With the BenQ-Siemens Mia EF61, the company makes no bones about making an almost exclusively girl’s phone. Even the company’s announcement confirmed this with the news that it is a product of an all-female design team. bathed in soft pale blue colours with the flower feature gracing both the front and the back, this cute and compact clamshell phone should reach where it was meant to.
So, how does it perform? On opening the phone, there is the screen which is supposed to double as a mirror. In fact this works. Switch off the screen and voilà! You have a compact mirror. The screen itself is quite good quality at 262K colours if rather small. There is a second smaller screen on the front to give you basic information when the phone is closed.
The BenQ EF61 has a 1.3MP camera which gives acceptable pictures in sunny outdoors. There is no flash and images indoors are largely poor.
The native memory is vanishingly small at 1.5Mb but fortunately there is microSD card slot for up to 1Gb, which you will almost certainly have to invest in if you are to make use of the memory-hungry features of the phone such as taking pictures or music-playing. Fortunately prices of microSD cards have continued to plummet.
The music player supports a fairly wide variety of formats including MP3, AAC and WMA. There is a supplied headset which is of good quality.
Connectivity is via mini-USB as well as Bluetooth which is good.
Messaging is supported with support for SMS, EMS and MMS but surprisingly there is no email client. There is a web browser and WAP 2.0
All the other standard features including vibrate alert, predictive text, Java, and video player are featured.
This is really a typical mid-range phone with all the predictable features you would expect. It is an unashamed successor to the Siemens Poppy which did well in sales. The BenQ Mia EF61 does what it does relatively well and should fare well with its target clientele.
Dimensions: 88 x 46 x 23mm
Weight: 99g
Standby Time: Up to 225 hours
Talk Time: Up to 3 hours.
