NEC 343i review

Features
i-mode is where it's at with this handset, so what's it all about?

A combination of handset features and Internet site design mean that i-mode services are specially produced to work at their best with specific handsets. O2 is the only UK operator with an i-mode service.

There are 100 i-mode sites offering services at launch, and they include banking, travel, shopping, news, games and suchlike. Some high-profile names are there. Check out the full list here.

You need to subscribe to the services you want separately -- O2 decrees that none can cost more than £3 a month. In addition, browsing and downloading costs £3 per megabyte, though bolt-on data bundles can reduce that significantly. There are introductory rates available at the time of publication.

There is also an email service -- accessed with that key containing the email marker. This is free to use till April 2006, then you start paying.

The NEC 343i itself might look good, and handle well but it is feature-light. Take the camera, for example. It is limited to what we consider a pretty poor maximum resolution of 640x480 pixels, with two other, lower, resolutions on offer (320x240 and 150x120). There is a zoom feature, and you can tweak brightness and apply a few filters (sepia, monochrome and blue). But there is no flash, and no video mode. Think of this as a handset for taking images purely to send to others via MMS rather than anything more fancy.

There's not much going on in the memory department, either. You get just 1.3MB and no expansion slots for you to add more. One of the knock-on effects of this is that while there is a voice memo function, what you can do with it is limited: you can only record memos up to 50 seconds in length.

There is no music playback facility, and you only get a mono earbud which has a proprietary connector to the headset. Oh, and for some odd reason there is no Bluetooth either. You don't get facilities to share information with a PC.

Performance
The NEC 343i itself is a joy to use for voice calls thanks to a very well designed keypad. Calls were loud enough, though the speakerphone could do with more volume.

i-mode worked well. It is certainly fast and sites generally look good. Subscription costs for each site are clearly displayed. We had the odd connection problem at first, but these were generally quickly resolved. The i-mode button takes you straight to the portal, there's some page caching so you don't have to keep downloading as you browse, and bookmarks are also a help.

We were able to go outside the i-mode area, but had varied success. We did okay with specially formatted sites like bbc.co.uk/mobile, but full-blown Web sites were all but unusable, which rather cramps this handset's style.

Battery life too was acceptable. We administered daily power charges to be on the safe side, but with no music player on board we didn't often make much more than 20 minutes of usage daily combining phone calls and i-mode use.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Nick Hide