akamike

o2 Cocoon

Despite a recent terrible shopping experience, I managed to pick up a new phone. I’ve been desperate for one since my old one died months ago, and since an iPhone is currently out of the question I decided to go with o2’s sexy looking Cocoon. I have been playing with it for a few days and I am quite happy with it, so far.

Now, I personally don’t have much to look up to in terms of my experience with mobile phones. I was never really a big phone user, so I just went with hand-me-downs from family members so that I had any phone. The Cocoon is the first phone I have actually bought, and at £59.99 (was £99.99 but it’s dropped significantly in the past week or two) I am quite pleased with what I paid for. Calling, SMSing and managing contacts is simple and straight forward on the Cocoon. Sound quality of calls is good and there is video calling, though I haven’t had a chance to try that out yet.

I went with Pay as You Go, since I don’t have a need for a contract yet and if I did I would probably go for a smart phone instead. The Cocoon isn’t a smart phone, however, it offers the usual calendar, notepad, calculator, Java (games) and clock/alarm which all work great, especially when coupled with the PC Suite. More on that later. First…

Media

With 2GB built-in storage, about 500 songs worth, there’s enough space to carry a decent amount of your music library with you on your phone. There is also a micro-SD slot for even more storage, up to 2GB, if you really need it. You can play back video clips and view images, and take photos/record a clip using it’s 2 mega pixel camera. It’s not an amazing camera but it’s good enough for the quick memorable shot if you don’t have a dedicated camera to hand.

Audio playback is excellent. The phone comes with in-earphones and has playback controls on the side (which can be disabled with a lock switch). The sound quality is awesome and there are several options for tweaking the audio, including an equalizer and surround & bass boost. In fact, the quality is far better than my old (and recently deceased) Samsung YH-920 GS mp3 player, making it a perfect replacement. I have not found it to skip while moving around, even while shifting boxes and boxes for setting up my home office, unlike my Samsung. One issue I have with the music player is there is no dedicated stop button. You have play/pause, next, previous and library/radio (oh yeah, it has FM radio) buttons down the side but no stop. In fact, the media player itself doesn’t even have an immediately available stop option, you have to go into the options menu to access “Stop”. It’s not a huge problem, just a little awkward.

The camera is a little slow to take photos, taking nearly two seconds to actually snap the shot. Video recording is a bit degraded, but records decent audio and is enough for clips of your friends drunken antics or happy slapping, though I completely don’t condone that! Video and image playback is good enough on the small screen, with options to take up the full screen for a bit better viewing experience.

Design

I love the design of the cocoon. A white shell with LEDs beneath and a sleek black interior, it’s not your usual slim phone but it is a decent size and is quite light. The LEDs are very functional and attractive, scrolling messages in blue to notify me of events (such as incoming calls or messages) or details (such the time or what song is playing). A really neat use of the LEDs is the message preview which reads out a new SMS’ message when it arrives, without even having to open the phone! “HI IM TXTN U RITE NOW LOL WRUU2?” in big blue letters is always fun.

The internal interface is nice, speedy and easy to use. There is even a short cut menu on the home screen which you can customize, so you can quickly access your favourite areas. Though, it does require a button press to activate before browsing, which is the same for accessing the main menu. Best to assign deeper level tasks to this menu.

PC Suite and Connectivity

The Cocoon comes with a CD containing Windows Media Player 11 (for syncing music), QuickTime (videos) and the PC Suite. The PC Suite is used as an easy way to modify and sync contacts, calender items, notes, profiles, messages, media and allows you to use the phone to connect to the internet. You can also sync data from Microsoft Outlook (Express), though I would like to see easier was to sync from other sources. I can’t speak for mac users, unfortunately.

One little thing to note: When connecting the Cocoon to your computer, you have to open up the phone. This is so you can access one of three choices from the internal screen. It’s a bit awkward to have to interact with the phone before moving to the PC, but I’ll get used to it.

Overall, the Cocoon is an awesome phone and mp3 player. Excellent design, good storage and great sound quality makes this a great piece of technology, I’m extremely happy with it. Being an o2 made phone it’s exclusive to o2, but as I said above it recently dropped in price so now is a good time to get one if you are in the market for a great phone.

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