Philips 699 is an upcoming dual SIM phone full touch screen

The Philips 699 is an upcoming dual SIM phone full touch screen phone and it has a 1.3 megapixel camera. Do take note that we are reviewing an engineering unit, and features on the phone might not all be available.

Design
The Philips 699 has a basic candybar design where the front of the "Dual Sim phone" is covered in porous black metal and surrounding parts are all plastics. The phone has a 2.5 inch full touch screen display, with a 262K TFT display. The images rendered are crisp and bright, even thought the resolution suffers a little.

The screen is of course full touch screen, but it comes with a keypad which had to be realigned to fit in the 2.5 inch screen. The keypad is slightly smaller that way but still manages to find its way during texting.

The left spine of the "dual Sim phone" has a volume rocker and the right spine has a quick camera button. We also fancied the uniform port design whereby the Philips 699 has only one universal mini-USB port for data transfers and charging. The mini-USB is protected with a pop flap that provides protection for the port. Meanwhile, the stylus fits in snugly into a bottom slot.

The back of the dual Sim phone has a 1.3 megapixel camera slot and flanking both sides of the camera opening is the phone’s speaker. When we popped opened the cover, the 800mAh Li-ion battery covers the dual SIM slots and the micro-SD card slot.

Dual SIM
The Philips 699 comes with Dual SIM storage, although it does not come with a dual standby mode. It works great if you fancy a backup to your contacts, or you have an extra phone number. The phone takes about five seconds to switch SIMs and goes through a soft reboot. However, the Philips 699 only remains with one SIM active and the other inactive. But calls on the inactive SIM can be diverted to the presently active SIM (depending on your telco settings).

Connectivity
The phone is armed with a few simple connectivity options, Bluetooth 2.0, GPRS- the phone also operates under either of the dual-band (GSM 900, 1800MHz) frequencies.

Features
The 699 runs on Philips’ propriety OS, it runs at decent speeds and load programs pretty quickly. The menu page is view in a 3x3 grid, and we used much of touch screen to access it, as it is far more intuitive compared to the keypad’s joystick. The joystick also allows for tweaking to your frequented menus, by default however it accesses the phone book, messaging, audio player and organiser.

The individual menus expand into a much more expansive and rich interface once you delve into the individual icons.

The PIM applications for the Philips 699 -"Dual Sim phone" are an alarm clock, calculator, calendar, agenda, dual language (English-Chinese) dictionary, international converter, daylight saving, international clock, task list, and time zone. Additionally, the 699 comes with unusual ‘health calculators’ such as the female calendar and a BMI (body mass index) counter.

Your contacts list can be tweaked for either a picture contact, music caller ID or video caller ID. You can use the phone’s camera to capture a video of your friend and when he/she calls up, you will be alerted by this video before picking up your phone call.

The phone has 11MB internal memory and a microSD slot, perfect for your music files and additional videos. The ringtones sections have 10 preloaded MIDI sound files, and there are also a bunch of wallpapers can also be changed. But MP3 can easily be uploaded and customised as your ringtones as well.

The multimedia section of the Dual Sim phone has numerous functions to access deeper functions such as the video player and the audio player. The audio player is by far the loudest we have yet encountered as it had enough sound to turn our office into your local drinking hole. The sound quality for the phone is good and we can’t ask for anymore in terms of music. It also features an ImageViewer, eBook, and a Melody composer.

The 699 also comes with Philips phone software tools, which allow phone management to be done from your PC. The software gives options to backup your contact lists, copy image and music files as well as documents from your computer. The software also allowed music editing as it allows speed editing of your favourite tunes to fit in as your ringtones.

Messaging
The 699 texting has been a rich experience which uses both the QWERTY touch screen key and a keypad to type in your messages. We liked that the messages allowed us to key-in up to 1,000 characters for those long winding messages.

The Philips 699 supports both alphabet and Chinese texting. Both texting styles offer many options to input your messages. The handwriting recognition on the 699 is also one of the more accurate we’ve used. The phone also support T9 for alphabet as for Chinese character the phone allows pinyin, and character recognition- and was surprisingly easy-to-use.

Camera
Meanwhile, the dual Sim phone has a 1.3 megapixel camera, with numerous options to tweak the settings of the images, from the colour effects to the white balance (florescent, tungsten, cloud, incandescence). There is also a time delay option for up to 15 seconds. The camera also allows shooting up to 1280x1024 pixels. Picture taken are decent and clean, though the photos seem a little saturated with ambient light.

The video recorder is simple to use and records in either the Mpeg4 or H.263 format and allow the same tweaking on the camera to be done on the video recorder. Video quality is quite decent and has a quick contrast button.

The Philips 699 can also double as a webcam when plugged into a PC via mini-USB and uses the phone camera as the webcam.

Games
The dual Sim phone has three games, ColorBalls, Memory and Puzzle. The ColorBalls game is reminiscent to the popular Space Invaders of the yesteryear with a twist. The coloured balls have to match the balls scrolling down the screen.

As for Memory – true to its namesake consist of challenging players to remember a four-card combination which swaps around much like the olden-day gambling movies.

Meanwhile, Puzzle is the old puzzle game that used to be on plastic where you could only move one piece of the puzzle to reorder every single piece back in place. Once you get past the hair-pulling frustration of missing a single piece, it is in fact a very rewarding game.

Verdict
In conclusion, the Philips 699 is a medium-end phone packed with some pretty interesting features. The array of features is very staggering at first but once we got used to it the phone is actually a very simple device.

At RM 799, the Philips 699 has a simple design, dual-SIM, touch screen functionality, and it drives home its point as a phone that has everything. If you are looking for a phone that has a basic premise without difficult features, the Dual Sim Phone is for you.

General 2G Network GSM 900 / 1800
Size Dimensions 106 x 56 x 15 mm
Weight 98 g

Display Type TFT touchscreen, 256K colors
Size 240 x 320 pixels, 2.6 inches
Type Polyphonic (64 channels), MP3

Ringtones Customization Download
Vibration Yes
Phonebook Yes, Photocall

Memory Call records 30 received, dialed and missed calls
Card slot microSD (TransFlash)
- 11 MB shared memory
GPRS Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots),32 - 48 kbps

Data No HSCSD; EDGE; 3G; WLAN;
Infrared port
Bluetooth Yes, v2.0 with A2DP
USB Yes, miniUSB
Messaging SMS, EMS, MMS
Browser WAP v1.2
Games Yes
Camera 1.3 MP, 1280 x 960 pixels, video (320x240)

- Dual SIM cards
- Java MIDP 2.0
- MP3/MPEG4 player
Features - Female calendar
- Weight management
- International converter
- ENG-CHN, CHN-ENG dictionary
- Voice memo
- Built-in handsfree
Standard battery, Li-Ion 850 mAh

Battery Stand-by Up to 250 h
Talk time Up to 2 h 30 min