Siemens S45 Review

Overall Rating

Dropped from 1.5 meters onto concrete and despite big dent, still works fine,
does EMS, send ringtones & pictures,
make your own bitmaps on computer to replace logos / screensavers,
included data cable (which siemens want copious ammounts of money for as a separate - £40),
excellent ringtone editor - I am experienced with PC midi editors, and this comes quite close to full blown midi software! - use crotchets, quavers & rests and stuff like that. name a song, you can make it),
GPRS (untested)

Quite complicated software - address book especially unuseful (you can copy ppls details to it, but not back onto the sim),
not colour screen (what you expect for £99),
screen scratches easily (same as most mobiles) & no way to replace screen (as can be done on nokia-via a new cover),

Well done, you have observed the first sensible rule of capitalism - don't believe the hype, it's nearly always craap. However, after reading extensive reviews, some from this site, i bought the Siemens s45 mobile phone. It must be understood that this fone is very much aimed at business.

The deal: I got a pay-as-you-go fone on T-mobile from argos.com for £99. very good deal. shop around, everywhere else sold the fone for no less than £180 on payg.

The fone: this fone has just over 1/3 MB of flexible memory, which can be accessed by the PC as a drive via the data cable. This may seem like little memory, but when ringtones only take up 1 or 2 KB each, you see my point. the fone has voice recognition for foen numbers and fone functions. this is however very patchy. eg, saying "lesbiian" aparently sounds like my recording for "calculator" this gave me & my best mate stomach ache from the hysterics. anyway, the fone has EMS, however i tried it with several other new fones and the only one to recognise the ringtones and animations i sent was my mates T68. all others just spurted out garbage and charged me 30p for 3 joint txts. that should change over time. the dictaphone is good, giving over 2 1/2 minutes of OK quality sound. not good enough for business purposes, but OK for recording the meaning of life (before you forget it) when you are drunk.

The software: the PC software that comes with it (updatable from internet) is very poorly written, but means you can use paint to design bitmap images 100x50 pixels and downloasd them to your fone as a screensaver or operator logos.

I personally feel that this looks 500% better than the previous ME45 and other vain attempts at a mp3 fone, but it has exactly the same software

This is really more of a 1st generation primative computer software. yea - it certainly could do with a fair ammount of debugging, but its a lot more versatile than most other fone software. They have tried to squeeze a lot into this fone, and they have largely succeeded in creating a great business fone.

If you can get it for between £100 - 150 then go for it, but don't get it on T-mobile PAYG - craap, i'm getting it unlocked for 15£ and getting an O2 online sim.

Members' Comments onsirpaulosthegreat.'s Review

• Thoon. on 24th May 2003

  I agree with the ur appraisal on the phone's functions. But the phone itself feels fragile, I had to buy a leather case just in case anything happens to it. And also on the second day of using it I already experienced my first sim card error, and the phone stopped during and sms send and I had to reset it. No more trouble yet, though I sense Siemens tried to cram too much into the phone thus the bugs and glitches. Or do you think I am worrying too much?