Acting pricey

INTEXs latest economy phone,is built on the BlackBerry model and comes with a QWERTY keypad,Wi-Fi and Push email.

Colour screens,FM radio,cameras and now Wi-Fi; budget phone makers are quickly upgrading their products with the latest features,putting them almost at par with their fancier and expensive cousins.

IN 6633,INTEXs latest economy phone,is obviously built on the BlackBerry model and comes with a QWERTY keypad,Wi-Fi and Push email among other features. The phone looks quite sophisticated with a black body and red highlights designed in a way that could have been tacky,but in this case the expensive phone look has been pulled off brilliantly.

Despite being a slim phone,its physical weight seems to be inversely proportional to how feature-heavy it is.The phone comes with a 2 megapixel camera and the picture quality is not great despite the flash. There is an additional VGA resolution camera in the front,to be used for an interesting feature called face-to-face,the video chat feature available on this ultra budget phone. Being 2G,it will work through GPRS,so its users will be able to video-chat before 3G users in India. The camera also serves as a webcam when the phone is attached to a computer.With its PUSH email facility users can access up to ten email accounts on different portals. The handset comes with a dual SIM feature (GSM,GSM),and has up to four hours of talk time. Plus,unlike the BlackBerry and other smartphone devices,the keys on this handset are not clickety-clack,another specification that helps in forming the illusion that it is a high-end phone.

At this point some of the only setbacks are that the interface does not look very user friendly and there are too many keys in the front,which make the phone look slightly crowded. There is a specific key assigned to the calendar,for example,which could have been avoided. The start-up tone is slightly jarring,and the screen display is lacking finish. But at the price of Rs 4,600,these are things one can look over.