Trio Aakash T2424

Even in this age of smartphones, the simplicity, charm and allure of a candybar is undeniable. So i decided to get this one.nnThe Goodn--------------nNice trendy fashionable and a different looking phone. Good quality plastics.nKeypad, especially is quite good for a phone in this class. nExcellent form factor, light, small and easy to carry. nSpeakers and ringtone are quite loud, but do distort at high volume, but it's ok.nCall quality and earpiece volume are ok. Voice calling was stable with no problems.nIt is a Java Phone and comes with Facebook, twitter and Maps though i haven't used it, as it will be pretty slow on GPRS. nMicro-USB Charging + data port, and an additional provision for a round pin charging port as well !!! Very interesting. I tried my old nokia round pin charger, and it works. Wooohooo !nThe micro SD card has a ZIF type socket which is very good.nnSince i use it a secondary backup phone, contact management was important to me. In this respect this phone is pretty good with 1000 contacts, 4 numbers per contact, and support for groups. I just had to export contacts fom my smartphone, copy onto this phone's SD card, and import. No problems at all.nnUsing it as USB mass storage (with sd card) was no problem. I got 800 kbps - 1mbps write speeds. Better than other phones in this class. One accidental good thing about this phone is that it exposes only one drive in Mass storage mode (your SD card). This is excellent because, now my USB car stereo sees only one drive, and has no problems playing music from this phone !!! With some other phones which expose 2 drives in mass storage mode, my car stereo will not work, as the stereo sees only the first drive (phones internal memory, which is generally very small) and says no music. Pretty cool. Sometimes less is more ;-))nnnThe Badn-------------nThe main issue with this handset, is the 3.5mm headset jack. It works only with a few 3.5mm headsets, not all, for some strange reason. The supplied one worked ok. Nokia ones seem to work ok. However it did not work with my smartphones headset (eventhough that was 3.5mm as well), and one other headset i had. Even a small 0.1 mm difference with different headset connectors will confuse this handset, and produce disturbance and noise on the headset. Definitely the headset jack on this phone could have been designed much better, and should have been tested with different 3.5mm headsets, to have some tolerance for minor differences in headset connectors. nnThe quality of stereo audio output via the 3.5mm jack could have been better. Even with a high quality headset, output is average. Volume is ok, but the quality of sound like bass and treble is very average.nnThe center navigation button, opens the Radio. And there is no way to remap it to something else. Normally on most phones this opens the Menu, so i keep hitting it by mistake only to see the radio instead ! Maybe easy to fix with a software update. nnnThese few things spoil the thrill of what is an otherwise Brilliant Handset !!! Even so, overall it's a very good phone for the price.