Monday, October 25, 2010

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.

16 comments:

Anonymous said...

"You can receive and send calls and texts any time from either sim."

partly incorrect as answering or making a call on one line (sim) effectively disallows making or receiving calls on the other line (sim).

in your "complaints", you mention nokia phones a bit but you indicated you would compare it to an HTC gene and iphone3g. please take note that not all nokia phones utilize the same operating system and pressing the delete key for 2 seconds does not clear the screen on all nokia phones.

Vince said...

"partly incorrect as answering or making a call on one line (sim) effectively disallows making or receiving calls on the other line (sim)."

ok, nice to know that

"please take note that not all nokia phones utilize the same operating system and pressing the delete key for 2 seconds does not clear the screen on all nokia phones. "

maybe. But most of the lower end or old models that I used all have that feature.

thanks for the added info.

Anonymous said...

How to Turn Off Vibration

Setting>User Profile>Customize>Volume>Key Tone>Vibration makikita mo un sa taas

Vince said...

Anonymous, thats not the problem. My problem is how to turn off the vibration whenever I touch the touchscreen while keeping the vibration for SMS and voice call tones on. If I turn one on, both turn on.

mhari said...

vince what anonymous gave you is how 2 turn the vibrate off so that it will not vibrate on every press on your phone. ~mhari

Anonymous said...

How can I forward messages to my caller groups?

Thank You..

Vince said...

"How can I forward messages to my caller groups?"


sorry, like I said, I do not own the phone, a relative of mine does and I just got to use it. So I dont know how to do that. That phone has a printed manual and AFAIK a PDF of the manual can be downloaded from the myphone website. Maybe the answer is there.

Unknown said...

The disadvantages you pointed out to some degree are true, but i would want to add something here if i may, it wouldn't be a balance review unless you give the advantages as well right? not to argue but just to help would be buyers to make an informed decision, here are a few advantage of the myphone t23 duo:

1. large screen size - the phone boast of a large 2.8" 240x320 pixel QVGA screen. with 256K color range. great for surfing the net! and i mean GREAT!

2. java capable - you can install java game or apps optimized for touchscreen phone and extend the phones capabilities! (OM 5.1 free internet anyone? wink wink)

3. large built-in phone memory - a whooping 20MB. okay, okay, i know its not much but where talking cheap phones here and a lot (and i mean a lot) of china phones come with a minuscule 700+kb of memory, so having a 20MB of memory on a cheap phone is a hell of a lot of elbow room.

4. touch screen - it not really that bad, really! compared to other china touchscreen phone on the market its pretty responsive. okay, sometimes it gets a little frustrating when learning how to use the phone's touchscreen. but with practice, you'll get the hang of it and will soon be touch typing those frustrations away!

5. Micro SD - it supports up to 8GB of extra memory so there's no file too big for you to carry.

6. Long battery life - like the energizer bunny, this phone just keeps on going... and going... and going... i can surf the internet all day long using this phone and i wouldn't even get a nudge out of the indicator. It could last up to 5 days of normal use. sometime i would have to beg it to just die already so i can recharge it.

Other note-worthy features:
Bluetooth 2.0
3.5mm audio jack
slim profile

There you go! For a phone with a price tag of around Php 3300+K who can blame it for its short-comings. but i think it really does compensate with some nice features and advantages. Great bang-for-bucks IMO.

Unknown said...

Does this model have other colors?

With regards to its advantages and disadvantages, since this is a very cheap touchphone don't expect to see high end features. But I can still say it's worth buying.

Anonymous said...

Hey! it can access internet without using wifi or hotspot and most of all even without a load! browsing the internet is so easy not to mention it's also free! They say you can't play videos from you tube on myphone t23, so what I could easily download it directly to myphone t23 using my trick operamini 4.2 and watch it hassle free!

Anonymous said...

hmmm. how do you go online without load? free? how? :)

Anonymous said...

Vince, you can turn off the vibrate every press by turning the vibration via MUSIC by pressing the speaker icon then vibration.
Then you can activate the vibration for message and calls via sound settings in the SETTINGS.

Anonymous said...

"They say you can't play videos from you tube on myphone t23, so what I could easily download it directly to myphone t23 using my trick operamini 4.2 and watch it hassle free!"

Whattrick opermini 4.2?? Where did you download it?? PLEASE TELL ME!!! Thanks!!

Anonymous said...

not only download videos on youtube on my t23, coz i can also watch streamin youtube videos on it w/out a load or or wifi using bolt browser! hehehe!

Unknown said...

for those interested in maximizing the full potential of their T23 you can visit: http://symbianize.com/showthread.php?t=322118&highlight=t23. nandyan na din ung pina-katatanong ninyong free internet. hehe. enjoy! by the way the phone will go on sale for only 2,488 on april 1 (nationwide). grab one now!

Anonymous said...

you can hold clear and all the text will disappear.

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