Lemon iT 717 Review

Michael Browne

Whenever we unpack a new gadget, we try not to peek at its specifications and photos emblazoned all over the packaging. Looking at a gadget in such a way gives us a clean, unfettered opinion sans any associated PR purple prose. At first glance, the Trio 320 looks like a solid little brick. And we mean solid – this phone is made of plastic, but it’s well constructed. For such an entry-level device, it feels unnecessarily large and quite thick. For one, the bezel surrounding the display is thick, adding to the dimensions. The phone is also as thick as Nokia’s N95 8 GB; the only reason we can think of, is the huge (for a phone of this range) battery, rated at 1500 mAh. Sound overkill? This phone supports three simultaneous networks. Remember that constant antenna scanning and maintaining a signal is a power hungry process. Therefore, with three SIM cards, this sort of battery is very much needed.

Wait a minute – did we just say three SIMs? In case you’re wondering if that was a typo – it wasn’t. The Trio 320 (name’s a hint!) supports two GSM SIM cards and one CDMA UIM SIM. Now you might ask yourself – why three SIM card slots? Well, a lot of people use more than one phone number – one office number and another personal number, for example. This phone will allow you to use multiple numbers in a single handset, which, in our opinion is a lot more convenient than lugging two (or three) cellphones around.

Look and Feel

The Trio 320 belies its price and entry-level status with a solid overall build. The body has a dark grey and silver colour that is appealing without being excessive. The display looks small in comparison to the body, but in reality at two inches it doesn’t feel small in use. The keypad is tacky – the keys are loose and move around a bit when you press them while not exuding good feedback i.e. they’re not tactile. This is a major shame because the key spacing and bevelling is decent. The centre button on the joypad and the music and browser shortcut keys are finished in metallic pink, a nice contrast to the silver used on the remaining keys. The four-way joypad also exudes minimal feedback and isn’t intuitive while feeling tacky. Call accept and reject buttons are about the only ones to feel reassuringly solid and intuitive.

The menu system is quite simple and uncomplicated, while retaining the basic functionality and intuitiveness one would expect from such a phone. Quite simply put, there are too few options available to mess up, and if Lemon did, it would be a crime most foul. One of the little additions is a flashlight on the top of the phone. Unlike most phones where the flash doubles as a torch, the Trio 320’s camera makes do without a flash unit. The torch isn’t as half as bright as the one on the Nokia E72, but it’s there for the odd emergency. Oddly, you can only operate the flashlight with the keypad unlocked. Additionally, even a simple action like disconnecting a call requires you to first switch the screen on, and hitting the call reject button once will do nothing; this simple gesture requires two key hits – badly thought out ergonomics.

Three small games are bundled, although we lament the lack of inbuilt space. We couldn’t even copy a single five-megabyte, MP3 file to this phone simply because only 558 kilobytes of space was available. What’s cool is that while on a call on a GSM network, you can still receive calls on the CDMA network, which appear as a call waiting. However, the second GSM SIM is not active, (reachable), while on another GSM call. Even when sending an SMS, with three SIMs installed, you can choose which of the three numbers to send it from – nifty, although as an extra couple of steps to be performed each time, this could get annoying.