Home » Mobile Phone Reviews » NEC E228 May 13, 2008

NEC E228 Review

First Impressions

As I previously owned a NEC E313 and had been very impressed by it I was very excited when NEC brought out this particular model, it is a lot smaller than the E313 and looks a lot more compact and robust. When I got it home and started setting it up I was impressed by the build quality, it also looked a lot classier than the E313, partly I think due to the reduced size, (its just a touch bigger than the nokia 3510i). As I started setting it up I however discovered that this model wasn’t going to impress me quite as much as the E313 did.

NEC E228

Sizes & Dimensions

Features

NEC E228 Box

Menu Structure

I didn't think that the menu on the LG was hard to use, you navigate the menus using the four-way scroll button on the handset.

Camera

The cameras on this handset are mounted on the front and back, with an option in the menu to change between them. The lens on both cameras are not covered by a sliding protector but instead the front camera is inset into the body of the phone, while the camera on the back is raised,so if you put the phone down on a hard surface there is a good chance that you are going to scratch the lens. The resolution on the stills camera is 640*480 which produces really clear sharp pictures. There is a 2x zoom function and also a choice of sizes and quality for the pictures. The video camera produces adequate, but not fantastic results although these are best viewed on the phones screen rather than transferred to the computer. The pictures or video taken with the camera can be transferred to pc via email or mms. A data cable can be bought separately but I found the price of this to be nearly as much as the handset. There is no addition of blue tooth or infrared on this model, but considering the email was free and quick and easy to use this made up for the lack of blue tooth or ir.

NEC E228 Photo


NEC E228 Photo

The Display

The display is a 65k tft, which is 35*43mm. The screen appears bright and clear and the photos are displayed well. There are five pre-stored wallpapers loaded onto the handset or you can download your own, or use the onboard camera to take pictures and set these as wallpapers. The screen shows all the normal icons, battery and signal strength etc. The screen also features shortcuts, which you can personalise or remove completely. My one complaint about the screen was that even in normal daylight, not necessarily bright daylight, the screen was hard to see, so when I was trying to take a photo a lot of the time it was a bit hit and miss. The E228 also supports called id, whereby you assign a picture to a number in your phonebook and when the person calls their picture will be displayed on the screen.

NEC E228 Screen

Design

Although big for a normal handset, considering this is a 3g the size wasn’t too bad, being just a bit bigger than the Nokia 3510i. The front is a silver colour with black sides and back and although it looks smart there is nothing in its looks to make it stand out. The back of the handset hosts the rear camera which sits slightly proud from the back plus the battery and sim compartment, its just as well that this cover doesn’t need to be removed on a regular basis as mine was incredibly stiff and hard to remove. On the back you also have the speaker, which is really loud and clear. On the right hand side of the phone you have the usb and headset connector, while the left side has the memory stick slot. The phone feels nice and solid in the hand and there is no creakiness or squeaking to the chassis, all in all the build feels well made and of a high quality.

The Keypad

The E228 features a four way navigation key and also a dedicated three services triangle key. Unlike the LGU8120 there is no dedicated back button so this makes it hard to navigate the 3 services. The keys are slightly raised but are really small and positioned close together so texting was I found difficult even for someone with small fingers.

NEC E228 Keypad

The Menu

The menu is in a grid layout, accessed by pressing the menu button on the keypad, consisting of handset, mail and messaging, multimedia, applications, contacts, sounds, connectivity, settings and calendar. The menus do take a bit of time getting used to and there are also quick links on the main screen, which you can personalise with your most used links, or you can totally remove them. You have a choice of user profiles such as outdoors and normal and the standard features of energy saving, backlights and so on.

Ringtones

This handset supports 40 chord polyphonic; there are six alert tones and seven ringing tones with space for up to twenty-seven downloaded or created ring tones. The tones are very loud and you can assign different tones for different things such as alarms, sms and calls.

Memory

There is an onboard 19mb of memory; this can be expanded up to 128mb by purchasing a memory stick duo, which fits into the left hand side of the phone. There is not sufficient memory space to upload many mp3 files without buying a memory stick duo so unless you plan to expand be warned that you will only fit a few mp3s on the handset. The phone has enough storage to save up to 100 photos taken on the highest largest size and on the highest res setting.

