BenQ-Siemens EF81

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Features
The EF81 is a fully featured multimedia phone. The most flashy feature is a Bluetooth application that lets you control your PC from your phone--as proved by a BenQ-Siemens representative at its UK launch, who used it to control his PowerPoint presentation. Of course, when we tried it we found it much harder to do and didn't manage to set it up properly, but it is theoretically possible.

One feature that does work well is the PC software, which lets you synchronize your Outlook contacts, tasks and memos with your phone at the click of a button. It's easy to install and after five minutes we had synchronized our computer and phone without any drama.

Have a look at the Motorola V3x's spec sheet and you'll notice this phone is almost identical. There's 3G connectivity and a video-calling feature that works very well with the swivelling camera. We found it very similar to making a video call on the V3x, with the added bonus of being able to place the EF81 on a table and set the angle of the camera and screen so you can do hands-free video calls.

Unfortunately, the 2-megapixel camera is extremely disappointing when used to take photographs. For starters, there's no flash, but since most mobile phone flashes don't really work this can be forgiven. More importantly, there's the issue of having to use the camera when the EF81 is shut (unless you hold it backwards) and the lack of a dedicated shutter button, so you have to do a bit of button pushing before you can actually take a photo.

Once you've taken a picture or a video, you can view it in the 'my stuff' section or use the media player. The media player supports a variety of formats including MP3, AAC, AAC+, AAC++, MPEG-4, 3GPP, H.263 and Real video. You can also play music through the loudspeaker, which is a little tinny but louder than most phone speakers we've heard. We liked the 64MB of internal memory and expandable microSD slot that can support up to 1GB, which means plenty of storage space for music and photos--although a 2GB capacity would have been nice. One niggle we have with the media player is the lack of adjustable settings. Unlike other media players, there's no way to adjust the equalizer or play mode.

Another thing that annoyed us, but might have been a problem specific to our handset, was that it deleted text messages when we received more than one at a time. For example, when coming out of a Tube station, if there were three text messages waiting to be sent to the EF81, it deleted one of them. Aside from that, the phone worked well and there weren't any outstanding problems that had us pulling our hair out.

Other features include Bluetooth, MMS, SMS, a calendar, an alarm clock, a calculator, a unit converter, a stopwatch, voice recording, voice dialling, Java games, polyphonic and MP3 ringtones, themes and time zones.

Performance
The 2-megapixel camera is particularly disappointing and unlike the V3x's camera, which also has a 2-megapixel sensor, the photos we took came out blurry and looked faded. When we took photos in normal light they came out looking like it was a foggy day and in dark conditions you could barely make out what the subject of the photo was.

The audio on calls was not great and there was a great deal of feedback from the microphone. When we called someone we could hear our own voices over the voices of the people we called, which made it hard to talk comfortably.

On the upside, the EF81's battery life was good--it's quoted at 300 hours standby and 240 minutes talk time.