Mobile phones just keep getting cheaper, don't they? I don't mean those jobbies you get for free on contract - we all know that their true cost is subsidised by the network operator, and you pay, month on month, for the privilege of having them in your pocket. No, I mean the phones you can buy outright.
The new Sagem my150X hits a pricing low as far as I am aware, coming in at a mere £10 on Orange pay-as-you-go. You have to go to Asda for it, but how much of a come-down is that considering the price?
I've seen other low-cost handsets from Sagem, most recently the my215X which by comparison costs a fortune - £19.99 in fact - again on a pay as you go contract, but like I said, the my150X hits a new low. Does it hit this low in a good way or a bad one? Well, that depends on what you want from a mobile. With no music player and no camera it certainly won't meet the needs of anyone with multimedia on their minds. It is dual-band, so don't expect too much from it if you travel internationally a great deal. And no, in case you are wondering, there's no FM radio, no Web browsing, no WAP browsing, no mobile email, no way to display images, no PC synchronising, no memory expansion, no Bluetooth, no handsfree headset connector.
So now you get the point - this is a pretty feature-poor handset. I have no intention of grumbling about that if the my150X does the job it professes to efficiently.
Certainly on the hardware ergonomics front the signs are good. This is a small, light candybar handset. It measures a candybar standard 107mm tall and 47mm wide, but manages to sneak in at just 10mm thick thanks to its overall lack of internal gubbins.
The light features list keeps the weight down too. The my150X is just 65g. Carrying it around I hardly ever realised it was in my pocket till it rang, which is wonderful.
The black and sliver design is attractive enough and Sagem has managed to work a bit of style into the look by making the silver band that runs around the edges of the handset sit off centre so that it is at the front at the bottom and at the back at the top. It isn't Earth-shatteringly clever, but it does show that even at the very lowest end of the market design doesn't have to be thrown out of the window.
The same can be said of the keyboard. It'd blue backlit when the phone is in use, and the numberpad, Call and End buttons and softmenu keys are all flat. Not surprisingly they don't have the ultra high quality feel of more expensive flat keys. But they don't feel ‘cheap', are easy enough to hit at speed and I am not going to complain at all about them.
The navigation key is a bit small for my tastes but the design is simple. It consists of a circular, silver-coloured navigation button surrounding a slightly rounded and black inner select button that both work well enough and look fine. Hold down the left, right, up and down parts of the navi button and you are shortcuttted in to different aspects of the phone - you can choose between a few options such as calls, contacts, alarm and inbox. The screen isn't too bad either. It is small at just 1.8 inches diagonally, and it delivers a mere 101 x 64 pixels and has just one colour in its armoury - a turquoise-ish blue. This sits against a two-part dark background.
About three quarters of the screen is given over to displaying info about what you are doing at the time, for example writing a text message. The top quarter has a constant display of the time and system status information.
Always present are the signal strength and battery power indicators. One of two mode indicator icons is also present (silent or ringing), and then others are present as necessary e.g. an alarm set indicator and received SMS indicator.
I found the screen fine in most instances. It fell over in two respects. When displaying texts it shows four lines of data at once, and you need to scroll to see the rest of longer incoming messages. And it has a fairly limited viewing angle. Glancing at the phone when it's sitting on a table is not always productive because of this. If this all sounds very low level, well, it is. But again, Sagem has managed to make what is a very basic screen look pretty good. Remembering the poor screen design of Motorola's low-cost MOTOFONE F3, the my150X is a beacon of what can be done with low specifications.
Getting around the phone is not a problem. The old fashioned looking menu structure might put some people off, but there is very little to learn in order to get around effectively. There are six top level menus: contacts, messages, calls, settings, extras and alarm. A dot-based progress bar tells you that you are moving through these as you press left and right on the navi key. Even the ringtones, plinky though they are, are a reasonable selection and if the plinks don't appeal there is a standard old fashioned ringer to fall back on. The ‘features' include vibrate mode, a speakerphone, calculator and a calendar, but the latter only tells you the date - it can't store appointments. In fact memory is non-existent, so contacts and text message storage is limited to what your SIM offers.
I am not too excited by Sagem's proprietary mains power adaptor - it is just something else to carry around - nor with the battery life itself which Sagem quotes as 3 hours of talk time. True, an entry-level handset like this is not going to be a gas guzzler, but I'd have liked the confidence to spend a long weekend away without having to use mains power.
Verdict
Gripes about mains power connector and battery life aside, the my150X is the best, ultra low-cost, entry-level mobile I have seen. Yes, it's low on features, but it proves good design and a tight budget are perfectly compatible.
