Micromax Handset

Micromax is another brand that is on the release warpath - phone after phone, in reasonably quick succession. This strategy seems to work well with the lower price-rungs of the market. The Q5C represents their latest offering, featuring a full QWERTY keypad that has become something of a buzzword for today’s generation. Obviously, the people most likely to be making better use of a QWERTY keypad are corporate users and executives who do a lot of emailing. Home users who do a lot of SMSing will also benefit from having a full keypad. We’ve already established the comfort and ergonomics of having a full keypad rather than a number keypad where multiple presses or judicious use of T9 is required to type out messages. However, no two QWERTY keypads are created equal, so a full keypad doesn’t necessitate usability or ergonomics. If you get our drift here, consider it as a spoiler for what is to come.

Look and feel

One look at the chrome bezel running around the facia and it’s evident that the Q5C steals its attire from the Blackberry 8900 Curve. Given the wide bezel, the display could have been made marginally bigger. The phone uses glossy black plastic for the body and this along with the chrome gives a slightly garish appearance. If this could be forgiven, the rather large button amid the four-way joypad is also chromed, and voila – overdone.

The quality of plastic used is pretty mediocre. The 3.5mm headphone jack is located atop the device, while volume rocker (that works flawlessly) is on the left side. Below this is a button dedicated to the music player. A micro USB port with protective flap is also on the left side. The right side is relatively bare with a microSD slot. The cover this slot is very hard to remove, and even with grown fingernails we had to wrestle with it. Overall build quality is mediocre, but really, this is something that one should expect from a phone in this price range.

The call buttons are pretty well laid out, and the joypad has a very intuitive feel. It exudes wonderful feedback that some 3x costlier handsets would be envious of. The left and right menu buttons also have wonderful feedback but they’re stuck to the joypad, spacing them out would have lent to their intuitiveness.

Being a QWERTY, we spent a significant amount of time on the keypad and to be frank, the experience was underwhelming, disappointing amid other similar adjectives. For one key pressing isn’t intuitive – the keys have insufficient feedback and there’s no positive feeling like you have pressed a key. The layout of the keys is wrong – they’re small, closely placed and lack proper bevelling – a total goof up in terms of design. This makes typing a hit and miss affair and one never feels comfortable enough to type even a shorter SMS without constantly keeping tabs on your fingers – (very close tabs), else you’ll end up with typos.

The menu icons could have been a little more indicative of the content they contain, or a little more colourful and lively, even Nokia’s archaic Symbian interface does a better job. There is a single row of shortcuts on the home screen for commonly used functions. A Facebook client is also present, as is Nimbuzz – a pretty useful application that allows calling, chatting and messaging with contacts from multiple sources like your phonebook, Yahoo Messenger, Skype, Google Talk and Facebook among others. Facebook seems especially important for the Q5C as there’s a dedicated hard key for it just below the left menu button. On the whole the menu system is pretty simple, although the menu icons can get confusing, meaning first time users will need to play around and get used to the location of things.