I have not searched but I suppose no one has written a review on a Chinese phone on TE. As promised, here I write a hands-on review of what is termed as the best clone of the popular iphone…. The Sciphone i68+ 3G
Reviewer's Note: All the pictures are 1600 x 1200 images hosted on TE server and may take time to open. Clicking on them will open larger image.
Update: Small update on Page 14
Apologies if there is any problem as this is first my review. :ashamed:
This phone is the latest version from the Sciphone family of phones. The Sciphone first came with the i68 , then with the immensely popular i68+ and now this i68+ 3G
Some of the things in this review are referencing to the previous version i68+ but they hold true for this phone too. All images (barring a couple) are of the Sciphone i68+ 3G that I own.
First let me try to solve some myths
1. Can you easily make out a Chinese phone from its look??
A. Yes in most of the cases, but this is true with the ones we get in India. Here in China they make phones that can imitate the real counterparts in each and every way. I mean it is nearly difficult to make out the difference even when navigating through them. Some examples to give you are Nokia E71 and XM 5800.
2. Chinese phones use sub standard components and hence cost less
A. Mostly true, but we have to warrant other things like, no advertising, mass production, cheap labor, mass wholesale purchase by resellers and all these things make them cheaper.
3. Do Chinese people use these cheap Chinese phones ?
A. Yes many of them but as I told in above point it is difficult to know whether someone else is using a fake or an original
4. The phone here is question has a 3G suffixed to its name. Is it a 3G Phone ?
A. No, its NOT a 3G phone but the name here is to signify that it is clone of the iphone 3G (full black body and all)
Few things that prompted me to buy this clone in the first place
-> It’s an iPhone clone
-> It’s not a sub standard clone but something made with quiet a lot of precision (just my opinion)
-> Dedicated forum and firmware upgrades for this phone. Unheard of for a Chinese phone. (Please note that this point is applicable for the i68+ but firmware upgrades are expected to come for this also)
-> Price
[BREAK=The Package]
The Package
The packaging of the phone is in a white box similar to one we get the iphone in (that’s black but). The picture below is the box along with its contents
What’s Inside ???
The Sciphone i68+ box has the following things inside
• One mobile phone
• One Earphone (ipod styled)
• One charger (accepting USB)
• One USB cable
• One ‘Finger Tips’ manual. I suppose it is exactly same as what we get in a iphone.
[BREAK=Specifications]
Specifications (Taken from company's website)
* Installed java games with jar package
* Slide to unlock
* FM radio
* Supports MMS/GPRS/SMS
* .E-book, 64 phonix ring tone
* Special input interface, enlarge the letter when click virtual keypad
* 3.2 inch ultra-definition flat touch screen
* Quad-band GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz up to worldwide
* Weight: 123g
* Dimensions: 115.0 X 62.0 X 11.5 mm
* High-Res TFT display, 260K colors, 240 X 320 pixel resolution
* Touch screen .
* Exclusive user interface, themes and styles
* 3.2 inch LCD plus 3.2 inch touch screen
* Integrated SVGA camera 0.3 megapixels)
* Digital zoom
* Image Viewer
* CMOS sensor, white balance and other adjustments
* Video player
* Video recorder
* Audio Player
* Sound Recorder
* FM Radio
* MMS/SMS/GPRS
* Bluetooth 2.0
* USB
* GPRS class 10
* WAP 2.0
* Integrated hands free speaker
* 3D Stereo surround sound
* Voice record and playback
* Polyphonic (MIDI) tones w/up to 64 voices; plus MP3 ring tones
* Video recording and streaming
* Digital music player
* Melody composer
* Playback, mp3, AAC, GP3
* English, French, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Vietnamese, Turkish, Russian, Thai and Simplified Chinese
* Long Talk time: 180-220 mins
* Long Standby time:180-200 hours
What a long list....many of them repeats :ashamed:
[BREAK=The Phone]
The Phone
The phone is quiet sturdy and you can feel that when you hold it. By looks, it does not look like a typical Chinese phone at all. In fact it has quiet accurately imitated the iphone 3G. The back side of the phone has the camera and bottom part has some text written.
The buttons on left side are for volume and profile change.
You cannot remove the back cover of this phone and hence you need to specify the capacity and pay accordingly. Mine is a 4GB version.
