FLIGHT OF FANCY

When I probed about the company, I found that they have great marketing budgets and the phone is doing very well in north and west India. The phones are manufactured by some South Asian company (no details are available), imported into India by one Meridian Mobile, and are availabe at every mobile store you walk into.

The models are copies of all top-selling brands, whether it’s an i-mate design, a Samsung slide-up or the Motorola Razr lookalike, and are 30 per cent cheaper than the originals—a good option if you are price conscious.

But I must say, I loved what I saw. I played some music and, of course, played around with the menu. The call quality was good, though the speaker phones were loud, but with the built-in Bluetooth most would use the hands-free option anyway. The headphones that come with the phone are of poor quality, but it supports Bluetooth stereo profiles, so if you can get the headphones that ship with the Motorokr E6, you will love what this phone offers in terms of music. It also features an eight-band graphic equaliser, and the best bit is that most models ship with FM radio, so you have a multitude of options.

The menus are interactive and the interface has been designed well. In some models, the joystick has been replaced by a scroll wheel. It’s not like the one in Blackberry, but is more like a volume control dial that you can turn round to go through the menus.

Though I am not sure how the battery works, I wouldn’t bet on more than two hours of talk time. The camera’s picture quality is also bad—blurred, problems in focus and lots of grains—but if you intend to save the pictures only in the phone and not print or transfer them to a PC, the quality is tolerable. The good thing is that all the phones have a shutter to slide over the lens when not in use, protecting it from dirt and finger smudges.

Sadly, the corporate site for Fly mobiles (flymobile.in) is bad in design and interactivity: it has inconsistent information, the press section doesn’t work, and if you want to look for a service provider, you can’t because even this section doesn’t work. Having said that I believe these problems can be ironed out. For now, the best option is to head to a shop or check out their UK website at flymobile.co.uk

To sum it up, Fly phones make for good alternatives as a brand, but whether they are worth taking the risk only you can decide.
Gagandeep S. Sapra is Chairman and CEO of System 3 group of companies.