| Siemens SK65 |
| General |
| Network | Gsm 900 / Gsm 1800 / Gsm 1900 |
| Announced | 2004, 3q |
| Status | Available |
| Size |
| Dimensions | 120 X 47 X 22 Mm, 115 Cc |
| Weight | 144 G |
| Display |
| Type | Tft, 65k Colors |
| Size | 132 X 176 Pixels |
| | - Integrated Cross-type Qwerty Keyboard
- Downloadable Pictures |
| Ringtones |
| Type | Polyphonic (40 Channels) |
| Customization | Download, |
| Vibration | Yes |
| Memory |
| Phonebook | 2000 |
| Call Records | 100 Dialed, 100 Received, 100 Missed Calls |
| Card Slot | No |
| | - 64 Mb Shared Memory (30 Mb Available To User) |
| Data |
| Gprs | Class 10 (4+1/3+2 Slots), 32 - 48 Kbps |
| Hscsd | No |
| Edge | No |
| 3g | No |
| Wlan | No |
| Bluetooth | Yes, V1.2 |
| Infrared Port | Yes |
| Usb | Yes |
| Features |
| Messaging | Sms, Mms, Email |
| Browser | Wap 2.0/xhtml |
| Games | 3 - Chess Master, Golf And Sea Battle + Downloadable, |
| Colors | Black Silver |
| Camera | No |
| | - Java Midp 2.0
- Push To Talk (voip Service)
- E-mail Push Based On Blackberry Built-in Technology From Rim
- T9
- Syncml
- Organiser
- Built-in Handsfree |
| Battery |
| | Standard, Li-ion 750 Mah (eba-660) |
| Stand-by | Up To 250 H |
| Talk Time | Up To 5 H |
|
Siemens - SK65Siemens SK65 w/BlackBerry
When we first caught wind of the Siemens SK65, I said to myself what I imagine many people did: "Huh. Why didn't I think of that?"
The the split body X shaped form factor seems so obvious to me now, especially after having used a Nokia 6820 for so long. But I suppose somebody had to actually think it up, obvious or not, and I'm just glad that Siemens not only thought of it, but actually did something with the thought.
SK65 Physical Design
Make no bones about it: the SK65 is a large phone. It weighs nearly as much as a Sony Ericsson P910, coming in at 147g. It is long and thick, too: 123mm x 47mm x 22mm. But it still fits the normal candybar form factor, and as such, is very pocketable. The gloss black and matte silver finish is very attractive, but the black surfaces are very prone to smudging. The front of the handset is home of the large, bright 132x176 pixel 64K color display, the metal screen inlay speaker grille, and the keypad and controls. The keypad, though low on the SK65's body, is quite usable, has no odd quirks to it, and is lit with a soft white backlight. The directional controller, or d-pad, also works very well. It is both large and easy to control accurately. The dual softkey call control buttons on either side of the d-pad also work well as long as you don't press them too hard. Since the pressing on the top end of the keys is how you get the softkey functionality and pressing on the bottom the call control features, pressing too hard can sometimes confuse the phone as to which you wanted since they don't have a solid pivot point in the middle. But that really will only be a problem for button mashers.
Up top on the SK65 you will find little more than a subdued IR port. On the bottom is the now familiar Siemens data/charger port. The back of the SK65 is very plain, being painted a semi-gloss black and having little to attract attention other than the external antenna port located there. The left side of the SK65 is bare, and the right side houses a pair of multi-purpose buttons that control volume and access a number of other features that I will discuss further in a minute.
But the real reason you are here is the hidden part of the design. The X Factor, so to speak. For when you turn the two halves of the SK65's body 90 degrees in opposite directions, a beautiful, very usable full QWERTY keyboard is revealed. For me, this keyboard design surpasses anything I have used on a mobile device so far. It is far and away better than the keyboards on Nokia's 6800 series, which are also split, and much more spacious and comfortable than the small thumbboards found on devices like PalmOne's Treo line. I even prefer it over Nokia's 9300 and 9500 Communicators. The design allows for the dedicated numeric keypad to be fully accessible. The fact that most basic punctuation characters can be accessed without a shift, and that the keyboard sports a very BMW-like red-orange backlight really seals the deal for me. It feels very solid and strong. I truly love this design.
