Focusing The Technology

Samsung Galaxy S4

2013-05-15T09:28:00.001+05:30

As the Galaxy S counter flips another digit, Samsung has hopes of getting an even tighter grip on the smartphone market, and reasserting its Android dominance. With two of the main rivals enjoying a head-start to the market, the Samsung Galaxy S4 would need to be something special to quickly erase their lead. Not to mention, it's looked upon to match, and outdo, its predecessor. And by the first impressions of the smartphone, that might be not be as tall an order as it sounds.

Samsung Galaxy S4 official photos

The new Samsung flagship improves on just about every aspect of the previous generation, coupling more powerful hardware with another handful of new software features. With a bunch of new sensors too, the Galaxy S4 aims to be your must-have all-in-one tool.

Here's the full cheat sheet for our Samsung Galaxy S4 review:

Key features

Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE; quad-band 3G with HSPA; LTE
5" 16M-color 1080p Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with Gorilla Glass 3
Android OS v4.2.2 Jelly Bean with TouchWiz UI
Quad-core 1.9 GHz Krait 300 CPU, Adreno 320 GPU; Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 chipset/ Quad-core 1.6 GHz Cortex-A15 & quad-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A7, PowerVR SGX 544MP3 GPU; Exynos 5410 chipset
2GB of RAM
13 MP autofocus camera with LED flash,1080p video recording @ 30fps, continuous autofocus and stereo sound
2 MP front-facing camera, 1080p video recording
Dual shot and dual video recording, Drama shot, Shot and sound
Wi-Fi a/b/g/n/ac, Wi-Fi Direct and DLNA
GPS with A-GPS, GLONASS
16GB/32/64GB of built-in storage
microSD card slot
microUSB port with USB host and MHL 2.0
Bluetooth v4.0
NFC
IR port for remote control functionality
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
Accelerometer and proximity sensor
Barometer, thermometer, hygroscope
IR gesture sensor for Air gestures
Smart gestures: Smart stay, Smart pause, Smart scroll
Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic
Ample 2600 mAh battery with great endurance
7.9mm thickness
Smart volume and Adapt Sound features for the music player

Main disadvantages

Design is a bit played out by now
Hyperglaze finish doesn't feel as premium as aluminum on HTC One or glass on Xperia Z
No FM radio
Video recording is slightly worse than on the Galaxy S III; FOV in video is pretty narrow
Shared camera interface makes framing tricky

So, there are enough major wows, some minor ohs and just a few oh wells - not a bad achievement when you are succeeding the most popular droid of all time. The Samsung Galaxy S4 was always expected to aim for the top, but its announcement still managed to surprise a few. The fact that the Koreans squeezed a larger screen, a bigger battery and more power into something smaller than the Galaxy S III is impressive enough in its own right, but the novelties certainly don't end there.

Samsung Galaxy S4 at ours

We only got the chance to get to know a few of the Samsung Galaxy S4 exclusive software tricks in our preview, but we'll be testing the full set this time around. The new camera also showed promise and we'll put it through all the motions to find out if it can really live up to its potential.

SPECIFICATIONS

GENERAL	2G Network	GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
	3G Network	HSDPA 850 / 900 / 1900 / 2100
	4G Network	LTE (market dependent)
	SIM	Micro-SIM
	Announced	2013, March
	Status	Available. Released 2013, April

BODY	Dimensions	136.6 x 69.8 x 7.9 mm (5.38 x 2.75 x 0.31 in)
BODY	Weight	130 g (4.59 oz)

DISPLAY	Type	Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
	Size	1080 x 1920 pixels, 5.0 inches (~441 ppi pixel density)
	Multitouch	Yes
	Protection	Corning Gorilla Glass 3
		- TouchWiz UI

SOUND	Alert types	Vibration; MP3, WAV ringtones
	Loudspeaker	Yes
	3.5mm jack	Yes

MEMORY	Card slot	microSD, up to 64 GB
MEMORY	Internal	16/32/64 GB storage, 2 GB RAM

