eRa Cellular

The phone sports a 128×128 4096 color dual-scan screen and the US version comes in two colors: orange and blue. The phone mounts as a USB storage device on any operating system and so you could use the phone as an ordinary storage device! Of course, the main feature of the phone that makes it special is its mp3/aac playback capability, its FM playback and recording capability and its full-fledged keyboard.

The phone has a “music” button that will automatically start playing the first AAC or mp3 song in a playlist (.pls and .m3u are supported). Pressing the music button again will load a menu with options for music playback, FM radio or switching off the current music. The phone comes from the factory with seven 30-second songs as a demo.

There are no progress bars when playing a song, but you can easily move from one song to another using the four-way button on the phone which allows for “stop”, “play”, “next song”, and “previous song”, while long presses of the same button can move the playback to a different segment of the same song. Regarding the phone as a… phone, this is a normal 128×128 Nokia Series 40 phone.

My personal favorite feature of the phone is its keyboard. The phone also supports Java games and applications (MIDP-1.0). The screen is dual scan and so fast action paced games (e.g. shoot’em ups) will look “dizzy” but slow paced games (e.g. puzzles) look great.