Tuesday, September 08, 2009

i-mobile TV 630 mobile phone - don't buy one!

This is my review of the i-mobile TV 630 mobile phone:

My wife Su recently bought a brand new i-mobile TV 630 mobile phone because it looked very good in the adverts, and when she tried it out in the shop it seemed to be excellent. Its very impressive specification includes dual SIM cards (so it's two phones in one), an 8 megapixel camera with full flash and video recording, micro SD memory card up to 8 GB, MP3 and MP4 player, TV tuner and FM radio. The price was 5,800 Thai Baht, or about 110 GB Pounds.

However, after using it for around a week, it has turned out to be nowhere near as good as it first appeared to be. In fact it is completely rubbish, and here's why:

Even though it can use an 8 GB micro SD memory card, you can't do much useful stuff with all that memory, like for example the MP3 music player in the phone cannot cope with a music library of more than around 400 MP3s (as opposed to the around 1200 that can fit on an 8GB memory card) - the phone hangs then crashes with more than around 400 songs. AWFUL!!

Also, the phone is supposed to be able to play MP4 files, but it has never worked for any of around 20 different MP4s that we tried. RUBBISH!!

Also, the phone does not display file names properly, with its operating system seemingly being based on something like ancient DOS with very basic short file names being displayed, including such useful characters as ~1 in place of extended file names. OH DEAR!!

And the few long file names that the phone does manage to display that are too long for the width of the display screen get scrolled across the screen at such a slow speed it takes ages to read them. DOH!!

Also, when using the web browser and waiting for a page to load, there is nothing displayed to show any kind of progress with the page loading, so you have no idea whether it is loading or has hung up. And it likes to hang up most of the time without notifying you that it has done so. STUPID!!

Also, the plastic flip cover over the phone's memory card slot snapped off after only about 8 uses, due to its ridiculously thin plastic attachment. And the main i-mobile shop in Bangkok doesn't have a replacement part for it, and even if they did they said would want paying to fix it, even though the phone is less than 2 weeks old! PATHETIC!!

And worst of all, the phone likes to randomly switch itself off for no obvious reason at all, sometimes when navigating around between menus, and sometimes even when in the middle of a call! TERRIBLE!!

The list of faults and problems actually goes on and on, but I can more easily sum it all up like this: DO NOT BUY AN I-MOBILE TV 630 PHONE, AND DO NOT EVEN ACCEPT ONE AS A FREE GIFT!! IT IS THE WORST PHONE I HAVE EVER SEEN AND EVER WILL SEE!!

We're going to get rid of this travesty of a phone and treat ourselves to a Nokia N97 instead - a lot more money, sure, but a lot less hassle too!

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