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i-mate JAMA 201   

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By Alex Kidman, CNET.com.au
Jun 26, 2008

Every once in a while, you may find yourself in a US$2 shop, looking at plastic junk. Somewhere in amongst the endless little green army men, glittery ponies with toxic paint and velvet Elvis mirrors, you'll probably find a fake mobile phone or two. Toys, after all, have to move with the times, and the current new generation of kiddies can't be expected to get by with twine and baked bean cans forever.

Why are we bringing up fake mobile phones in a review of a phone that costs quite a bit more? Well, just as those fake mobile phones look somewhat like real mobiles but lack the critical components to make them actually functional, the i-mate JAMA 201 looks all the world like a proper Blackberry-style smart phone--except that it's lacking just about everything that you'd want in a real smart phone. Sure, it's cheap--but it's just not good enough for a real purpose.

Editors' note:

This review is based on tests done by our sister site CNET.com.au. As such, please note that there may be slight differences in the testing procedure and ratings system. For more information on the actual tests conducted on the product, please inquire directly at the site where the article was originally published. References made to some other products or telcos in this review may not be available or applicable in Asia.

Design

So having established what the JAMA 201's trying to do, it is worth pointing out that it certainly looks the part of a Blackberry-style smart phone, right down to the full QWERTY keyboard. Like most Blackberry clones, the keyboard is on the very small side, but then there's only so much key space you can dedicate to 113 x 63 x 14mm worth of design space.

Sadly, there's still a few flaws here as well. The space bar is, even for a smart phone, pretty small whichisaproblemifyouwantoseparateoutyourwords. The keys also have a distinctly slick feel to them, which makes it all too easy to slide over the key you intended to press and mis-type.

The five-way directional pad and selection keys above the keyboard have the same slick feel problem, and it took us a lot of patient repetition to get used to the fact that only the bottom half of the selection keys work with any kind of reliability when selecting things. The USB connector--for both charging and data transfer--hides behind a very solid rubber cap that is hard to remove. It was exasperating to open when we needed to, and we have this feeling it'll probably tear off most JAMA 201s rather quickly, even if only accidentally.

 
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