The new live! service from Vodafone offers not only phones, but a complete service setup to go with them. Oliver Thylmann places his mitts on the Sharp GX-10, and goes live!
As the largest operator in Europe, one could almost expect Vodafone - except for operators introducing i-mode - to be the first major European operator to launch a service where both phones and services go under one brand. Likely to have been inspired by NTT DoCoMo's success with just i-mode, Vodafone teamed up with Sharp to deliver its GX-10 exclusively as a live! phone, and Oliver Thylmann has been getting in the zone to see whether ideology from the east works equally well in the west.
 | The GX10 offers a good feature set, particularly for such a low-priced phone
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The Sharp GX-10 sports GSM 900/1800 Mhz, GPRS 4+2, weighs 107g, measures 94 x 27 x 49 mm, has an integrated digital camera and dual displays (of which the internal offers 16-bit color), supports MMS, Load-A-Game, vibration, polyphony, T9 and has an infrared port - all in all, up to par with European counterparts.
The Hardware
It is always hard to review a phone by somebody who is relatively new to the market, or even your own hemisphere. The Sharp GX-10 presents just one of those cases - and as a result, we've attempted keeping an open mind when it comes to features and functions. In general, this clam-shell phone feels well made, with a very nice comforting click sound when you open or close the phone. Its external display is somewhat small, but provides the necessary amount of information, while the internal display is bright, colorful and offers good readability under any lighting conditions.
Buttons are well placed, however, though lacking in terms of tactile feedback due to short key travel. Also, poor backlighting presents a challenge when using the phone late at night.
In terms of battery life, Vodafone Germany lists the GX-10 as having up to 250 hours of stand-by time, which is probably head on - provided you don't touch the phone. The GX-10 is a phone meant to be used, though, as users will be taking pictures, using live! services on the bright screen, or do any number of other things such as playing games. And due to the fact that you do, the GX-10 will not hold out that long. As always, judging battery life in an advanced phones is a complex task, but the GX-10 is no poorer than similar phones on the market such as the Nokia 7650 or Motorola T720.
The camera of the phone provides a maximum resolution of 288 x 352 pixels, which is adequate for taking a snapshot and using in an MMS to show your friends you're out having a party while they are at work. You can also save pictures at two lower resolutions, which enables you to store more images. There seems to be enough space for 40 high resolution images on the phone. In any case, images can be sent off via MMS to save space, but sadly there is no option to use the IR port or a cable to transfer images to your computer.
When taking pictures, the internal display functions as a viewer - and as a nice touch, a small mirror in which the user can see what the camera will photograph has been placed right next to the lens, making the task of shooting a self-portrait that much easier. Also, pictures can be sent to e-mail addresses via MMS; the phone has no embedded e-mail client.
The address book lets users enter 3 phone numbers, a group, an e-mail address, assign an image to an entry, and add some personal data. Although a nice set, the GX-10 does as previously mentioned not offer synchronizing with a PC, which makes entering contacts a tedious task. The image caller id feature comes in useful, however, as pictures assigned to entries pop up on-screen when the user receives an incoming call from someone listed in the address book. Although some might find such a feature slightly unuseful, it does provide more instant recognition than reading a name or phone number will ever do - and besides, you'll have to spend those 500 KB of storage memory with something, right? Just for the record, there's an additional 500 KB of storage space for MMSes.
Also, on a visual-related note, gamers will definitely enjoy the big color display, as well as the polyphonic sound of the device. The phone comes with some games embedded, and users can also download J2ME games through the live! service.
Sadly, the phone offer no e-mail client, which means users will have to resort to a WAP service to be able to send and read e-mail, or alternatively send e-mail via MMS. Browsing is well taken care of, with the GX-10 sporting the Openwave WAP 2.0-capable microbrowser in version 6. The browser supports WML, HDML and even xHTML, and even managed to display some HTML based web pages on our end. Also; a small, but nifty feature lets users take so-called snapshots of current pages, saving them locally for offline viewing.
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