Panasonic GD87 Review

Overall Rating

size, build quality, ergonomics, screen quality, features

The mobile came with incorrect MMS setup, only available with Vodafone, hard to follow user manual. Can't download games.

This is only my second phone after my Nokia 6210 was stolen. This phone is superb. Being a clamshell design it is extremely compact (thinner than the Sharp GX10 and also has better battery life) and has room for a user friendly and full sized keypad where you can actually read the alphabet for text messaging. The 65,000 odd colour screen is amazing - far better than any other phone I have seen and is also bigger than the Sharp GX10. An external LCD screen shows who is calling and can be set to light up in one of three colours to identify callers. Menus are intuitive and are accessed by a very easy to use central toggle button. There is a dedicated Vodafone Live key (which should boost Vodafones revenues) which takes you straight to their wap site to download (at a cost) their polyphonic ringtones and wallpapers etc if you so desire. The MMS was not setup correctly on my phone and it took several calls to Vodafone to find out how to set up the defaults. You have to go to Vodafones UK website and there is a 32 step setup proceedure under "Configuring your phone", you may get a box with only the first few steps shown, don't worry, highlight the text and drag down through the bottom of the text box to see the rest. This process will take about 20 minutes!!! You can send MMS for free until Feb 03 with Vodafone and this includes to mobiles or to internet addresses. The images are usually around 15kb in size and as you send them it counts up and displays how many kbytes you have sent. This also happens on Vodafone Live where you can be charged for what you use on GPRS - it works out at £2.35 per megabyte. You will need to contact Vodafone customer service to get you phone connected to GPRS and MMS before you can use either service. This is free of course. The camera is very cool, not very high resolution but then the files would be much bigger and take longer to send. It has a twighlight mode for taking pictures in low light, a 2x zoom, and you can add fancy frames if you wish and sound and text. It's not as easy as the advert makes out - you need to save the sound first and then add it to the picture. Battery life is good but if you browse a lot and use the screen ie have it fully light, then it will only last a couple of hours or so. The polyphonic tones are great and easy to setup. You can have unique tones for different people and their picture will appear if you save it in the address book. The Infra Red allows you to send various files to a PC with Infrared - so you CAN backup your phone book and save your pictures. You can also access e-mails from the phone although I havn't tried this yet as you need to set it up with Vodafone customer services. So all in all a great little phone. Buy one and you should not regret it.

Members' Comments onAndrew.'s Review

• Ryan. on 17th Jan 2003

  All i want to say is yes you can download games. I have the phone on orange and i have download a few games from the orange network, easy. But this only works if your on the orange network.

• Tom. on 21st Feb 2003

  I would just like to ask if you can purchase this phone on O2? And also is this the best colour screen/camera phone there is?