BenQ E72 Smartphone

BenQ has targeted its latest smartphone at the mass market. Ursula Hirschkorn finds out if it manages to pack in the features for a budget price

With the iPhone 3G finally available, smartphones are becoming as desirable and ubiquitous as basic mobile phones were a decade ago. It’s not enough to be able to send pictures and messages, listen to music and take snaps on your phone – now everyone wants high-speed internet access and the ability to send emails and surf the web as well. BenQ hopes to meet this new demand from the mass market with the E72, a device that looks just like a standard mobile phone but promises a whole lot more.

Features:
Despite its small size – at 90g and measuring just 108 x 46 x 13mm, it’s no bigger than a standard mobile – the E72 manages to pack in all the high-end features you would expect from a smartphone. It runs Windows Mobile 6, supports GSM 850/900/1800/1900MHz, sports a super-clear 2in 65,000 colour TFT screen and 2-megapixel camera, offers 802.11b/g Wi-Fi for fast internet access and supports five instant messengers.

Performance:
Onboard storage is pretty limited for a smartphone designed to handle video, emails, music and photos. While the entry-level iPhone comes with 8GB onboard, the E72 has just 64MB DDR RAM and only a fraction of that is actually available to you for storage. Sure, you can slot in a 2GB microSD card to boost storage but that’s going to cost you extra and you’ll still be way short of what the iPhone offers. It also lacks 3G support and is a bit slow when launching new applications.

Ease of use:
The E72 is as easy to use as any other mobile phone, with menu systems and navigation that are all intuitive and simple to work out, even without a manual. But, at the end of the day, it can’t compete with higher-end smartphones sporting large displays and touchscreen controls. If you want to use the internet, send emails or view video (all of which you can do on the E72), you really want the decent-sized screen and larger keys offered by the iPhone and its imitators.

Value for money:
Unlike many smartphone rivals, the BenQ E72 is free with a BT Fusion contract (www.bt.com/btfusion). However, you can currently only use the E72 if you are a BT Fusion customer, which means you need to have BT Broadband at home or you’ll have to switch over to it. The benefit of this is that it uses your Wi-Fi connection to make calls while in the house or near a hotspot for cheaper calls, only switching to GSM when it’s out of range. The downside is that if you don’t want BT Broadband, you can’t have this phone, at least for the time being.