Spice it up with fancy budget mobiles

Spice in the race of giving competition to other mobile brands.Its Dual SIM GSM based phones packs quite a punch.

Indian mobile device manufacturer, Spice, has come up with quite a competitive offering in the form of the Spice M-7070. This Dual SIM GSM based mobile phone packs quite a punch in terms of features, especially its 5 MP camera.

Form
The phone isn't too bulky even though its shape is boxy. But as of now, the only available colour is black. It has a good screen featuring 240 x 320 pixels with 262 K colours. The phone also has a camera click and zoom in/ out buttons on the side, which make a world of difference. On the other side you have your standard micro USB jack. The keypad here works well with the design — it's neither small nor large.

The candy bar design unfortunately leaves the phone looking quite standard as far as it comes to fitting in the battery pack, 2 SIMs, and a memory card (up to 16 GB). Nevertheless, as 'standard' as its form may seem, I can't say it's not well designed for comfortable use.

Features and interface
The user interface is easy to use and fairly consistent throughout. The speakers are quite sound; they have decent bass response and good highs. The audio player shortcut makes your playlist accessible at the push of a button. On the earphones, the bass is somewhat subdued and highs a tad high.

The FM radio reception can get somewhat fuzzy around indoor areas but is consistent throughout. An additional add-on is the Schedule FM Record, which allows you to record shows. It plays standard MPEG4 and 3GP video formats. Although there's a little framing, it's quite cool as it has a TV out function.

Connectivity
The phone is quite basic on the connectivity front with options such as Bluetooth with A2DP and EDGE/ GPRS; there's no Wi-Fi support. You have the Opera mobile browser, which is good. The M-7070 comes preloaded with some good Java applications including a social media app from ibibo.com, ngpay (India's largest online mall), a custom messenger, and the Mgurujee application which allows students to download sample question papers off the Internet.The phone supports POP and IMAP accounts and also comes with a service called 'email2sms'.

Camera
This is one of the few phones to feature a 5 MP camera at its price point. The camera quality is good — it tends to get a tad slow, but your pictures come out great. It also features an LED flash, which is useful when taking pictures at night. The picture quality compares quite well with 5 MP cameras in the same league. Apart from this the phone also features a basic photo editing software. The camera records and stores videos at 30 fps, which isn't bad.

Battery
The phone features a standard 800mAh Lithium Ion battery pack and ships with two. The battery will last you a good day and a half with standard usage. Talktime averaged in at 2.5 hours.