Looking to stand out from the crowd in style? If so, Sindre Lia thinks the camera-toting Siemens SL65 might be just the ticket for you.
Review summary of the Siemens SL65:
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 Price: $450.
Pros:
Cons:
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Full Siemens SL65 Review:
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Siemens launched the innovative SL55 with a sliding keypad back in 2003, and now the German manufacturer offers a new and improved version in the SL65. The competition has hardened quite a bit since then, however, and currently we find among other handsets the Samsung SGH-E800 as a tough competitor to Siemens' slider phone offerings.
 | Siemens gets it just right with the slider mechanism of the SL65
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Sleek and slippery
The Siemens SL65 weighs in at 99 g, and certainly looks good both in its open and closed modes, measuring 90.2 x 47.6 x 20.9 mm when in the former state. With elegant curves, the slider mechanism, which also doubles as a keypad lock, offers just the right amount of resistance. The keypad itself is definitely an improvement over that of the SL55, now featuring large and flat buttons even though it remains a bit noisy. Another feature of the keypad is the well-rounded joystick; a little too much so, apparently, as ones thumb has a tendency to trail off every now and then.
The 16-bit TFT display of the Siemens SL65 performed on average, with slightly milky colours and a resolution of only 130 x 130 pixels. On the back of the phone, we find a 0.3 MP digital shooting decent quality pictures in daylight. Pictures taken in darker surroundings, however, are nothing but a waste of space in the phone's 10 MB internal memory. A 5x digital zoom can be adjusted on the fly by means of the joystick, and the viewfinder offered fluid motion. The camera also acts like a camcorder, recording 30-sec videos at a resolution of 128 x 96 pixels (also known as sub-QCIF).
 | Don't expect to be snapping any candid pictures in the dark with the SL65's camera
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Sometimes shortcuts are better
Being a tri-band GSM 900/1800/1900 MHz phone, the Siemens SL65 also supports GPRS Class 10 and IrDA for data transfers. Furthermore, we find support for SMS, MMS, e-mail, and the integrated WAP 2.0 browser powered by Openwave provides support for XHTML as well as plain old WAP. 40-tone polyphonics make for a pleasant listening experience, but even the lowest volume setting is a tad on the loud side; fortunately, the handset offers vibrating alert as an alternative. Bluetooth is however not present, and neither are features such as voice dialing and instant messaging.
Logically assembled, the menu system of the SL65 is easy to navigate, also incorporating a nifty feature which lets users program each direction of the keypad for launching an application - thus avoiding the slippery joystick.
Reception and voice quality proved good in the Siemens SL65. Siemens claims a stand-by time of 12 days and talk time of 4,5 hours, whilst our experiences resulted in a stand-by time of 5 days and talk time of 4 hours.
Availability
The Siemens SL65 is at the time of writing available in several European markets, selling for approximately $450 USD without subscription.
Price and availability
The Siemens SL65 will start selling for $450 () in November 1999.
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