Myphone T23 Duo biased review

Myphone is a filipino cellphone company which sells cheap cellphones with decent quality. Most cellphones are designed with the filipino in mind. This is their website. I assume that they outsource production to chinese  factories, which is common practice. Being a Filipino company, support and service is much better than buying a chinese phone from an unknown chinese company.

I'm reviewing the Myphone T23 Duo. See here for specs.

First of all, let me be clear, this will be a slightly biased review. I am comparing it to my HTC gene windows 6 phone and a relative's iphone 3g and I find that the usability is markedly inferior, although much more affordable. So I will concentrate on the disadvantages.



A relative of mine bought one and I got to use it. This phone is perfectly usable and cheap at only PhP 3300 or us$ 76. It works and the dual sim feature is handy. The dual sim is actually dual active sim which means both sims are active at the same time. You can receive and send calls and texts any time from either sim. Some dual sim phones are not dual active. They require you to switch from one sim to another and the inactive sim is off and cannot recieve. Dual active sim is a trademark feature of myphone.



Some complaints:

* Scrolling is a heck of a lot harder than with an iphone because with an iphone you just do it, press your finger on the screen and flick (move finger in one of the 4 cardinal directions). Here you have to be conscious to flick the screen on a location on an empty location, i.e. there is no icon or menu item on the location that you press-flick. Otherwise the phone will not interpret it as a scroll command, it will instead interpret it as pressing that icon/menu item. 
* There is no alternate method of scolling like windows scroll bars or physical buttons.  
* no feature where any press on the screen causes a sound, but there is a feature where any press on the screen causes vibration
* whenever you make a call, you ALWAYS go to an unnecessary menu where you select fake background noise for your call
* volume controls are buried under many submenus
* stupid vibration controls. The vibration is either on or off. If you choose your ring tones to also have vibration, you also turn on the "every press on the screen has vibration" function. The volume and other controls for the ringtone should be separate
* no option for an onscreen QWERTY keyboard
* the virtual keyboard is, like in most cellphones, a 0 to 9 numeric phone keypad. The alphabet has 26 letters and there are only 10 buttons so for some letters you need to press one of the numbers multiple times, unless you use the predictive input dictionary. For example, press the number 2 and you get A, press it two times and you get B, press it 3 times and you get C.
* corollary to the above, with a physical keypad it's easy to close your eyes and press the key multiple times and get the desired letter. However with this phone, the quality of the touch screen is poor so a lot of times, if you press the key multiple times, one or more of the presses might not register. I assume I'm too fast and with practice you can get the timing right.
* in nokia phones, pressing on a key for a long time causes the key to ouput a number instead of a letter. This is a nifty shortcut. Example, press 2 for one or two seconds and instead of an A, you get a 2. For this phone it looks like you still will get an A. For this phone you need to manually switch from alphabet to numeric mode
* in nokia phones, press the delete key for one or two seconds and the entire screen is cleared. This shortcut is not available on this phone
* The camera has around a 1/4 to 1/2 second delay from the time you press the button, the shutter sound plays and the image is actually captured


The charger is a relatively cheap 220v to USB charger with a USB to mini usb cable. Since it uses mini usb, fiunding replacement cables and chargers will not be a problem. You can of course charge via the USB port on a PC. Some software is supplies so you can copy files and contacts to and from the PC.


It also has bluetooth and a mini-sd card slot.