inexpensive dualSIM phone

[Motel75]

So far, the S320 has performed pretty well - the battery lasts about 4-5 days unless you take the phone somewhere where there's no reception, and then the network search drains it very quickly. The music player works well enough, but the sampling noises and GSM interference are annoyingly audible, so this would be for casual use only. The video player is finicky about playing files, and the picture viewer has a size limit, so you probably can't use it to look at the pictures straight from your digital camera without editing. However, no one buys the S320 for its media playback capability, and as a basic four-SIM phone, it's just fine.

FWIW, it's also useful as a tool to compare the coverage of different networks - I've had one SIM from each of the major networks in Germany in it, and it provides a real-time display of how crappy E-Plus is compared to O2, which is markedly worse than Telekom, which isn't quite as good as Vodafone; and it's dismaying to see how not a single German network bothers to have coverage for any except the highest-capacity railway mainlines, so I've traveled from Rügen in the northeast to Tübingen in the southwest with coverage less than half the time.

I've ordered an iPro FX3 pro as well, so I'll soon be able to compare the two four-SIM phones on the market. One suspicion is that its battery life will not be as good as that of the S320 - its battery appears to be 850 MAh compared to the 1500 of the S320. But we shall see.

[dg7feq]

Originally Posted by Motel75

FWIW, it's also useful as a tool to compare the coverage of different networks - I've had one SIM from each of the major networks in Germany in it, and it provides a real-time display of how crappy E-Plus is compared to O2, which is markedly worse than Telekom, which isn't quite as good as Vodafone; and it's dismaying to see how not a single German network bothers to have coverage for any except the highest-capacity railway mainlines, so I've traveled from Rügen in the northeast to Tübingen in the southwest with coverage less than half the time.

to get a compareable result you should swap the cards around as well. These phones usually have different antennas (and of course antenna positions) inside the phone that can give you significantly different results. E.g. in my C5212 from Samsung one antenna is on the top and the other on the bottom of the casing. If you hold the phone you automatically shield the lower antenna with your hand...

Chris