Here's how to make the right call

Gone are the days when you could simply pick a nice little cell phone that was only meant for communication. With convergence seeping into the cell phone market, picking the perfect phone is like plucking out the grey from your hair. The questions in the quest for the perfect are innumerable: Does your ideal phone come with a snazzy camera, voice-activated dialling, but no text keyboard? Or do you need a speaker phone, text messaging and tons of music? Is emailing and working on office files a routine? There is no single perfect answer. So how do you decide? Simple. You just spot the category you fall into.

Say, most of your day is spent swearing at everything—from the dog that you almost run over to the honk-happy bumper to bumper traffic—that wastes your time. You’d be much happier using your time to answer important e-mails or work on proposals. Undoubtedly, you are the mobile office type of bloke.

The best tools for such people are handhelds, PDAs and smart phones. Like Palm’s Treo handhelds, Research In Motion’s BlackBerry devices or the O2. These deftly integrate call-management software, on-screen touchpad and numeric keypad, which makes sending and receiving calls a snap. They come with large screens that make reading messages easy on the eyes, and offer the ‘push email ’ service—forwarding messages to your handheld . They also come with convenient joysticks for navigating menus and programs. In addition, you get some useful applications such as a spreadsheet and a word processor.

But if you are not a power user, beware. These can be a bit much to handle. “It’s the most irritating phone,” fumes Anita Agarwal, a Mumbai-based marketing executive who owns an O2. The reason? “My earrings always touch the on-screen touchpad and the damn phone dials conference to random numbers ,” she grumbles. Plus she never needs to use the office suite or the e-mail or even the planner. What adds to the confusion is the complex multilayer menu. If all you do is use the phone for texting and talking, go for budget versions. Your best options in this case would be the likes of Nokia 1600 and the Sony Ericsson J series.

But for those who rate style high, it’s got to be chic models like Motorola’s Razr V3c and Samsung’s MM-A 900. Razr is both functional and stylish. The clam shell handset works well for voice calls, offers a lively internal LCD, features a 1.3-megapixel camera, and overall is a pleasure to use. The glitzy colours complete the coolness quotient. Samsung’s MM-A 900 too has a svelte look. It has some excellent features, including a vibrant and roomy internal LCD, and a 1.3-megapixel camera.

Finally, multimedia hounds who like to take impromptu photos or snap on the headphones and let the music play, could choose between Nokia’s bulky N90, Sony Ericsson’s sporty-looking W600i and Motorola’s sleek Slvr L7. All three handsets are designed to make picture-taking fun and simple, and come with super cool audio-video players. Nokia’s N90, though pricey, has a swivel-style camera with 2-megapixel resolution, an MPEG-4 video recorder, and a MultiMediaCard slot for expandable memory. For a more affordable model, go with Sony Ericsson’s W600i. It has a 1.3-megapixel standard camera, and for audio-video capabilities, it’s a topper. It combines adequate sound quality (with both the speakers and earphones) with a simple music player.