CRUISE P9800 Mobile Phone Review

By savvy1Aug 10 '11

The Good: The Cruise P9800 mobile phone offers both a large responsive touch screen as well as a slide-out full QWERTY keypad. It’s a rich multimedia smartphone with Dual SIM, Dual Standby, Dual Camera, Bluetooth, and FM Radio. The phone looks great and is super easy to use.

The Bad: The handset offers many exciting features but they also add some grams to its weight.

The Bottom Line: In the below Rs. 5000 price range, Cruise P 9800 is the best multimedia mobile phone. If you put its weight aside, the phone will beat rivals in looks and capabilities both. In design, the phone can even take the BlackBerry’s of the market head on. Truly a high performance, high value phone!

Cruise P 9800 Review

DESIGN

The shiny and premium zinc allow body of Cruise P9800 cell phone feels smooth in hands.  The first thing that you notice about the phone is completely clutter free design. The device has nothing protruding out of it. If you close your eyes and run your hands around its body – front, back, and on sides – the only thing that you feel is smoothness. The tiny volume control key, on the left side, is the only thing that you will observe. The black finish body inside the stainless steel edges looks brilliant.

The phone features a 3.2 inch touch screen that takes majority of the space on the front-side. Right below the screen is the navigation control for the phone – Talk, End, Home, and Back keys, and the optical trackpad. All the keys are etched in the phone’s body to preserve the velvety finish. Keys are wide apart, soft to press, and responsive.

A gentle push at the bottom of the touch screen exposes the full QWERTY keyboard underneath. The whole mechanism to expose this keyboard is very smooth and feels robust. On full slide-out the upper and lower parts of the phone adjust so well that their weight is evenly distributed. Often with such mechanism, phones tend to get either top or bottom heavy but Cruise P9800 is a pleasant revelation. When you close the phone, the screen locks back in place comfortably and securely.

Slide out gives you a physical keypad right below the touch screen – so you have the option to use either. For texting you may prefer the physical keyboard whereas for browsing the touch screen is an excellent option. The keys on the physical keyboard are nicely placed. There is enough room between the first row of the keys and the bottom edge of the display making it comfortable to type. The keys themselves are clearly labeled and are nicely spaced with metal partitions between the rows. You can type easily without making mistakes or straining your finger tips.

Overall, Cruise P9800 design is impressive. It can compete head on with the BlackBerry’s of the phone world.

KEY FEATURES

Cruise P9800 is a Dual SIM phone that comes with Dual Camera and Dual Standby. Switching between two SIM cards is painless. Both the SIM cards can reside in the phone simultaneously so you don’t have to replace the SIM card for switching. Just press the up/down keys to activate a particular SIM card.

Phonebook allows to store up to 300 contacts with name and pictures. You can copy the phonebook from one SIM card to another. We appreciate this feature as it makes it easy to keep phonebook in sync across SIM cards which may even be used in other phones.

The call functions of the phone are impressive – Hands Free, Call Hold, Swap Calls, Mute, Sound Recorder, DTMF Activation/Deactivation, and Multi-Party Call, the phone offers it all. You can put the conference call on hold or carry a conversation with one party privately while keeping rest of the group on hold. You can also just connect the two parties and excuse yourself out of the conversation without dropping their connection.

Audio quality of the phone is quite good. The Audio Player supports all popular audio formats viz. WAV, AMR, MID, IMY, and MP3. The free headset that comes with the phone makes it fun to take calls or to listen to favorite tunes. Honestly we didn’t expect the audio quality for such a low priced phone to be so good. We put the provided headset to test and were quite delighted by the offered experience.

The phone also features FM Radio so you can refresh yourself with latest Bollywood numbers. FM Radio also keeps you abreast of current happenings around you, if you care. The audio recording feature lets you record favorite songs as they are played. You can record voice memos as well which can be sent via MMS. The memos are stored in WAV or AMR audio formats and can be played back at any time or attached to a message.

Cruise P9800 comes equipped with two cameras – one for capturing photos and other for video chats. You can adjust camera shutter speed, sound, EV contrast, anti-flicker, delay timer, and continuous shot settings. The self timer feature allows you to not miss yourself in the photos. The phone also allows you to adjust the image size, quality options, white balance, and scene mode. You even have the option to add special effects to the captured photo which include Normal, Grayscale, Sepia, Sepia Green, Sepia Blue, and Color Invert. Finally, you can opt to store the clicked photos on the phone memory or the external memory card.

The quality of the photos also surprised us pleasantly. The zoom in feature is cool. You do need to let the image stabilize in the viewfinder before clicking the capture button for best results. The phone lets you be real creative with photography.

For sharing photos with friends, you can use MMS feature or use direct connection to social networking sites such as Facebook to upload the captured photos.

The handset features video recording capability as well. The video recorder allows you to control the quality and white balance. It also features self-capture mode that allows you to be in the video clips yourself. Video Player can then be used to play the video back right on the phone itself.

You can use USB port or Bluetooth connection to transfer files, image or videos, from the phone to a computer. You can then view them on a larger screen.

The internal memory of the device is 512MB but you can expand it via an external memory card. Like other Cruise phones, P9800 supports T-Flash memory card for increasing the memory up to 2GB.

User Profile feature lets you configure your preferences for ring tones depending upon an event or environment. For example, you can have different tone, volume, alert type, ring type, or answer mode settings for outdoor and indoor usage.

The phone also supports automatic power on or off feature. You can schedule it to go off or turn on at a particular time automatically. This is a nice feature to have. For example if you know meetings or events in advance you can preset the on/off time. You can also choose to turn the phone off around your dinner time. This is just what you need to keep some distance from your phone for some part of the day. Additionally, it’s a way to stay nice to environment by controlling the carbon footprint.

For spicing up your experience, mobile phone comes with easy access to MSN, Yahoo, and Twitter, in addition to Facebook. The device comes preloaded with popular F1 race game. It supports Java 3.5.1 and allows you to download your favorite games from the Mrp Store or internet.

Other features of the phone include World Clock, Organizer, Calendar, Email, and Alarm. It also supports many languages including Hindi and English. It was nice to see the menu options and home widget titles in Hindi. You can choose your preferred language through phone settings. What we found impressive is that the phone lets you switch your language at the time of composing a message.

Overall, it’s a stellar phone with some neat features. The device will appeal to those who like being flamboyant. The phone has many similarities to BlackBerry Torch, but we hope it develops its own fan following.