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Granite: OK, the phone isn't much. But look at the stand!

by Tony Smith | posted on 17 February 2009

BT's new DECT handset, the Granite, introduced us to a genuinely new experience. Opening the box, it wasn't the phone that took pride of place under the lid, but its stand. The Granite itself was tucked away under a fold of card right at the back. Unbox the product too hastily and you might miss it.

The DECT phone has always been the Ugly Sister to the cellphone's Cinders, lacking the grace, elegance and - more to the point - functionality of their less stay-at-home siblings. BT clearly hopes the Granite will change that, and while the handset isn't bad looking for a DECT phone - and is a lot slimmer than most - it feels depressingly cheap.

Out of the box, it weighs next to nothing, and inserting the slim lozenge of a lithium-polymer battery makes no appreciable difference. Now, not weighing a ton is generally a good thing, but here it only serves to reinforce the flimsy, plasticky feel of the handset.

That sensation is reinforced by the chrome-coloured sides and metal-hued back, the latter with a glossy veneer that does the exact opposite of what we think its designers intended. The (equally glossy) black front looks better, and at least the handset's dimensions have a candybar cellphone comfortable-in-your-hand size.

But back to the battery. BT's quick-start guide and the interior of the battery bay contain dire warnings that the power pack needs to be charged for whopping 24 hours before you can use it - or "YOUR PHONE MAY NOT WORK.

Actually, the capitals are ours, but you still get the feeling this is not a warning you should ignore. Which is odd, given how 90 per cent of phone batteries require only a quick charge before they're ready. And this is a Lithium-polymer cell - not one of your old NiCads or NiMHs that you really did need to leave connected long after the charge light indicated they were good to go.

Battery weirdness is compounded by the need to connect the cell in place by pushing a tiny plug into a slot within the battery bay. Folk who build their own PCs will be used to these tiny jumper-switch sized connectors, but others will wonder - as we did - why the heck the battery unit doesn't just have a set of metal plates that connect to another set, as they do in mobile phones?

Because it's not a battery pack - this is literally just the battery. Woe betide anyone who connects it up incorrectly, because it'll undoubtedly break the phone. Fortunately, a monochrome picture's been placed in the battery bay to ensure you fix the red wire at the right end.

The basestation feels altogether more robust than the phone, but it comes with an AC adaptor with a cable that terminates in a RJ45-style connector that's almost identical to the one on the cord for linking the base to the phone socket. The basestation's power and line sockets are right next to each other and distinguishable only by a small power brick icon next to one, and the word 'Line' adjacent to the other.

Thankfully, the power connector's restraint clip is different from the one on the phone cable, so you can't easily plug them in incorrectly, but we can see folk who've rushed to get their Granite set up - 24 hours is a long time to wait to use a new phone - wondering why the wretched cable won't go in.

At this point, we had to stop, to say "we'll be back in a day" to see how the thing actually works... and 24 hours later, we had the charged Granite in our hand. It feels a little light, as we said, but it's comfortable to hold and use. Much better than the chunky cordless phones of yore - much more like a mobile.

If the Granite's look and feel is of a modern mobile phone, its UI harks back to an earlier, monochrome era. The menu's a one-icon-at-a-time affair that you cycle through using the large, oval navpad, using the left soft-menu key to select entries. Pick one and you get a list of textual options. It could be a late 1990s Nokia you're using.

But it's no less easy to use or functional for that, and the Granite gives you all you really need from a cordless: decent capacity, 100-name phonebook with 15 ringtones that can be assigned on a per-caller basis. If you have more than one handset, you can use them as an intercom system, and each will work on speaker too.

There's a stand attachment to raise up the basestation
The call quality is adequate rather than outstanding, whether through said speaker or the earpiece. There's no headset socket, by the way. We didn't have any trouble chatting away while walking up, down and around the three floors of our Victorian north London home.

There is a text messaging facility, but it's sub-optimal. Sending texts worked fine - apart from the fact they took a good five minutes to arrive. Incoming texts took a while too, but were delivered as voicetexts - which we couldn't play for some reason. BT's robogirl told us to "contact your service provider", which is... er... BT.

The attractive base-station operates as an answerphone and recharge point, which brings us to the Granite's battery life - or, rather, lack of it. Even after the 24-hour charge, the handset's battery died after two-and-a-half days away from the charger. Not a problem if you're the sort of person who dutifully drops your cordless onto the charger every evening, or leaves it there permanently, but we tend to carry us around with us when we're working at home. Our current cordless, a five-year-old NiMH-powered - two AA-sized cells - Panasonic lasts for a lot longer than that.

The answerphone's limit is 12 minutes of calls, which is clearly rather less than the 30 minutes offered by ye olde Panasonic, but undoubtedly adequate for most folk. Half an hour's overkill, we'd say, unless you're an obsessive message saver.

Verdict
BT's Granite is a lot better looking than many of its DECT rivals, but for all its slimness, it feels cheap - especially when BT wants the best part of 80 quid for it. It delivers a decent set of DECT functionality and delivers it well, but you can get the same features for a lot less if you shop around, especially if you forgo features like text messaging. BT's own Freestyle 335 can be had for £24, for example. It's uglier, but who really cares how such a utilitarian product looks? With the Granite, you're paying for the styling.