Most of the mobile phones that cross our desk aspire to be seen in the soft, elegant manicured hands of catwalk models, business tycoons, or their precocious teenagers.

The Vodafone XP3 Enduro is not that sort of mobile. For starters, it’s ugly. Forget sleek, elegant, streamlined executive sedans and think big, bulky tractor tyres, welding gloves, fluoro vests and hard hats. The Enduro is solid, hard-working muscle. It tips the scales at 160 grams, with dimensions of 118.8mm x 56.3mm x 24.6mm. And there’s none of this “pretentious smartphone stuff”.

But take it from us, the Vodafone XP3 is rugged – and if you don’t want to believe us, hop on to YouTube and watch a veritable army of geeks freeze, hammer, compress, drown, steam and cook the Enduro to test its limits. The manufacturer promises that the XP3 will come up smiling or it will replace it, no questions asked (for the first three years – excluding fires and natural disasters anyway). Working folk, boaties and serial phone abusers: read on.

Design
The XP3’s durable exterior casing is covered with ridges of hardened rubber that create maximum grip, even if you’re wearing heavy gloves or have gunk all over your hands. The buttons are chunky and well-spaced, also designed no doubt to be easily pressed with gloves on, and can apparently withstand 500,000 pushes.

The menu key at the centre of the D-pad has tread like an industrial staircase. Along the left side of the handset, the volume controls and phone book/push to talk buttons are all raised and made of moulded, textured rubber, and on the right side there’s an on/off switch for a deceptively small but impressively bright torchlight embedded in the top of the handset.

The battery flap on the back is held in by two screws that are conveniently sized to be turned by a coin (no slide out screwdriver, unfortunately), and the SIM card slots in underneath the battery, with a clip to hold it in place.

Another screw secures the cover over the microphone, 2.5mm headset socket and mini USB charger port at the base of the handset. This second screw emplacement is too small for your average coin, but the manufacturer is obviously confident that the Enduro’s target user would have a screwdriver close at hand. All these screws make it clear that it’s up to the user to make sure the phone is tightly sealed, and, as you’ll quickly find out if you do a rush job on closing the covers, the waterproofing and ruggedisation is only as good as you make it.

Navigation & interface
Power up the Vodafone XP3, and you take a giant step backwards into a previous era of mobile phone interfaces: pixelated fonts, clipart-style graphics, and none of those confusing, feature-laden home screens. The display is rudimentary: 128x160 resolution (65,000 colours) but it’s also anti-glare and shock-resistant – less surface area to crack or crush, we suppose.

Navigation is a simple matter; your choice is limited to menu or a shortcut to a favourite app (phone book by default).

The menu icons themselves are a utilitarian-looking bunch: The Swiss Army knife opens the tools menu which consists of a basic organiser, alarm clock, calculator, audio recorder, Bluetooth (v1.2), Opera Mini browser, stopwatch, countdown timer and universal Time.

The cogwheel icon takes you to the ringer, phone, date and time, and factory settings. The spanner and lightning bolt gives you “Quick settings”, consisting of five preset profiles: normal, silent, meeting, outdoors, and use in car. The briefcase icon takes you to my files: pictures, sounds and capacity, the latter of which – no surprises here – shows you how much of the XP3’s 10MB internal memory you’ve used. With the SIM inserted you also get call list for basic call history; SIM toolkit, which accesses your Vodafone services, messages – SMS and voicemail only; phone book, name and contact number fields only; and WAP for access to Opera Mini browser.

Calling & messaging
The XP3 is a tri-band GSM/GPRS (900, 1800, 1900 MHz) phone. Call quality varies, as you might expect, given the amount of external hardware as well as the rugged environments the XP3 is likely to find itself in. Most importantly, we were able to communicate on it, to hear and be heard on a choppy day at sea, in the train, in a crowded room, and on a city street. The speakers are designed to cope with noisy environments and they do that well. The battery is suitably hard-working too: 1180mAh with 6Hrs talk time and 320hrs standby time.

The only messaging capabilities are SMS (up to 1000 messages) and voicemail. The messaging editor itself is one of the more fiddly text editors we’ve come across. Using T9 predictive text you have to type into a single-word sized entry field at the bottom of the screen, use the arrow keys to view other possible word options, then hit the select key to enter your word into the message field.

Features
Putting it bluntly, the Vodafone XP3 Enduro is not a particularly clever phone. There’s no 3G, no camera, no music, no wi-fi, only entry-level Bluetooth, no Java, no expandable memory. Surprisingly, for a phone destined to live in the great outdoors, there’s no GPS either.

If you’re really keen you could sync the phone’s calendar, to do list (30 entries only) and contacts with your PC; or you could transfer music, photos or ringtones, but we’re not sure anyone would bother. Opera mini browser enables you to access the internet, but at GPRS speeds on the clunky display it’s not an experience you’d want to endure on a regular basis.

On the other hand, the Enduro has the sort of letters behind its name that could make it the handset of choice in a crisis situation. It has IP57 certification, rated for protection against solid objects and liquids, and MIL-810F certification for salt, fog, humidity, transport shock and thermal shock.

It’s vibration-proof from 5Hz to 500Hz, will survive a 2m drop onto concrete, and can operate in temperatures ranging from -20 deg C to +60 deg C. Even without a SIM card inserted, you get one click access to local emergency services from the home screen.

Summary
The Vodafone XP3 Enduro may be a basic phone, but it’s a high-performance mobile accessory. If you need a handset that is simple to use, works in noisy environments and doesn’t need to be pampered, the XP3 may well be the phone for you. Strap on the belt clip that comes in the box and you can go about business as usual, confident that the Enduro will take care of itself. Get the word out to anyone who works or plays in forestry, farming, construction or marine environments: it’s time to get connected again. If only we could claim it as a business expense, we’d be tempted to get one for the boat.

9/4/1_ex_m_h

By Steve and Kylie Jurgensen