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Sagem Bleu 651Z
The newest addition to the Bleu series by Sagem is the 651Z, supposedly a chic looking phone for an affordable price. But clearly, Sagem does not seem too serious about the 651Z. I checked both the Sagem India and the Sagem global site, and this one is not listed on any one of them. In fact, there is not a mention about the fact that the 651Z really belongs to Sagem. We even checked out the official bleu site for India, and sadly the hosting for that particular domain is not even configured. The performance of the 651Z only reaffirms all this. Let's see how!!


Design
I’m going to be brutally honest with this one. The phone looks decent. It’s shiny black; sort of like a pebble, and compact. However, it creaks a lot. This in itself is a total downer. I like my phone to be a neat piece of work. Even if it is not much to look at, it should never (I repeat, never!) creak when held. This one does. Feels like it has a few loose joints, here and there!!


The 651Z is a slider, and despite the fact that the slide manages to bring itself a lot of attention (in the train that is!), it does the slide in the most obnoxious way possible. The phone has a small mounted surface, just below the screen and the word 'bleu', where you can lock your thumb-tip and slide the phone open. And trust me the slide is not a piece of cake. It should have been a lot more smooth
Features
The user interface looks shoddy, and is equally strenuous to use. For starters, every number is displayed in a specific color. I get it, maybe people at Sagem are really trying hard to make life a lot colorful for its users, but these are some very cheesy colors. The way it displays calls records is good. All the missed, dialed and received calls are displayed together, differentiated by an icon. I think it's very convenient

The UI, however, can get to you. It's real slow. Messaging can be a pain, if you are used to the t9 dictionary. While using the dictionary, you get only two options — all caps or all lower caps. So if you are typing a message to your boss, you will have to avoid using the dictionary. All caps will make your message look very loud, and a message in all lower case will only make you seem uncouth.

It has all the regular things like Alarm clock, World time, calculator etc. But nothing new. You can use the phone as a mass storage device, but that's prevalent in mostly all the phones these days. Also it allows only 500 phone book entries, which according to me is peanuts!
Media & Camera
There isn't much to talk about the music player, except that it is average. The sound isn't loud enough. The settings are very basic, and the presets ineffective. However, the FM reception is good. It also plays video, but it's a not a very enjoyable experience.