Picture taken from company's website
Front View
Side View
The 3G Part
The following picture is of the back of the phone. As you can see it is full black, styled like the iphone 3G, hence the name
Back View
[BREAK=The Unexpected !!!]
What’s this…a 3.5mm jack input ??
Yes this phone has a 3.5mm jack input and not the usual Chinese phones proprietary connector.
In the middle is the SIM card slot which does not have a cover. In fact it had but after removing for the first time I misplaced it. The left most button is for turning the phone off/on or for coming to the standby screen (effectively locking the phone screen).
I have seen this on an iphone / ipod !!
This is something else you would not find on a Chinese phone. It has an ipod styled connector and what’s it is actually compatible with your original ipod accessories that can fit here. But the bad part is that this is reversed.
Its like if you connect this phone to a ipod dock, you will have to connect it with its face backward…. how stupid
Connector connected backwards :no:
[BREAK=Interface and Menus]
The Stand By Screen
This is the main stand by screen of the phone. I have a custom wallpaper setup here. Ganpati Bappa Morya
The first things that will catch your attention is the big time display at the top and the ‘Slide to Unlock’ at the bottom
On top left is the signal. This is a single SIM phone hence only one set of bars.
Next to that is the operator name which comes as a very small text and scrolls in my case as the text is long (CHINA MOBILE)
In the middle is the lock sign signifying that the phone is locked.
At the very right is the battery indicator.
We have to do the usual ‘slide to unlock’ to go to the main page with icons
[BREAK=Menu Page 1]
Menu Page 1
This phone has a three page menu and the bottom four icons remain same for all the pages.
Let’s go through each icon one by one.
Remember that adding any new application / game does not create any new icon as it happens in iphone.
SMS
We can send / read SMS / MMS messages using this icon and there is also some setting that we can do from here.
The compose screen of the SMS looks like below with a full QWERTY keyboard. Touching on any of the letters / numbers will make it bigger for better visibility of what you are typing. I am new to touch screen phones so finding it difficult to use this.
Calendar
Clicking this icon takes you to the calendar screen. Here, the places where you see yellow attachment types are notes / reminders for that day. The current date is clearly highlighted and I have currently clicked on the 15th date and as you can see the reminder for that date is showing below
Photos
This icon takes us to the image gallery. It is a little bit sluggish but manageable. Clicking on any of the pic opens it on the screen and if you turn the phone horizontally, the pic also follows. You can also navigate to the other pics in gallery by swifting your fingers on the touch screen as you would do in a normal iphone. Surprisingly the touch screen is quiet sensitive and only happens in like 2 out of 10 times the touch is not registered.
[BREAK=Camera, Java, Video, Calculator, Contacts]
Camera
This phone has camera which is nothing to talk about. I mean as expected it is absolutely crap. But it does have functions like white balance, night portrait etc and the maximum resolution picture you can take is 640 x 480
Java
Now this is unheard of. Supposedly it was not possible to install anything new on Chinese phones but not on this. This phone supports Java (jar) files and hence you can add games and software based on java.
Here you can see a list of things that I have installed. It even has an iguiter type application which is available for iphone and it actually works. I downloaded this application
Video
This section has all the videos. This phone can play mp4 and 3gp videos only with a maximum resolution of 176x144, the usual in old symbian phones.
The video too turns horizontal if the phone is turned horizontal.
Calculator
The usual calculator
Contacts / Phonebook
Here we can find all our contacts and we can either do a quick search (by typing the name) or search normally scrolling through the list.
[BREAK=Notes, Settings, MSN, Call Center]
Notes
This application is particularly handy for me as I can set my reminders or meetings using this. Haven’t explored other functions of this.
Settings
This is like the heart of the phone. Here resides all the settings. It has pen calibration tool also but funny part is that this phone does not come with a stylus so just finger calibration it is. You can change your phone and network settings using this. One interesting thing that this phone has is the scheduled on/off with which you can actually schedule the phone to turn off at certain time and turn on at certain time after that. A very handy feature I must say.
MSN
Java MSN Messenger in Chinese language.
Call Center
This lists down the dialed, missed and received call list and also call times and SMS & GPRS counter.
[BREAK=Menu Page 2]
You can swift you thumb on the touchscreen to go to next page.
