| Siemens MC60 |
| General |
| Network | Gsm 900 / Gsm 1800 / Gsm 1900 |
| Announced | 2003, 3q |
| Status | Available |
| Size |
| Dimensions | 110 X 46 X 21 Mm, 88 Cc |
| Weight | 86 G |
| Display |
| Type | Cstn, 4096 Colors |
| Size | 101 X 80 Pixels, 7 Lines |
| | - Navy Key |
| Ringtones |
| Type | Polyphonic (16 Channels) |
| Amount | 38 + 4 Custom |
| Customization | Composer (cubasis Mixer), Download, |
| Vibration | Yes |
| Memory |
| Phonebook | 50 X 14 Fields, 5 Contact Groups |
| Call Records | 10 Dialed, 10 Received, 10 Missed Calls |
| Card Slot | No |
| | - Total Of 1 Mb
- 10 Voice Dial Commands
- 20 Voice Dial Numbers
- 500 Calendar Items |
| Data |
| Gprs | Class 8 (4+1 Slots), 32 - 40 Kbps |
| Hscsd | No |
| Edge | No |
| 3g | No |
| Wlan | No |
| Bluetooth | No |
| Infrared Port | No |
| Usb | |
| Features |
| Messaging | Sms, Ems, Mms, Email |
| Browser | Wap 1.2.1 |
| Clock | Yes |
| Alarm | Yes |
| Games | Yes, |
| Colors | 3 - Aquamarine, Titanium And Grenadine |
| Camera | Cif, 352 X 288 Pixels |
| | - Java
- T9
- Currency Converter
- Calculator
- Stopwatch
- Reminder List
- Calendar
- Voice Command/dial
- User Profiles
- Built-in Handsfree
- Exchangeable Covers |
| Battery |
| | Standard, Li-ion 700 Mah (eba-510) |
| Stand-by | Up To 250 H |
| Talk Time | Up To 6 H |
|
Siemens - MC60Siemens MC60
The MC60 is the new entry-level cameraphone from Siemens. It shares many traits with the SL55 and other recent Siemens handsets, but has a scaled-back feature set more appropriate for an inexpensive phone.
Entry-level Multimedia
Long gone are the days where a 256 color display is acceptable. Most new handsets shipping today have some sort of 65k color display. Siemens has often been a bit behind in this color-depth race, and as such we see the MC60 shipping with a 4k color display. Unfortunately the 4k color display on the MC60 is quite poor when compared to those from Nokia and others. Even when compared to the SL55. It appears to be caused by a poor choice of backlighting, which causes the display to have a dirty look to it. Whites just are never white. While it is quite easy to read, which is important, it looks no better than an early Sony Ericsson T68 256 color display - and it should look quite a bit better.
But unlike both the Sl55 and the T68, the MC60 comes with a built-in CIF camera. This means it can take photos with a maximum resolution of 352x288. Additionally, it supports other sizes such as 176x144, 320x240, and 160x120. The auto white balance setting for the camera does an admirable job of adjusting to different lighting sources. In fact, it did a better job than the manual Daylight/Indoor settings in my tests. The overall quality of the image, though, was still somewhat lacking. Focus was poor, contrast was a bit low. Acceptable for the random snapshot, I suppose, but not something you would want to MMS over to a friend who uses a phone with a big and bright display. You can see some example photos taken by the MC60 at the end of the story.
As I mentioned, the photos you take with the MC60 can be sent to others using MMS. In fact, this is the primary way to get photos off of the phone, since it has no infrared port. If you have a compatible Siemens serial cable, you can use that instead. There is a reasonable amount of storage available, bearing in mind that the camera is fairly low resolution. There appears to be just under 2MB total storage on the device, with about 650K available to the user by default. It is worth noting that most everything that comes pre-installed on the MC60 can be deleted by the user, freeing up more storage.
The MC60 has a 16 voice polyphonic system in it, which can create reasonably attractive music. Like earlier polyphonic Siemens phones, you can record your own ringtones directly onto the handset and then use them for alarms, call rigners, or whatever you like.
Not as light as it thinks
While the MC60 is a reasonably small and light phone, it is not quite so small and light as Siemens claims. Siemens claims a weight of 86g for the MC60. Our scales report something quite a bit heavier, though: 95g. 9g is not a lot of weight, of course, but in this case it does represent a full 10% increase over the claimed weight. Most handsets that we review are usually within a single gram of the claimed weight, or in some cases actually lighter. But even at 95g, the MC60 is still light enough.
In terms of size, the MC60 is a bit larger than a T68i or 6610. Part of that bulk comes from the replaceable cover system, which does not fit the phone body particularly tightly. In fact, the buttons on the keypad tend to rattle, and the cover never quite seemed to fully close. The buttons were a bit difficult to press at times, and the design of the keypad, while perhaps good for games, is very poor for normal phone use.
There are no buttons on the sides of the phone at all. No dedicated camera or volume controls, for example. The 5 keypad button has been preprogrammed for use as the camera button, which is acceptable. The buttons are all well backlit, and while the MC60 is missing a true 4-way directional controller, the up/down scroll button has a nice design and feel. Although the scroll controller does look like a 4-way deal, the left and right directions are actually the two main softkeys and can not be used for normal left/right movement.
