O2 Cocoon review

O2 Cocoon Review

Reviewed by: Andrew Lim

Reviewed on: 31 August 2007

Cleverly, the external LED screen that we mentioned earlier also displays track details, so you can see all the track names without needing to open the phone. To listen to your music or the built-in FM radio, O2 has generously included a proprietary in-ear headset that isn't half bad. If you want to use your own pair, you can use the included 2.5mm adaptor.

Alternatively, you can use a set of stereo Bluetooth headphones to listen to music but you'll need to buy these yourself. If you feel like sharing your music, you can either use the included two-way headphone splitter or the speakerphone mode, but we found the latter wasn't loud enough.

If photos is more your thing, there's a 2-megapixel camera on the front with autofocus and LED photo light, and a secondary VGA camera on the inside for video calls. Unfortunately, activating the camera is quite fiddly -- there's no dedicated shutter button -- but you can set it as a shortcut on the homepage.

Unfortunately the inside of the phone isn't as stylish as the white exterior

The homepage is fairly straightforward, as is the rest of the phone's interface. Once in the menu, you have access to a variety of applications, including O2's Web browser. This isn't particularly ground-breaking but you can just about view a mobile Web page on it, and it works quickly over 3G.

Unfortunately, it doesn't have an overview mode, such as the one on Nokia's Nseries phones. It's also missing a desktop mode and support for flash, so it's not as good as browsing the Web on your desktop PC or certain other phones, such as the Nokia N95.

Another application we felt could be better is the alarm clock, one of the Cocoon's headline features. It's not a massive problem but it would be nice if you could set multiple alarms and the days of the week you wanted it to go off. And we wish more phones would allow you to select your preferred snooze time.

Aside from the above niggles, we enjoyed using the Cocoon and everyone flocked around it when the external hidden LEDs came on. We also really liked the PC Suite software that comes with it, which lets you back up all your data and send messages from your computer via the provided USB cable or Bluetooth.