Games
It has some some preloaded games and along with that links to download few more games. Clicking them opens the default browser of the phone. Need GPRS connection to use this.
DV
This is the video recorder. Quality as expected is crap.
Recorder
This is an audio recorder and can save audio in wav or amr format as chosen.
Radio
Good old radio. Needs the earphone to be plugged in and you can even record the radio content.
File Manager
This is the default file manager of this phone allowing access to phone and external memory area. It lists the size of the memory (total and used) on top. The internal phone memory is like 2 MB and external memory in my case is 4GB.
[BREAK=QQ, Ebook, Bluetooth, Tools]
QQ
This is a very popular Chinese instant messenger (just like Yahoo messenger etc). No use for us.
EBook
Using this phone you can read ebooks. Effectively text files. Looks good on the big screen and you can also set the size of font and style of font. You can even set a bookmark and then continue from that point later on. There are some text files (ebooks) already pre-installed.
Bluetooth
Used for normal device pairing and also to connect a Bluetooth audio headset and hence supports BT stereo headsets too. Have not tried myself as I don’t have either of them. Just tried transfers with my old phone and it works fine.
Tools
This contains a calculator, stop watch, calendar, notes, alarm, world clock, ebook. Effectively a redundant icon as most of these things are available as separate icons.
[BREAK=Alarm, Clock, Backlight]
Alarm
You can set five alarms here. Quite handy. You can also set any MP3 file as your alarm tone and the usual features like ascending etc are also there.
Clock
Use to set the time and date and also world clock is available.
Backlight
Used to set the time for the backlight to be on and the brightness of the screen.
[BREAK=Menu Page 3]
Language
You can change the language of the phone from here.
Profile
This is an important icon and I suppose this should have been on first page. With this we can set profile we want and customize it. We can then later on switch between our chosen profile and silent using the button on top left of the phone.
Pic editor
Never used. We can edit pics on the phone using this feature.
Ebay, Google, stock just open Chinese links or applications. It also comes with pre loaded opera mini which is English but the UC WEB is Chinese version
The Maps icon opens up the google maps application. Mail icon takes us to UC mail… Chinese again.
Opera Mini
[BREAK=Bottom Four Icons]
Making a Call
Now we come to the main function of this phone, which is obviously making calls. The screen where we can dial number is quiet good and uses the real estate of the phone effectively. In order to go to this screen we need to press the handset green icon on the lower left of the screen. This icon along with the other three are common for all the pages of menu.
On this calling screen, you can just punch a number and hit the call to make a phone call. The lower left clock sign takes us to the call center from where we can speed dial on of the last dialed numbers.
Clicking the outline of the man, opens up the contacts and the right most matrix type icon takes us back to the number pad.
When you have an active call going on, it shows as follows
Write SMS
This is also a sort of redundant icon but useful in the sense it saves you from a few touches as it directly takes you to the SMS compose screen. I have no complains.
Internet
Clicking this icon opens the place where we can set data account for internet access. It looks something like this. Notice that the top section in Chinese. Clicking that also opens things which are in Chinese.
iPod
This is obviously the music player of this phone. The sound quality is passable. Stock earphones are crap. I used my EP-630 and it did improve the sound. But i would prefer using my w800i as a dedicated music player. The screen shows a picture in this case. Don't be confused but. This default music player cannot read ID3 Tags or album art. Here if i have a song named Title.mp3 and if i have a jpg file named Title.jpg in same folder then this pic is displayed. Phones comes loaded with few English and Chinese tracks. One funny part was that i had put a few 320 kbps VBR Mp3 files and in file info it showed them as 128 kbps.
Update: 14th July 2009
Here is a small update to this review.
Handwriting Recognition
This phone has handwriting recognition but writing on the screen with finger is a pain and this phone does not come with a stylus :no:
So i use a pen (back of it actually), to operate the phone now as it provides better control over the touchscreen rather than my thumb. The phone recognizes capital and small letters equally well. It does not recognize numbers though. Using back of any normal pen we can write on the phone screen (for messages etc). Also you can write only one character at a time and after you are done writing, it gives you the character that it feels is correct and also gives options of others, just incase it has recognized it wrong.
T9 Dictionary
This phone has NO inbuilt dictionary.
