Beyond E-Tech Duet D8 – A Cheap iPhone Look-A-Like

Sum and Substance:

Thumbs Up:

Two slots for SIM card, good call quality.

Thumbs Down:

Bad camera quality, typing on the portrait mode of the QWERTY keyboard will be a nightmare.

Inside the Trunk:

Technology: GSM
Band: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 (Quadband)
Phone design: Candy bar
Caller ID: Yes
Other features: WAP web browser, FM radio, camera, music player.

The Whiz Kid Speaks:

Duet D8 has a 2.8 touch screen with a resolution of 320X240 and 16-bit (65000 colors). Supported languages are Chinese, Vietnamese, Spanish and English. MP3 is the only supported audio format and the video formats supported are 3gp and MPEG-4. FM can be heard with the built in antenna on the phone and you don’t need to plug in the headset.

The phone has a 300 capacity phone book and the two SIM cards can store 250 contacts each. The phone has a two mega pixel camera behind the phone and there are two stereo speakers around the lens. The handset comes with an extra battery and a 256 MB microSD card.

The phone has talk time of 240 minutes and standby time of 130 hours.

Razzle Dazzle:

The phone looks a lot like Apple’s iPhone, it is so similar that it breathes plagiarism after a while. Duet is just looking to cash in on the iPhone’s look  by making similar phones. But you will find that apart from the looks, there is no similarity between the two phones. There is nothing attractive about this cheap Chinese phone.

Inside Dope:

D8 is the successor of the D888 which also could take two SIM cards at a time. While we like this concept we used the phone to find out that it is terribly bad at the features that it is supposed to serve and looks like a typical cheap Chinese phone.

The display of the phone is 2.8 inch big and will give a resolution of 320X240 which is pretty low considering the size of the screen. The phone is also touch screen based so we would have liked a bigger screen because it is the only input device in absence of a numeric keypad or QWERTY keyboard.

The display is nothing great and the big icons on the menu will certainly turn you off. Smaller icons would have accommodated more items on the menu but then the low resolution comes in the way. You can change the wallpaper, greetings, screen saver and function settings on the display.

Using the touch screen is quite frustrating and we kept wishing for a numeric keypad. Sometimes it didn’t register touch at all, we didn’t know what was wrong and we pressed harder on the screen. We were perplexed by this problem on some occasions it registered touch quickly while on some, it didn’t register at all. We would have also liked haptic feedback but then asking a feature like that from an entry level phone like this is a bit too much.

Below the display are a set of keys like two call buttons, one for each SIM, a call end button, music player short cut key, two soft keys, and four way navigational pad with the OK button in the center. These keys are good to use and even thought they are flat on the surface of the phone, the buttons are not hard to press.

To dial a number on the phone all you have to do is press the phone dial button on the screen. The dialer is again a lot similar to the iPhone. 16 keys which make up the dialer are pretty spacious to use, but again the phone might not register touch sometimes.

Problems arise when you have to compose a message. There is no keypad so all you get is virtual keyboard on the screen. The full sized QWERTY keyboard cannot be used in landscape mode since the phone doesn’t have an accelerometer which means clumsy typing full of mishits. You will be using the little finger to type (since it is the tiniest) and still you have end up with mishits. To make matters worse there is no stylus included. They keys are very small we found it impossible to type without making mistakes.

The phone has handwriting recognition feature but again it is hard to use without the stylus. We drew up a few letters on the screen and weren’t surprised to see the phone couldn’t make out what we were drawing. For entering messages the phone supports Chinese, Spanish, Vietnamese and English. The phone comes bundled with an extra battery just like typical China model phones.

Other features on the phone include file manager, vibrate mode text and multimedia messaging, to-do list, world clock, alarm clock, currency, converter, stopwatch and calculator. There is a game called Magic Sushi if you love playing games while waiting for your bus or alike.

The phone has 500 memory for contacts and each SIM can store 250 contacts. A single entry can take three phone numbers, company name, e-mail and birthday. You can put your friends into groups on how you know them and you can also pair up a contact with a unique ring tone or a photo that you have clicked with the camera. The phone has 15 polyphonic ring tones and you can use the music tracks in the device as ring tones.

Other buttons on the phone include a volume rocker, camera on the back which as a speaker on each side of it. There is an antenna for FM radio which means you do not have to plug in the head set for listening to radio. There is a single port for charger, USB cable and headset which means you can use only one device at a time with the phone. The phone comes with a 256 MB microSD card but the card slot is located behind the battery which means you will have to go digging to access it.

The two mega pixel camera behind the phone isn’t any good when it comes to taking pictures. Image quality was awesome; they looked blurry and washed out. Other multi media features include a music player with basic features, FM radio with recording and mobile television.

The phone has a good call quality but volume was a bit soft on our sides. Other than that our friends reported good call quality and they didn’t have the soft voice problem. The volume level is a bit low and you will struggle while calling in high noise areas.

Speaker phone calls were fine with no voice distortion even at the highest volume.

The battery of the phone will last about four hours for talk time. The phone comes with a additional battery incase you run out of juice and you can’t charge.

Nitty Gritty:

The main attraction of this phone is the dual SIM feature. You can put two SIM cards in the phone and you can make and receive calls from both cards. It is also great if you are a frequent traveler abroad, you will be able to put a SIM of your home country and a SIM of the country that you are currently in. Other than this there is nothing that will make you overlook better phones in the market and buy this piece.