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| Sharp TM150 |
| General |
| Network | Gsm 900 / Gsm 1800 / Gsm 1900 |
| Announced | 2004, 3q |
| Status | Available |
| Size |
| Dimensions | 93 X 43 X 25 Mm |
| Weight | 113 G |
| Display |
| Type | Tft, 256k Colors |
| Size | 240 X 320 Pixels, 33 X 45 Mm |
| | - Second External 65k Colors Display 64 X 96 Pixels |
| Ringtones |
| Type | Polyphonic (40 Channels), Smaf, Midi, I-melody, Amr |
| Customization | Download, |
| Vibration | Yes |
| Memory |
| Phonebook | 500 Entries, Photo Call |
| Call Records | 10 Dialed, 10 Received, 10 Missed Calls |
| Card Slot | Sd/mmc, |
| | - 6 Mb Shared Memory |
| Data |
| Gprs | Class 10 (4+1/3+2 Slots), 32 - 48 Kbps |
| Hscsd | No |
| Edge | No |
| 3g | No |
| Wlan | No |
| Bluetooth | No |
| Infrared Port | No |
| Usb | Yes, V1.1 |
| Features |
| Messaging | Sms, Mms, Email |
| Browser | Wap 2.0/xhtml |
| Games | Downloadable, |
| Colors | |
| Camera | 1 Mp, 1144x858 Pixels, Video(128x96 Pixels), Macro |
| | - Java Midp1.0
- T9
- Organizer
- Calculator
- Currency Converter
- Voice Memo |
| Battery |
| | Standard Battery, Li-ion 780 Mah |
| Stand-by | Up To 200 H |
| Talk Time | Up To 3 H 20 Min |
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Sharp - TM150Sharp TM150
Sharp's latest phone for the US is the TM150, a phone made exclusively for T-Mobile, and is their first megapixel phone for the US. Indeed, "mobile imaging" is where the TM150 most excels in, with a decent macro mode, possibly the best screen you can get on any GSM phone, and the ability to store files on a SD/MMC card. There's also tri-band GSM support, allowing you to roam anywhere in the world, a WAP browser, Java game support, and polyphonic ringtones to round out the package. While I did have some issues with the phone, it's a very solid handset and is possibly the best cameraphone you can get in the US at the moment.
Physical Aspects
Sharp is famous for making clamshells, and the TM150 returns to their roots after making the TM100, a slider phone for T-Mobile. The TM150 is a fairly large clamshell, in the same league as the Motorola V600, or Sony Ericsson Z600, and at times can feel a little awkward in your hands, primarily because it is more square than its competition. While nobody will call the TM150 a lightweight at 110 grams, this seems reasonable compared to most other clamshells on the market, which are between 90 and 120 grams.
The exterior of the phone is reasonably attractive, and photos don't really do it justice. It's certainly a deviation from Sharp's previous silver and chrome color scheme, but it is still mostly silver. The upper side of the phone houses the megapixel camera, with "Mega Pixel" written around the lens, in case you should forget. Next to the lens is the speaker, which is only used for polyphonic ringtones. We also have the external color LCD, which is around 1" diagonally, and uses CSTN technology. Located on the right side of the phone is a macro switch that allows you to improve the quality of close-up photos. Located on the left side is the SD/MMC card slot and handsfree port. The charging/data port is located on the bottom of the phone. Both the headphone and charging ports had rubber covers over them that I found annoyingly hard to open.
Opening up the handset, we are greeted by a huge 2.2" display, which dominates the top half of the phone. The bottom half houses the keypad which includes a D-pad with 'OK' selection in the middle, two soft-keys, answer and hangup keys, a dedicated T-Zones button to quickly access the T-Mobile WAP portal, as well as the typical number keys. The '*' key doubles as a toggle for switching between the main and external display while in camera mode, and the '#' enables silent mode when held for 2 seconds. The keypad, overall, was a bit of a mixed bag for me. The D-pad was possibly one of the best I've ever used. On the other hand, the keys, though large and well spaced, lacked travel and didn't provide enough feedback. I also found that the phone would occasionally miss a character if you typed too fast, though this seems to be caused by the phone's software rather than the keypad. Another disappointment was the lack of backlighting on the D-pad and soft-keys. While it's possible to navigate the phone in the dark with no backlighting, I would have liked it simply to make the keypad feel complete.
Multimedia
First up, we have the internal display. Like the GX-30, the TM150 features a 262K color TFT display with a huge QVGA (240x320) resolution. Sharp's phones use a special CGS TFT display which allows them to make their displays much sharper than most standard TFT units. All this results in the best mobile phone display on the market. Not only is it bright, very easy to read in the sunlight, and unbelievably sharp, but it's also the most vivid phone display I've seen. This allows Sharp to pack more information on each screen, and makes viewing megapixel images shot with the phone a pleasure.