Movable Icons
As i had said somewhere before that the four icons at the bottom remain constant, it is not the case. You can actually move icons within a single menu page and using the below 4 icons slot you can move them between pages. But the bad part is that if you restart the phone, the icons get rearranged back to their factory set position. :no:
[BREAK=A few more things]
PC Connection
With the supplied USB cable we can connect the phone to the PC. On connecting it we get the option to be used as mass storage, COM port (so that we can use internet on PC) and pictbridge
This is how i keep the phone with me
hyeah:hyeah:
To get an approximate idea when held in Palm
[BREAK=Assorted Information]
I had done quiet a few R&D before getting this phone. As here in Shanghai, you get iphone clones at every nook and corner and people selling them on roads. This phone (actually the one previous to this i68+) has a dedicated forum
Here's the URL of the same
Sciphone forum • Index page
There is also a company named Javquisoft which makes firmware upgrades for sciphones and few other chinese phones
Its forum URL is
javquisoft.com • Index page
Where to buy this cell phone ??
There is no dearth of places where you can order your own sciphone i68+ 3G on the internet but the main question is whether the one you are getting is genuine or not ?
So to make your decision clear i suggest you ONLY go to the following places for buying one
1. scoPhone.com Cell Phone, Electronic, DVD Wholesale - This is the company that manufactures this phone, so you can be rest assured you are getting the right product. I bought from here only. It will cost 90$ + 19$ shipping by airmail to India
2. ZYDAGLO Home Page - This is another website which sells genuine sciphones.
3. Ebay - Most of the sciphones available on ebay are fakes. I mean fake versions of the sciphone. But a genuine dealer is
eBay Store - Winlans: TV cell phone TV mobile phone, m830, watch mobile phone
They are nothing by the scophone on ebay.
Damages
For me the damages were less that anyone else would have paid. Being in Shanghai helped me. I directly contacted the customer care of this company and told them i will be paying in local currency. I got my 4GB version of the i68+ 3G for 530 RMB (approx 3.8K), cheaper vis-a-vis what i would have a paid if i went through their website.
So guys that's all from my side. I hope you all like my first attempt at review writing on TE and appreciate it. Comments, Criticisms and Questions are welcome. If you would like me to add anything to this please let me know.
Reviewer's Note: All the pictures are 1600 x 1200 images hosted on TE server and may take time to open. Clicking on them will open larger image.
Update: Small update on Page 14
Apologies if there is any problem as this is first my review. :ashamed:
This phone is the latest version from the Sciphone family of phones. The Sciphone first came with the i68 , then with the immensely popular i68+ and now this i68+ 3G
Some of the things in this review are referencing to the previous version i68+ but they hold true for this phone too. All images (barring a couple) are of the Sciphone i68+ 3G that I own.
First let me try to solve some myths
1. Can you easily make out a Chinese phone from its look??
A. Yes in most of the cases, but this is true with the ones we get in India. Here in China they make phones that can imitate the real counterparts in each and every way. I mean it is nearly difficult to make out the difference even when navigating through them. Some examples to give you are Nokia E71 and XM 5800.
2. Chinese phones use sub standard components and hence cost less
A. Mostly true, but we have to warrant other things like, no advertising, mass production, cheap labor, mass wholesale purchase by resellers and all these things make them cheaper.
3. Do Chinese people use these cheap Chinese phones ?
A. Yes many of them but as I told in above point it is difficult to know whether someone else is using a fake or an original
4. The phone here is question has a 3G suffixed to its name. Is it a 3G Phone ?
A. No, its NOT a 3G phone but the name here is to signify that it is clone of the iphone 3G (full black body and all)
Few things that prompted me to buy this clone in the first place
-> It’s an iPhone clone
-> It’s not a sub standard clone but something made with quiet a lot of precision (just my opinion)
-> Dedicated forum and firmware upgrades for this phone. Unheard of for a Chinese phone. (Please note that this point is applicable for the i68+ but firmware upgrades are expected to come for this also)
-> Price
[BREAK=The Package]
The Package
The packaging of the phone is in a white box similar to one we get the iphone in (that’s black but). The picture below is the box along with its contents
What’s Inside ???
The Sciphone i68+ box has the following things inside
• One mobile phone
• One Earphone (ipod styled)
• One charger (accepting USB)
• One USB cable
• One ‘Finger Tips’ manual. I suppose it is exactly same as what we get in a iphone.
