Porsche Design
This is now a bit different than Asus Lamborghini, or Hummer phone. It’s different because we’re not talking about a car manufacture, no matter the name. Porsche Design (although it has its roots at Porsche) is a well-known and famous designer team. We might be meeting objects designed by them in all sorts of places, it’s worth checking their webiste, where we get to know that Fuji Finepix 6800 is their work too, but we can also find Porsche Design navi, monitor, water boiler and even incubator.
Porsche P'9611 – with Navigon software
In spite of these, many of my acquaintances were looking for the sports car in Porsche P9521 and they didn’t really find it. Although it’s there, we can find racing 911’s amongst the preloaded videos, but this only a kind of bonus, as this is phone is not primarily about the sports car. This is the product of a renowned design studio and a not so renowned cell phone manufacturer, which is Sagem.
We greet Sagem on the market of luxury phones, welcome. They made a good decision when they’ve decided that they have not a chance in this area with their own name, so they contacted a well-known and famous company for external help. Porsche design has drawn the shapes, the menus, the graphics, I think they even had a word in the use of materials, and this has a result. P6521 is hard to confuse with anything else.
There have been a couple of companies who have already done this trick. Samsung cooperated with Bang & Olufsen and they now have more than one model (Serene, Serenata), LG Prada is the result of another similar cooperation. Samsung had a business, with good old Giorgio Armanival too, while Asus tried to implement the Lamborghini style in some of their products. Motorola put some make-up on V3 with the help of Dolce & Gabbana, and the list goes on. These names can sell medium functionality at an exorbitant price, and now Sagem takes a part of this luxury business too, and we had the opportunity of reviewing the results thanks to XXL GSM.
Exterior
It’s evident that the exterior is which makes Porsche Design unique. The list begins with the longish box, which should have been logically packed with four Toblreone chocolates, but we can “only” find a phone, a charger, a nice headset, a USB cable and a 2 GB memory card, placed stylishly amongst pieces of soft sponge.
The phone itself is surprisingly angular. We let our readers decide how beautiful it is, based on the pictures, we weren’t affected too much. It’s really brick-like, too thick, extremely heavy (as it’s made of metal) and it uses only black and silver colors. Even in spite of this we could find its front and back ad it’s clearly visible where we have to open the lid, which has a shining black color. In the middle of it there is a tiny external display, which shows monochromic grey texts – in case there is no sunshine, as than it becomes unreadable.
On the back we can find the camera and a double-LED, but this is not the point for me, as I had long minutes of fight with the part covering the battery. Theoretically there is a small gap at the end of the back cover, but this is reachable only by those who have hands designed specifically for this phone. I’ve read the manual many times, but the graphics there stubbornly showed that this is how I should take it off. It’s an overly expensive design-gadget, so I didn’t want to force it with a screwdriver, but I had to in the end. Then I came across the second challenge: where does the memory card go? We have to put it under the SIM, but this place is accessible only when the SIM card is not in its place: solution of rare stupidity I say.
There is a gap on each side of the phone, in the bottom, for the speakers, on the left we can also see the volume control buttons and the multimedia hotkey. This is which launches the music player by default, but this become’s the camera’s exposure button when its software is running. The third function of this button is cancelling incoming calls. The only problem is that it is very easy to press, so I have started playing music accidentally a lots of times and the keys can’t even be locked, so music is easily activated easily when the phone’s in our pocket.
The front cover opens soft as silk. Even in spite of this, it stands still in almost any position. The main display in the interior is of QVGA resolution; the cover can be twisted and closed back with its inside out. This is how we have to take pictures. Under the display we can see the fingerprint reader; we’ll be talking about this a bit later on. The keypad is quite simple, it has nothing extra, has a logical layout and it’s easy to use. The whole device is of high quality, it’s made of brushed aluminum everywhere where it’s not black.
Basic functions
There isn’t much problem with the picture of the internal display, it has good contrast, and the menu is readable, mainly because Porsche Design’s own font is used. It even uses OLED technology which is quite rare at such a resolution Nokia 7900 Prism is the other phone that is also capable of this. The graphics are no big deal, however, in the menu, we can change the wallpaper, but the icons are simple, transparent shapes drawn with a single line. The use of green in selections and scrollbars is a unique solution, but P9521’s visual customizability still approaches zero. Although the design is not by Sagem, but we can see their work in the menu’s logic, mostly when we exit from a submenu without making any changes, as in these cases a window is popped up with the label “cancel” and this upset many of the editors here. Windows opening one from the other are cool, just like the fingerprint reader sitting under the display, as stroking it in the appropriate direction navigates in the menu.
The phonebook’s capacity is practically infinite. This is primarily due to the fact that it hardly takes any space from the internal, dynamic memory (245 entries took 27 KB) and the internal capacity is 22 MB. If we would still be in trouble, the phonebook can be copied on the memory card too, although the phone cannot directly read them from here, they have to be copied back first. A contact can have the usual additional information (name, phone number, email, company, URL, mail address, birthday, comment) and pictures assigned to them are displayed full-screen in case of calls.
Messaging is quite plain, as the device doesn’t support any kind of email, so we have SMS and MMS only. We can store 100 of the first, while the latter one takes space from the previously mentioned internal memory. Text entry is not a real pleasure, as it’s hard to feel the pressure point of the buttons, we have T9 to help.