DATA	GPRS	Yes
	EDGE	Yes
	Speed	HSDPA, 42.2 Mbps; HSUPA, 5.76 Mbps
	WLAN	Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n/ac, dual-band, DLNA, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi hotspot
	Bluetooth	Yes, v4.0 with A2DP, EDR, LE
	NFC	Yes
	Infrared port	Yes
	USB	Yes, microUSB v2.0 (MHL 2), USB On-the-go, USB Host

CAMERA	Primary	13 MP, 4128 x 3096 pixels, autofocus, LED flash, check quality
	Features	Dual Shot, Simultaneous HD video and image recording, geo-tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection, image stabilization, HDR
	Video	Yes, 1080p@30fps, dual-video rec., check quality
	Secondary	Yes, 2 MP,1080p@30fps, dual video call

FEATURES	OS	Android OS, v4.2.2 (Jelly Bean)
	Chipset	Exynos 5 Octa 5410
	CPU	Quad-core 1.6 GHz Cortex-A15 & quad-core 1.2 GHz Cortex-A7
	GPU	PowerVR SGX 544MP3
	Sensors	Accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass, barometer, temperature, humidity, gesture
	Messaging	SMS(threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Mail, IM, RSS
	Browser	HTML5
	Radio	No
	GPS	Yes, with A-GPS support and GLONASS
	Java	Yes, via Java MIDP emulator
	Colors	White Frost, Black Mist
		- Wireless charging (market dependent) - S-Voice natural language commands and dictation - Smart stay, Smart pause, Smart scroll - Air gestures - Dropbox (50 GB storage) - Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic - TV-out (via MHL 2 A/V link) - SNS integration - MP4/DivX/XviD/WMV/H.264/H.263 player - MP3/WAV/eAAC+/AC3/FLAC player - Organizer - Image/video editor - Document viewer (Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF) - Google Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Google Talk, Picasa - Voice memo/dial/commands - Predictive text input (Swype)

2013-02-02T17:22:00.002+05:30

Sony Xperia V review

It won't be long before those full-HD five-inchers start stealing the show and the older Xperia generation should be preparing for life in their shadow. It doesn't mean though that the Xperia V cannot hope for a good time.

We don't see why a phone with dual-core Krait and an LTE connectivity shouldn't enjoy life in the midrange. OK, the upper midrange - but the Xperia V isn't easily caught off guard. Of course, people are not as easily impressed today as, say, a year ago. Yet, a select few phones are willing to offer 1080p videos and 13MP stills, while putting an HD touchscreen at your fingertips.

Sony Xperia V water-resistant phone

And there's more to the Xperia V than that. It's more durable than your average smartphone without looking like an army bot. You should've figured it by now, what we have here is a dust and water-resistant Xperia T with 4G connectivity and a tad smaller screen. Oh, well they needed to make sure the wetsuit would still fit the user.

Key features

Quad-band GSM /GPRS/EDGE support
3G with 42.2 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA
LTE Cat3 DL 100 Mbps UL 50 Mbps
4.3" 16M-color capacitive LED-backlit Reality LCD touchscreen of 720p resolution (720 x 1280 pixels) with Sony Mobile BRAVIA engine 2; Scratch-resistant glass
Android OS v4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean coming up
IP57 certified for dust and water resistance, up to 1 meter immersion for 30 minutes
Dual-core 1.5 GHz Krait CPU, 1 GB RAM, Adreno 225 GPU, Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8960 chipset
13 MP autofocus camera with LED flash and geotagging, Superior Auto mode
1080p video recording @ 30fps with continuous autofocus and stereo sound
VGA front-facing camera
Wi-Fi a/b/g/n with DLNA, Wi-Fi Direct and hotspot
GPS with A-GPS, GLONASS
8GB of built-in storage, microSD card slot
microUSB port with MHL and USB-host support
Stereo Bluetooth v4.0
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
Stereo FM radio with RDS
Voice dialing
Deep Facebook integration
PlayStation Certified, access to the PS Store
Accelerometer and proximity sensor
NFC connectivity

Main disadvantages

No JellyBean at launch
Relatively modest battery capacity
Video recording fails to impress
No hardware shutter key
Comes across as overpriced

The one thing that doesn't help Sony look particularly good is the tardy arrival of the latest software. The Xperia V is still to get Jelly Bean - and it will most likely be JB 4.1. There have been reports of Sony pushing back the Xperia V's launch on certain markets to put the latest software in. That makes sense but is perhaps part of the reason for the limited supply, that's been keeping prices quite high.

