Thursday 25th February 2010

Emporia Life Plus big button mobile with emergency function.

Available from O2 @ €50 (Bill Pay) and €129.99 (Pay as you go).

When we look at the latest mobile phones here, they tend to be crammed with apps, widgets, GPS, acceleromters, advanced cameras and all types of ways to keep your social network going.

Today we take a step back, so to speak, and look at a phone that simply makes calls, and sends texts, but aims for a key market.

As it says in the box, it has a "Simplified Operation" and is "Reduced to the essential"...

Some of the mainstream major mobile manufacturers have in the past made mobiles that just made calls and sent texts - no more than that, and some even had big buttons which made them easier to use.

But at the moment you have to look for specialist manufacturers such as Emporia, Binatone, Doro and Amplicon, even then some were hard to find.

The Emporia Life Plus is a lot easier to get, and there was a big marketing push before Christmas...

Emporia Telecom is an Austrian company who specialise in the "50 plus" market, as they term it. They have a number of phone products that are very easy to use - this model, the Emporia "Life Plus" even comes with an emergency button.

It's a fairly big and chunky mobile phone, but this accomodates a big 2.7 inch screen, and great big buttons on the key pad. It also makes the phone harder to lose, and easier to hold and use.

On the front of it when it is slid shut, it has a big green OK button to answer calls, and a red button with a handset in the "down" position, clearly meaning you are hanging up or selecting "No".

On each side there are two buttons and a slider switch - and on/off button a volume and a keypad lock, and on the other there's a speaker, an alarm clock switch, and a torchlight button - a nice bright LED bulb, that would be very handy for lighting up the lock of your front door.

The screen and menus are very easy - there's never too much on the screen, and you can change the font size to suit yourself - it's defaulted to nice big numbers and letters.

The instruction booklet at first looks a bit daunting at 37 pages long, but it is broken down into 3 sections, a 10 minute guide, a 20 minute one for useful details, and a 30 minute guide for what they call "professionals"!

The Emergency Call feature is a simple function, as you would expect, and makes you think, why didn't someone think of that before?

You can save up to 5 emergency numbers (relatives, neighbours, friends, 999 etc). These numbers are then automatically dialled in sequence when you press the red button with the heart shape on the back of the phone. If the phone cannot get an answer on the first number you have saved in, then after 60 seconds it tries the second numbers instead, and if that does not work, it automatically dials the third one and so on.

The phone emits a warning tone continuously so that you and the person you ring know it is an emergency - the idea being that if you are incapacitated and cannot speak, but are able to hit the emergency button, then the person you have set as the emergency contact will already know what the warning tone means when they hear it.

The phone also sets itself to handsfree function and at full volume, when the emergency button is activated.

The Emergency button is recessed into the back of the phone to avoid you pressing it accidentally, but the keypad lock does not lock the emergency button, so you would still have to be careful not to trigger it, though you should hear the loud warning tone if you do.

You can also set your Top 10 favourite phone numbers as short cuts on the number key pad, so just pressing one key will bring up your ten most frequently called numbers, and you can select who you want to call.

On a different version - you can run the phone off of normal AAA batteries in an emergency if the Li-Ion battery is dead, but not on this one, which is a bit of a shame.

But the battery life is pretty good, the previous version had a smaller battery and could last in stand-by mode for up to 6 days, while the battery is this one is even a bit stronger.

The battery life is better when you consider that it just displays black numbers or letters on a bright orange battery. There are no dazzling colours displays, no GPRS or Bluetooth to suck the power out of the phone in a hurry, as is the way of new smart phones.

This phone is strictly for making voice calls and sending SMS messages. There are five ringtones plus a birdlike cheeping sound and even a cockerel, plus a vibrating function as well.

It doesn't have a link to Facebook or Twitter, you can't download apps, and you can't take photos of the grandkids as it doesn't have a camera, but it is a reliable and easy to use mobile, which could give you a bit of peace of mind.

It is available from O2 @ €50 (Bill Pay) and €129.99 (Pay as you go).

At the other end of the spectrum, some details now of a very specialist iPhone app from RTE...

Now you can access the massive archive of RTÉ Radio 1's 'Documentary on One' from anywhere in the world.

The Documentary on One is RTÉ Radio 1's multi award-winning radio documentary strand.

With an ever increasing library, this App offers immediate access to over 400 of RTE radio documentaries dating as far back as 1966 - by April, there'll be over 600 docs to choose from as we continue to upload from the archives.

This is the world’s first free iphone/touch application devoted entirely to radio documentaries.

RTÉ Radio 1's short documentary series, 'The Curious Ear' is also available on this app.

Users can search through all RTÉ Radio documentary content by keyword search - i.e. type in 'love' and any doc with love in the title or podcast summary is offered in the search results

Users can share each RTÉ Radio documentary and the App itself by Twitter, Facebook or e-mail

Download the Documentary on One iPhone App from:

http://www.rte.ie/mobile/documentary-on-one-iphone-application.html