Panasonic VS6

Discontinued
7th November 2005

You might be forgiven for thinking that you've seen this phone before - it looks just like the Panasonic VS3 and VS7 phones announced in February this year, and really it's very little different in technical terms too.

The Panasonic VS6's unique selling proposition is this - it's cheap, considering the features on offer. There's a 2 megapixel digital camera, a high quality 320x240 pixel display in 16 million colours and Bluetooth. It's quite a slim phone at 21mm thick and it looks quite sleek from the outside. Open the Panasonic VS6 up and it's unfolds into quite a large handset, which is something these Panasonic handsets have in common with recent Sharp phones. It comes with downloadable Java games, and a version of Sonic the Hedgehog is included. In the UK, the Panasonic VS6 can be had for about £120 (around €190) on prepay.

The VS6's trick is that it looks like an expensive handset, but it isn't. But the VS6's value for money comes at a cost - there's no MP3 player (although it does have MP3 ringtones), internal memory is just 32Mb and is not expandable, There's a WAP browser, but no email client. And from the VS6's size, you'd maybe expect it to be a 3G phone.. but it's just a plain tri-band GSM phone with GPRS.

If you're looking for a good value handset with a high quality screen, camera and Bluetooth then the VS6 looks good. However, most contract customers could expect a rather more sophisticated handset than this. There are some great technologies in the Panasonic VS6, and we'd love to see them in a proper multimedia phone, but Panasonic have so far failed to come up with something that we can truly recommend for higher-end customers.

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