A bit of a vicious circle there, not too good for Sony, but hopefully not for long. Hopefully, the Xperia V should be getting the Jelly Bean treatment as early as February.

The Sony Xperia V at HQ

Elsewhere, the Sony Xperia V makes a pretty strong case for itself. The HD display is looking good, the camera on the back is ready to serve 13MP stills, there's LTE and the dual-core Krait is humming along. And the Xperia V is ready to take calls at the poolside or in the shower.

Handling

The Xperia V isn't the most compact of smartphones with a 4.3" screen but the surprisingly lightweight body is a pleasure to handle, and the finish is great.

Single-handed operation is very comfortable and the dust and water resistance are something many users will appreciate. The flipside is a non-hot-swappable microSD card and the absence of a proper shutter key.

The Xperia V held in hand

Overall though, it's a great-looking smartphone - without overdoing it - and one that's very secure and comfortable to hold.

SPECIFICATIONS

BODY	Dimensions	129 x 65 x 10.7 mm (5.08 x 2.56 x 0.42 in)
	Weight	120 g (4.23 oz)
		- IP57 certified - dust and water resistant - Water proof up to 1 meter and 30 minutes

DISPLAY	Type	TFT capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
	Size	720 x 1280 pixels, 4.3 inches (~342 ppi pixel density)
	Multitouch	Yes, up to 10 fingers
	Protection	Scratch-resistant glass
		- Sony Mobile BRAVIA Engine 2 - Timescape UI

SOUND	Alert types	Vibration; MP3 ringtones
	Loudspeaker	Yes
	3.5mm jack	Yes

MEMORY	Card slot	microSD, up to 32 GB
MEMORY	Internal	8 GB, 1 GB RAM

DATA	GPRS	Yes
	EDGE	Up to 237 kbps
	Speed	HSPA+ (DL 42 Mbps/ UL 5.8 Mbps); LTE Cat3, (DL 100 Mbps/ UL 50 Mbps)
	WLAN	Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, dual-band, Wi-Fi Direct, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot
	Bluetooth	Yes, v4.0 with A2DP
	NFC	Yes
	USB	Yes, microUSB v2.0 (MHL)

CAMERA	Primary	13 MP, 4128x3096 pixels, autofocus, LED flash, check quality
	Features	Geo-tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection, 3D sweep panorama, image stabilization
	Video	Yes, 1080p@30fps, continuous autofocus, video light, video stabilizer, check quality
	Secondary	Yes, VGA

FEATURES	OS	Android OS, v4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich), upgradable to v4.1 (Jelly Bean)
	Chipset	Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon
	CPU	Dual-core 1.5 GHz Krait
	GPU	Adreno 225
	Sensors	Accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass
	Messaging	SMS (threaded view), MMS, Email, IM, Push Email
	Browser	HTML5
	Radio	Stereo FM radio with RDS
	GPS	Yes, with A-GPS support and GLONASS
	Java	Yes, via Java MIDP emulator
	Colors	Black, White, Pink
		- TV-out (via MHL A/V link) - SNS integration - Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic - MP4/H.263/H.264/WMV player - MP3/eAAC+/WMA/WAV player - Document viewer - Photo viewer/editor - Voice memo/dial - Predictive text input

BATTERY		Li-Ion 1750 mAh battery
	Stand-by	Up to 300 h (2G) / Up to 400 h (3G)
	Talk time	Up to 7 h (2G) / Up to 7 h (3G)
	Music play	Up to 18 h

Sony Xperia J

2013-01-02T16:20:00.001+05:30

A trimmed-down version of the Bond phone or a remake of the Xperia Arc, the Sony Xperia J knows looks are important to reasonable spenders, too, and doesn't get carried away with the level of equipment. What it offers over a very similarly equipped Sony Xperia miro is a bigger and higher-res screen, which sure sounds like the right thing to get users interested.

