Is There a Quad Band HiPhone? Yes, It's Called the SciPhone and Here's a Look at Its Features

I've been covering the iPhone clones for quite some time. Until very recently, there was not a quad band version of the HiPhone i32. We've had a quad band P168 for quite some time, but nothing covering the 850 MHZ band for the shake and tilt versions.

Here's a brief summary of how the i32 differs from the P168. The basic difference is that the HiPhone has the two finger touch interface with tasks like editing with photos and it has the shake and tilt control, which means that when you want to change media and music, you just shake the phone. Likewise, the phone can easily change to wide screen mode by tilting it.

The P168 does have an FM radio though which the original i32 lacks.

Why is a quad band phone an advantage? Well, it greatly depends on your carrier. The original HiPhone supported GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900 MHZ networks.

The new SciPhone supports these same networks, but has added the 850 band. This means it will work with many more carriers. However, if the tri band version works with your carrier, then you're fine. The quad band just allows for almost world wide use and it covers just about any network you can think of. For this reason, the SciPhone is often called the "quad band HiPhone." It is also sometimes called the CECT i68 or y32.

With the SciPhone, the manufacturer has added a few things that the previous versions lacked. First, it's thinner and smaller and it has added an e-book reader, the missing FM radio, and the latest edition of Java.

It's the Java that gets me and a lot of other people most excited because this really gives this phone a whole new level of productivity. Java allows so many useful options like MSN, Office, PowerPoint and tons of gaming possibilities.

This new mobile still has all of the standard features, like: a 3.2 inch touch screen; dual sim slots (two numbers on one phone, but you don't have to use this feature if you don't need it); slide unlock; a 1.3 mega pixel camera which also serves as a webcam; Bluetooth 2.0; full MP3 / MP4 capabilities; web browsing, emailing and messaging via GPRS and WAP 2.0; and expandable 2GB of memory.

And it really hasn't gone up that much in price. It starts at about 0, which about where the original i32 came in at its release.