Gadgetory

hello I'm Richard trinoma cnet and I'm holding in my hand the fujitsu stylistic s01 an Android smartphone designed specially for seniors now unlike some phones designed for the older generation it doesn't have big clunky patronising plastic buttons instead it's designed to have the full smartphone experience so you get a big colorful touchscreen and all the Android apps you could want so the first thing you notice is that such screening designed to be easy to use and avoid accidental presses so instead of just tapping on it as you would with a normal phone what you have to do is you have to sort of press a little bit harder because it's a pressure-sensitive screen which means you avoid accidental presses and with the big icons it means it's much easier if you press on the thing that you wanted to press on another way of keeping it simpler is that everything is all on one home screen there's no swiping left or right for a grid of apps or anything like that so you start off with your basic functions at the top like calling text messaging email your contacts and also these big friendly speed dial shortcut buttons that you can assign to your your friends and family or your loved ones these big orange one two three numbers and then as you scroll down you get things like headlines Google search internet search maps camera video access to the Google Play Store and so on as you keep going down many but your settings this is quite cool as well you also have a big button that says my number on it so you can press that at any time to get your number so you don't have to remember your own number if it's if it's a new phone and then as you go further down then you get more complicated stuff more advanced features you've got a bunch of apps including tripadvisor amazon YouTube that kind of thing built in until you get to the bottom and you can download even more apps one of the great things about these the big icons on the home screen is that their color coding that you can see that they're all different colors and those colors correspond to pages in the manual to make it really simple to look up how to use them and when you do open up an appt with one of those long presses every app has this ? in the top which has access to help so that you can always find the the Help button in the same place and once you're done using an app we're going to do is press D at the physical home button and it that kills the app so you don't have loads of apps running and using at the battery it takes you straight back to the home screen and there's also a couple of features to make it easier for seniors to make phone calls so for example there is Mike in the front to pick up your voice and a mic in the back which picks up ambient noise and cancels it out so it's easier for you to hear there's also a very clever feature that allows you to input your age and then the phone will adjust the ste the frequency of the voice on the other end of the phone which allows you to hear better so that's the software also in terms of the hardware it's a waterproof case so it can survive being dropped in the bathroom sink or in a drink and you can also wash it afterwards and wash it clean it has the little charging points here so you don't need to plug it in to charge it you just drop it into a dock just like you do with a normal landline phone a cordless phone another feature that's really useful for seniors is you have this button here which is an alarm so when you slide that out a little buzzer will go off to alert people in the vicinity and it also dials out to your specified contacts and and tries to get hold of someone to raise the alarm that you that the person owning the phone has fallen or is in trouble and cleverly if it reaches a voicemail it will simply try the next person on the contact list so it always is trying to get hold of someone speak to someone to make sure they can let you know that you're in trouble so that's the fujitsu stylistic s01 it's coming to france in june on orange and it's packed with features that make it simple to use for seniors and I've got to admit there's a few things I wouldn't mind on my phone I'm rich the train home of cnet