Panasonic Eluga review

Slimline and waterproof Android smartphone

Panasonic Eluga review
The Panasonic Eluga is the brand's first Android smartphone of 2012

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Contacts

The contacts aspect of the Panasonic Eluga is a pretty standard Android affair, which is certainly a good thing. It means that it's easy enough to get all of your colleagues, clients, friends, followers and so on into your address book simply by adding your Google, Facebook, Twitter and Exchange details in the settings menu.

It's a straightforward affair - you simply enter your usernames and passwords for any platform you wish to be included and, once the Panasonic Eluga has made contact with the appropriate virtual cloud, all of your contacts will be synced in one place.

Panasonic Eluga review

As per all Android handsets, the phone will also ask if you want to merge contacts from different sources that it suspects are the same people.

Twitter sync can be a bit of a pain at times, although this is in no way an issue specific to the Panasonic Eluga. We've had similar troubles on even the biggest Android punchers, such as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the HTC One X.

Panasonic Eluga review

Contacts are accessed either by tapping the Phone icon (which also gives you a call log and access to contact groups), creating folders on one of the home screens or via a variety of contact-based widgets.

There's nothing too fancy about the way contacts are presented - you're simply presented with a picture (if there is one available from Google or Facebook) along with whatever contact details you have stored for that individual, be it phone numbers, email addresses and so on.

Calling

There's no smart dialling feature, the keypad screen is about as simple as it comes. But it's easy enough to locate somebody in your contacts list, even if it is long, using the letter dial down the right-hand side of the screen.

Call quality isn't great. We frequently had recipients state that they couldn't hear us properly, despite us being in locations with strong signals.

Panasonic Eluga review

Hearing your contact's voice is also a strain. Volume on the Panasonic Eluga is very low across the board (for ringtones, alerts, media playback and so on) and the call volume is no different.

Even with the volume turned right up our contacts' voices were very faint, and there is an issue with the speaker in that if it's not held in exactly in the right place, you'll be greeted with silence. The Panasonic Eluga, therefore, struggles with its most basic of tasks.

Call connection is fine, however - we had no issues with dropped calls or struggles to find signal in areas we know to be signal hot-spots.