BenQ P30 - detailed review

Posted by energetic
Hardware detailed review here.

Software detailed review here.

And for wappers.

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BenQ P30 review

July 2004

BenQ P30 is the fifth UIQ based Symbian OS device from a third manufacturer. Being a GSM/GPRS phone, the P30 can be considered a strong competitor to Sony Ericsson Pxxx range of UIQ phones.

1. Hardware

First of all, BenQ P30 is a very stylish phone with compact and elegant design - it won the iF design award. It is slightly lighter than the P900 and both thinner and narrower - 118 mm (or 138 mm with the antenna) x 52 mm x 17-19 mm. The casing is very solid - no cracking sounds, no fragile plastic elements - it looks and feels like a piece of aluminium.

P30 is equipped with typical UIQ screen (208x320 pixels, transflective TFT, 16-bit, 65536 colors) but its physical dimensions are slightly smaller than of the P900's screen: 39x59 mm. This is mainly because the inactive area (black bars surrounding the screen) is thinner and also because of slightly smaller dot size, which makes the display quality even better. Like in all UIQ phones, the screen is touch sensitive.

The P30 has a built-in phone keypad. Unlike in the P900, you don't have to open the flip to access full screen - it is always available along with the hardware keypad. You can choose between operating the phone in one-hand mode using the keypad or in two-hand mode using the stylus and the touchscreen. Keys 2, 4, 5, 6 and 8 are distinguished with built-in green LED diodes and they serve as arrow keys with OK key (5) in the centre. The keypad also contains the usual green and red buttons and a dual function key that can be used to switch between applications or to select options in dialogs. The phone also has a browser button (above the screen) and a camera button (left side). The built-in hardware keypad not only allows using the phone and PDA in one-hand mode but it can be also considered a great news for gamers and emulator fans as it provides much better controls for full screen games. The keys work very good - they are very solid and with good tactile feedback.

BenQ P30 is equipped with SD card slot, compatible with both SecureDigital and MMC cards. Enhancing the storage memory with MMC/SD card is especially important with this phone as it only offers about 4 MB of internal storage memory, which means that it relies on external storage. Good news is that the P30 offers more free RAM memory than the P900 - 8-9 MB. The device uses Texas Instruments OMAP1510 processor running at 144 MHz. Even though the clock speed is lower than P900's, the device works noticeably faster.
The P30 uses Lithium-Polymer 1050 mAh battery. It provides up to 200 hours of standby time and up to 3-5 hours of talk time. The battery is "smart" - its electronics monitors cells' temperature and shows remaining power (percentage) as well as remaining time in hours and minutes.

The stylus is retractable. You can make it longer or shorter according to your preferences. It will fit its hole (on the bottom of the phone) in the phone casing in both states.

BenQ P30 generates stereo sound and is equipped with stereo mini-jack connector. It also supports loudspeaker mode and the sound is clear and loud.

Bottom part of the phone is occupied by charger and USB cable connectors. Infrared port is located on the top of the device.

P30 is a triband phone (EGSM 900 MHz / GSM 1800/1900 MHz). It supports GPRS (class 10, class B) and CSD data transmission and Bluetooth connectivity. Supported Bluetooth profiles include: DUN-GW (Dial-Up Networking), GAP (Generic Access Profile), Generic Object Exchange, HandsFree-AG, Headset-AG, OPP-Client (Object Push), OPP-Server, SDP (Serial Device Profile), Serial-DevA, Serial-DevB.

The BenQ is equipped with VGA (640x480) camera. It supports both still images and videorecording with audio and 6x digital zoom. Small mirror on the back of the phone allows making self-portraits.

The P30 makes great use of its two color diodes. Their combinations show status of missed calls, unread messages, network coverage, low battery etc.

2. Software

BenQ P30 is powered by Symbian OS version 7.0 and the latest UIQ version 2.1. This means that the device supports user inteface customization with Themes. Moreover, the P30 also provides full support for Profiles. There are 5 fully customizable profiles: Normal, Outdoors, Meeting, Home and Handsfree but there is no possibility of creating new ones. Profiles are superior to Themes and Appearances, which means that a Theme is just one of the Profile settings - this allows setting a separate theme for each Profile and quickly changing it along with all other Profile settings. Each profile allows you to customize the following options: Ring volume, Increasing ring (yes/no), Vibrator (on/off), Ringtone, SMS tone, MMS tone, Cell broadcast tone, Email tone, Voice message tone, Beamed file tone, Warning tone, Button click tone, Screen tap tone, Theme and Appearance (UI colors, skins, icons' "halo", background picture, hardware button tone). You can quickly switch between profiles by tapping the speaker icon on the status bar and selecting Profile name from the list. The window also allows to quickly override profile settings of ring and multimedia volume and enabling or disabling the Silent mode.

P30's Applications launcher displays three icons per row as opposed to 2 icons per row in P800/P900 and Motorola A92x. More icons per row means more icons displayed simultaneously, i.e. quicker access to applications. Similiarily to other UIQ phones, the AppLauncher can also be switched to a list view (13 lines per screen).

Phone is just one of the applications - as there is no separate "Flip closed" mode there is also no special "phone mode". The device starts with Applications Launcher as its default screen but you can always quickly invoke the Phone application by either selecting its icon from the shortcuts bar on top of the screen or by pressing the green "dial" button (pressing it another time will take you to the call log where you can quickly select and dial last dialled/answered/missed calls' numbers). Phone application consists of three windows: main window with network information area and speed dial thumbnails, call log screen with lists of all dialled/received calls and a window with large, virtual phone keypad with keys big enough to use your fingers to enter the number (which is just one of the options as you can also use the hardware keypad). With Phone application in the foreground, you can quicky lock the hardware keypad and the touchscreen by pressing and holding the "#" key. Keypad and touchscreen can also be locked automatically, after some period of inactivity. Key combination to unlock the screen and keypad is "#" and "*".

