Independent Review of
DUOSIM i9 - TRUE DUAL SIM PHONE 

This is a hands-on review of the new Duosim i9 phone, which is a clone of the Apple iPhone.

Features

* It is unlocked. Or to be more accurate it was never locked to begin with.
* It is quad band: It supports all four GSM frequencies: 850, 900, 1800, and 1900 MHz. It is therefore a world phone because it can be used anywhere on the planet.
* Its display is a relatively large 3.2 inch touch screen offering 240 by 320 pixels. It appears to support 16 bits per color.
* It comes with a small stylus that slides up into the phone for storage.
* It accepts up to two SIM cards and they are both usable whenever you like. When you make a call there are two dial-out buttons on the screen to let you select which SIM you will use.
* It accepts a MicroSD flash memory card up to 8 GB capacity. It comes with a 1 GB card preinstalled.
* It has the slide-to-unlock feature.
* The i9 has a built-in motion and orientation sensor and some of the phone software responds to sudden motion (shaking) and/or to whether you are holding it in landscape or portrait orientation.
* The only buttons are the round frontal button and two up/down buttons on the left side near the top.
* It has only one port into which goes the USB cable or the cable for the earbuds-plus-microphone. You cannot plug in your own headphones.
* It has a camera that is of 2MB resolution.
* It runs Java "MIDP" programs such as games.
* It charges entirely via USB. There is a separate charger but the USB cable plugs into it.
* It comes with 2 batteries that are each 900 mAh Li-Ion.
* There is one speaker on the back for playing music that is used in tandem with the frontal ear speaker to provide stereo music playback.
* On the front there are a speaker and microphone for talking on the phone.
* The phone has some useful but clunky built-in programs such as calculator and calendar.

What I learned by using the phone every day

Procedure for transferring files
The i9 is a media-centric mobile phone. As such you will want to transfer media files to it and the procedure for doing so is very simple:

1. You connect the USB cable from your phone to your computer.
2. The phone will display a menu asking if you want to tell the computer it is a storage device or some other option. Select "mass storage".
3. Two new drives will appear on your Windows computer. The 1st is large: It is the MicroSD card. The 2nd is only 2 megabytes: It is some internal memory that the phone always has.
4. You then move your MP3 files into the appropriate directory of the MicroSD drive.

The directories are as follows:

* Audio = voice recorder files
* EBook = text files
* Java = Java programs specifically .jar and .jad files
* My Music = MP3/WAV files
* Photos = photos e.g. JPG files
* Videos = videos e.g. 3GP files

Music Player
The phone comes with a decent music player program. I have experimentally determined that it that can play the following types of music files:

* MP3
* WAV
* AAC
* AU

It cannot play OGG or FLAC.

The sound quality produced on the two small speakers is quite good, although a bit tinny. They are good for rock-and-roll. The included earbuds-plus-microphone are in some ways better quality. They are better for listening to speech or the FM radio.
Problems
There are two problems with the music player.

1. The lowest volume (before off) is still quite loud. I have had no luck turning that down even in Engineering Mode.
2. The music player only supports one playlist. So all your songs -- even if you have 100s of them -- are in the same list. This is very inconvenient.
* A simple workaround is to put all the songs by a given artist into one folder and then use the Documents feature to browse and select individual songs. (When you select a song to play in this manner you see an animation of a man dancing instead of the usual picture of a musical note.)

Video Player
This phone plays videos. You can load them in the same way as MP3 files except that you must put them in the Videos directory.
Supported video formats
The video player program does not play just any video file format. At this point I have only gotten small 3GP and MP4 videos to play.

* 3GP is the standard video format used with mobile phones.
* MP4 is used on regular PCs.

Note that 3GP and MP4 are just containers. The codec that is used to compress the movie can be

* h.263
* Xvid
* Possibly h.264/AVC

After much experimentation, 176x144 remains the largest resolution that has worked on this phone. The video player rejects anything larger than that.

For best effect, I encode videos using a free program called SUPER with the following settings:

* MP4 container
* Xvid codec
* 176x144 resolution
* 12.5 frames per second
* 9600 kbps video bitrate
* AAC LC audio
* 2 audio channels
* 128 kbps audio bitrate
* 44100 audio samples/second

This results in playback frame rates from 5 to 12 fps, averaging around 8 fps. But the audio quality is good enough that it compensates for the video. Using the Xvid codec, video and audio do not so easily go out of sync is long videos.

The only way to achieve a video larger than 176x144 is to create an animated GIF. See here.
Converting videos
To convert the videos, I use the commonplace, free program called SUPER. It's is made by eRightSoft. In SUPER, I select either 3GP (Nokia/Siemens) or MP4 as the output format.

Another free converter is ABC 3GP, available at download.com. The phone seems to reject everything that ABC 3GP produces.

There is a converter from Xilisoft however it is not free.
Orientation
The video player program responds to the orientation of the phone. If you hold it in upright (portrait) mode, you get a smallish, narrow image like on a TV. If you rotate the phone 90 degrees to achieve landscape mode, all videos appear larger but any widescreen video will look much nicer.
What kinds of videos are worth converting?
Many kinds of videos that are not suitable for a small screen such as the i9's. But I find that cartoons, animations, and interviews work best. For instance, Bill Moyers' interviews look good. Videos that do not fill the frame with a person's head or body are not as watchable.

Also, videos with a lot of action or where the camera is handheld fare worse because they are harder to compress, so the frame rate is lower.
How large are the files?

* A 15-second MP4 Xvid 176x144 clip was half a megabyte.
* Some 55-minute MP4 Xvid 176x144 9600 kbps videos were between 150 and 200 megs.

