A mini AIEK C6 Card phone review

You might have seen these tiny credit card sized “feature” phones on eBay or Amazon. Very cheap, very small.

Made by these people: http://aiek.cn/products/product.php?lang=en&class1=77 and looks a bit like the M5.

So here’s a mini review for a mini phone.

The essentials:
Does it work? Yes! If you have a 2G compatible sim and provider, then it seems to do a pretty good job of finding a signal.

The good:
It’s a tiny screen, but it’s clear, readable and manages to get a lot of information across. It’s surprisingly easy to read txt messages.
Because it’s a tiny LCD screen, the battery life is also very good. It should last for a few days, maybe a week before it needs charging again. Not bad for a tiny phone.

The bad:
The keypad isn’t back lit, and because of it’s size, you need good light and good eyesight to use it.
None of the useful shortcuts are documented. There’s no documented way of manually locking (or unlocking!) the keypad for example.

The ugly:
Forget using it for text entry.
No phones in this price range have T9 text entry, but this one takes it to a whole new level. Instead of changing between upper and lower case by pressing #, you have to step through all of it’s many language options before you get back to upper case.
There is a way around this! You can leave the txt message, go to options, select language, change to uppercase, then exit the options and go back to the txt you were writing!
Erm. No.
It’s a shame, because the tiny format is very appealing, but the hideous barriers to text entry make it pretty much unusable for anything except phone calls (and even then, good luck entering names in the contact list).

I haven’t tried all the other AIEK mobiles, but I strongly suspect all of the small LCD format phones they make will have this same problem.