[BREAK=Specifications]
Specifications (Taken from company's website)
* Installed java games with jar package
* Slide to unlock
* FM radio
* Supports MMS/GPRS/SMS
* .E-book, 64 phonix ring tone
* Special input interface, enlarge the letter when click virtual keypad
* 3.2 inch ultra-definition flat touch screen
* Quad-band GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz up to worldwide
* Weight: 123g
* Dimensions: 115.0 X 62.0 X 11.5 mm
* High-Res TFT display, 260K colors, 240 X 320 pixel resolution
* Touch screen .
* Exclusive user interface, themes and styles
* 3.2 inch LCD plus 3.2 inch touch screen
* Integrated SVGA camera 0.3 megapixels)
* Digital zoom
* Image Viewer
* CMOS sensor, white balance and other adjustments
* Video player
* Video recorder
* Audio Player
* Sound Recorder
* FM Radio
* MMS/SMS/GPRS
* Bluetooth 2.0
* USB
* GPRS class 10
* WAP 2.0
* Integrated hands free speaker
* 3D Stereo surround sound
* Voice record and playback
* Polyphonic (MIDI) tones w/up to 64 voices; plus MP3 ring tones
* Video recording and streaming
* Digital music player
* Melody composer
* Playback, mp3, AAC, GP3
* English, French, Spanish, Polish, Portuguese, Italian, German, Vietnamese, Turkish, Russian, Thai and Simplified Chinese
* Long Talk time: 180-220 mins
* Long Standby time:180-200 hours
What a long list....many of them repeats :ashamed:
[BREAK=The Phone]
The Phone
The phone is quiet sturdy and you can feel that when you hold it. By looks, it does not look like a typical Chinese phone at all. In fact it has quiet accurately imitated the iphone 3G. The back side of the phone has the camera and bottom part has some text written.
The buttons on left side are for volume and profile change.
You cannot remove the back cover of this phone and hence you need to specify the capacity and pay accordingly. Mine is a 4GB version.
Picture taken from company's website
Front View
Side View
The 3G Part
The following picture is of the back of the phone. As you can see it is full black, styled like the iphone 3G, hence the name
Back View
[BREAK=The Unexpected !!!]
What’s this…a 3.5mm jack input ??
Yes this phone has a 3.5mm jack input and not the usual Chinese phones proprietary connector.
In the middle is the SIM card slot which does not have a cover. In fact it had but after removing for the first time I misplaced it. The left most button is for turning the phone off/on or for coming to the standby screen (effectively locking the phone screen).
I have seen this on an iphone / ipod !!
This is something else you would not find on a Chinese phone. It has an ipod styled connector and what’s it is actually compatible with your original ipod accessories that can fit here. But the bad part is that this is reversed.
Its like if you connect this phone to a ipod dock, you will have to connect it with its face backward…. how stupid
Connector connected backwards :no:
[BREAK=Interface and Menus]
The Stand By Screen
This is the main stand by screen of the phone. I have a custom wallpaper setup here. Ganpati Bappa Morya
The first things that will catch your attention is the big time display at the top and the ‘Slide to Unlock’ at the bottom
On top left is the signal. This is a single SIM phone hence only one set of bars.
Next to that is the operator name which comes as a very small text and scrolls in my case as the text is long (CHINA MOBILE)
In the middle is the lock sign signifying that the phone is locked.
At the very right is the battery indicator.
We have to do the usual ‘slide to unlock’ to go to the main page with icons
[BREAK=Menu Page 1]
Menu Page 1
This phone has a three page menu and the bottom four icons remain same for all the pages.
Let’s go through each icon one by one.
Remember that adding any new application / game does not create any new icon as it happens in iphone.
SMS
We can send / read SMS / MMS messages using this icon and there is also some setting that we can do from here.
The compose screen of the SMS looks like below with a full QWERTY keyboard. Touching on any of the letters / numbers will make it bigger for better visibility of what you are typing. I am new to touch screen phones so finding it difficult to use this.
