Travelocity Travel Phone (Beyond E-Tech K250)

[ Background Music ] >> Hi! I'm Kent Sherman, Senior Editor here at CNET.com. Today, we take a first look at the Travelocity Travel Phone. The Travelocity didn't actually make this phone, what they did is they just put a little bit of content on it, and I got to stress "a little bit." The phone is actually imported by Beyond E-tech, which has brought us the Chinese-made dual SIM card phones. This phone doesn't fall under the Duet name, but it does have two SIM card slots. So the whole idea is it's unlock, so you can travel, you can take your US SIM card, leave it on the phone, and get your calls from your home number and then you can put it in a prepaid SIM card from anywhere you travel and make local calls there. I've used a phone like this before in traveling, and it is great to get calls to both numbers. Now, the Duet W002 was a direct ruboff of the iPhone, not a very good one I might add. This phone mimics a combination of Sony Ericsson models; probably the closest one is the W995a, now that's a Walkman model. The curve end right here, the curve end on the top, the real thin slider, some of the keypad design, the navigation array, and also there's a Walkman logo, at least almost looks like a Walkman logo behind the battery cover. I don't understand the point of that at all. Again, it looks a lot like a Sony Ericsson phone, that's what it's really trying to be. Unfortunately, display has a much lower resolution than most of your basic Sony Ericsson model. It is 65,000 colors, not the greatest pixel count, so graphics and photos are just gonna look okay. The menus are easy to use. You could dial and text quickly on the keypad. Mostly, it is a bit cramped in the numbers and the letters. And the keys are pretty small, so if you have visual impairments, you're going to want to take this one for a test drive first. Also the navigation radio. You see there are two talk keys, that's for calling from either SIM. It's pretty easy to do that, you just dial a number and then you press either SIM, the talk button for SIM 1 or the talk button for SIM 2. Here at the back, there's a camera lens and a flash. Now, this is 8 megapixel. This is not even close to 8 megapixel. It's actually a VGA camera. I have no idea why they basically lie and tell us it's 8 megapixel, it just baffles me, I didn't mean it. If they told us VGA, I'd expect VGA, and I'd be fine with that, but you look at this and say, "Huh, it's 8 megapixel," you go in and you don't get a resolution above VGA, so that's disappointing. Camera is not good at all. Media player is just it. Voice recorder not great. You see this is not a media phone at all. It's really for making calls, sending messages, and that's it. But I think when you're traveling, that's really all you want anyway. There's this antenna that pops up that takes you to the TV function which the Duet phones had, that is analog TV, so good luck finding analog TV signals. All we can get here is just a bunch of statics, so I don't really understand the point of that. Overall, as far as the dual SIM card phones we've looked at, there haven't been a real respectable bunch. This is probably the second one I like the most behind the Duet D88, the other--the two touchscreen phones, I didn't like at all. This is fine. I just wished they had been a little more truthful about the camera. And just for making calls, and you can get pass the--anything get passed the mimicking design, then it's not a bad option. I'm Kent Sherman and this is the Travelocity Travel Phone.