O2 Ice 3G Phone

Designed exclusively for O2, the O2 Ice is the first in a series of innovative, insight-led, consumer-friendly 3G phone that have been specifically designed with the user in mind. With it’s smooth, sleek white casing, they think they’ve hit on a fashion winner ready to attract the dedicated followers of fashion, who would otherwise be after a slim Motorola or chic LG Chocolate.

O2 Ice will be a basic candybar handset with a front-mounted camera for video calling and a 1.3 megapixel camera for photo shots at the back. Besides a 176 x 220 display, built-in MP3 Player, Bluetooth and a MicroSD card slot, the phone has 32MB of memory on board and feature tri-band GSM/GPRS radio in addition to its 3G support and come in a iPod-white design.The TFT screen provides up to 262k colours on its clear display.

The phone weighs 90 grams which is definately light for a 3G mobile phone & measures 115 x 49 x 14 mm which provides the user with a compact & easy to operate 3G handset. The keypad is well set out which makes dialling & text input easy for the user. The simplicity of the design is echoed in the menu. There are only 9 options, with a simple grid icon display, although this can be changed. For those who want 3G without a million other option this will work well.

There are lacks of the O2 Ice phone too where I picked from the Tech Digest.

The design is a key seller for this phone, but when you actually get it out of the box, it’s a huge disappointment. The white plastic looks tacky, whilst the candybar styling makes it look like a remote control - a phone masquerading as a tacky remote is not going to be a massive seller. However, this is a complete Marmite phone - some people love it, whilst others hate it, so I’m willing to admit when I’m wrong should this go ahead and be the most popular phone ever sold.

O2 seem to have sacrificed a lot of other functions in the quest to make this a simple 3G phone. There’s no shortcuts, except to the contact list, so you find yourself spending a lot of time going through the menu in order to get to what you want. The camera is also only 1.3 megapixels, and you experience a shutter lag of about 2 seconds, so be prepared for some blurry shots.

The other thing that ensured I’d never use this phone out of choice was the selection of ringtones. I was left mortified every time it rang, having decided that a circus tone was the least offensive of those offered.

The big services they’re pushing with this phone is Ebay and Streetmap. I have to say that despite only having a small screen, the Streetmaps did appear easier to read than on many other devices, with the maps being adjusted so you could get a proper idea of where you were. However, for the amount of effort they’ve put into plugging the Ebay service I was expecting more. Yes, you can enter th ‘My Ebay’ section and check on your auctions, but that’s as far as it goes. There’s no way of bidding on anything, which makes it pretty useless in my eyes. I can’t imagine much worse than being able to check to see you’ve been outbid and then being able to do absolutely sod all about it.

Please read more about the phone specifications and features from Yourmobilephonereviews.co.uk.

Written by martin on February 13th, 2007 with 2 comments.
Read more articles on O2.

• [+] Digg: Feature this article
• [+] Del.icio.us: Bookmark this article
• [+] Furl: Bookmark this article