Product Reviews

For a couple of years now there's been a marked contrast between the ultra-light, eye-catching, big-screen phones common in the Far East and the sober conservative styling of Scandinavian-born handsets. A number of phones in recent months have shown how the demands for WAP and SMS have bred European phones with bigger screens and how Japanese styling is being absorbed into handsets sold over here. The Panasonic GD93 is typical of this new breed with its gimmicks and silver cladding.

It not only looks great, but is also comfortable to use with its profile widening at the big screen, making it easy to use one-handed. Good-sized keys and an excellent four-way navigation button help this.

Aside from the technical features, another attribute likely to grab your attention is the ability to allocate any one of seven screen colours to ten caller groups to help you know who's calling. The screen itself is suitably large for text messaging, email and, of course, navigating all your favourite WAP sites. That said, you're going to need good eyesight to see the various status icons. Both the Battery Status icon and signal strength meter are reduced to specks on the large screen. Since there's little warning when the battery is about to run out, this is of particular concern. The Ringer icon is especially frustrating, because there's only a hair's breadth line through a musical note to signify your ringer is off.

Rather than offering an unrestricted combination choice of ringer, escalating volume ringer and vibrate, Panasonic gives you a complex series of choices that realistically limit you to choosing between either ringer or vibrate, but not both. If you don't like the selection of installed fairground organ-style tunes, the G93 offers a true 'executive toy' feature. This is the ability to simply record any external sound as your ringer, which can be quite unnerving if you choose your own voice to alert you.

Discretion in meetings may be limited in terms of ringer choice, but the offering of an excellent desktop hands-free operation almost makes up for this. A large speaker on the back of the phone allows a group to sit around the phone and conduct a call. You need to be careful as it's exceptionally loud, so don't accidentally hold it up to your ear in this mode.

The standard 2.5mm jack plug for the headphone set is a welcome inclusion. This means you aren't restricted

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to the narrow range of hands-free options that are usually phone-specific. With its arrangement, the GD93 offers you the option to use any headset that works with a DECT phone. As with a lot of aspects of this phone, there's a counterpoint to this commendable feature - the stopper that covers the jack socket has no attachment to the phone, so you're bound to lose it within a week.

The phone was noticeably poor at holding on to a signal in weak areas. Also, the transmitted voice quality was low and tended to pick up a lot of background noise, which fared worse when coupled with very harsh sound reproduction from the earpiece that's simply not loud enough. Without volume buttons on the side of the phone, it's also very difficult to change the ear volume when making a call. Using up and down on the navigation key just isn't easy with the phone to your ear.

The inclusion of a dictaphone is useful to preserve a fleeting thought, just as long as you only have two thoughts, each ten seconds long. Voice dial works well, despite the irritating US accent of the instructions, although a maximum of only five numbers can have voice tags.

The GD93 offers POP3 email support and you can allocate email addresses to everybody in your phone book, which can mean up to 200 email addresses if you use both the SIM and phone memories. On the storage front, you can also keep a healthy 40 received emails and ten sent messages.

The WAP browser functions well but takes a lot of getting used to, as setting the thing up isn't intuitive or pleasant. Then there are some odd labels for various functions, while activating links always involves multiple key presses. In any other phone this would consign WAP to the 'unused gimmicks' menu, but the fantastic screen and quick processing of pages mean it's worth persevering.

It's also easy to browse offline, although the number of pages stored will be variable. During my tests I had six pages stored at one point, but a few more seems to be possible. The microscopic icon syndrome returns to haunt you here again, since there's a tiny LCD image at the bottom of the screen that tells you whether you're online.

Under a surface of bravado and fun, the Panasonic packs quite a punch for such a tiny handset. It's contradictions like this that make it a strange beast to figure out, since it has frivolous animations and images to show off its great screen as well as the gimmicky changeable backlight colours. But the desktop hands-free and POP3 email make it a great business phone.

That said, most business phones these days come with some organiser or diary function, which the Panasonic lacks, while the omission of any games - a feature that's made a raft of Nokia phones must-haves for anyone with time to idle away - suggests that Panasonic isn't aiming for a youth user. These contradictions and the styling are likely to make this 'a love it or loathe it', so it's only really an option for the more adventurous phone buyer.