David Le Page Until now, if you said wireless application protocol (Wap), people instantly thought Nokia: “Ah, you’ve got a 7110.” Nokia has to be congratulated on having marketed their product so effectively that many people follow the arrival of their latest models with the same enthusiasm normally reserved for a new BMW. The 7110 itself is a great monster of a phone, with a large and extremely clear display that would satisfy those who get the special large-print books out of the library. The display is surrounded by an aluminium border, which embraces their “navi-roller” – the Wap equivalent of a mouse, and the entirety is finished off with an attractive, minutely speckled maroon-brown plastic. However, its looks are unimportant – what is important is the Wap interface, which works as well as any Wap interface, and is almost nightmarishly difficult to set up. The first competition for the Nokia was the Ericsson R320s, which holds the dubious distinction of being the first cellphone this reviewer has known to crash. The entire system froze up and the only way of restarting it was by removing the battery. The R320s has another disadvantage. It’s thin, it’s light, but it has a front surface area reminiscent of its three-year- old predecessors. In other words, like the 7110, not something you’d fit comfortably into any pocket other than a jacket pocket. This review, however, is not of either of these phones, but of the Siemens S35i, the top-of-the-line phone in the latest range from that manufacturer. Siemens’s phones do not have much of a public profile. The advertising is minimal, their public relations people never return calls and the name is associated more with industrial products. Yet in the S35i, they have a product which (fortunately) outweighs all these factors. In fact, Siemens actually launched the first Wap phone in South Africa, the S25, several months before either Nokia or Ericsson. Unfortunately, they were too far ahead of their time. The Wap browser in the S25 remained, in South Africa at least, a cute anachronism, incompatible with the real Wapsites coming online. The S35i has by far the best voice dialling, when compared with the Nokia 7110 and the Ericsson system. This is probably because it listens more carefully – you have to give it two samples when you set up voice dialling for any particular number. It hardly ever fails to recognise what you’re saying. What are the S35i’s weaknesses? Well, the casing feels slightly flimsier than its predecessor, suggesting that it might be more susceptible to damage. What’s more, the display is by no means as well illuminated as that of either the Nokia 7110 or the Ericsson R230s. The S25 had a colour display, which was excellent. For some inexplicable reason, Siemens has elected to drop the colour display and go back to a comparatively poor monotone. This is mitigated though, by the ability to increase the font size used by the phone. What’s more, the predictive text input – called T9 – is practically impossible to use. The idea is that it takes the first couple of letters you enter as a suggestion and tries to complete the word for you. In practice, it changes the word you’re entering completely, perversely turning an initial “m”, for example, into an “o”. Fortunately, it can be deactivated. That’s the downside. The upside is weight, function and price. What’s more, the S35i has excellent voice quality and, despite having an internal antenna, excellent reception.
It’s small enough to carry comfortably in a shirt pocket. So there’s no need to leave it on your desk to persecute your colleagues in your absence with the standard range of revolting melodies. In fact, at 99g it’s just two-thirds the weight of the Nokia 7110, which weighs 141g, and just 8g heavier than Nokia’s miniscule new 8850, which doesn’t have a Wap browser. Of course, it’s arguable whether you actually want a Wap browser; many have been disappointed by the awkward nature of Wap, its slowness and the fact that it is a very poor match for the hype of “the Internet in your pocket”. Wap is in a sense a prototype technology waiting for faster data rates, and at present you would be well advised to investigate carefully before making it the basis of a purchasing decision.