Haier P6 review

5 August 2004 20:48 GMT / By Stuart Miles

It’s not until a gadget comes along with a certain feature that you realise you obviously couldn’t live without it. Haier, an electronics manufacturer that according to its website makes everything from mobile phones to fridges has decided that what we all need in a mobile phone is a laser pointer.

Of course! I hear you gasp with realisation. But in actual fact we couldn’t think of anything more pointless to put on a phone. Okay so for the business types it could be deemed useful in presentations, but really - do you want one on your phone all the time?

Unfortunately it’s not just the laser pointer that makes you wonder what is going on with this phone. Shaped to look like a thin voice recorder you would be easily forgiven for not realising this was a phone in the first place, it’s an interesting concept but one that is laden with problems. The first is the tall thin display is useless for viewing anything. To get around this Haier has swivelled the data on the screen by 90 degrees. What this amounts to is having to twist the phone to view anything. As you can imagine this soon becomes very annoying. That combined with a poor quality mono display and it’s a pretty poor show.

Specs wise there’s nothing here to excite at all. Dual band and polyphonic tones, the phone doesn’t offer much else. The only saving grace could be the voice recorder option that allows you to record up to 15 minutes of talking, but even then performance was ropey and most phones do this now anyway.

Verdict

Perhaps it's a nice idea to include a laser pointer on a phone, and perhaps we are just being silly for not getting the groundbreaking significance, but for us, we can't thing of anything more pointless unless of course you plan to be one of those annoying people with the laser pointer in the cinema.