Using the SK65
Siemens SK65 (ZOOM)
The SK65 is very much a Siemens phone when it comes to usability. It makes use of the same OS you see in the S65 and similar models. You will probably either love its quirks, or be muttering under your breath for a while until you unlearn the habits that were picked up using other mobile phones. For example, the ability to program most any key to do whatever you like is really great - you can change the softkeys, assign menu items to the numeric keypad, reprogram the alternate functions of the volume keys, etc. But the odd Siemens inconsistencies that go with that, such as getting prompted to see if you really wanted to access that function when you short-press a soft-key instead of long-pressed it as Siemens intended, and the difficulty in reprogramming those keys after you have set them, that part is sure to frustrate a new Siemens user.
Part of that user programmability is also tied to the keyboard. When you put the SK65 into the X form, you can have the phone automatically start one of a number of functions. In my case I have it go into the SMS text editor. I could have set it to start the BlackBerry application if I had wanted to, but since I don't have BlackBerry support on my T-Mobile account, I was only able to use the most basic BlackBerry services hooked up to a MyBlackBerry.com account. I can say, however, that the SK65's display and software seem to be up to the task. You can actually get a lot of text on the display in the BlackBerry application if you set the font to small. I really like it and just wish I could have tested it out more fully.
Some of the nicer parts of the Siemens UI include the ability to use the d-pad to enter and leave menus by pressing right or left. Right selects/enters a menu, left is like a back key. Very convenient; more companies should do this. Siemens also makes sure that you can use the numeric keypad to whiz through the menus, leaving the d-pad untouched in most cases. It is much faster, for example, to hit menu, 9, 8 to get to the Communications menu than it is to d-pad through the 3x3 icon grid main menu and the various lists of possible menu items in the Settings section. The UI doesn't have a colorful themes system and can appear a bit plain, but overall I like it quite a bit.
The SK65 As A Phone
The Siemens SK65 has most everything you'd want in a basic phone. The SK65's audio is really quite good. Phone audio expert "Mom" thinks that the outbound audio is about as good as it gets on a GSM phone. Inbound audio is equally good. The speakerphone is adequate, but would have been very good if it offered a bit more volume to the remote callers. The SK65 has pretty good reception characteristics on the 1900Mhz band, at least, and also support the 900 and 1800Mhz bands used by most of the world outside of North America. And while on the subject, Siemens USA has told me that we will not be seeing a SK66 US model at all, which is a shame. One thing to keep in mind in weak signal areas is that when in the X configuration used for typing on the keyboard, your right hand is going to block the antenna. So be sure to remove your hand before you try to send off that SMS or email message.
Battery life could be the SK's Achilles Heel. It scored a nice 4.75 hours of talk time in our tests, which is just fine, but standby time seems to be a real issue. While we didn't have a chance to officially test standby time, it seems excessively short; likely due to the large and very bright display and the additional backlight load from the full keyboard, which I used often. You are going to be charging the SK65 every other day at least. I'd wager. Heavier users are going to being doing a daily charge.
That's a shame, really, because the SK65 is a really good basic phone otherwise. The contact management system is very good, for one. You can enter multiple numbers, an email address, a street address, and even a birthday with an automatic reminder. The contact search system lets you enter multiple letters at one time so that you can type O-R-Y to skip to Oryl instead of going through a list of every contact that starts with O. You can only search based on last name, though, which I find rather odd. But it is only that: odd. It's not a deal breaker.
The SK65 has a very nice profile system, as you might expect. You can set different ringtones for recognized and unrecognized phone numbers, set volume levels, and even configure the behaviour of the backlight and the font size for each profile. There are 7 normal profiles that you can choose from, plus an airplane mode that turns off the GSM radio. You have the option of copying from an existing profile to make a new one, too. Nicely done.
Considering that the SK65 has no real multimedia capabilities, I would say that the 8.5MB of on-board memory (5MB free) should be more than adequate for most people. That should allow for quite a few email attachments and 3rd party Java applications.
The only glaring omission I see, apart from more standby battery life, is the lack of voice control/dialing. The SK65, like too many other Siemens phones, does not support any kind of voice dialing or other voice control. That is really not acceptable for a business oriented phone. For a phone like the SK65 that supports Bluetooth headsets, that's just plain wrong.
