Spice Mi-280 Review

Media

A strong set of in-built equalizers and in-ear headphones with good audio drivers automatically means the phone passes this section with flying colours. The stock player won’t impress you with the interface, but it more than compensates with some really good music playback via both, speakers and the in-ear headphones. MP3 and AAC+ are supported out of the box, and you’ll have to download third party applications for playback of more formats.

Strong performer in the media department

It’s a low-res screen and it’s small, so viewing movies isn’t really an enjoyable experience. MP4 and H.263 is supported by default, with more support requiring a third party player. A strong performer, definitely with that price tag.

Connectivity

The Mi 280 is a dual SIM standby phone (3G + 2G) with Wi-Fi (with tethering), Bluetooth 2.1 and GPS. The internal memory stands at 134 MB and the front camera supports video calling. In-call quality is pretty loud and clear on the 280. The browser doesn’t have flash support, so you’ll have to make do with that.

No flash support

It’s a dual SIM standby phone, but the dedicated SIM management option will allow you to manually configure which services need to run on which phone. While it’s done pretty neatly, we couldn’t get the phone to change our data network between Loop and Vodafone. Though toggling was successful, data service couldn’t be swapped between the two operators. We had to manually restart the phone to use that particular data connection. However, this could also be an issue from the network side.

A front camera on a phone this cheap is only a good thing, right? But, there’s one problem. At the moment Skype doesn’t support the 280, and the app force closes everytime you try logging in, though VoIP calls work just fine with other apps, like Viber. We’re hoping that Skype support is added soon, because that will only sweeten the deal.

Misc. Apps

As always, Spice Mobiles spices up their mobiles (pardon the mini tongue twister) with a lot of pre-loaded applications. Apps include Bharat Matrimony, BSE stocks, Delhi Metro Navigation, eBuddy, Economic Times, iBiBo browser and farms, Hindustan times and Justdial. Phew!

Misc apps

There’s also Nimbuzz, inBollywood, Yahoo! Messenger, mig33, Mobile tracker, Rail Yatra, Reuters and Opera Mini. With so many pre-installed applications, you’re ready from the word go. Also, if you’re tired of these apps and find a way to delete them (read: root), you can free up some additional internal memory.