The P30 provides advanced handwriting recognition based on smARTwriter engine from Advanced Recognition Technologies. Unlike P900's letter-by-letter input, the P30 allows you to write full words or sentences - you can even fill the entire screen. Recognition starts only after you make a pause (which can be set to either short, medium or long). You can also customize the color of your handwriting, line thickness and whether to automatically add a space at the end or not.

If that's not enough for you, we've got even more good news: the P30 allows you to teach it how to correctly recognize your handwriting. The Personalize option of handwriting configuration lets you draw each single character and add it to the HWR database. From now on the phone will be using your own patterns instead of the standard ones.

When you start writing on the screen, the device automatically displays a small toolbar. It makes handwriting even more convenient. The toolbar lets you quickly switch between handwriting and cursor mode (which is useful when you need to use a scrollbar or tap a button or menu with handwriting active, so that your actions are not mistakenly recognized as characters or symbols), enter space, carriage return (new line) or delete characters, switch between character sets (letters, digits, symbols) or several supported HWR languages (English, Italian, Spanish, French in our unit) or quickly display a small window with special characters difficult to enter using HWR (like e.g. colon, semicolon, underline, asterisk, percent etc). The toolbar can be minimized or dragged around the screen.

BenQ P30 also provides text input using virtual QWERTY keyboard displayed on the screen. It looks and works the same as in the P800/900.

P30's smart battery provides detailed information about its current conditions and remaining power level. By tapping the battery icon you can not only check the percentage of remaining power but also approximate remaining standby time in hours and minutes as well as temperature of the battery.

P30 supports the Flight mode which provides full access to the device with phone part and Bluetooth disabled. Unlike the Sony Ericsson Px00, the P30 can enter the Flight mode also without any SIM card inserted.

Screen brightness can be fully adjusted using a slider. The setting is accessible via Control Panel. Screen saver can be set to either blank screen, custom picture or GIF animation, or large, analog and digital clock displayed over a nice picture (different views for day and night).

The P30 allows you to set your own user greeting which is shown when the system is loading. Unlike in Px00 phones, the text can be very long and you may use various font colors and styles (italic, underline, bold).

BenQ P30 is equipped with faxmodem, which means that it can serve as both modem and fax for your desktop PC or laptop. Unfortunately, fax messaging is not supported directly on the device - you can't send or receive faxes using just the phone. Let's hope that this function can be implemented with 3rd party software.

Messaging, Contacts, Agenda, Jotter, Time, To-Do, Calculator, Remote Sync, Online services and GPRS data log applications look and work exactly the same as in Sony Ericsson Px00 range of phones.

Voice Recorder also looks the same but it provides one important enhancement: possibility of recording phone conversations.

Camcorder application supports both making still pictures and recording movies with audio. It can be quickly launched using Camera button located on the left side of the phone. Camcorder supports 1-2-6x digital zoom for both pictures and movies and can be switched to a full screen mode providing much larger "viewfinder" area. Video recording time is only limited by free storage memory, but you can restrict it (if you want to) by either size in kilobytes, size in seconds, percentage of free disk space or MMS-compliance. You can choose between MPEG4SP and H263 codecs and three levels of quality (low, medium, high).

Music player application supports MP3 and offers nice graphic spectrum analyzer. You can choose multiple files for playback and enable Shuffle or Repeat options. Sound volume is very high via both the loudspeaker and stereo headset.

Photobase application is a picture viewer with full screen mode and a slideshow function with many transition effects.

Picsel Viewer is a document viewer supporting many popular document types (HTML, Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Adobe, etc). Both quality and performance are much better than of P800/P900 built-in document viewer.

The built-in Web/WAP browser is the same as in P900 but, of course, one can install the Opera browser to get even better support for WWW browsing.

The P30 supports voice dialling, voice commands and Magic word. It supports both Handsfree and Headset Bluetooth profile, which provides compatibility with all existing Bluetooth audio devices. Preferred sound device can be set to Phone, Headset or Handsfree mode and you can set it to use either in-band ringtone or normal ringtone via the speaker.

3. Summary

BenQ P30 is a very stylish, compact and elegant phone. Based on the UIQ 2.1 platform, it provides compatibility with many existing UIQ applications. It is packed with useful features and several important enhancements over the Px00 series: support for user Profiles, recording phone conversations, hardware keypad for one-hand operation in full screen mode, more free RAM memory and support for much more popular SD/MMC storage cards offering large capacities. Expected availability: early August in Asia and September in Europe. The unsubsidized price is not known yet.

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Sony Ericsson P900
Olympic Games Athens 2004! You are all welcome!
Chain game!

[ This Message was edited by: energetic on 2004-07-03 10:33 ]

Posted by swipe108
If the BenQ's P31 comes out soon enough it could possibly beat the P910 if they upgrade the RAM to 64kb. Especially since the P30 supports SD and its handwriting recognition software recognizes words and not just letters. you might end up writing faster on it than on typing on the P910's QWERTY thumbboard. and all the software on the Pxxx series would also be usable on the P31. Plus this one certainly looks better than motorola's and arima's try at UIQ.

[ This Message was edited by: swipe108 on 2004-07-16 10:50 ]