Phonebook

The phonebook or contacts is easy to locate, as there is a shortcut on the main screen by default. This has the space to add up to 500 contacts including extra space for details such as name, alternate name, telephone number, email address, caller groups, pictures and so on. It is advisable to store contacts email addresses if you are going to be mailing them regularly as if you don’t then adding an email address to a email can be quite tricky and is rather long winded. You can also assign a picture to a phonebook entry, as well as a particular ring tone.

Email SMS

You can either check you email by using the email facility in the services menu or via the email function on the handset itself. The email is reliable and can send and receive quite large attachments. Email is the method I use for sending pictures from the handset and also for downloading pictures to the handset, wallpaper for example. When emailing large amounts of pictures I found the easiest way was to send them to the outbox and them mail them all in one go from there, far easier than sending them one by one. The E228 features predictive text which once used to makes for faster texting, I never quite got the hang of texting from this handset as instead of using symbols you had the symbols lined up next to numbers and you had to choose the corresponding number so it got to be really confusing, and in my opinion a bit pointless. MMS works well and like the email once you have addresses and numbers stored it is a quick and easy way of sending sound, picture or text files.

NEC E228 Comparison

3 Services

The 3 services are accessed by pressing the dedicated triangle button on the keypad, this will take you straight to the main page called today on 3, here we have services such as top shelf, MTV news, news this week, games, tunes and pics, news and new releases. The services button which can be found at the top right of the today on 3 page gives you access to various services such as news and sport, email, games, showbiz, find and seek, weather and travel and also map finder etc. You need to be in a 3-coverage area to access these services apart from email, tunes and pics and the help area. The services were sometimes slow to load with the email being the worst offender, but once the email was loaded, navigation and using this facility was really easy, straightforward and surprisingly fast. You can download videos and store them on your handset. A one MB video clip will take approximately 40 seconds to download. The main gripe about the 3 services are the inability to browse any other sites other than the 3 site, referred to as the walled garden, you cannot access a site other than the ones 3 approve which can sometimes be frustrating.

MP3 Player

As the handset came with such small amount of memory I only bothered loading one track onto the mp3 player, the quality was adequate either listened to through the supplied headset or indeed through the rear speaker. Personally I think a stand alone mp3 player would be far better as the battery on this model is so dire that standby would be greatly reduced. When listening to the mp3 player you can choose to create play lists or repeat etc, you can also choose what animation to have playing on the screen whilst listening to music, mine was a rather funny little cartoon character doing an impersonation of John Travolta’s dance from Saturday night fever. The midi files which are used as ring tones features a James Bond theme tone which I have to say was the best out of the small number supplied on the handset.

NEC E228 Side

Issues

The biggest problem without a doubt was the battery life, 3G handsets are well renowned for being power hungry, but this handset was awful, sometimes not even lasting a full day on a full charge. Another problem that I encountered was that sometimes the handset would turn itself off with no warning, so I wouldn’t even be aware that it had happened. Signal strength is also an issue with this handset, I have used various 3 handsets and the signal strengths have not been as poor as on this model.

Battery Life & Signal Strength

The battery was quoted at 100 hours on standby but in reality this was very much less than this figure. With minimal usage the battery would last around eighteen hours on standby before starting to bleep that it needed charging. This to me was totally unacceptable as I had all the power consumption options correctly set. The signal on this model was also not very good, it constantly kept switching networks, but it wouldn’t just changeover, it would sit there with no signal for a couple of minutes before switching over, only to switch over again a few moments later, in the end I turned the annoying switch over tone off. Call clarity was another area where this handset wasn’t very good, when I did manage to get a signal the call clarity was really poor with me not being heard clearly and also not hearing clearly as there was lots of crackling going on.

NEC E228 Back

Summary

I was really looking forward to this model when it was released, but my enthusiasm soon turned to irritation over the small niggles and the bigger issue of the battery. Overall for £30 I suppose you cant get much better but it seems that this being the successor to the excellent NEC E313 you would expect it to be better, it seems however that NEC have reduced the size of the handset and also the quality and reliability considerably. I would not recommend this handset over the E313, but as a budget handset with a fairly good camera then you could do far worse. Another problem is the lack of infrared or blue tooth, meaning that when 3 start charging for their email service, you either need to buy an expensive cable and software or pay high prices to send your pictures from the handset to the pc.