On top of that, the Xperia J has borrowed design cues from the current flagship and an old-time favorite, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc. So, although Sony has pretty good coverage of the low-to-midrange market, the Xperia J is easily an attention-grabber.

You may have lost count of all the Xperia droids released over the past year - less than a year actually, which is quite impressive - but the Xperia J isn't likely to slip under your radar if you're on the market for an affordable smartphone. The J is a sensible package with an important advantage over similarly equipped and similarly priced competitors.

Key features

Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and dual-band UMTS support
7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA
4.0" 16M-color TFT capacitive touchscreen of FWVGA resolution (480 x 854 pixels) at around 245 ppi
Android OS v4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich
1 GHz Cortex-A5 CPU, Adreno 200 GPU, Qualcomm MSM7227A chipset
512 MB of RAM
4GB of inbuilt storage (2GB user available)
microSD slot (32GB supported)
5 MP autofocus camera, single LED flashlight, geotagging, touch focus
VGA video @ 30fps
Secondary VGA front-facing camera
Wi-Fi b/g/n, Wi-Fi hotspot
GPS with A-GPS
Accelerometer and proximity sensor
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
Stereo FM radio with RDS
microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v2.1
1750 mAh Li-Ion battery

Main disadvantages

Noticeable lag
Non-hot-swappable microSD slot
Image quality a bit of a letdown
No hardware shutter key
No DivX/XviD support
Feeble loudspeaker

No deals are perfect in this price range, which on the other hand is brimming with offerings, so the Xperia J will have to consistently show the right attitude. Sony gave the screen and design probably its best shot within the budget but there's more to a smartphone than that.

Sony Xperia J live pictures

So, that's what we are going to explore today. We'll start with the design and build as usual, before we move on to Ice Cream Sandwich and what kind of performance and features you can expect of the Xperia J.

specifications:

GENERAL	2G Network	GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
	3G Network	HSDPA 900 / 2100 - ST26i
		HSDPA 850 / 1900 / 2100 - ST26a
	SIM	Mini-SIM
	Announced	2012, August
	Status	Available. Released 2012, October

BODY	Dimensions	124.3 x 61.2 x 9.2 mm (4.89 x 2.41 x 0.36 in)
BODY	Weight	124 g (4.37 oz)

DISPLAY	Type	TFT capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
	Size	480 x 854 pixels, 4.0 inches (~245 ppi pixel density)
	Multitouch	Yes, up to 2 fingers
	Protection	Corning Gorilla Glass
		- Timescape UI - Sony Mobile BRAVIA Engine

SOUND	Alert types	Vibration; MP3 ringtones
	Loudspeaker	Yes
	3.5mm jack	Yes

MEMORY	Card slot	microSD, up to 32 GB
MEMORY	Internal	4 GB (2 GB user available), 512 MB RAM

DATA	GPRS	Up to 86 kbps
	EDGE	Up to 237 kbps
	Speed	HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps; HSUPA, 5.76 Mbps
	WLAN	Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot
	Bluetooth	Yes, v2.1 with A2DP, EDR
	USB	Yes, microUSB v2.0

CAMERA	Primary	5 MP, 2592х1944 pixels, autofocus, LED flash,
	Features	Geo-tagging, touch focus, image stabilization
	Video	Yes, VGA
	Secondary	Yes, VGA

