CECT A380i mobile

Having liked the look and feel of the new iphone but not being able to afford one, I read about CECT mobiles in a PC mag. I started searching for such mobiles and decided on the A380i as it seemed to have good reviews on various websites etc. I didn't want to buy from abroad so chose a seller on Ebay that was shipping from the UK. I received my mobile on 14th February, it comes with 2 Lion batteries, a charger with UK adaptor (that also doubles as a data cable), earphones, UKmanualand silicone cover.

The phone can hold 2 sims, the primary sim needs to be put in the Sim 1 slot. You can only use one sim at a time but its fairly easy to switch. There were some preloaded mp3's and mp4 files but many of the songs are chinese. When you attach your phone to your PC via the data cable its basically a case of drag and dropping your files into the desired folder e.g Music, Photos, Video's etc. You can use MP3 tunes for ringtones and photo's for wallpaper or screensavers. The phone has got a memory card installed and I assume this can be upgraded to a larger one if required.

The layout of the menu on the home screen is fairly similar to the iphone but you can't search through your files etc like you can with an iphone. It has a shake feature that you can use to change wallpaper or MP3's, but so far I've found this annoying as when I've put the phone down with little movement the wallpaper has changed and I can't find a way to disable this feature so far. I would imagine that if your out and using the phone as an MP3 player it would easily jump to the next tune with the slightest movement.

Moving onto SMS so far I am very disapointed with how this works. You have the choice of handwriting with the stylus or using the tiny qwerty keyboard at the bottom of the touch screen. Having been very used to the layout of a standard phone keyboard I found this method slow and inaccurate ( and I can touch type on a keyboard!) The handwriting recognition method is extremely slow and often picks the wrong character.

If you want to use MMS or WAP you will need to download the WAP and MMS settings from your network provider before you can do this, I went to the T-Mobile website and downloaded them from there but had to pick another phone from the list as obviously they don't list foreign phones.

To conclude the phone is a good buy if you want an iphone look alike but dont expect to get all the features of one.

I don't think I would buy another foreign phone as if you decide you don't like the phone you can't send it back, at least when purchasing an english phone you have 14 days to decide if you like it and can go into a shop and try the features before you buy.