Tough phone takes water torture

FOR a lowly GSM phone with a small low-res screen and no multimedia skills, the Sonim XP1 is a whole lot of fun.

We played phone footy with it, dropkicking it around the office and slam dunking it to the floor, to the horror and delight of onlookers, as well as running it over with the family Subaru Forester, just because we could.

If you harbour a lot of built-up Luddite tension against the tech-laden world of the 21st century, bashing up the low-tech but super-tough Sonim handset may help.

On a more practical level, the Sonim is built for a hard life in the field, or perhaps a children's playground.

It is about the size of a standard chocolate bar and the electronics live inside a hardened rubber case with a scratch-resistant screen.

It has a 1.7in, 128 by 160 pixel colour display, Bluetooth and the basic set of applications including a WAP browser, organiser and calculator with 32MB of built-in memory for storing contacts but there's no camera, multimedia player, GPS or memory slot and it hooks up to GSM networks at 900, 1800 and 1900MHz.

It can't do much in the way of singing and dancing, but the Sonim does have walkie-talkie-style push-to-talk enabled, which is handy for remote site communications.

It is shock, vibration and water resistant and handles temperatures between -20 degrees and 60 degrees centigrade and is backed by an unconditional three-year warranty.

The phone carries an IEC IP-54 rating for water and dust protection and a MIL 810F certification for salt, fog and humidity intrusion, and for transport and thermal shock.

Sonim says the XP1 can handle a 1.65m drop on to concrete and on test it handled that abuse OK, but when we more than doubled that distance the scratch-proof screen cover went flying on landing.

Mind you, we just picked it up, pushed it back in again and the phone was fine.

The spin sheet issued with the Sonim says it has been known to stop a round from a 9mm Glock pistol and keep on working (we are not sure about the operator) but we couldn't find a friendly copper willing to unload their sidearm into the phone.

As for water resistance, the Sonim is rated for a stream of water hitting the case at a 90-degree angle but is not rated for submersion. In other words, don't take it surfing or scuba diving.

To test its water resistance we ran a tap on it for a minute and then tried to make a call.

The phone fired up OK, but alas the number keys no longer worked so we couldn't make a call.

To help it revive, the phone was placed in front of a heater for an hour and the number keys came back online, although it took a day or two for the condensation to disappear from under the screen.

Towards the end of the review, the Sonim developed a terminal fault in that the charger, which hooks up through a USB connection at the base of the phone, would no longer make electrical contact without serious upward pressure being applied to connector.

Our Sonim didn't quite survive its kicking and in the real world would have found itself wending its way back to the vendor to test how serious the company is about the three-year unconditional warranty.