A slightly awkward UI
These softkeys are part of the problem with the UI itself. For example, the default action is always defined to the right softkey, which is fine. The problem is that sometimes yes and no are flipped around, depending on what is being asked. This seems counterintuitive to me. Using the softkeys from the standby screen is also a bit odd, in typical Siemens fashion. You need to hold the button down to make use of the shortcut, not just press it. Merely pressing it normally will earn you a prompt asking if you wish to set the button instead. To me, it would make more sense to do this the other way around. Press normally to get what you programmed it for, long-press to do something unusual such as reprogramming it.
The main menu uses the same basic layout as the SL55 - the 3x3 icon grid first used by the T68. The number keys are mapped to the corresponding icons in the grid, as you would expect. In general the UI is reasonable, in spite of the softkey issues. A real 4-way controller would really improve things, though, since there are times when the UI really expects you to be able to move left or right - and you can't. There is always a way to do what you want, it is just not always the most direct or intuitive way.
One nice, if common, thing that the UI supports is themes. There are 4 themes included in the phone, and they can be activated from both the display settings and by selecting the actual theme file when browsing through the file system with the MC60's file manager.
A strong, basic phone
The MC60, in spite of the UI issues, makes for a good solid triband GSM (900/1800/1900Mhz) phone. The 700mAh battery is sufficiently large (40% larger than that of the Sl55) and manages to deliver more than a few hours of talk time or offer a week plus of standby capacity. The MC60 offers 7 user configurable profiles, plus an airplane mode that disables the radio unit. The audio quality of the handset is very good, plenty loud and very clear. It's reception, on the 1900Mhz band, at least, is also very strong and on par with the current range of Nokia handsets.
The weak side of the MC60's phone capabilities, though, is the contact management system - or lack thereof. Unlike the Sl55, which could store up to 14 different pieces of information per contact, the MC60 can store only Name, Number, Email address, and Group. It can not store multiple numbers per contact, and can store only a maximum of 100 numbers in the phone's internal storage. If you have a lot of contacts, you will be forced to make use of the SIM card's capacity instead.
The MC60 does not offer much in terms of connectivity, either. While we would never expect something like Bluetooth in this type of phone, we would expect and demand IR. The lack of IR on a cameraphone is stupid, plain and simple. The GPRS system on the MC60 is good, on the other hand. As is typical for Siemens phones, the configuration is a bit odd, but it works once you realize what parts need to be configured. There is a GPRS data counter to help you track your usage, too.
Last up we have the speakerphone and voice dial capabilities. The speakerphone, while good in a pinch, is too difficult to understand at times. The remote person hears very clear quality audio, but you as the MC60 user will often struggle to understand what has been said. The voice dial and voice commands system works quite well, however. You can assign a voice command to a contact or to most of the major menu system commands, which is quite nice.
Messaging
We have already touched upon the fact that the MC60 supports MMS messaging. It also supports EMS and, of course, basic SMS. The MMS editor is decent, but not quite as nice as some others on the market today. At least it does support multiple slides/frames in a message, and does offer up some interesting extra information such as a slide list, attribute list, and a list of extra headers.
Like other recent Siemens phones, the MC60 supports text modules as a flexible template system that can be used with any of the 3 messaging formats. This saves you some data entry time when sending common messages. When you need to type in something new, though, the MC60 offers T9 predictive text input. The unit I tested supported English, German, French, Italian, and Dutch in T9 - and a few other languages like Turkish without T9.
The MC60 has no email client. I find this odd since one of the few pieces of information you can store in a contact is their email address. It does support multiple profiles for the other messaging systems. This is good if you use a third party SMS server, for example.
Apps
One of the weaknesses of an entry-level phone, in general, is often the application support. This is the case with the MC60. For example, there is no ToDo List app included. And while there is a calendar application, there is no ability to synchronize the phone with your desktop PC - which is a big deal for many people.
The included calendar is fairly basic, offering a month and day view only. You can create anniversary, meeting, memo, call, or birthday events in the calendar. These events can be sent to another phone via SMS as a vCal file or as a simple text message. You navigate around the calendar by using the numeric keypad, but the 5 key does not act as a select button in this case. I really think that the keypad-as-navigation attempt in the MC60 is half-baked. They should have sprung for the extra two softkey buttons and made something usable.
The MC60 supports Java apps, as you would expect. They take a very long time to load, though, making the games not very useful for passing a quick moment when waiting for a bus or train. For example, the included Arena game took over a minute and a half to load and bring up the start screen, which is crazy. Additionally, you often get Java security prompts whenever an application tries to write anything to the file system. While I appreciate the fact that they are trying to protect us from rogue applications, it slows down the entire process of getting something done (even if just a game) and the prompts are likely to confuse a novice into thinking that the app/game in question is trying to do something evil when it is just trying to save the high-score list.
A few other apps are included in the MC60. Magic Photo is a picture puzzle game. There is a decent image editor included, too - but why bother? The standard alarm clock, calculator, currency converter, stopwatch, and countdown timer are also accounted for and can be easily assigned to a speed-dial button.
Not recommended
Our MC60 was packaged for Italian network TIM, and was running the following firmware: SW 05 var A 119, 2003-09-17
While the MC60 does have good reception an audio qualities, which are very important, and it does include a camera (which most people think is also important), it just doesn't do enough other things well enough. There are too many small quirks, many related to the keypad design. I could be convinced that this keypad design is worse than that of the Nokia 7210, and the actual button action itself is worse than most phones on the market today.
So with all of that said, I can not recommend that you buy a MC60. Even if your network offers the phone for free with a new contract, I am sure you will be able to find much better similarly "free" phones available to you. The MC60 gets a thumbs down vote. |
| Common misspellings on this brand: siem3ns , diemens |
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