AGM M10 Rugged Flip Phone
The AGM M10 is among the nicest ruggedized phones I’ve encountered. Conforming to the MIL-STD-810H specification, it can cheerfully survive impact, submersion, vibration and several other potential hazards, and keep on talking.
It’s not even particularly expensive.
If you’re carrying one of these phones and something sufficiently serious happens to damage it, you probably won’t care, as you’ll be dead.
Available from Amazon, the M10 is quick to arrive, easy to set up and intuitive to use. Ours included a UL-listed USB charger – I’m always impressed by things that can be plugged in without fear of eruption.
Flip
I have a conventional smartphone for use in civilized company. However, when we venture into the hinterland to cut firewood or go hiking, a smartphone is arguably not an ideal device. Disposed to falling from one’s pocket, being crushed by a plummeting maple, dropped into a stream or otherwise having their warranties invalidated, smartphones become really, really nervous in the woods.
When one is out among lofty trees and the occasional black bear, a phone that can run apps and check Facebook could be considered overkill to some extent. All I would ask of a phone in these circumstances is its ability to make and receive calls.
The M10 is good at this stuff. It has a superb transceiver that can pull a clear, stable conversation out of almost no signal. It supports 4G LTE. It can be equipped with a second SIM card, should you devise a use for two cell phone accounts on a single device.
Weighing 138 grams, it’s almost not there at all. It’s also really, really tiny.
While it’s a bit tricky to spot, the M10 has an opening for a string lanyard, allowing it to be hung around its owner’s neck, or tied to a belt. This makes it exceedingly difficult to lose, and precludes an hour or two walking around the forest with another phone repeatedly dialing its number in the hope of hearing it ring from wherever it was dropped.
Despite its diminutive size, the M10 has a large, bright display panel, and really big buttons with a positive, mechanical feel. After an hour or two of operating a chain saw, big funky buttons are all but essential.
While I bought the M10 exclusively for its aspect as a communications device, it turned out to be able to perform most of the other basic functions of a contemporary mobile phone. It has a respectable camera, a calculator, a calendar and so on.
The AGM M10 is decidedly unstressful to set up and get on line – anyone familiar with phones and four out of ten liberal politicians can likely complete the task in under five minutes. Removing the back of the device is slightly more difficult than it appears, as it’s been made to extremely tight specifications to ensure that it’s watertight. A plastic trim removal tool is an asset for this task.
Once the back is off, the M10’s battery, SIM card and an optional micro-SD memory card can be installed, and the whole works reassembled.
Somewhat mysteriously, the Amazon listing for this phone said “if you’ve purchased a new SIM card, be sure to activate it in another phone before inserting it into the M10. Failing to do so may result in the SIM card not being recognized by the device. If you’ve purchased a new SIM card, be sure to activate it in another phone before inserting it into the M10. Failing to do so may result in the SIM card not being recognized by the device.” As my SIM card had previously been driving another phone, this didn’t prove to be an issue.
The M10 starts up in way less time than a smartphone – mine requires 13 seconds to be live and ready to talk. Its user interface is simple and clean – no animations, metaphors or main-screen icons can be found. It has a simple, one-screen menu to access its accessories and its configuration section.
Entering an outgoing phone number in the M10 is epic – the font involved is huge, and a conventional ten-digit phone number fills its entire diminutive screen. While I suspect this feature might have been installed for older users with bad eyesight, it’s entirely welcome in the deep woods, and when seen through the mesh of a chainsaw visor.
The M10 maintains a simple, easily-accessed contacts list. Adding entries to it does entail entering text using its numeric keypad – while cumbersome compared to the on-screen keyboard of a smartphone, it’s arguably workable for first and last names.
In addition to the keys you’d expect to find on a flip phone’s pad, the M10 maintains one to activate its internal FM radio and one to turn on its flashlight. The FM radio was something of a surprise. Most phones offer this functionality, but only if you plug headphones into them, so they can use the headphone cable as an antenna. The M10’s radio works without the need of headphones, and has remarkably good sound quality for so tiny a device.
As mentioned earlier, the M10 supports a camera. It can be configured to be accessed by pressing the left side of the navigation pad just below the screen of the phone, but this option took some while to locate in its user interface.
The only genuinely unfortunate feature of the M10 is its requirement that its screen be unlocked before it can answer a call. Even if you don’t configure this device with a security PIN, you’ll need to press the left soft key and then the asterisk key the first time it’s used after it’s powered up. Most of its other ostensible security features can be disabled through its menu interface… save for this one.
The mandatory initial lock is far from unmanageable, but it’s somewhat inexplicable.
In addition to being a phone and a camera, the M10 includes a calendar, a basic calculator, a clock, a world clock and some Bluetooth functionality. I didn’t try the latter, as bears just don’t care about such things.
The M10 can send and receive SMS text messages… but once again, you’ll be entering text using its numeric keypad if you try.
The AGM M10 ships with somewhat questionable ringtones. It allows additional sounds to be added to it as WAV files. Users of this device will need to access its Profiles screen to change ringtones, a feature that took some while to locate.
Prose
The only real concern most users of this phone are likely to have with it is its singular paucity of instructions. It’s accompanied by an encouragingly plump booklet having the surface dimensions of a playing card… but the book encompasses English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Russian and Chinese. The English section is a mere six pages long, one of which is entirely occupied by disclaimers.
You can spot the English section immediately by its title – “Descriptions Des Fonctions.” This was not an auspicious beginning. Perhaps predictably, the corresponding title in the French section was in fact in English.
Two pages of the booklet deal with a graphic and text naming the various salient parts of the phone. The actual instructions, beginning with the title “Getting Starten,” deal with installing the battery and SIM card; charging the battery; setting the emergency number dialed by its SOS key – it defaults to 112, for Europe; enabling the torch, or flashlight, for those of us in the colonies; and how to use the internal FM radio.
Most of the functionality of the phone isn’t mentioned in its documentation… which, considering the profusion of spelling and grammatical errors in those five pages, might prove a kindness to anyone who graduated high school.
I’m disinclined to protest too vehemently about the literary shortcomings of the M10. While having a coherent manual would have made configuring a few of its more obscure features somewhat quicker, it’s a phone… it largely explains itself.
Let’s Talk
The AGM M10 is a thoroughly likable device, should you find yourself in need of an indestructible basic phone for use in a harsh environment. It’s probably not the only phone you’d want to own, as the known universe increasingly expects its inhabitants to carry smartphones.
The shockingly clear call quality of this tiny phone, and its ability to maintain a stable connection with an all-but-nonexistent signal level has made it a perfect device to carry into the hinterland.
People with iPhones would mock this thing, but they don’t cut timber as a rule.