Though it has not been in the forefront of the mobile industry here, Spice has launched a number of mid-range handsets in this year, offering a plethora of services to lure the customers. Here's a dekko into one of its popular offerings - the Spice S-5420.

Features

The sleek handset has a very clean appearance and impresses with the extremely user friendly interface. It is equipped with a 2 inch display that sports a 240 x 320 pixel resolution, a very rare feature in the handsets of this segment. The display is vibrant, bright and the large fonts (default) make it extremely easy to navigate and read hence adding colour to display and bringing it alive. The five way navigation key is embedded above the keypad and brightens up the otherwise complete black handset.

It also supports up to 4GB of external memory via microSD cards for which there's a swap slot under the rear panel.

Multimedia

For the price bracket under which the handset falls it offers a varied multimedia functions. The VGA camera is a bit of a jolt though the quality of the pictures for a VGA camera surprised us. It comes with features such as White Balance, timer and exposure. It also features FM radio, an increasingly important feature. Few animated themes as well as games are thrown in as well.

The handset amazed us with the quality of its music player. It also features an mp3 player with 8-band graphic EQ for personalised settings. With the headset, the music quality is further enhanced. It is loud enough and we liked what we heard. The handset supports 3GP and MPEG4 video file formats as well.

Connectivity

Apart from Bluetooth withA2DP, the handset is also loaded with plenty of connectivity freebies that include apps like Nimbuzz for chatting, ibibo and Spice's own Spice Gang app for Social Networking, MGurujee for students, Reuters and Sangeet which gives access to a huge library of songs.

The battery back-up is unsatisfactory and the charger becomes a necessary tag along if one needs to travel for longer time.

With all the applications thrown in at the price of Rs 3800, the handset is worth what would be aptly called 'paisa vasool'!