Sharp TM100

Posted by T3 Online on Wed 31 Oct 2007

Classy cam-phone for T-Mobile users

You could be forgiven for thinking that Sharp only produces one type of mobile phone - the Becks-approved clamshell GX series. Yet the company does make other handsets and one of these has just been snapped up as an exclusive by T-Mobile.

Design-wise, the TM100 looks like the bastard child of the Sony Ericsson T610 (T3 89, 5/5) and Siemens SL55 (T3 88, 5/5). It shares its smallish rectangular chocolate-bar styling with the former, while borrowing the cunningly hidden pull-down keypad from the latter. It's a ruse that's worked well - it not only looks good but is easy to make voice calls with too.

The star of the show is the phone's screen. Boasting 240 x 320 pixels and 256,000 colours, it's almost certainly the same as that on the Sharp GX-30 (T3 98, 4/5), and to our eyes is the best currently available in the UK. Sadly, Sharp hasn't matched the screen with a megapixel camera. The on-board 0.3-megapixel snapper performs well, though, taking pics in either landscape or portrait mode.

There's also a video camera, although with footage limited to snippets of around 15 seconds, it probably won't get much use. Other features include a basic organiser, easy access to T-Mobile's ever-improving t-zones online portal, and a simple-to-operate POP3-compatible email client.

Points are lost, however, for the absence of Bluetooth or a music player, plus poor battery performance, a paltry 2.5MB of storage space and the omission of a memory card slot to upgrade the capacity.

While the screen is neat and the camera's cool, the TM100 isn't strong enough to warrant swapping over to T-Mobile for. If you've already got an account with that network and you fancy a decent camera phone, you won't be disappointed.

FEATURES: £from free 240 x 320-pixel, 256,000-colour screen. VGA camera. Tri-band. 200 hours' standby battery life, 3 hours' talk time. Weighs 105g.