i-mate Smartflip Review

Camera:

Smartflip has a 1.3 mega pixel camera which, unfortunately, does not have any specialized capabilities such as automatic focus or a flashlight and as a whole is not on a par compared to the phones presently on the market. It is situated at the top of the front lid and is slightly bulging. It starts comparatively fast (4 – 5 sec) after holding the shortcut key on the left side – in spite of the camera’s interface, which is not particularly elaborate, it is quite easy to work with it. In the respective menu you can choose the white balance and colour effects as well as execute various settings, including resolution and compression. It takes the picture about 2 – 3 sec after pushing the button even though there is no automatic focus and you need one more second to get ready for the next picture – thus the interval between two pictures is approximately 4 seconds.

The camera photos are hardly of any worth – they have a very weak detail (a lot of artefacts and blurring) and unreal cold colours, but a strong contrast. Indoors, even with strong lighting, there is more ‘noise’ (the latter being present in the outdoor photos as well). With the light going down it increases at the expense of quality, poor as it is.

Multimedia:

For playing music and going through video files the telephone has a built-in Windows Media Player: it is very similar to the one for PPC devices) and in it you can look at the songs’ performer / album/ genre provided that this information is available in the ID3 song tags. During playback small buttons (back, pause, forward) are visualized on the whole screen and the file name and its quality can be viewed at the top. Fortunately, here you can use fast forward and rewind functions in contrast to the buttons of the external screen. This is achieved by holding one of the directions of the d-pad.

The loudspeaker sound has medium volume and in fact sounds well for a miniature phone speaker. However you will need headphones for a more realistic musical experience; the ones from the set of our smartphone had a decently pleasant sound compared to other mobile-set headphones. They are strong enough and listening to music with them is not quite bad, but they lack dynamics, fidelity and reality, and a discerning listener would not favour the low-frequency reproduction. If you belong to that group of listeners you will definitely need to replace them with some expensive brand, but unfortunately it will be hard to find the necessary adapter between the phone’s unique port and the standard 3.5 mm jack, so that to use your Hi-Fi headphones. However the Bluetooth is readily available for connecting to wireless ones.

As far as viewing video files is concerned, there is a full utilization of the screen area and the additional option to look through the file in full-screen mode.

Software:

The telephone features a 64 MB built-in memory and the same amount of RAM. The available memory can be increased by using micro SD cards but unfortunately the slot for them is situated under the battery cover and the SIM-card – there is no way to replace the card without switching the phone off since it automatically turns off after removing the battery cover.

Our version of the telephone arrived with pre-installed programmes of the office pack Clear Vue – here one can find previewers for Microsoft Office documents (Word, Excel, PowerPoint) and PDF files. As a whole, the software works well but unfortunately is solely capable of viewing, not editing files. Problems arose when we tried to open a bigger Excel document with considerable amount of information and images – the telephone crashed and the document could not be viewed. What is more, when we tried to open a big (1.2 Mb) PDF file there was an error message stating that the document cannot be opened.

The telephone is supplied with two games, standard for Windows Mobile –Solitaire and Bubble Breaker. Additional games and software can easily be added.