In my experience of reviewing phones there are several questions I would have wanted to ask but forgot, due to the excitement of tinkering with the demo unit in front of the sales guy. The great thing about reviewing phones is that I get to take a more in depth road test which usually lasts for a week or more.

Here are some things that consumers should be testing out for themselves:

It’s hard to test the signal strength. When buying a new phone, make sure there’s a SIM card (or whatever if its CDMA) inserted and ask permission if you could walk into an enclosed area to see if the signal seeps through. If you can’t do this then you could ask for user feedback. Some of the newer phones don’t have a very good signal indoors, like the N90. Those fancy built-in antennas can be a pain.

Ask how many contacts the phone can accomodate. Sony Ericsson has that annoying problem of only being able to store 510 contacts despite their huge memory capacity, which is not allocated to phonebook memory. How tragic, how irresponsible.

Find out if the phone can do multiple fields per contact. Motorola phones for instance don’t this (like the E398). Nokia and Sony Ericsson can have just one contact with several entries for FAX, Home, Mobile and Email.

My gosh, if you could drop the phone to test its durability then do so. Some sales people actually do this. I remember a Samsung guy opening a clamshell and getting a mallet. He pounded the hinge where the screen and keypad were connected really hard just to prove how durable it was. I almost fainted.