i-mate Ultimate 6150 Review

Camera:

A business-oriented device such as i-mate 6150 is not expected to make perfect pictures and that’s why the camera has quite primitive functions.

It takes about 5-6 seconds after holding the inconvenient left side button for the interface to start. Focusing is relatively quick (2 seconds), but there’s no way to turn off the picture preview (appears after 4 seconds) and you can’t take consecutive shots.

The good news is that almost all settings (resolution, camera mode, flash power on/off, effects) can be adjusted directly from the screen without entering the options submenu. The bad news is that the icons are very small, ugly and not finger-friendly.

The pictures are of rather low quality. The colors are unreal, there is a lot of noise and overall, the details are slightly blurred. Sometimes, although rarely a strange geometrical distortion of the picture can be seen in some photographs. We first met this annoying problem in HP iPAQ 614.



A camcorder is also present, with option to record in QVGA (320x240) in MPEG4 format. The quality of the videos is low, since the frame rate is low too – only 15 fps.

Viewing images with i-mate 6150 is not one of the most pleasant activities. Jumping to the previous/next picture, by touching the screen is only possible in the slide show mode. In the rest of the cases, you’ll have to rely on the joystick.









Multimedia:

i-mate 6150 is equipped with the standard mobile version of Windows Media Player. It is a multimedia player for music and video files. MP3 format is supported, as well as WMA and WAV. After updating the library with files, all supported types are found, and they can be added to playlists. This function is not well implemented and organizing them is quite hard. Songs can be viewed by artist, album and genre, as these are taken from the ID3 tag of the files.

The phone plays videos in the h.264 format, which provides good quality. As a whole, it plays videos relatively good and you’ll be able to watch smoothly QVGA clips. If the resolution or the fps are too high, the picture will not correspond to the sound.

You can’t really enjoy quality music with i-mate 6150, since it only has one small speaker, which if at maximum volume makes an awful sound. This could be expected from a phone which is not designed for music in the first place, so we switched on the earpieces of the set with the hope of making things better.

Luckily what we heard on through the earpieces was not that bad, but when at maximum the result wasn’t good. That’s why we recommend using the earpieces for wired handsfree mainly.

The phone has a FM radio with RDS, which uses the headphone' cable as an antenna for receiving signals. This function is pretty convenient, especially in moments when you’ve had enough of the music uploaded on the device.



Software:

The phone comes with 128 MB RAM and 256 ROM internal memory, which can be expanded via a microSD card. Unfortunately, there is no additional task manager and you’ll have to use the standard one. It is hard to access, and you’ll definitely need it when you overload the phone.

As we’ve already mentioned, you are able to connect i-mate 6150 with a monitor/projector via cable. It can transmit picture and sound. The visualization and controls are on a good level and we didn’t have any trouble.

Unfortunately, although it supports Office 2007, i-mate 6150 performed unsatisfactory in one of its main functions, namely viewing documents. It is absurd not to be able to view and open them directly from the file manager, and to have to start the respective application (e.g. Word). The small PowerPoint presentations are play well, but the larger ones (20-30 MB) you’ll have to wait 9-10 seconds for the next slide to load. The effects do not visualize correctly, and in some loaded pages, an “insufficient memory” message appears.

PDF files are opened with ClearVue, which was very problematic. The pages load slowly (about 2 seconds), and navigation is done only using the scroll bars below and on the right of the screen.


Overall, we are very disappointed from this software element, because it limits the presentation capabilities, and this was supposed to the key feature of this phone.

There are numerous programs created for this platform, almost as much as the ones intended for PCs with Windows operating system. The most popular are the various utilities for personalizing the PPC, multimedia players, file explorers, Instant Messengers, etc. You can download third party applications to be used instead of the preloaded ones.

The model is equipped with NVIDIA GoForce 5500 graphics card, which should offer high picture quality while viewing video and pictures, and the ability to play 3D games. To our regret, the phone doesn’t come with any applications which to take advantage of this feature.