FEATURES	OS	Android OS, v4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich), planned upgrade to v4.1 (Jelly Bean)
	Chipset	Qualcomm MSM7227A Snapdragon
	CPU	1 GHz Cortex-A5
	GPU	Adreno 200
	Sensors	Accelerometer, proximity, compass
	Messaging	SMS (threaded view), MMS, Email, IM, Push Email
	Browser	HTML5, Adobe Flash
	Radio	Stereo FM radio with RDS
	GPS	Yes, with A-GPS support
	Java	Yes, via Java MIDP emulator
	Colors	Black, White, Gold, Pink
		- SNS integration - 50 GB of Cloud storage (time limited offer) - Active noise cancellation with dedicated mic - MP4/H.263/H.264/WMV player - MP3/eAAC+/WMA/WAV player - Document viewer - Voice memo/dial - Predictive text input

BATTERY		Standard battery, Li-Ion 1750 mAh
	Stand-by	Up to 607 h (2G) / Up to 618 h (3G)
	Talk time	Up to 5 h 36 min (2G) / Up to 7 h 18 min (3G)

Nokia Asha 308 Dual SIM - Fast Touchscreen Phone with Dual Sim - Nokia - India

2012-12-15T10:41:00.001+05:30

Nokia Asha 308 Dual SIM - Fast Touchscreen Phone with Dual Sim - Nokia - India

Da Thadiya Enthaanu Bhai (thecompleteentertainmentblogspotcom) Free Songs Download

2012-12-15T10:02:00.001+05:30

Da Thadiya Enthaanu Bhai (thecompleteentertainmentblogspotcom) Free Songs Download

Nokia 500 - Nokia 500 - 3G Mobile Phones with a fast processor and Wi-Fi - Nokia - India

2012-12-13T09:26:00.001+05:30

Nokia 500 - Nokia 500 - 3G Mobile Phones with a fast processor and Wi-Fi - Nokia - India

Let the world follow you - Nokia - India

2012-12-08T10:05:00.001+05:30

Let the world follow you - Nokia - India

Nokia Lumia 510

2012-12-08T10:04:00.000+05:30

The Details

Design
Stand-out design in vibrant colours, with a 10.16 cm (4”) screen
Windows Phone
Windows Phone makes staying in touch easy
Microsoft SkyDrive
Back-up files with 7GB of free SkyDrive storage
Live Tiles
See your whole world at a glance with Live Tiles
Price
₹10,499.00
Design
Dimensions

Height

120.7 mm

Width

64.9 mm

Thickness

11.5 mm

Weight

129 g

Volume

81 cm³

Form factor

Phone form factor

Monoblock

Hardware

Connectivity

Connectors

Micro-USB-B

Micro-USB 2.0

Wireless connectivity

Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, high-speed USB 2.0

WLAN IEEE 802.11 b/g/n

Syncronization

Zune PC SW

ActiveSync

Mac Connector SW

WLAN features

WLAN security

WPA

WEP

WPA2-Personal

WPA2-Enterprise

Photography

Main camera

Camera sensor (main camera resolution)

5.0 megapixels

Camera resolution

2592 x 1944 pixels

Main camera focus type

Auto focus with two-stage capture key

Camera F number/aperture

2.4

Camera digital zoom

4 x

Camera focal length

28.0 mm

Graphics

Graphics format

JPEG

BMP

WMF

GIF89a

TIFF

EXIF

PNG

WBMP

GIF87a

Data Network

Data bearers¹

GPRS (2G)

EDGE/EGPRS (2G)

HSDPA (3G)

WCDMA (3G)

Dual Transfer Mode (2G)

¹ Requires data service. Data services may not be available in all networks. Data transmission speeds may be as high as HSDPA 10.2 Mbps, but may vary based upon network capabilities and other conditions. The establishment and continuation of a data connection depends on network availability, provider support and signal strength.

Power Management²

Battery model

BP-3L

Battery capacity

1300 mAh

Battery voltage

3.7 V

Removable battery

Yes

Standby time (2G)

738.6 h

Talk time (2G)

6.2 h

Standby time (3G)

653.2 h

Talk time (3G)

8.4 h

Music playback time³

36 h

Video recording time

3.2 h

² Operation times may vary depending on radio access technology used, operator network configuration and usage.

