Sagem myX-8 review

Features
40MB of internal memory is not bad at all for a phone. You can fill this with whatever you choose, music and photos being the obvious options. But the handset will also play tunes from a mini SD card, which fits under the battery cover but not under the battery itself.

The good news is that you can swap cards without powering the handset down. The bad news is that playing tunes is a real palaver. You don't play individual songs from the audio software -- you need to browse the contents of the internal memory or a card through the multimedia menu and choose them from there. The audio player only has a role when you've added selected tunes to a playlist. It's all too convoluted, in our view.

The camera is a similarly mixed bag. The screen renders images superbly, and the 8x digital zoom might be useful at times if you have a very steady hand. But it's a nuisance that you can't change many settings while looking at an image. You change image size and quality from the Settings area of the handset.

What you can do when in camera mode is zoom by pushing the joystick up and down, and change the image 'look' by moving the joystick left and right, choosing from sepia, negative and black and white modes. You can also use the timer with a softkey but you have to have to set it to 5, 10 or 15 seconds from the Settings menu. You take shots using the joystick or the side button. Among the shutter sounds is a dingdong doorbell and a cuckoo.

These sounds are an example of the fun nature of the handset. There are plenty of wacky ringtones and if what you want isn't provided, it's easy to record your own.

The myX-8 has Java support, and a game is already built in, but it isn't an ideal choice. Alive and Fearless is an arcade-style alien-shooter, and we felt it required more agility than the small joypad could deliver.

You can use the myX-8 as a modem with a laptop and setup couldn't be easier -- we had a connection up and running literally within a couple of minutes using infrared, though you can use Bluetooth. Sagem also provides some synchronisation and phone backup software for your PC. It has its own calendar, address book and task manager that can synchronise with the handset, and you can even create SMS messages with it.

Performance
We did experience some break-up in the myX-8's call quality and the volume wasn't particularly loud, but the easily accessible volume control meant we could push it as high as possible without any fuss. Call quality was best through the headset, which also delivered excellent audio. There's no equaliser but we didn't feel one was necessary.

Battery life, at a manufacturer estimate of 5 hours talktime, was average, and if you intend to use the myX-8 for a lot of music listening, you'll need to schedule a daily charge. Even without using the music feature, you'll need to feed the handset some mains power every few days.

Edited by Mary Lojkine
Additional editing by Nick Hide