Opel Mobile Touch Flip

I am very happy with this phone. I bought a flip phone because I was tired of a smart phone controlling my life. I managed to install some apps and now it has everything I need - particularly podcasts and music. The screen is bright - I never have any issue using it outdoors. The hotspot feature is extremely useful. The battery tends to run out… Read more

somewhat quickly, but the point of having a flip phone is to use it less anyway, so this is not too much of an issue for me.

Am not impressed with this phone Model OMFF248. The battery does not hold charge for long so have to recharge every 24 hours. The main issue though is that it sometimes won't make outgoing calls or receive incoming calls even though all bars are showing and in a good reception area. It also cuts out in the middle of a call which is extremely… Read more

aggravating. Don't use it very often so it is distressing that it will not do what it should when I do need to use it. Tried contacting Opel but could not get through.

A problem with the manual – Bought this phone, model OMTF22B, for my wife. The charging adaptor packed up after 2 days, but Opel replaced it quickly. There're some issues with the manual though. I've spent quite some time trying to get to the Sound menu, to adjust loudness, etc to my lady's liking, and couldn't find it. The manual doesn't say clearly where, only seems to… Read more

imply that it's in the phone's Settings, but isn't. Asked the Opel support for help, but the first reply wasn't quite satisfactory. Only the second one directed me to the Android OS's settings. That should've been said clearly in the manual. Wife is quite happy with the phone though, it's good for what she needs. Manual should be edited and corrected.

A nice phone that has quirks – The instruction booklet was more like a little book and seemed very detailed. It wasn't easy to follow at times. Having been printed in B&W some of the images were almost impossible to make out, but as a guide and along with some experimentation I got to know the phone well enough. In some ways, the web-based user manual is better as it’s easier… Read more

to read and in colour.

The buttons on the phone have a nice feel and are a good size. The screen is clear and looks good. The hinge seems sturdy. I’m unsure why I read of some people having trouble with the hinge. It seemed solid to me. In the few weeks I’ve had the phone I made good use of the charging cradle. It’s much easier than plugging the cable into the phone to charge.

It was easy to fit the SIM card into the phone, but I had to remove it to pop it back into my old phone and found it was almost impossible to get out. A toothpick was useful. Not such a great design in that regard, but removing it is not a routine procedure. I guess it needed to be a tight fit for it to stay in place. With my old phone (ZTE T96), the battery held the SIM in place, which seems a better design.

When first turned on I used it to call another another phone. It worked. I then passed the new phone to a friend and using the other phone rang them. It didn’t connect. I checked the troubleshooting notes, which referred to a possible Flight Mode issue. That was set correctly. I switched Flight Mode on and then off. No difference. Rebooted the phone and tried all this again, and it worked. Perhaps being a new phone it needed more than just switching on but needed the reboot before it settled down.

The instructions recommended the battery be charged for at least 3 hours. So, just to be safe I left it charging for 5 hours before switching on. I had expected the indicator that turned red when I plugged in the charger to eventually show green, but no, it stayed red while the charger was on. (It flashes during charging and remains red when charged.) I can’t stand the flashing red light. So annoying. I put something in front to hide it. The Opel website states the battery will “...last up to 1-2 days on standby mode with light usage with good reception.” I’ve been testing it and after 4 days (with no incoming calls) it dropped to 9% which is way better than they say. But my old phone (T96) to which I was comparing it, showed 50% after the same amount of time. The T96 doesn’t show a percentage, actually. Its indicator is a bar made up of four segments and at the end of four days, two segments remained lit (ie. 50%). After four and a half days the Opel was at 1% and was completely flat not long after that. The T96 still showed 50% which is not bad for an ancient phone with its original 1000 mAh battery. Good stuff ZTE Corporation. The Opel has a 1400 mAh battery. So, the battery life was better than claimed but not great compared to my old phone.

I turned the phone on for the first time and the battery indicator showed 100%. I was surprised to find it had dropped to 99% almost immediately. Then 97%. After about 10 mins was about 95%. I like to use any phone I have as an alarm clock. I set it to go off in the morning. The battery showed 90% as I did that. The next morning I had 80% left in the battery. That seems like a big loss of battery power for doing nothing much all night.

The first time the alarm went off I flipped it open there was an option to turn the alarm off. Good! On the second day, that option wasn’t available and of course, the alarm went off again a few minutes later. On the third morning, the option to stop it was presented. It seemed random. There are various options to select a snooze time (5, 10, 15, 20 mins), but there is no option to disable the snooze function. The alarm function did settle down after a few days and behaved itself.

The phone is supposed to offer 4 hours of talk time from one full charge. I tested it and it does. Better than that, actually. Over several hours I rang another phone then set it down next to the TV and walked away. I made several calls of various duration between 10 mins and 1.8 hours. After 2 hours of talking the phone had 64% of its charge remaining; after 4 hours of talking the phone had 21% of its charge. I got another 47 mins and then the call disconnected. I checked the phone and there was 7% left.

I thought the Magnifier function could be useful when I was reading up on the phone. Yes, it works, but with a 2MP camera, the enlarged image becomes sufficiently fuzzy to be pointless. The company shouldn’t advertise this as a feature. It's no use to anyone.

The WiFi Hotspot function was important to me. It works, but is slower than hoped for. I also have an old Nokia smartphone and I put them to the test. The Opel offered 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. I tried both, and 5 GHz resulted in way better performance than 2.4 GHz. The Nokia on the other hand only had 2.4 GHz available. Test results (in Mbps):

Opel 9.72 download, 18.22 upload. Nokia 39.36 download, 3.51 upload.