SK65 Connectivity
As I just mentioned, the SK65 supports Bluetooth, which is great. The lack of voice dialing mars that support a bit, which is a shame. A few other odd behaviours with Bluetooth headsets also are present. In fact, the reason this review is 5 weeks late is that I was having Bluetooth problems with headsets and eventually had to get a new SK65 from Siemens since a user installable firmware update was not available (they are available now, though). But even in this new model, there are issues. When making a call, for example, you have to wait until you hear the first ring before you can manually transfer sound to the headset. Since there is often a delay in initiating a call, this is a real problem. Why there is no way to have the sound automatically transferred to the headset escapes me. That would avoid the problem completely. Inbound calls also take a bit too long before they start ringing in a headset, which makes it more likely that the caller will hang up before you can pick up the call with the headset.
But outside of headset support (which worked fine, once connected in a call), Bluetooth support was spot on. I especially applaud the support for the Bluetooth OBEX Sync profile. It is by far the easiest and fastest way to sync up a phone. If you aren't quite up to speed with Bluetooth yet, the SK65 also has a fully functional IR port that you can use with other mobile devices and your laptop.
The SK65 supports GPRS data for both WAP and traditional Internet access. The setup of the GPRS system is a bit disorganized, in my opinion, but it works fine once you get everything lined up. I had no problems with it at all. I do wish for a future version of the SK65 that supports higher-speed EDGE data, though.
SK65 Messaging
Apart from the novel keyboard, messaging on the SK65 is pretty straight forward. SMS is simple and easy to use, and makes use of the Siemens Text Modules capability that lets you insert pre-defined bits of text, such as "I'm running late" or "The rain in spain falls mainly on the plain" and other things everybody uses daily.
The MMS editor in the SK65 is nice, too. Siemens offers the ability to make use of multiple MMS "layouts" for setting up your message, and even lets you configure such things as text and background colors, or setting a picture as a background image. You can have multiple pages/slides in your message, but you can not define the amount of time to display each one. When you create a new message, you have the option of saving it as a template for use in future messages, too. I kinda like that.
I liked the SK65's email system as well. It offers a lot of configuration options and worked for sending and picking up mail with both POP and IMAP without a problem. You can configure the SK65 to download only messages that are smaller than a certain size (such as 4KB), tell it whether to download the header only or the entire message, and say whether or not you want it to leave the messages on the server after they have been downloaded. The only problem I saw is that you couldn't instruct it to download only the first so many KB of all messages, though you can have it prompt you for what to do as it gets to each email, which is not really practical. Overall the system worked.
While the SK65 does support T9 predictive text input, it is not really that important. When you have a real keyboard at your fingertips, there are few situation when you are going to want to use T9 instead. You do have that option, though.
SK65 Applications
The SK65 offers a well rounded application suite. The Calendar app (started with a short press of the up volume button) is really great looking and very easy to use. As with the contacts, calendar entries can be synchronized with your PC either by using the Bluetooth Sync profile or the sync software offered by Siemens.
Other useful apps include the task list, notes, missed appointments list, a voice recorder, a world clock, and a calculator. The calculator offers a lot more functionality than most, including % and 1/x functions, but not as easy to use as some others I have recently tested. The alarm app only supports one alarm at a time, but does allow you to configure it to repeat on particular weekdays. You will also find a unit converter, stopwatch, countdown timer, a SyncML app, and a FileSystem manger.
Siemens supplied our SK65. It ran the following firmware: SK6R v42, 2004-09-07
Hidden away a bit deeper in the filesystem are a few more applications - and the games. There is an application that will provide you with the emergency phone number for any country (ie. 911 in the USA). The nicest app was the survival dictionary, though. It gives you basic phrase translations between English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. The games were also pretty nice. SeaBattle is a slightly more complex version of the classic Battleship game, and Golf Pro 3D is a cool looking 3D Golf Game, as you might have guessed. ChessMaster is also included, and is just like the original game you might have played as a kid on your old 8 bit computer.
Conclusion
I really love the SK65. I've been using it for the past 6 weeks, almost to the complete exclusion of all others. I just can't get enough of the keyboard, the solid feel, and good looks. I do miss proper standby times, though, and am less than thrilled with the Bluetooth headset integration (including a complete lack of voice dialing). But even with those negatives in mind, I still keep using it.
As you might expect, I give it a Highly Recommended rating.
If the Siemens SK65 just doesn't do it for you, though, you can always consider the RIM 7100 series devices that are being offered in various forms, or devices with thumbboards like the PalmOne Treo 650. |
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