³ With wired headset
Display and User Interface

Display size

10.16 cm

Touch screen technology

Capacitive Multipoint-Touch

Display orientation

Portrait

Display resolution - Height

800 pixels

Display resolution - Width

480 pixels

Display features

Light time-out

Ambient light detector

Brightness control

Tactile feedback

Orientation sensor

Low power mode

Proximity sensor

Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G review

2012-10-08T11:59:00.001+05:30

After numerous leaks and a name change prior to entering officialdom, the slide-out QWERTY sporting Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G has made its way to the US market, aiming for users with a heavy knack for messaging. The epically named distant relative of the legendary I9000 follows the footsteps of the Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G, which we took for a spin earlier this year, but adds a hardware QWERTY and updated internals to the mix.

The specifications of the Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G are a curious mix of some of the iconic tech features released in the past two years. The smartphone's 4" Super AMOLED display and 5MP main camera can be traced directly to the original Galaxy S, while its dual-core Snapdragon S4 chipset is featured in none other but the hot selling Galaxy S III.

Here goes the full list of talents, which the Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G has to offer.

Key Features

Quad-band GSM and quad-band 3G support
42 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA support
4" 16M-color Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen of WVGA (480 x 800 pixels) resolution
Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich with Samsung's latest TouchWiz launcher
1.5 GHz Krait dual-core CPU, Adreno 225 GPU, Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 chipset, 1GB of RAM
5MP autofocus camera with LED flash, 720p video recording; 1.3MP front-facing unit
Slide-out five-row QWERTY keyboard
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n support
GPS with A-GPS connectivity; Digital compass
8GB internal storage, microSD slot
Accelerometer, gyroscope and proximity sensor
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
Stereo Bluetooth v3.0
NFC support with Android Beam
File manager comes preinstalled
Rich video format playback support
Great battery life

Main disadvantages

No dedicated camera button
The screen is let down by its PenTile matrix
5MP camera does not fit the rest of the hardware or the price tag
Large amount of non-removable T-Mobile bloatware with zero functionality
The smartphone is hardly a looker

The presence of a hardware QWERTY in the Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G is a dream come true for many users out there. It was only a few months back when we thought that this category of Android smartphones is on its way out.

As for the combination of Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 silicon and the Samsung adorned Android Ice Cream Sandwich - they have already proven to be a sweet combination in the Samsung Galaxy S III. The same goes for T-Mobile's speedy 42Mbps HSDPA.

We can't say the same about the camera and screen of the Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G. Both units, while perfectly functional, are hardly befitting of the handset's other internals, as well as its price tag.

FEATURES	OS	Android OS, v4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich)
	Chipset	Qualcomm MSM8260A Snapdragon
	CPU	Dual-core 1.5 GHz Krait
	GPU	Adreno 225
	Sensors	Accelerometer, gyro, proximity, compass
	Messaging	SMS(threaded view), MMS, Email, Push Mail, IM, RSS
	Browser	HTML, Adobe Flash
	Radio	No
	GPS	Yes, with A-GPS
	Java	Yes, via Java MIDP emulator
	Colors	Black
		- SNS integration - MP4/DivX/XviD/WMV/H.264/H.263 player - MP3/WAV/eAAC+/AC3/FLAC player - Organizer - Image/video editor - Document editor - Google Search, Maps, Gmail, YouTube, Calendar, Google Talk, Picasa integration - Voice memo/dial/commands - Predictive text input (Swype)

DISPLAY	Type	Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, 16M colors
	Size	480 x 800 pixels, 4.0 inches (~233 ppi pixel density)
	Multitouch	Yes