I wasn't as impressed with the external screen, though. While it can display 65K colors, the display uses CSTN technology which is less vibrant than TFT, and (generally) harder to read in the sun. The display lacks, and everything had a brown tinge to it. If I didn't have the specifications, I would have said the display was a 4K color unit. I also found it hard to use the external display in the daytime without the backlight on. The backlight can be activated by pressing one of the volume buttons on the side of the phone, but it's annoying to do so time after time. Personally, I would have preferred a simple monochrome unit with nice backlighting.
The only time I found the external display useful was when taking self portraits, at which time I used the external screen as a viewfinder. By simply pressing the '*' key while in camera mode, the external display is activated and shows the image, size selected, and quality of picture. It worked reasonably well, and is a handy, if not essential, feature.
Which brings me to the camera. Sharp has spent a considerable amount of time working on making their cameraphones the best on the market, and the TM150 is the fruit of their labours. It features a 1 megapixel CCD sensor with macro mode, night mode, brightness settings, a proper digital zoom, and 2 levels of image quality. On a bright sunny day, the TM150 is almost good enough that you could leave your normal camera at home, with excellent levels of detail and great colors. I also found its night mode more effective than many other devices. The CCD sensor was able to manage decent quality photos in minimal lighting. The TM150 uses a proper digital zoom, such that zoom is only allowed on the lower resolutions, only ever using the pixels it really has, never zooming past the capability of the camera's sensor. The camera can shoot at 5 different resolutions: 858x1144, 768x1024, 480x640, 240x320, and 120x160, and has 2 different quality modes: normal and fine.
You will find a gallery of sample photos taken with the TM150 located on the page after the conclusion of this review, page 5.
Once you're done with your photo, you can use the image retouch program on the phone to add effects such as sepia, ripples, emboss, and frames, as well as being able to add stamps and rotate the image. It's like your own mini Photoshop right on the phone. One other cool feature was the ability to use any part of a large image and resize it for use on the external screen, power on/off, incoming call alerts, and alarm images. You can even select the framed area you wish to crop.
Also available in the TM150 is a video mode which lets you take videos of up to 95KB in size with sound. While the quality of the video was reasonably OK for a cameraphone, the 95KB limit meant that most videos had to be kept to 5 or 6 seconds in fine mode, or around 10 seconds in normal mode. Michael had mentioned in his GX30 review that he was able to record videos up to 400KB, but I was unable to find this option. This is possibly a T-Mobile mandated limitation. The option to turn off sound to extend video recording is also available, and you can even use the external display for shooting video.
The TM150's sound system is reasonably good, even though the main speaker could be a little louder. It features 40 chord polyphonics. The TM150 lacks support for popular MP3 ringtones, but users can still make their own MMF or WAV format ringtones which will have a similar effect.
One of the more handy features of the TM150 is its SD/MMC card slot which (unofficially) supports sizes of 512MB or even 1GB. The phone comes bundled with a 32MB SD card, which is more than enough for megapixel photos, video, wallpapers and ringtones. The real advantage to having memory card support is the ability to play MP3 files from your phone, avoiding the need to buy a separate mp3 player. Unfortunately, the TM150 doesn't support MP3 playback, so it's likely that users will ever need more than the 32MB bundled. Using a SD card with the phone was reasonably painless, but you can only use predefined directories on the card to store data.
User Interface
The TM150 features a similar user interface to the GX30, but includes T-Mobile branding instead of the usual Vodafone. Sharp's user interface is great because it tries to take advantage of the high resolution screen. One example of this is the ability to put 2 full calendar months on the main display, letting you quickly look up that important date or task. When browsing through a menu it's possible to look at up to 8 lines of text, making it much easier to navigate than a comparable Nokia phone, which would display 2 lines of text at most.
The main menu can be accessed by pressing the middle button on the d-pad and is comprised of the typical 3x3 menu grid which most people favour. I didn't find an option to view the menu as a list.
The menu system is fast and intuitive, and I felt at home with it inside of 5 minutes. For most options you can simply click the right softkey and this will expand it, while the left softkey will take you back. I found it much faster using this method than the way most other companies do it. Users can also customise most shortcuts on the phone. Not only are the 4 directions on the d-pad customisable, but you can even set different features for the volume keys. Since the TM150 is made for T-Mobile, it has custom user interface colors of pink and white. One thing to keep in mind if you are considering buying this phone is that there is no theme support, so you're stuck with the pink bar along the bottom.