As for organizer functions, the calendar is a bit complicated, as we change between month, week and day view at the press of a button, but adding a new entry is only possible through the menu. Here we meet the Sagem software again, as besides text entries we can store audio ones too, recorded with the sound recorder, and sorted in many different categories. The calendar has many features, but the alarm clock is very plain, it remembers a single time point, but at least we can choose on what days of the week it should ring. Snooze time is 5 minutes. The calculator has basic functions and besides these there is a countdown timer only, so we have to say bye-bye to the stopwatch, currency converter and world clock.
Multimedia
Maybe we should start with the camera, as this functions only when we open the front cover and close it back upside down. This starts the camera’s software automatically from all menus, except one. The viewfinder is fullscreen and we can immediately observe then Porsche P9521 has gyroscope, as the device senses landscape and portrait view even before taking a shot. This is how the necessary menus are placed, amongst which we can browse with the fingerprint reader. Let’s see a short video about how this functions:
Technically we’re talking about a 3.2 megapixel device with autofocus, which takes pictures in a surprisingly good quality, but in turn it’s darn slow. After the pressing the lateral exposure button, there is a 5-6 second wait until we hear the sound and there are another few seconds of wait left until the picture is saved and we can use the camera again. There is not much extra in the settings; there is a “forced” option for the flash, which makes the camera use the light wherever possible. I’ve tried movie recording too, as we can choose “HD” quality, which means a 176 x 144 resolution.
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The music and video player look cool, on the other hand. It supports MP3 and MP4 files, sound quality is better than average, due to the metallic case and the supplied headset can be taken apart at the remote, so we can use any other headset. There is an equalizer, which supports user settings. The player runs in the background, there are repeat and shuffle modes and playlist support. If we’re watching a video, then closing the cover upside down doesn’t start the camera, but puts the player in fullscreen mode. The gyroscope has a function here again, as it rotates the picture according to the phone’s position. The 2 GB storage space has some movies preloaded on it; all of them have something to do with Porsche, as we can see racing Caymans and water boilers too. There are no games included, but the phone is Java-compatible.
Data transfer, other
This Porsche won’t be racing on the information superhighway. The device supports EDGE transfer at best. They weren’t poking around much with browser either, they just took good old Opera Mini and shoved it in there. There is Bluetooth, which is stereo compatible, and the box includes a USB cable too, which can be used for connecting the phone with our computer. In this case the memory card is seen as an external drive.
The fingerprint reader has security functions too, besides being a controller. To make it function, we first have to identify ourselves, which means we have to stroke its surface with our finger ten times. It’s pretty hard to make it store our fingerprint; I had to experiment a lot until I finally succeeded. After this we have to define a password (this is what we need later in case we want to change the fingerprint) and from then on the phone functions only if the appropriate finger is put on the sensor. As a bonus we can register all ten fingers and then all of our fingers are used for speed dialing a contact by default. Thumb for daddy, pointer for mummy and middle finger for the boss…
The battery provided a pleasant three day standby during the test period. The charger’s connector is on top and it doesn’t seem to be compatible with anything so we can only use Posche Design accessories.
Summary. It’s a fact that the device brings some good ideas. It’s a fact that it’s made of quality materials. It’s a fact that it hung up four times during three days and although I didn’t have to take the battery out, it restarted on its own. Its beauty is questionable; Sagem’s cooperation might be disturbing for many. I don’t know if it will have a target user group, but being unique is always somewhat attractive. As for us, there’s no award.
Bog
Translated by Szaszati
Porsche P9521 has been provided by XXL GSM. The device can be bought at:
Budapest VI. Jókai tér 6.
Budapest VI. Teréz körút 18.
On-line at www.xxlgsm.hu.
Specifications
| Porsche P'9521 | ||
 | General | |
| Technology | GSM | |
| Size | 91 x 48 x 18.4 mm | |
| Weight | 139 grams | |
| Colors | Black | |
| Display | ||
| Display diagonal | 2.2“ | |
| Display resolution | 240 x 320 pixels | |
| Display type | OLED | |
| Number of colors | 262 thousand | |
| Memória | ||
| Phonebook capacity | dynamic | |
| SMS memory / max. MMS size | 100 / 300 KB | |
| Internal memory | 22 MB | |
| Memory expandability | microSD | |
| Data transfer | ||
| Frequency bands | 900/1800/1900 MHz | |
| GPRS / EDGE | Class 10 (4+1/3+2) / Class 10 (236.8 kbps) | |
| UMTS / HSDPA | none / none | |
| IrDA / Bluetooth | none / 2.0 (A2DP too) | |
| WiFi | none | |
| USB | present | |
| Push-to-talk / RSS | none / none | |
| GPS receiver | none | |
| Basic functions | ||
| Profiles | present | |
| Vibra function | present | |
| Built-in handsfree | present | |
| Voice calling / voice commands | none / none | |
| Sound recorder | only in the calendar | |
| Alarm clock | present, also when turned off | |
| Predictive text entry | T9 | |
| Software | ||
| Platform | Sagem | |
| WAP / HTML browser | 2.0 / Opera Mini | |
| E-mail client | none | |
| Java | present, MIDP 2.0 | |
| Games | none | |
| Currency converter | none | |
| Extra software | - | |
| Multimedia | ||
| Main camera | 3.1 megapixels, autofocus | |
| Secondary camera | none | |
| Video recording | QCIF | |
| Music player | present, runs in background too | |
| Equalizer | present | |
| FM radio | none | |
| Battery | ||
| Main battery | Li-Ion | |
| Standby time | 240 hours | |
| Talk time | 3.5 hours | |
| Other | ||
| fingerprint reader, gyroscope | ||
