Introducing the Philips Xenium 9@9q

What does it take to keep a 10-year-old happy with her phone? The resident kid geek looks for a camera, a music player, games, and a full-color LCD screen, though not necessarily in that order.

For one who can’t bring her phone to school or anywhere without parental consent, the phone just stays at home and at bay until after homework is done and only on weekends when the phone becomes a workhorse to fill up the vacant hours after dance practice, church, the family lunch, books, more homework and the required quiet time on two long and lazy afternoons.

Of the new Philips Xenium 9@9q, the girl has this to say: It’s small, fits in my purse. It’s black, I can easily spot it among my things (a sea of pink, by the way). It lights up when there is a message (she hardly receives a message). It’s easy to use (she doesn’t need to read the manual, she can’t grasp it anyway, at least not yet).

“And oh, mommy, the battery lasts a really long time.”  

That’s it. So far the best feature of the newly introduced Philips Xenium 9@9q is an unsually long battery life, which claims to have a standby time of about 750 hours (or one full month) and talk time of eight hours, according to phone specs found on the Philips website.

Whether battery life can really last a month on standby would have to be tested over time by real users. If you have a phone for review, it cannot just be standing by idle for a full month. One has to make full use of it and experience everything there is to it.

However, on its claim of eight hours’ talk time on a single charge, that could probably true. On average, the phone lasts at least three times longer than the average phone for this reviewer; that is around three to four days without charging the battery.

Factoring in idle time, and the use of the phone for other things such texting, MMS, exchanging files on Bluetooth, camera and video capture, and music playback, which probably takes up more time than voice calls, the battery lifespan is record long.

This is highly appreciated, especially when you are on the road most of the time or always too busy to bother charging the phone every now and then.  

Feature for feature, the new Xenium 9@9q has also about everything that you need in a phone nowadays — a 1.3-megapixel camera with video capture, an music player that supports MP3, AAC and WMA, a microSD slot (up to 2GB) and Bluetooth and USB interfaces.

If you go by that Philips’ catchphrase “sense and simplicity,” you would understand better the Xenium 9@9q form factor: simple, functional, easy to use, made for your convenience.

The clamshell phone is available in phantom black, although there is a red one on the Philips website. It weighs only 0.086 kg and measures 46.5x18.3x99.3 cm, and has a 262k TFT LCD screen.

On the navigation side, however, it can still do with some improvements like enabling users to flip open the phone more easily and preferably using only one hand. When the phone call is urgent and the ringing and vibration furious, it would be more helpful to open it in one easy flip.