Sanyo S750 3G handset poor on data capabilities

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Price: Free or £140 depending on contract
Supplier: Orange
Technical support: Sanyo Mobile
Full tech spec: here
Availability: Now

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AS A PHONE for making voice calls, the Sanyo S750 - available from Orange UK as a 3G handset - ticks all of the right boxes. But as soon as you delve deeper, into its data capabilities, for example, lots of holes start appearing.

For starters, the S750 behaved impeccably as a mobile video phone when making calls across networks from Orange to an LG U 8110 on the 3 network. It's a slider phone (to protect the keys) with a big 2.4 inch colour screen. It also has two cameras with one on each side (including a 1.3 megapixel camera facing outwards) and you can switch between the two cameras while making a video call.

Battery life seemed pretty reasonable for a fully featured phone - Sanyo claim you can video chat on one charge for 100 minutes, for example. The rear camera has a built in flash facility which works well and picture quality is high. There's also a built in MP3 player which adds to its attraction especially as you can supplement is 8Mb of internal memory with a regular SD memory card. Plus you can records videos too.

Start thinking about using its data capabilities and you touch the S750's dark side, though. How do you get you numbers off your existing GSM SIM card into the handset so you can start making calls with your new 3G phone? There's no obvious way because the handset can't copy numbers of the old SIM onto the new USIM card. So the INQ simply used a low cost SIM backup device from Teleadapt instead.

But what about all the numbers stored on your PC? That's when the real trouble started. Sanyo boasts that you can download telephone numbers, tasks and appointments held in Microsoft Outlook straight across to the phone. Just you try it!

The S750 boasts a Bluetooth capability that should permit such connexions but the INQ simply couldn't get Bluetooth to connect the handset to a PC. So we begged a USB cable from Sanyo instead. Orange in its infinite wisdom doesn't bundle the USB cable with the phone, so you'll have to buy one from the likes of Dextra (it'll cost you around £12).

Once you've installed the USB driver, the INQ has a special tip. For some reason Windows XP set the port speed to a miserable lowly 9600 baud. Reset it to the top whack and suddenly your USB connexion will burst into life. Another hot tip is that buried away in the documentation on the Sanyo site is the fact that the handset's default password is '9999'. Use that and you can finally get the utilities work.

Consequently after much messing around, the INQ finally got the S750 to sync with a PC. The S750's addressbook only holds 500 entries though. However, the main reason you'd want to get the USB connexion going is to take advantage of the handset's built-in MP3 player.

Another good reason to own the S750 should be to surf the regular Internet via 3G's fast connexion. Yet the handset is let down by the Openwave browser which copes badly with regular HTML pages.

After all the aggravation with the S750's Bluetooth synching, we decided to miss out testing the S750 as a modem using either using an infra-red or Bluetooth. So you'll just have to take Sanyo's word for it.

In short, the S750 has a great pedigree on paper but getting the best out of it is frequently too troublesome.µ