TCC Q285 Triband 4096 colour polyphonic mobile phone (4)
Overclocker 1 Aug 2002

Photo Gallery (3)

Is this a phone or is this "windows". What ? Control panel on a phone ? Yes, the icon based control panel looks just like the familiar control panel on your W2k. You can of course change it to a List Menu instead of the Icon menu. Over here we can select 9 basic functions and they include Wall paper configuration, Calculator, Profiles, Charge Info, SIM TOOK KIT, Games, Dual Clock, Ring Tone editing and lastly Picture Manager. 

One thing I particularly like is the ability to configure two clocks. In this case, I configure them to Singapore and London. The clock can be changed to a analog (circular and rectangular) or digital clock.

As this is a tri-band phone, you can force your phone to operate in GSM 900, 1800 or 1900 mode or combinations of it. In most cases, setting it to automatic is the best. There are also 7 colour skins which you could choose. For example, Colour 4 skin or I call it Scheme is golden colour for the highlighting.

Yes you can change the font type. There are only Italic and Comic font available. Although this phone does not come with GPRS, you can configure your phone to use the WAP services if your telecoms company provide that service. In the picture below, we have configured it to work with Starhub's Gee WAP services.

Conclusion

I have been using this phone, in replacement of my Nokia 6150 as it is big and bulky. I like the functionality of this phone. Although wall papers and ring tones doesn't really fancy me, but the big colour screen does really help as SMS messages now appear bright and clear. With the inclusion of EMS, it makes sending messages more fun. Well the only downside about the EMS is that it is compatible with its own class of phones. I don't seem to be able to receive the EMS sent from Nokia or SonyEricsson phones.

With its built in antenna, it looks better but reception can be a problem where the signal strength is not strong. I took the Nokia 6150 and compared the signal strength, out of 5, I get 2 / 5 on the TCC whereas I can get 1 / 5 at a corner of my house. I also tried the roaming capabilities by bringing the phone near to the border of my country where I could "roam" into another country's network. The Nokia 6150 is able to detect all available networks in the other country but on the TCC Q285, I can only see the local networks. That is probably due to the fact of the internal antenna.

Overall this phone is a very interesting phone which most users will love. The only drawback is that some of the earlier models have firmware problems and need to be updated with new firmware and it is only available in Taiwan (as TCC don't provide tech support online). The manual is also in Chinese only and this really cuts off a lot of international potential market. Well, let's hope TCC will come out with a newer model perhaps with 65 thousand colours 16 polyphonic tunes with GPRS and Simplified Chinese input. I will definitely buy one and try it out. 

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