Oliver Thylmann has taken time to play with the Philips Fisio 820, a business phone with features such as Bluetooth, GPRS and an e-mail client. He's not too impressed, though.
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Philips is currently moving back into the mobile phones market with force, and I have to admit that the Fisio 820 looks interesting at first glance. It’s a tiny (98 x 21 x 47 mm), light (84 g) dual-band handset sporting a 256 color screen (112 x 112 pixels), GPRS Class 10, WAP, an e-mail client, synchronization, EMS, voice recording, voice activation and Bluetooth. On top of that, it has a stand-by time of 400 hours with 5.5 hours talk time and a suggested retail price of 499 EUR without contract in Germany.
 | The Philips Fisio 820 looks good on paper, but needs a bit of tuning
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I really like the fast GPRS access, and the high resolution of the screen helps a great deal when surfing WAP sites. When Bluetooth is off, the stand-by and talk time is great and lives up to Philips' claims, but as soon as you turn on Bluetooth, it drops considerably - especially if it’s put to use. With only an Acer Bluetooth stick here to try out Bluetooth, I got nothing but FAX and Dial-up Access working with my desktop even though synchronization and file transfer should have been working as well. Because of that, the fact that the synchronization software for my review unit was missing didn’t really bother me that much, as I would not have been able to try it out anyway.
The standard package does not include a data cable and the phone does not have an IR port - and even though it may seem a strange decision from what I've already said, it would be the right approach had Bluetooth been working properly.
Beauty does not grace the eye of the reviewer
While a 256 color screen is nice, it’s front-lit, and although it's well readable for text the overall clarity is sub-par. A friend of mine likened it to those little toys that kids have, the cameras they look into which already have images and they can change the image - and I don't disagree with him.
The navigation on the screen is done through a wheel-like system in which the icons turn around the screen. If the phone had a jog-dial this would be a wonderful system. But it hasn’t. It has a navigation pad overlaid on the 2/6/8/4 keys with the 5 key (sometimes) being an OK button. On top of that pad, there is a menu button, a cancel button and an OK type button centered between them, plus two soft keys above menu and cancel buttons. The tactile feedback is nice and typing is easy, but these 5 keys can’t be set to perform any other function than what they are programmed to do. All of the number keys can have special functions.
The 5 top buttons also change functions frequently, making them confusing to use, and due to the small button spacing, it's also very easy to press the wrong one. I personally often started a voice recording (via the OK button) due to pressing OK too late (it already returned to the main menu) and also canceled writing SMS messages frequently.
The e-mail client of the 820 works great, but sadly does not save local copies of mails that have been downloaded. That means it's necessary to connect to the mail server and download mails each and every time, which is both time-consuming and bandwidth-consuming (and thus expensive). The phone has a special storage area for small images though, which can be received by e-mail and saved. A nice feature is that it is possible to choose some or all of these images as part of a screensaver for when the phone goes in standby mode - rather useless, but amusing nevertheless.
Conclusion
The Fisio 820 has a very good feature set, which by itself would make it a very good business phone. However, the screen makes you wonder why you need color, and the interface coupled with the key layout is prone to errors and confusion. Many features also tend to lack capabilities that really should be there - such as the e-mail client or the address book without a place for an address. Over time, the interface grew on me, and if the 820 had a jog-dial, the entire menu system would make amazing sense - but the frequent pressing of the wrong keys made for an overall bad experience. In the end, its negative traits sadly disturb the entire experience to such a degree that the feature set becomes of second importance.
- What's positive: Good feature set, small size, sturdy
- What's negative: Confusing Button/Menu layout, sub-par screen
Overall: 
Price and availability
The will start selling for TBA () in November 1999.
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