Phones.com » Cell Phones » Review of the Sonim XP3 Enduro

The Sonim XP3 is built for extreme conditions as can be seen from the very looks of this device. The phone is almost entirely covered in a hard rubber casing. The body is manufactured with high-grade material that seems almost impossible to break under normal conditions. All the keys felt strong and offered extremely tactile feedback when pressed. The XP3 weighs a heavy 128 grams, but feels solid in one's hands. Gripping the phone is very comfortable, thanks to the rubber casing. What's remarkable about the XP3 is that you can drop it multip[le times, since its resistant to a 2M fall to concrete! You can only imagine how sturdy the construction of the device is.

The specialty of this phone is its construction. So, lets talk about the build features in this section. Sonim calls the standard of its phone RPS, or Rugged Performance Standard, which defines nine 'rugged' qualities. The entire body and hardened rubber casing are non-porous, to prevent dust or micro-partcles from entering the handset. The phone is rated to operate within -20 degrees to +60 degrees centigrade, which is kind of paranoid safety for a normal user. The phone is also rated as fully submersible in 1M deep water, compliant to IP-57 certification. There's also another certification called MIL-810F which guarantees that the phone is unaffected by rain, fog or salty water/air. The loud speaker was rated at 105db+ at 10 cm distance. At this point we have to admit there's no other phone we know of so far with such a loud volume for calls. The keypad buttons were tested for 500000 hard-presses. There was a rugged PTT key and dedicated volume keys on the side. The screen was anti-glare and had a scratch-resistant coating. Coming to the usual feature set, the XP3 supports up to 1000 SMS storage. There were a total 7 soft keys and 10 programmable shortcuts. A 2.5 mm output, USB charging, and PC-Tools application were all the positive side of the XP3. The screen had 128x160 pixels of resolution at 64K colors. The XP3 had no problem displaying 7 lines of text. The phone supported music and picture files transferred through the PC Tools application bundled. The phone was powered by an ARM-9 processor on the Philips Nexperia 6120 platform.

The Sonim XP3 was a Tri-band GSM handset with support for 900/1800/1900 MHz bands. There was no EDGE but GPRS was supported. The bundled WAP 2.0 browser did a decent job. Local connectivity was through USB and Bluetooth 1.2. Bluetooth profiles supported are DUN,SPP,OPP,HSP and HFP. Various wireless headsets sold by major Bluetooth sccesories companies are supported. Push-To-Talk was supported and there was a dedicated PoC Alarm key for sending call-back requests.

The XP3 was backed by a 1180 mAh Li-ion battery, giving it a talk time of over 6 hours. Standby was also good at 320 hours, meaning the phone can withstand long periods of time without neediang a charge. Other indicators of the XP3's performance are described in the features section.

People who live on the edge of bricking their phone any moment are left with only a handful of phones in this category. The Sonim XP3 certainly fits the bill with its neat, rugged package and warranty. Sonim XP3 Enduro, a cell phone with good built offers a 3-year unconditional warranty that appears to be a good estimation of its neat and rugged package.