T-Mobile has also added their own little shortcuts throughout the menu's to entice you to use their services more often. For example, if you wanted to look at the pictures available, you would have the option of looking at My Album, My Journal, and T-zones Wallpapers, all of which are produced by T-Mobile.
Making and Receiving Calls
One of the advantages of using a clamshell form factor is the generally better audio transmission you get during a call. Being a large clamshell, the TM150's microphone sits right below my mouth when it's opened. This is probably one of the reasons calls sound reasonably good on the phone. The TM150 is a tri-band phone and I tested it on my home network in Australia, Optus, which generally has good reception throughout Sydney. I found coverage to be as good as any Nokia phone I've used, and the TM150 was able to pull decent reception even in fringe areas.
As with all phones, battery life on the TM150 varies greatly depending on what you do with the phone. In the TM150's case, I found that taking around 15 full size megapixel photos would decrease the battery to half capacity. This is not a bad result, especially when you consider the camera sensor is CCD, which is supposed to use more battery power than your standard CMOS camera sensor, and the high-res screen was powered the whole time. Under normal use (30 minutes of talking per day, a few photos, and 2-3 messages) the TM150 lasted 3 days, which is a respectable amount. I was also able to manage 3 hours straight of talk time in a separate test.
Sharp's contact management system is reasonably good, with the ability to add 3 phone numbers, 2 email addresses, a street address, and notes for each contact. You can also assign speed dial numbers (accessed by holding down a key on the keypad), a custom ringtone, and a photo for Caller ID. One feature sorely lacking, though, was voice dialling. Considering most manufacturers have this feature as standard on their phones, and some have even gone further to even include voice control, the lack of voice dialling on the TM150 is fairly significant. I, personally, never use voice dialling so it wasn't a big deal for me, but some of you may find it handy.
Connectivity
Considering that the TM150 is designed by T-Mobile to utilise their network for connectivity, it would be unfair to judge the TM150 by our normal standards. The only ways to get data on or of the TM150 are via the SD/MMC slot, WAP, or using data cable. The data cable should allow you to synchronise your contacts and other data, but I didn't have one available to test. Between the data cable and the SD card slot, I think most users should be able to get the basics done, even though infrared and Bluetooth would have been handy additions.
One of the best features of the TM150 is its WAP browser. Not only is it one of the fastest WAP browsers I've used, but it fully takes advantage of the high-resolution screen with a fine font size, allowing you to fit more on a page than ever before. The browser also supports the latest WAP 2.0 and xHTML protocols, allowing you to access any WAP site on the net. All of these combine to deliver the best WAP experience I've had on a non-smartphone. I suspect this WAP setup is T-Mobile's special weapon designed to make you spend hundreds of dollars in GPRS charges every month. Thankfully, T-Mobile users can get unlimited GPRS for only $20, which is very little when compared with the small fortune many of us around the world spend on GPRS.
Messaging
Messaging on the TM150 is a pretty straightforward affair, with support for SMS, MMS, and E-Mail. While it does support T9, I could see no way of adding your own words to the T9 dictionary. The rest of the features worked as advertised, with a comprehensive MMS editor, allowing you to attach pictures, sound, and video files with minimal fuss.
While the MMS editor didn't have support for multiple slides, you could attach multiple pictures and other items to a message.
Email was very painless, from the setup of accounts to receiving email everything worked just fine. It's possible to have multiple email accounts (not locked to T-Mobile), and you can also select, if you wish, to download headers only, or a specific number of KB from each message.
Applications
The TM-150 comes with some basic organiser functions such as a calendar, a comprehensive alarm application, a calculator, and voice notes. The calendar application looks great and uses the TM-150's high-res screen to display a full calendar month without the user having to squint to see the screen. Unfortunately the calendar app is only very basic, and won't really cut it for anyone who relies on their phone for organising their life. For example, you can only add 3 notes per day, and none of these can have an alarm or reminder associated with it.
The alarm application supports 5 alarms and also allows for daily repeats. I would have like to have seen weekly and monthly repeats too, since this is something many people would find handy. The calculator app is very easy to use and supports operations with 12 digits, as opposed to 8 or 10 on most other phones. There's also a handy voice notes application that lets you record 60 second voice clips on your phone. A 60 second clip takes around 40KB to record so you can store a fairly large number of them in the phone's 6MB memory.
Conclusion
The TM150 is the second Sharp megapixel phone I've had a chance to test, the first being the GX30, and I was overall very impressed. While there were a few features I found lacking such as voice dialling and speakerphone, I think most normal users will find this phone very appealing. The camera and screen were the highlights of the phone and still manage to blow me away every time I see them, and I've had this phone for over 2 weeks. I'm giving the TM150 a "Recommended" rating simply because it's so good at what designed to do. |
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