Calendar
Clicking this icon takes you to the calendar screen. Here, the places where you see yellow attachment types are notes / reminders for that day. The current date is clearly highlighted and I have currently clicked on the 15th date and as you can see the reminder for that date is showing below
Photos
This icon takes us to the image gallery. It is a little bit sluggish but manageable. Clicking on any of the pic opens it on the screen and if you turn the phone horizontally, the pic also follows. You can also navigate to the other pics in gallery by swifting your fingers on the touch screen as you would do in a normal iphone. Surprisingly the touch screen is quiet sensitive and only happens in like 2 out of 10 times the touch is not registered.
[BREAK=Camera, Java, Video, Calculator, Contacts]
Camera
This phone has camera which is nothing to talk about. I mean as expected it is absolutely crap. But it does have functions like white balance, night portrait etc and the maximum resolution picture you can take is 640 x 480
Java
Now this is unheard of. Supposedly it was not possible to install anything new on Chinese phones but not on this. This phone supports Java (jar) files and hence you can add games and software based on java.
Here you can see a list of things that I have installed. It even has an iguiter type application which is available for iphone and it actually works. I downloaded this application
Video
This section has all the videos. This phone can play mp4 and 3gp videos only with a maximum resolution of 176x144, the usual in old symbian phones.
The video too turns horizontal if the phone is turned horizontal.
Calculator
The usual calculator
Contacts / Phonebook
Here we can find all our contacts and we can either do a quick search (by typing the name) or search normally scrolling through the list.
[BREAK=Notes, Settings, MSN, Call Center]
Notes
This application is particularly handy for me as I can set my reminders or meetings using this. Haven’t explored other functions of this.
Settings
This is like the heart of the phone. Here resides all the settings. It has pen calibration tool also but funny part is that this phone does not come with a stylus so just finger calibration it is. You can change your phone and network settings using this. One interesting thing that this phone has is the scheduled on/off with which you can actually schedule the phone to turn off at certain time and turn on at certain time after that. A very handy feature I must say.
MSN
Java MSN Messenger in Chinese language.
Call Center
This lists down the dialed, missed and received call list and also call times and SMS & GPRS counter.
[BREAK=Menu Page 2]
You can swift you thumb on the touchscreen to go to next page.
Games
It has some some preloaded games and along with that links to download few more games. Clicking them opens the default browser of the phone. Need GPRS connection to use this.
DV
This is the video recorder. Quality as expected is crap.
Recorder
This is an audio recorder and can save audio in wav or amr format as chosen.
Radio
Good old radio. Needs the earphone to be plugged in and you can even record the radio content.
File Manager
This is the default file manager of this phone allowing access to phone and external memory area. It lists the size of the memory (total and used) on top. The internal phone memory is like 2 MB and external memory in my case is 4GB.
[BREAK=QQ, Ebook, Bluetooth, Tools]
This is a very popular Chinese instant messenger (just like Yahoo messenger etc). No use for us.
EBook
Using this phone you can read ebooks. Effectively text files. Looks good on the big screen and you can also set the size of font and style of font. You can even set a bookmark and then continue from that point later on. There are some text files (ebooks) already pre-installed.
Bluetooth
Used for normal device pairing and also to connect a Bluetooth audio headset and hence supports BT stereo headsets too. Have not tried myself as I don’t have either of them. Just tried transfers with my old phone and it works fine.
Tools
This contains a calculator, stop watch, calendar, notes, alarm, world clock, ebook. Effectively a redundant icon as most of these things are available as separate icons.
[BREAK=Alarm, Clock, Backlight]
Alarm
You can set five alarms here. Quite handy. You can also set any MP3 file as your alarm tone and the usual features like ascending etc are also there.
Clock
Use to set the time and date and also world clock is available.
Backlight
Used to set the time for the backlight to be on and the brightness of the screen.
[BREAK=Menu Page 3]
Language
You can change the language of the phone from here.
Profile
This is an important icon and I suppose this should have been on first page. With this we can set profile we want and customize it. We can then later on switch between our chosen profile and silent using the button on top left of the phone.
Pic editor
Never used. We can edit pics on the phone using this feature.
Ebay, Google, stock just open Chinese links or applications. It also comes with pre loaded opera mini which is English but the UC WEB is Chinese version
The Maps icon opens up the google maps application. Mail icon takes us to UC mail… Chinese again.
