BenQ E72 budget Windows Mobile smartphone

BenQ has pre-loaded the useful Mundu Instant Messaging application, which brings together six IM services – MSN Messenger, Yahoo!, GoogleTalk, AOL, Jabber and ICQ – so you can chat easily to friends or colleagues over different networks with little fuss.

Messaging options extend to push email, while the usual Windows Mobile facilities for syncing with a PC’s Outlook email and calendars are present too.

Windows Media Player 10 Mobile is another standard, providing decent enough music playback through earphones. It supports MP3, WAV, WMA, AAC, and AAC+ audio files, and has a reasonable, if not particularly slick, user interface that’ll be familiar to users of Microsoft-powered smartphones.

We didn’t get a headset with our review sample so we can’t rate BenQ’s earwear. Instead, we used a set of spare mini-USB connected earphones, through which the E72 sounded fine enough. There’s no 3.5mm headphone socket. A loudspeaker option is available, though it’s typically bass-light.

The 2Mp snapper doesn't have a flash or autofocus

There’s Micro SD support for cards of up to 2GB, and internal storage runs to 64MB, although on our sample we had around 26MB free. The card slot is tucked beneath the back panel, but it's still hot swappable.

The E72's camera is able to capture video, but it’s average sort of mobile quality: QVGA at 15f/s. It's limited when it comes to stills too. The two-megapixel snapper isn't endowed with a flash or any sophisticated autofocus gadgetry. Still, it takes reasonable snaps for this level of shooter, with a decent amount of detail and good colour reproduction – just don’t expect anything special.

There are no Office Mobile tools for editing documents on this phone. BenQ has added a few additional bits of software, including Fizz Traveller, which combines world clocks, alarms, currency converter, online weather forecast updates and to-do lists in one app. There’s also a less than useful QuickMark barcode reader, a ringtone editor and a handy voice recorder application which allows you to append comments to existing recordings.