Panasonic VS2: nice screen, shame about the buttons

By Nick Hide on 21 October 2005, 11:13am

Whenever big manufacturers branch out into something they have no prior experience of making, we hold our breath. Something magical may happen, but the results are usually... interesting. Nokia tried to make a portable games console, the N-gage. Bang & Olufsen has recently made a phone. Nissan, the Japanese car giant, even tried its hand at a DVD recorder. I think we can all agree that these ideas seem a bit of a stretch.

But without this kind of outside-the-box thinking, we wouldn't have the Microsoft Xbox or the Apple iPod. And in this spirit we welcome Panasonic's mobile phones. The Japanese TV leviathan has been at this for a while, and although we didn't much care for its X400, the VS2 has much more going for it.

At first glance, the VS2 is hardly impressive. It shares the wobbly, tacky feel of the X400 and, much worse, the stupid clicky flick-knife quick-open button. Come on, we're never in that much of a hurry to answer the phone. Once it's open, though, things improve dramatically. There's a whacking great 56mm (2.2-inch) screen, which is bright, contrasty and offers up to 16 million colours.

Sadly, this has the effect of making the 1.3-megapixel camera look rather ordinary, which is unfair. It offers five different resolutions and a very grainy video mode that doesn't cope well with sudden movement. There's also a basic picture editing tool, letting you frame, resize and crop your images.

The VS2 also offers two Java games: Soccer, which is so bad it's unplayable, and Sonic the Hedgehog, a complete port of the classic Sega Megadrive game. This moves very smoothly and shows off the lovely screen, but the phone's unresponsive, clicky buttons make playing it a sure-fire recipe for RSI. Also aimed at the kids is 'messaging illumination', which uses the phone's multi-coloured LCD on the outer hinge to show the 'tone' of any incoming text, which it garners from included emoticons.

So, the VS2 -- cheap-looking, tacky-feeling and packing a few features children might like, as well as a brilliant screen. It's not the Sinclair C5, but it certainly ain't no Sony PlayStation. -NH