Philips 162

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Philips 162

Aalaap Ghag, Apr 25, 2005 1616 hrs IST

A low-end, compact and cheap GSM phone

Compact, lightweight, all basic features in place, low cost

Ultra low resolution, over-bright display, sort of ugly looking, slow UI, keys are hard and have an ugly blue backlight

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The Philips 162 is a low-end basic handset under the 5k range. It's trying for the place that was once reigned supreme over by the Nokia 3310.

The 162 is a regular dual-band GSM (900/1800) handset, with WAP 1.2.1 support. There is no GPRS available, no Infrared, no Bluetooth. There is no cable connectivity either.

It measures a very, very compact 9.8cm x 4.5cm x 18.5cm frame, and weighs a fairly light 82g. It's small and pocketable. The buttons are rubber, which means they will ware out pretty quickly if you run into excessive usage. The keys are also quite hard, so fast SMSing isn't very easy to accomplish. The keys slow you down, and the UI itself is slow, so the entire experience is extremely lethargic. The phone is available in three colors: red, black and silver. The red one we received for testing looked very ugly, but the black and silver ones on the site don't seem to look so bad. But the keys have a dirty blue backlight that simply destroy any amount of liking you may have had for the phone (especially if you have a red colored one).

The display is a CSTN 4k color at 101x80 pixels. This is almost the resolution of some secondary displays on flip phones, so when this phone's more than 1 inch big display is lit up, the super low resolution hits out at you like an old Atari 2600 at the time of today's PlayStations and Xboxes. Nokia's 4k color can look much better than this - the colors look washed out, and contrast is too high.

The font used for text as well as numbers is also abnormally huge - probably a good thing for the myopic, but not for everyone else. As a result, you have only three lines of usable text available. Reading long SMSes will require constant scrolling, and the phone tries to ease this a bit by activating auto-scroll everytime a message is opened, but if you don't read fast enough, its just quite pointless. There is no MMS feature in the phone, but at least there is T9 for SMS and EMS.

The phone has around 4MB of ROM and 320kb of memory for usage, out of which around 200kb is occupied already with ringtones and wallpapers. Removing this frees up around a total of 260kb usable memory. The phonebook stores upto 100 entries, and also supports Fotocall picture caller ID. The call log stores upto 20 missed, dialed, and received calls. There is obviously no way to expand on memory.

The phone offers 16-channel polyphonic ringtones. The ringtones are loud enough, and offer an ascending volume mode. The phone also offers vibration alert. The tones are all MIDI so you can download new ones to the phone via WAP. The games in the phone - Brick, Snake, Master Mind - are native and not Java, so you can't add new games to the phone.

The Philips 162 runs on a standard Li-Ion 720 mAh battery. The rated life of the battery is around 300 hours (over 12 days) and 4 hours of talk time. We did a combined test and it didn't run out for 4 days, which is an acceptably good performance.

At an MRP of Rs. 4,190, this phone is alright if you like the way it looks. You can pick it up for a street price of around 3,500 which makes it even better. However, if you really want a phone that's easy to use and has all the features of this phone, I think the Nokia 2600 would be a much better buy, at a street price of around Rs. 4,400.