UPDATE: Alas poor BenQ-Siemens we knew you well. Sadly, BenQ-Siemens is no more. Read more about it here. My friend in retail is now having a much harder time selling off the S88 after the company declared its last hurrah.

The S88 is BenQ-Siemens’ first flagship phone for 2006. It comes in two colors – black and white and from afar borrows a lot from the Sony Ericsson design. I was able to borrow the S88 for a few days and here is my hands on review.

The front of the unit real estate has the regular 0-9 keypad with two menu buttons and two call buttons. At the center is an embedded 5-way joystick that for once, doesn’t hurt my thumb.

The sides of the phone contain the volume control keys on one side and the camera shutter button on the other. I was dissapointed with the camera button because it wasn’t very well constructed: it’s hard to tell if you did a full or half press.

What gladdened me was that BenQ-Siemens applied the Nokia keymap layout (the “0″ is spacebar) for SMS which means that I didn’t have to relearn another user interface for sending SMS.

In a nutshell I was impressed by the improvement in design. The pictures here show the vibrand difference between typical cellphone displays and the OLED screen of thte S88. When I first held it, it seemed like I was holding a dummy unit because the screen seemed like it was plastered on.

Camera

The S88 comes with a built in 2.0Mp Sony lens. I was expecting it to fare in the likes of the k750i but was gravely dissapointed by its slow shutter response. Images on the viewfinder were a bit laggy which makes still night shots a bit hard to do unless you have a really steady hand. Fortunately the S88 also comes with a built-in flash. Here are some samples of the S88’s pictures:

Macro Mode

Normal Mode Focused

Normal Light

Music

The S88 comes with a microSD card. Internal memory houses 20MB of data. So this leaves very little for internal memory music. Now since music is better heard that read about, watch this video.

Wireless Connectivity

Bluetooth beaming was a little slow. The S88 comes with its own sync software. Sadly I was not able to pair the phone with my Macintosh. iSync would recognize it but have no software available yet. I’m pretty sure of the rollout in the next few months though since BenQ-Siemens will be a powerful player in the phone market this 2006.

Availability is set for April 2006 in Asia.

Pros
Bright OLED screen
Loud speakers
Nokia-like button-mapping for SMS

Cons
Camera is a bit slow
Phone UI a bit slow
Does not sync with a Mac (at least now yet)

Post from: Cellphone9