Micromax Q5C Review

Bought it for Rs. 4500/-. Looked nice visually with good finish. Went home and started using it and then the dream of a economical QWERTY phone on CDMA went bad.

My observations,

-The keys are very cramped together and small. Invariably one will press on another adjoining key. Very tiring and not meant for people with healthy fingers. Even my wife's thin fingers could not operate it properly.

-The moment i inserted the headset for FM Radio, the phone hangs. No key works, nothing. Only option remove battery and restart. Afterwords again tried for auto scan. Nothing happens. Then tried for manual frequency. No voice. I was not deep inside where the FM Signals are weak because at the same place, other phone's FM was working crystal clear. Then went outside on the road. Voilla. FM sound started with a lot of disturbance. Tried all channels. Only one channel with lot of distrubance. Nothing else in any other channel.

-The phone is having memory of only some 2.6 MB which again is the root cause of so many issues,

It is having 2 Megapixel Camera but if you shoot a photo with the highest resolution, it will shoot but the photo won't open in the phone saying size too large. You are saving the photo on memory card and not on the phone. Still no high res photo could be viewed on the phone.
Same thing with the video. At 30 FPS it gives error and does not record.

The camera is having LED Flash as touted in the specifications. Any average person will understand that Camera Flash should flash when you click a photo. But here things are different. The so called LED Flash is actually a LED Light which you can start from the phone settings. It remains on till you disable it. It is just like a torch function on many chinese phones. The light is very low. And even in little darkness, it had no effect. Just a marketing gimmick.

-There is a facility for attaching Picture ID in your contact list which is actually just on paper. Whatever size image file you try to attach, it will say file size to large. I have tried even 10kb file. Didn't work.

Internet and Browsing.

Opera Mini is preinstalled but when you launch it, phone takes approx. 3 to 4 minutes saying connecting. Then the page loads. If you type another web page address or even click a link on the loaded page, it again takes 3 to 4 minuted saying Connecting. After that the page loading time is OK for a CDMA 1x connection. Forget about serious browsing even normal browsing is not possible with this phone. Lets understand this with my actual experience.

-Launched Opera MINI. Load time including connecting-3 Minutes.
-Typed GMAIL.COM and opened. Load time including connecting-4 Minutes.
-Typed USED ID and Password and LOGIN- Load time including connecting-5 Minutes.
-Clicked on the first e mail-Load time including connecting-4 Minutes.

So for checking just one e mail, time taken is 16 minutes. Useless actually.

Tried installing other JAVA browsers like BOLT and UCWEB. Both installed. UCWEB was faster then OPERA as far as page loading goes. But the problem when you click on any link and phone displaying the message Connecting was uniform across all browsers. This i suppose is with the CDMA technology when the connection is immediately terminated and then reconnected when you use internet again. There is some issue with the modem of the phone taking so long to connect again.

The phone is not having any Phonesuite. However USB and Modem Drivers are there for connecting to PC and browsing. Installed USB Drivers and connected the phone to PC. Surprisingly, the speed for PC browsing is appropriate for a 1X Connection and had no issues.

Audio Player and Sound Quality.

-The audio player standard like many chinese phones. Sound quality for phone speakers is quite loud and you can hear the audio very comfortably in a room size of approx. 150 square feet. Sound is real loud actually.
-The bundled headset is also having good loud sound. Sound in the headset is loud with more sharpness but absence of bass totally.

Video Player

-Did not play any files saying file size too large.

Call Quality and Reception

-The call sound quality and reception was excellent across locations with very clear voice even with 3 Bars of Signal out of 5 Bars.

Memory Card access with UDISK function.

-You can access the memory card with data cable with UDISK function. But the speed of copying anything by this mode was extremely slow. It took nearly 11 minutes to copy one 6 mb size mp3 file. And even then when the file was played only 25% of it played and terminated.

So for copying anything to Memory Card, you will have to always remove it and attach it to a separate memory card reader and attach to pc. Imagine every time you click a photo or want to transfer some music, you cannot do it through data cable because it will take hours but only have to use separate memory card reader.

So there are many other gripe which i don't even remember or care to remember. Ultimately after 24 hours, went to the shop from where it was purchased and requested the guy to change the handset with other brand. Now the sad part. The fellow said he will do it but deduct Rs 1500/- as he will have to sell it as second hand only even though it was used for only 24 hours. Got really annoyed. Negotiated and finally the guy agreed for deducting Rs. 900/-. Had no other option so agreed and bought LG510 Cookie Zip instead.

For all who want to buy this handset, it is useful only if you want to make and receive Calls and nothing else. So please do not fall for this trap of cheap QWERTY CDMA handset.


Review by rajanmehta.

http://www.rimweb.in/forums/topic/25986-micromax-q5c-launch/page__st__15