Messages. The device supports EMS and has a set of small pictures (40 pictures), animation (15 items) and a possibility to attach a melody to the message as a result. You may also save and use personal pictures, melodies and animation. About 100 messages besides SIM-card memory may be stored in the internal one. Up to 20 numbers may be included into a mailing list where you can add users one by one or even in a group.

Russian and English T9 are present in the phone and up to 10 templates may be created.

MMS. Multimedia messages are kept into a separate item. Up to several pages may be created and the limit size of the message is 70 KB. Up to 1 MB of memory is provided for MMS.

Call lists. Everything is traditional here. There is a list of outgoing, incoming and missed calls with date and time; each list may contain 10 entries. Call timers don't show total time but there are separated incoming and outgoing call time.

Organizer. A current month is shown in the calendar and a memo with 15 characters in length may be stored for a day. Several memos may be kept for a day and a signal may be set for each. The dates with memos saved are indicated in another colour. You may set reminders and a scheduler; the only difference is that personal melody can't be set for everyday events.

World time.

Plain calculator.

Unit converter.

Biorhythms. The device offers to enter your birth date and see your condition for today or a month. And of course, that's not more than a game.

Games. There are two games preinstalled in the phone. They are Minesweeper (a famous computer game) and Puzzle.

Fun World. Here a user may install personal Java applications at the available 512 MB of memory. And the preinstalled game is arcade Icarus.

Settings. Everything connected with sound, display and other functions of the device is here.

You may select one of 10 preset pictures for the display, personal text (up to 16 characters) that will be shown on the screen.

Network services. All the settings connected with the network are here.

WAP. A wap-browser version 2.0 is installed in the phone. The device also supports batch communication (GPRS class 8).

Camera. A VGA-camera is installed in the phone. 800 KB of memory are kept for photos. The taken photos are impossible to transfer to a PC since there is no IrDA and a cable isn't included into the kit. Nevertheless the photos look well on the phone screen.

The integrated camera allows photos with the resolution of 160x120, 320x240, and 640x480 pixels. You may apply various effects and frames, set a timer (only 7 seconds). Multishooting for 6 photos with a possibility to choose a speed (normal, average, fast).

The photos may be viewed all at the same time or one by one in the photo album. Each photo may be increased or shown a saved info.

There is a mirror on the back panel of the phone. The reason of its appearance is quite unclear for me since the camera may be rotated towards your face and the image is turned pressing the right functional key. Integrated flash on the back is also unnecessary since there is no any sense of it in the dark room.

Impressions

The quality and the volume of the sound are average and was not enough in a noisy room. The microphone is not very sensitive and to hear the interlocutor we had to ask him to speak louder. The 40-tones polyphony sounds middling with metallic notes and the preinstalled melodies sound loud the call is hard to miss. And you shouldn't hope for the vibra since it's very low in power.

Bad plastic is a real disadvantage since it makes a feeling of fragility. The device buzzed about five times during the tests. A slider form-factor since there is no any great choice in this form, a rotational camera and a comfortable joystick are advantages.

Melody samples (mp3, 348 KB)

Vladimir Fokin ([email protected])
Translated by Maria Mitina ([email protected])

Published - 2 February 2005

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