Siemens s56

I bought this phone from the Cell Guru and put my T-Mobile To Go SIM in it. Here's what I found (this model is an unlocked Cingular phone):

This phone is nice and small, yet doesn't sacrifice features for its size. Its keypad arrangement is sorta wierd, but not nearly what you'd expect from some wacky Nokia phone. The user interfae is actually quite bearable, as opposed to that of the Siemens a56. Maybe because it's in color.

The ringtones and speakerphone, while not overly loud, are reasonably good with sound output and clarity. And if you don't like the speaker you can use a Bluetooth headset (or a wired one if you have the little adapter, which I now have). And if you don't like the ringers you can use Bluetooth or infrared to get better ones on.

Overall this phone just feels advanced. And it's field test option, graciously enabled by the Cell Guru (it requires a serial cable mod to the phone and my SIM), is well laid out and comprehensive, showing me that this phone gets a reasonably good signal, even when compared with the stalwart Nokia 6010s that I have\had. Call quality is good and the phone connects the call faster, in my estimation, than the 6010 does.

There is a lot of room for customization and a lot (at least in bar phone terms) of screen real estate to do the cusomization on. You can change the background, startup logo, operator logo, "greeting", shutdown logo, and whatever sounds can be applied to these. Pretty nice.

Also, web access is nice and fast for such stuff as T-Zones, even though the phone nly has GPRS. Yes, it's faster as far as I can tell than the Nokia 6010. But then again the s56 was an advanced phone in its day. The 6010 has always been a more basic-oriented phone.

Yes,. the phone is small, but it still gets fairly good battery life. After heavy usage (web, playing ringtones out the wazoo, a few short calls) but without bluetooth or infrared turned on, for about half a day, the battery bar registered 1\3 depleted. I'm not complaining.

If you have any more questions about this phone then comment on this post. Hope this helps, though yes this is an older phone. And yes, it does have many more features than the Nokia 6010 and I got it for a mere $30.