MOBILE REVIEWS:

                                                            Micromax Qube X550

A shiny exterior cannot camouflage mediocre interiors for too long

Tough build, decent response for a resistive touch-screen, fair-sized 3.2 inch screen, workable and somewhat decent-looking UI, dual SIM

Poor text input options, stylus dependency in some cases, mediocre multimedia performance, unsatisfactory network reception, no multi-tasking of Java apps

INTRO:

Micromax is one of the few Indian cellphone companies that is making its presence felt very strongly - thanks to the massive advertising campaigns running in the media. They recently also did what inexpensive phone makers are expected to do sooner or later; take the openly available Google Android OS and slap it on one of its models, which gave birth to Andro A60.

But today we're taking a look at one of their non smart touchphone offerings - the Qube X550. It is a decent-looking phone under Rs. 5,000 that may catch the attention of many. Its USP is supposedly the "3D Cube User Interface". Let's see if it is any good beyond its dazzling UI effect. 


User Interface
The Micromax Qube X550 runs a touch-optimized version of a proprietary OS. As we hinted before, the interface is quite "inspired" from the UIs of other smartphones. For example, the "Slide up to unlock" or the big digital clock from the HTC Sense UI, or the call connection menu, which is a complete rip-off of the iPhone - are all inspired. Anyway, the home-screen has many clickable elements and quick access shortcuts to apps and often used settings. Some of them simply represent the menu in different styles. For example, you can view the menu in a Pearl necklace like arrangement, a regular page-by-page one, and the "3D Cube" way. 
The last one can be described as nothing more than a gimmick, as it simply represents all the menu items on the walls of a three-dimensional cube that you spin around; the motion of which isn't very fluid. It served me no real purpose and I would access the menu in the regular way any day. The UI speed is otherwise fairly swift. The menu animations are also fairly attractive. The touch response is also pretty decent for a resistive screen. You can manage most of the interface with your fingers, except for one part explained below where you'll eventually want to pull that stylus out.  
Moving on to the first and the most irritating aspect of the device; the input options. Despite the screen being a little too narrow to fit a full keyboard in portrait mode, the phone makers felt it would be alright to still cram a QWERTY in there somehow. The way they did that was by increasing the number of rows, due to which the layout is now totally messed up with characters to the end of the display flowing on to the next row.

For anybody used to a regular QWERTY keyboard layout (I would assume most of you reading are), this input method becomes very unintuitive and I wasn't able to get used to it despite using the phone for several days. As a saviour, there's an alpha-numeric pad text input mode with T9 support. But it somewhat sucks too as you cannot add new words to the dictionary. To top it all, using the keys with your thumbs (especially if you have fat thumbs like mine) isn't very accurate and it will make you eventually pull out the stylus.

For web browsing, there's Opera Mini pre-installed, which renders full websites pretty well on a low-power device like this. But since this is the same Java version that runs on even non-touchscreen phones, the menu layout isn't optimized to be used with the fingers; you'll be compelled to pull out the stylus for this one as well. The Java text input issue, where it opens another window to type into a text-box and requires three clicks before you can actually place those words there, still exists.

While it is acceptable in apps like Opera mini, where you don't have to enter text very often, chat clients like Nimbuzz will suffer this plague badly. For other internet-related applications like Twitter, Facebook etc., there's an integrated app called Snaptu. You can minimize apps, which is a good thing and something that cheaper Nokia's cannot do, but there's not enough CPU power and/or RAM to run two Java apps at a time.

Appearance wise, the Micromax Qube X550's UI isn't a charmer, it still needs polishing, especially the type of fonts used. 

Product Specifications

GPS	No
Additional features	Nimbuzz, Facebook app / MP3/AAC+ player / TV-out
Infrared Port	No
USB	Yes, v2.0
Card slot	microSD, up to 16GB
3G	No
2G Network	GSM 900 / 1800
Phone Type	Dualband GSM
Networks	GSM 900, 1800
GPRS	Yes
EDGE	No
WLAN	No
Wireless Internet Technology	GPRS
Height (mm)	112.5
Width (mm)	55.9
Depth (mm)	14.1
Weight (g)	85 g
Battery	Standard battery, Li-Ion 1200 mAh
Standbytime (h)	Up to 144 h
Talktime (m)	Up to 8 h
IrDA	No
SMS	Yes
Email	Yes
MMS	Yes
Bluetooth	Yes
Java	Yes
Radio	Yes
Camera	Yes
Camera resolution	2 MP, 1600x1200 pixels
Colour display	Yes
Number of colours	256000
Video recording	Yes
Memory	microSD, up to 16GB
Ringtones	Vibration, Polyphonic
MP3	Yes
Games	Yes
Predictive text	T9
WAP version	WAP 2.0/xHTML (Opera Mini)
WAP	Yes
Display width (pixel)	240
Display height (pixel)	400
LCD Size (pixel)	240 x 400 pixels, 3.2 inches
Touchscreen	Yes
Vibrate	Yes
Phonebook Capacity	1000 entries, Photocall

Performance 
Like all Micromax phones, the Qube X550 also follows the tradition of having two SIM card slots. As a phone, the X550 is a little unsatisfactory, as the network reception wasn't as good as it generally is on most other phones. There were noticeable call-drops, especially if you cup the phone entirely with your hand. The sound from the earpiece also wasn't as clear as we'd like. The loudspeaker is fairly loud though.

There isn't much to talk about the Multimedia of the phone. The 2 megapixel camera, in sufficient lighting takes bearable images; the quality of which deteriorates further once the light levels fall. The audio quality delivered when you connect a decent pair of ear-phones is just about bearable.

Battery life is pretty good; the phone lasted me for two days with moderate phone-call usage.

Price and Verdict 

The Micromax Qube X550 sells for Rs. 4,500, which is not too much to ask for. But in the same range, you have a few models like the Samsung Champ. Comparing the two, the Champ's got a smaller, lower resolution screen, but it beats the X550 in UI and ease of use. The Micromax Qube X550 has got decent looks and the UI isn't entirely horrible to use. But the issues that we pointed before stop us from recommending this phone.