Saturday, July 11, 2009

Touch-Phones.Co.Uk: Product Review

Touch-Phones.Co.Uk is not a pretty site. Its design is bland and the only images to speak of are of phones. And yet, forgoing that, the site is very utilitarian: it has three boxes down the left-side of the page that allow a customer to browse the available touch phones in a variety of ways—by make and model, by network, by color—and also prompt the customer to explore many payment options for their phone (Touch Phones pay as you go, contract phones, whatever).

And so it comes to brains over beauty, or vice-versa? And in this instance, I’m inclined to choose brains. Why, exactly? Beyond the function of the site—and what some could argue as the soothing quality of its blandness—it also offers, at the bottom-half of its home page, a pretty fantastic little tool. It has three sliding bars, one after the other, labeled “Monthly Cost,” “Inclusive Texts,” and “Monthly Minutes,” respectively. The customer—one—you—can slide the bar from “doesn’t matter” to “any” to “zero” on all three options, and given a specific combination (say: zero monthly cost, 200 inclusive texts and 1,000 monthly minutes) the gizmo tells you how many of their phones offer those features (in this case: a whopping 17,970). That’s beyond neat, right?—that’s pretty freakin’ sweet.

So you want to buy one of those Samsung Touch Phones, eh? Or better yet, you’re just out looking for Cheap Touch Screen Phones. Well I’m willing to bet you’re not out looking for the prettiest web retailer; but you are looking for a helpful one. Touch-Phones is helpful and offers a lot of little nuggets of info about any prospective phone (e.g., battery life, weight, dimensions, color options, available features like camera) that help it transcend the ordinary and become-in a word—functionary.