Photo Viewer
The photo viewer is a little bit clunky but it works. You select a photo from a list, then select View and it appears. You can also browse thumbnails. You can then move to the next or previous photo, you can zoom in or out, and you can pan within the photo. While viewing a photo, if you rotate the phone to landscape mode the photo will rotate as well.
Image file formats
I have experimentally determined that the viewer supports the following image formats.

* JPEGs of any size
* BMPs of any size
* GIFs up to 1280x1280
* PNGs only up to 640x480
* Animated GIFs

It does not support TIFF. For best results, use either large JPEGs or, for small images, 24-bpp BMPs.
What about animated GIFs?
Surprisingly, these work. You could call them an alternative to videos except needless to say they have no sound. You view them in the Photo Viewer, not the Video Player. The frame rate appears to be slightly worse than Xvids at the same resolution, but animated GIFs are advantageous in that you can use them for higher-resolution videos, albeit at maybe 2 or 3 frames per second without sound. In addition, GIFs are limited to 256 colors. I created one that was 320x240 using SUPER.

How to make a good animated GIF

1. Obtain the free program VirtualDub
2. Obtain a demo copy of ULead GIF Animator
3. Open your video file in VirtualDub
4. Add the video filter Resize to resize the video to width 240.
5. In Frame Rate: select Decimate by a factor to reduce the frame rate to about 4 fps. For instance if the video is 24 fps then decimate by 6.
6. Save the video to an AVI file.
7. Run GIF Animator and open the AVI file.
8. Click on Optimize tab.
9. Select either Photo 32 or Photo 64.
10. Save As GIF.
11. Move that to anywhere on your MicroSD card; or into the Photos folder.

For a 320x240 animated GIF, use the same procedure but resize to 320 width and decimate to get 2 fps. So for instance if the video frame rate is 30, decimate by 15.
Problems

1. Unfortunately the photo viewer's zoom facility is a bit broken. The specific bug is: If you try to zoom in all the way into a photo, i.e. to 100%, it won't let you. It takes the zoom to maybe 80%. This is a problem if you are viewing a screenshot of a map, I have found. To compensate, always use higher resolution images than you think you need.
2. In addition, the orientation sensor sometimes jumps to portrait view inappropriately. This does not affect useability.

Camera
The built-in camera is essentially just a webcam. It could never substitute for a real camera. It is not easy to take a decent photo with this camera. The dynamic range appears to be very narrow therefore it is typical to see washed-out photos. That said, some photos are good and there's something amusing about the challenge of trying to get good photos. I tend to think that any good photos would be taken in grayscale mode. And, preferably in 320x240 mode.

Video Recorder
The video recorder does a fair bad job. In some situations however it may be sufficient. If you witness a police beating, for example, and this phone is all you have then by all means use it.

I made a movie file which is here in edited form that is:

* 176x144 although it looks like interpolated 88x72
* 10 fps
* Motion JPEG
* Less than 800 kbps

Audio Recorder
This appears to work fine. It stores the audio as an "amr" file, which Quicktime can read. The audio quality is just the minimum.
Java
It works, albeit slowly.
Program load times

* An included Java game took 8 seconds to launch.
* The Java MIDP benchmark Amark however took only 2 seconds to launch.
* A certain Java-based PDF reader took minutes to launch and was so bad that I deleted it.
* A certain Java-based Office suite took so long to (try to) load a Word file that I terminated it.
* Opera Mini does run but only if you have a phone plan that offers an Internet connection. I use prepaid minutes therefore I do not.

Where to find Java programs?

* Midlet.org

eBook Reader
The e-Book reader is only for reading text files. It is functional but it has some problems:

1. There is no fixed-width font like Courier.
2. The reader does not permit reading in landscape mode.
3. There is a software bug wherein the large font is incorrectly displayed. Some characters are too high.
4. Operating it involves learning what the 0 through 9 on-screen buttons do. For instance "2" is help.

Making calls
Oh right, I almost forgot: It's a phone too. Getting that to work was a no-brainer.

1. You insert your SIM card. In my case that was a T-Mobile prepaid SIM.
2. You select whichever SIM slot that is not in use as "closed". I initially put the card in SIM slot 2 and later moved it to SIM slot 1. Each worked fine.
3. You turn the phone off and then on again and you can make calls.

I was told that I sounded pretty clear and the other person sounded very clear to me as well.
Data entry and SMS
Data entry is an area where this phone is very clunky. Therefore, using SMS is a pain.

On-screen keyboard
The engineer(s) who created the software on the i9 have not managed to replicate the easy keyboard entry of the Apple iPhone at all. The letters are too small and require using the stylus. Even then it is difficult. There is no auto-complete feature.

This is definitely not a phone for Blackberry addicts. On the other hand, people who text each other constantly are at risk of getting carpal-tunnel syndrome.
Handwriting recognition
The phone comes with built-in handwriting recognition that does a decent job of making sense of single letters. Using it is slower than using the on-screen keyboard however. And there is no way to draw a space character.

Cases
The i9 is nearly the same size as the 1st-generation iPhoneTM, but not quite.

* It is maybe 2 millimeters wider.
* The round frontal button is higher.

The result is that hard-plastic and leather iPhoneTM cases will not fit. You have to use silicone. I am not aware of a specific silicone case for the i9 or its cousin the i68.

Calculator
This is a very basic calculator without even a square-root button.

Calendar
The calendar displays a calendar (useful) and lets you enter events for specific dates (clunky and hard to use). However it is worth pointing out that the Apple iPhoneTM's calendar feature is not much better.

Currency converter
With the US dollar rapidly becoming worthless thanks to our wonderful leaders, I have little need for this feature.

Conclusion

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