Opera Mini
[BREAK=Bottom Four Icons]
Making a Call
Now we come to the main function of this phone, which is obviously making calls. The screen where we can dial number is quiet good and uses the real estate of the phone effectively. In order to go to this screen we need to press the handset green icon on the lower left of the screen. This icon along with the other three are common for all the pages of menu.
On this calling screen, you can just punch a number and hit the call to make a phone call. The lower left clock sign takes us to the call center from where we can speed dial on of the last dialed numbers.
Clicking the outline of the man, opens up the contacts and the right most matrix type icon takes us back to the number pad.
When you have an active call going on, it shows as follows
Write SMS
This is also a sort of redundant icon but useful in the sense it saves you from a few touches as it directly takes you to the SMS compose screen. I have no complains.
Internet
Clicking this icon opens the place where we can set data account for internet access. It looks something like this. Notice that the top section in Chinese. Clicking that also opens things which are in Chinese.
iPod
This is obviously the music player of this phone. The sound quality is passable. Stock earphones are crap. I used my EP-630 and it did improve the sound. But i would prefer using my w800i as a dedicated music player. The screen shows a picture in this case. Don't be confused but. This default music player cannot read ID3 Tags or album art. Here if i have a song named Title.mp3 and if i have a jpg file named Title.jpg in same folder then this pic is displayed. Phones comes loaded with few English and Chinese tracks. One funny part was that i had put a few 320 kbps VBR Mp3 files and in file info it showed them as 128 kbps.
Update: 14th July 2009
Here is a small update to this review.
Handwriting Recognition
This phone has handwriting recognition but writing on the screen with finger is a pain and this phone does not come with a stylus :no:
So i use a pen (back of it actually), to operate the phone now as it provides better control over the touchscreen rather than my thumb. The phone recognizes capital and small letters equally well. It does not recognize numbers though. Using back of any normal pen we can write on the phone screen (for messages etc). Also you can write only one character at a time and after you are done writing, it gives you the character that it feels is correct and also gives options of others, just incase it has recognized it wrong.
T9 Dictionary
This phone has NO inbuilt dictionary.
Movable Icons
As i had said somewhere before that the four icons at the bottom remain constant, it is not the case. You can actually move icons within a single menu page and using the below 4 icons slot you can move them between pages. But the bad part is that if you restart the phone, the icons get rearranged back to their factory set position. :no:
[BREAK=A few more things]
PC Connection
With the supplied USB cable we can connect the phone to the PC. On connecting it we get the option to be used as mass storage, COM port (so that we can use internet on PC) and pictbridge
This is how i keep the phone with me
hyeah:hyeah:
To get an approximate idea when held in Palm
[BREAK=Assorted Information]
I had done quiet a few R&D before getting this phone. As here in Shanghai, you get iphone clones at every nook and corner and people selling them on roads. This phone (actually the one previous to this i68+) has a dedicated forum
Here's the URL of the same
Sciphone forum • Index page
There is also a company named Javquisoft which makes firmware upgrades for sciphones and few other chinese phones
Its forum URL is
javquisoft.com • Index page
Where to buy this cell phone ??
There is no dearth of places where you can order your own sciphone i68+ 3G on the internet but the main question is whether the one you are getting is genuine or not ?
So to make your decision clear i suggest you ONLY go to the following places for buying one
1. scoPhone.com Cell Phone, Electronic, DVD Wholesale - This is the company that manufactures this phone, so you can be rest assured you are getting the right product. I bought from here only. It will cost 90$ + 19$ shipping by airmail to India
2. ZYDAGLO Home Page - This is another website which sells genuine sciphones.
3. Ebay - Most of the sciphones available on ebay are fakes. I mean fake versions of the sciphone. But a genuine dealer is
eBay Store - Winlans: TV cell phone TV mobile phone, m830, watch mobile phone
They are nothing by the scophone on ebay.
Damages
For me the damages were less that anyone else would have paid. Being in Shanghai helped me. I directly contacted the customer care of this company and told them i will be paying in local currency. I got my 4GB version of the i68+ 3G for 530 RMB (approx 3.8K), cheaper vis-a-vis what i would have a paid if i went through their website.
So guys that's all from my side. I hope you all like my first attempt at review writing on TE and appreciate it. Comments, Criticisms and Questions are welcome. If you would like me to add anything to this please let me know.
