Home » Mobile Phone Reviews » NEC E313 May 13, 2008

NEC E313 Review

First Impressions

The NEC was the first real budget handset on the 3 network. With prices as low as £19.99 with trade in the handset offers some pretty impressive features. When I first saw this handset my first overall impression was'wow that's a big phone. The initial feel of the handset was that it was too light for its size at 125gm and it also felt very plastic and not very robust. The feel of this handset while using was also uncomfortable as the length made it feel very top heavy, especially when taking pictures or texting.

NEC E313

Sizes & Dimensions

Features

NEC E313 Box

Keypad

The keypad is I feel the major thing that lets this phone down. The keys are very small and slippery and they are also too closely spaced, anyone with above average finger size would, I think find the keypad too small to use, especially for texting. Considering the size on the keys it is quite easy when accessing the menus to choose the wrong option, thus making it very frustrating at having to start again as there is no dedicated back button. Overall considering the size of the phone the keypad could have been more well spaced out.

Menu Structure

This is without a doubt a phone that you cannot use with first reading the book. The menus I found to be totally confusing to navigate, as there were so many sub categories to trawl through. The phone had a choice of user profiles, including the normal, outdoors etc. The phone book was impressive with space for 500 contacts, including numbers, emails and addresses.

The Camera

The camera on this handset is placed on the top centre of the phone. It is a rotating camera, the idea being to point it towards you during video calls, or away to take pictures or to film small videos. The camera being rotating also help to keep the lens protected. The camera itself has three res settings, the highest being 640*480 (see picture samples). The camera is really a point and shoot device and gives superb results for the price of this phone. The pictures were in fact good enough to have printed. The format is also the popular jpeg image file. For transferring images there are a few ways, the most easily I found to be was by emailing, which with a couple of button presses your pic would be on its way. The facility to send a list of pictures to your outbox and send them all at once was perhaps the easiest way. Pictures can also be sent via MMS, but at the time of owning this phone MMS was only available to people on the same network. You can also buy a cable with the appropriate software to transfer and manage your images etc; the price of this however at the time was £30. The phone also has a video camera facility, which supports the mp4 format. I found the quality of this to be extremely poor, with the highest quality being selected the biggest video you could shoot and send via email or mms being eleven seconds, which in my opinion wasn't worth doing. However the videos you watch or download from the 3 portal were excellent quality, both the visual and audio couldn't be faulted.

NEC E313 Photo

NEC E313 Photo

The Display

The screen dimensions are 35*43mm, with a 65k colour display which I was very impressed with as the display images and pics appeared very bright, vivid and clear. The display had various tools for adjusting colour, contrast and brightness etc. The display is icon driven which tends to cover the images on the screen, but removing these shortcuts so you can see the full display means you have to go delving into rather awkward menus to access the function you desire. The display also features clock, battery meter and signal strength indicators. There are a few quite boring pre installed wallpapers for you to choose from, or the ability to download your own or to use the camera for pictures and to set these as desktop wallpapers.

NEC E313 Held

Browser

3 have a dedicated triangle button to take you directly to its services. If you have no 3 signal the only services you can access are your balance, pics and ring tones and your email. 3 do not let you access the internet outside their services, having what's called a walled garden which means you can only browse what 3 allow you to. The connection to the browser was a bit hit and misses, with the service normally currently unavailable, although email was considerably better to access and it was also very reliable and had the ability to send and receive attachments. I did use the video messaging briefly, and my thoughts on it is until 3 upgrade its system, it isn't worth the 50p a minute cost incurred, indeed the images were of a grainy, jerky quality which rendered it practically unusable.

Battery Life & Signal Strength

This phone comes complete with two batteries, and that's because it needs them. The applications that this phone runs makes it power hungry, indeed I was very lucky to get 48 hours out of it on standby, and if I was using the camera and emailing pictures I would have to charge it every night. A full charge would take around two hours before the display indicated it was full. Signal strength on this handset was poor in comparison to other 3 models. I would have a bar of signal strength sometimes, but mostly I would be connected to the O2 network, the annoying thing is that it wouldn't stay on one network but be switching between the two practically all the time, with the handset audibly beeping to let me know it was doing this, during voice calls this would result in dropping calls. The clarity of voice calls was very good and the volume also was good once id played around with the settings to alter it.

MP3 Player

This phone has a built in Mp3 player, but unless you expand the memory the capacity depending on quality is about four tracks. The sound through the supplied headphones is of average quality, certainly not up to the quality of a stand-alone player.

Other

The internal memory of 19mb can be expanded with a Sony memory stick up to 128mb, which is used for text messages, video and images etc. The instruction book was not very clear, for example setting up my email would have been so much easier if the book had firstly informed me that do set my email password I firstly should have reset my voicemail pin so that the voicemail pin becomes your email password!! A phone call to customer services was the only way I found this out. The phone comes with IR, which is easy to use and keeps a good connection.

Summary

My conclusion on this phone is that for the price I would recommend it, but purely for the quality on the camera. If you don't mind a big phone and the commitment of having to buy a voucher every month, and providing you have sufficient coverage, then for not a lot of money you are getting a lot of phone.