Telstra has revealed the addition of almost one million new mobile services in the six months to December 2011, but Sensis revenues plummeted 24 percent in 12 months.
John Oxspring, the Marketing Head of the “Oceania” region for SE said that: “The R306 Radio allows you to tune-in to your favourite music shows or sports reports, across both AM and FM broadcasts. It certainly looks and sounds the part, offering a radio-inspired design and features set on a clamshell phone”.
The phone will cost AUD $199 to buy outright, and will undoubtedly be available on a range of phone plans, so those truly wanting to listen to AM radio but already have a phone they’re happy with are unlikely to be tempted by this model.
After all, you can buy small or even tiny AM/FM radios from electronics stores cheaply enough ($10 - $50), with the higher quality “Sony” models costing a bit more but giving better audio quality and radio reception (between $50 and $70 from memory), and for AM radio lovers this is clearly the cheaper and potentially even easier solution, despite being “another” device to carry around.
The specs are as follows:
The size dimensions are 90.0 x 48.0 x 16.0 mm / 3.5 x 1.9 x 0.6 inches, while the weight is 93.0 g or 3.3 oz. Available colours are “Coffee Black” or “Lustrous White”.
The screen is a 65,536-colour TFT at 128x160 pixels, and there’s 5MB of memory included.
It’s a 2G phone operating on the GSM 900, 1800 and 1900 MHz frequencies, with “up to” 9 hours of talk time, “up to” 410 hours of standby time, and “up to” 27 hours of radio listening time.
The camera is 1.3 megapixels and it can also record video. It can play MP3 or AAC files as ringtones.
The TrackID feature is present, as is SE’s basic web browser, although you’d likely instantly upgrade this to Opera Mini if you want to do any decent mobile browser, as the phone does support Java for this feature, and Java for mobile games, of which a Texas Poker and Mahjongg game are included.
Bluetooth is included so you can use the phone as a headset, or send photos you’ve taken to your Bluetooth equipped digital photo frame, you can send and receive SMS and MMS messages, it has the standard T9 predictive text input (or the old ABC tap tap tap input), and there’s a sound/voice recorder.
You can also use polyphonic ringtones, it has a speaker phone, vibrating alert, picture wallpaper, basic organiser, calendar, contacts, alarm clock, calculator, notes, phone book, stop watch, task list and a timer.
And that’s it. Hopefully, now that SE has broken the AM barrier in phones, we’ll see the include this feature in future models of the rest of its range as a standard feature, something that would be a lot more useful to tech-savvy people who might appreciate AM radio capability on much more capable phones.
David Bass
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