I’d be downloading data more often than uploading. So, the Opel doesn’t fair as well as the Nokia. But when I tried a few web pages on the computer performance seemed okay. The performance was okay to watch Netflix on the TV. My Netflix experience was a bit sluggish (both were) but there were no buffering problems at all from either phone. So, the hotspot performance was good enough for me.

I would have liked to have seen a clock on the phone when closed. That would have been a nice touch. But it’s not difficult to open. The exterior has warning lamps (unread messages, missed calls). They are annoyingly bright and from my perspective could have done without them. They’d be a battery drain too. They are useful, but annoying. And I sometimes had difficulty in getting the lights to go out.

Messages. I’m not a big fan of texting, but messages arrive and they have to be attended to. So, eventually, I received a few messages. I knew this because the green light on the phone came on. I read the message and then tried to delete it. I couldn’t work out how to do that for ages. The instructions didn’t help much. Eventually, I found a command that said ‘delete all threads.’ Fine, I’ll use it, and they were gone because when I clicked on the ‘Messages’ button there was a note saying ‘No conversations.’ Perfect, but I wondered why the green light on the back of the phone remained on. That’s not right. There was also a little smiley face inside a speech bubble icon that indicated there were messages. There were none. Weird. I restarted the phone, and when it came on again the smiley face and the green light were both gone. I shouldn’t have had to do that.

Being a touch screen you can do things by touching the screen. Alternatively, you can use the cursor keys. Though, there is a bit of a trap. While it might generally seem as though the choice is yours (to touch the screen or use the keys), and that’s generally true, you will find that some things can only be done with the keys and other things can only be done by touching the screen (eg. working with the alarm, or doing something with a message). I’m still figuring out which is which. That makes using the phone difficult to learn.

There are more clicks/taps required with the phone than I’d prefer. For example, a comparison with my old T96 phone and the Opel to delete a message.

OLD PHONE 1 select messages 2 select inbox. The first message is highlit 3 click Options to reply, delete, forward etc (each option invoked by selecting the corresponding number or moving to it) 4 To delete you have to confirm the delete – another click

OPEL 1 select messages 2 touch the message on screen to see it / use cursor key and click OK to see it For functions (eg delete) 3 touch the message and hold /use the arrow to select the individual message click and hold OK 4 a menu of options appears 5 select an option to copy, forward, delete, etc 6 To delete you have to confirm the delete – one more action.

There’s a red light that comes on when a call is missed. I don’t really care if I’ve missed a call. If important they’ll ring back, but to get rid of the red light I have to start fiddling with the Call Log lineup. I’d rather not have to do that. There may be a way of disabling the red warning light, but I haven’t got that far.

I started the browser when in the car and selected Maps. There was a location I had to get to. I could enter the address, but with the tiny screen and my fat fingers, this was difficult. The map came up. I could move it around. Zoom in zoom out. Great stuff. And it seemed as though I might be able to use it as a GPS tool, but it was fiddly and I had a deadline and I couldn’t enter the destination easily. I skipped that and used my friend's smartphone to do the same thing. It’s bigger and easier to use. I’ll try again later.

The phone doesn’t have a stopwatch or timer. My ancient Nokia (around 2005) had a timer. That’s a great thing to have. My old dumb phone didn’t have one either, and I missed it, but it did have a stopwatch. That’s kind of a compromise. The Opel has neither. Of course, it could be argued that since it has web access I can just dial up Google and find a timer online. Problem solved. But that takes a certain effort and it requires a data connection, whereas an inbuilt timer & stopwatch would be so much easier. How difficult can it be? Part of the reason I didn’t consider this was because the phone uses Android. All the smartphones I’ve used that run Android have a stopwatch & timer as part of the software. Maybe this phone running Android is not such a big deal.

The charging cable that comes with the phone is interesting. One end is permanently bonded to the 240v charger unit and the other end can plug into the charging cradle or the phone. It’s described as a Miro USB. It works perfectly fine. However, you can’t unplug it from the charger. All the other phones I have came with a cable that could be unplugged from the charger, and being able to unplug the charger means you can use the cable to hook up the phone to the computer. That’s not possible with this setup. You’ll need to buy another cable if you want to do that. That was rather mean of the manufacturer.

Overall: Mostly happy. Not super happy. It’s the little things like not being able to shut off warning indicators, or the alarm clock playing up that bugged me the most. A larger capacity battery would have been really good too.

I bought it from Office Works and they have a 30-day no questions asked return policy. I was going to take them up on that, return it, and buy an Aspera, but my partner likes flip phones so we kept it and it will be her phone. I bought the Aspera R40 for myself.

TouchFlip 4G phone – I purchased an Opel Mobile TouchFlip 4G about 2 months ago and I enjoy my phone thoroughly and have recommended it to many friends! I enjoy the separation it gives me away from social media, while still being able to be contact/contact someone in an emergency. Most of the features of the phone work well, except for the calendar which I could never… Read more

use. It is just not user friendly to create or see events. The music player isn't bad but it isn't good either cause there's no ability for playlists or queuing songs, but you can shuffle them. Without an SD slot there isn't much space for music anyway though. Spotify can work on it but it does tend to crash, so you are better off getting a music player app and having the songs locally on an SD card (though I still haven't done this yet). I like the radio, calculator, alarms, and notes functions. Having WhatsApp is also a plus for being able to have groupchats, as I have a family groupchat on there. Overall I love my silly little flip phone!!