Peter Griffin: Telecom's hot new cellphones

Japanese brand Sanyo is often associated more with budget stereo systems and televisions than mobile phones. But Sanyo is propping up Telecom's mobile-phone selection these days.

The range of phones available to Telecom 025 and 027 customers has always been limited and a few years ago this hurt the company. Even now, Telecom lists only 19 phones on its website and many of them are basic.

A greater range is available to Vodafone users and many flashy phones bought overseas will work here when you insert your Vodafone SIM card.

Telecom offers just four brands of mobile — Sanyo, Hyundai, Samsung and Nokia, and Nokia doesn't make most of its slicker models available on the CDMA network used by Telecom.

The benefit Vodafone has in using the 3G network equipment backed by Europe will become obvious again when it launches its new high-speed network services in the next couple of months.

Some of the 3G phones on the market from the likes of Sony Ericsson and Nokia are very impressive.

In the meantime, however, two phones, the Sanyo 7400 and the newly released 5600, keep Telecom in the game, in terms of handsets.

Do a search on the internet and you'll find plenty of comment on the 5600; it's used by thousands of Americans who are subscribers of the mobile phone company Sprint.

It's a co-buying deal with Sprint that enables Telecom to get hold of much-needed models like the 5600.

The most interesting thing about the 5600 is that it's one of the first models to debut here with a one gigabyte Mini-SD card included.

Mini-SD is a cut-down version of the SD cards we've grown used to slotting into cameras and mp3 players.

Telecom was smart to sell the phone with a high-capacity card thrown in. A one-gigabyte SD card gives you some space to play with. That's around 200 songs, or 16 hours of music.

he media player is simple but useful and the music playback is as good as most stand-alone mp3 players I've used.

My only gripe is there isn't a regular headphone jack, but instead a smaller one which requires you to use the supplied ear-bud phone. The 1.3 mega-pixel still camera isn't up to much, but that's to be expected.

The phone will support the Push 2 Talk walkie-talkie service, and the streaming video clips of the news and music videos being offered by Telecom.

Battery life is good, if you don't spend too long using the media player menu, which requires the screen to be constantly lit.

It's a pricey model, but as a reasonable mp3 player as well as phone, the 5600 is the phone for gadget-hungry 027 subscribers.

Price: $899

- HERALD ON SUNDAY