Philips' New Longer Battery Life Phones

Philips's new Xenium 9@9 series of phones offer longer talk time of up to 10 hours and stand by times of up to 40 days. This far exceeds the recent MOTOFONE F3's claims of 8 hours of talk time and 12 days of stand-by.

There are three phones in this range.

The Philips Xenium 9@9a has the longest battery life with up to 10 hours of talk time and 40 days of stand by. It's a basic dual-band GSM phone with WAP support, a 1.5-inch, 128x128 pixels 65k color screen. It has 2mb of internal memory, polyphonic ringtones and a phonebook capable of storing up to 1,000 entries.

The next one is the Xenium 9@9d which offers 8.5 hours of talk time and 1 month (30 days) of stand by, but it makes up by including more features such as a 1.3 megapixel camera, Java MIDP 2.0 support, a larger 128x160 pixels 65k color screen and finally 18mb of built-in memory. It is a tri-band GSM phone with support for USB 1.1, Bluetooth and IrDA.

The last one, the Xenium 9@9t, offers a similar 8.5 hours of talk and around 35 days of stand by, but it ups the previous phone by adding a touch-screen and stylus input method, handwriting recognition and a miniSD expansion slot. Unfortunately, it lets go of the Bluetooth and IrDA connectivity.

Will these new phones put Philips back on the mobile phone map in our country? In Mumbai, where battery life of phones is not the worst problem of all, we don't think so. In other inner parts where battery life is a concern, this line of phones would be a good introduction and also good competition to the MOTOFONE F3.