SANDY TECHFANATIC

In this age of mobile wizardry, anything is possible. You could watch TV on your mobile, use two SIM cards simultaneously, and still walk away with no dent in your wallet. While mobile phones also have a fair share of knock-offs, or 'clones' as we like to call them, there are plenty of handsets that aren’t clones and yet deliver in the features department. We know these as the nameless ‘Chinese Mobiles’. I managed to get hold of some and tested them for you.

I may not be able to give you too much by way of detail about the handsets themselves, but I can tell you what they essentially offer and how good they are. Those of you who aren’t aware of their prices (which is unlikely since they’ve pretty much flooded the market) please listen up. All the handsets I've tested in this feature are priced under Rs 10,000 (they range anywhere between Rs 5,500 and Rs 9,000).

V323

The V323 mobile is a rather bulky handset and heavy too. But it has a superbly clear 3-inch touchscreen display that’s great for watching videos and TV, if you have the reception. The interface looks identical to Nokia Symbian interface handsets, so navigation should be easy for Nokia users... or just about anybody. The interface is a little bit slow though. The phone supports analog TV, but unfortunately I couldn’t get decent reception anywhere and all I saw was a lot of static.

The V323 comes equipped with a 1.3MP camera (with plenty of settings) and the image quality isn’t too bad. There various features, including a pretty good media player and an FM radio, in addition to regular stuff like a converter, calendar for schedules and appointments etc. The best thing about the V323 is that it supports dual SIM cards, both GSM. It’s a bit tricky figuring out messaging and calling the numbers stored on the SIMs, but poking around helps. Both SIMs are simultaneously active and incoming calls from the second SIM will simply have a ‘(2)’ attached to the callers name. You can switch off either SIM if you wish. The V323 also supports external memory.

TV01

If you thought the iPhone was the big daddy of cell phones, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet. I’m not referring to the handset in technological terms and calling it that, but more in terms of its size, especially with its external battery pack that includes an additional speaker. It’s unfortunate that the company that designed this handset with the external additional pack has given those annoying individuals who play their mobile music in the train some rather heavy artillery.

This handset also supports analog TV with pretty good pickup. Don’t expect to get crystal clear reception, but the image quality is okay and so is the sound. The external pack has a little stand to prop up the handset. The TV01 supports dual SIM cards too, but as far as I could tell, both are not simultaneously active, though there is a dedicated button to switch between the two. This handset has a large touchscreen interface that supports quite a high resolution. The interface is quite catchy and easy to navigate, with the five-way nav-pad or the stylus. Feature-wise the TV01 is quite well equipped with multimedia, a 1.3MP camera and the relevant features that all mobile handsets come with including alarms, calendar, notes etc. External memory is supported via microSD cards.