SOUND	Alert types	Vibration; MP3, WAV ringtones
	Loudspeaker	Yes
	3.5mm jack	Yes

MEMORY	Card slot	microSD, up to 32 GB
MEMORY	Internal	8 GB storage, 1 GB RAM

DATA	GPRS	Yes
	EDGE	Yes
	Speed	HSDPA, 42 Mbps; HSUPA
	WLAN	Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, DLNA, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi hotspot
	Bluetooth	Yes, v3.0 with A2DP
	NFC	Yes
	USB	Yes, microUSB v2.0

CAMERA	Primary	5 MP, 2592x1944 pixels, autofocus, LED flash
	Features	Geo-tagging, touch focus, face detection
	Video	Yes, 720p@30fps
	Secondary	Yes, 1.3MP

Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate review

2012-08-08T21:13:00.002+05:30

Introduction

Announced at CES 2012 as an eco-centric phone, the Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate I577 for AT&T offers plenty of functionality for a device with ecological credentials. Powered by a dual-core CPU, and sporting LTE network connectivity, the handset should be able to cater for the needs of all, but the most demanding smartphone users. Throw in an attractive price to the phone's list of features, and we have another strong entry-level smartphone candidate made by Samsung on our hands.

Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate official photos

Samsung-made eco-friendly smartphones have been around on the US market for quite some time now, but never sold in numbers large enough to make a splash. The reason for this was simple - their spec sheets offered nothing to write home about, with their main highlights being the type of recycled materials used for making them.

The Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate is a slightly different case. True, most of its specs come directly from 2011, but they've been borrowed from some of 2011 top shelf Android smartphones. The Exhilarate features a Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 chipset with a dual-core CPU, clocked at 1.2GHz. LTE, 4" Super AMOLED screen, one gigabyte of RAM, and 5MP main snapper are also among the spec sheet's highlights. Here goes the smartphone's full list of talents.

Key Features

Quad-band GSM and quad-band 3G support
21 Mbps HSPA+ and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA support
LTE network connectivity
4" 16M-color Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen of WVGA (480 x 800 pixels) resolution
Android OS v2.3.6 with TouchWiz 4 launcher
1.2 GHz Scorpion dual-core CPU, Adreno 220 GPU, Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 chipset, 1GB of RAM
5MP autofocus camera with LED flash, 720p video recording; 1.3MP front-facing unit
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n support
GPS with A-GPS connectivity; Digital compass
4GB internal storage, microSD slot
Accelerometer and proximity sensor
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
Stereo Bluetooth v3.0
Document editor
File manager comes preinstalled
Incredibly rich video format playback support
Body made of 80% recycled materials
Affordable price on a contract

Main disadvantages

No dedicated camera button
Screen has PenTile matrix
Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread out of the box does not cut it anymore
Its looks are overall unexciting

You might have noticed that the Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate is quite closely related to the Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G for T-Mobile. The two handsets are practically identical save for the clock speed and the network connectivity. We do believe that the Galaxy Exhilarate is slightly underpowered in order to offset its LTE capability, which is a well-known energy hog.

We really wish that we didn't see Android 2.3 Gingerbread on the Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate this far into 2012. The device has plenty of horsepower to handle Ice Cream Sandwich. What makes the issue even more painful is the lack of word on whether or not the I577 will receive an update.

If you are willing to compromise on the above issue, the Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate is a well-balanced Android smartphone, which will handle just about every task you throw at it with ease. Samsung have once again reached into their huge parts bin to create a device, which, although not destined to be a bestseller, will contribute to the company's growing market share.

Samsung I577 Galaxy Exhilarate live shots

As always, we'll kick the review off with an unboxing, followed by a design and build quality inspection.

The retail box is eco-friendly too

In a manner befitting its eco-credentials, the Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate comes in a box, made entirely out of recycled paper. Inside, you will find a charger and a microUSB cable to go with the usual set of booklets.

The retail box

Headphones and a microSD card are unsurprisingly missing from the device's box. It should hardly be a surprise in this price range though.

Design and build quality

Let's be honest here - the Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate will definitely not win a beauty contest. Having said that, the device looks like quite a few Samsung offerings launched over the past year. Finished in an all-black color scheme, the I577 can be branded as dull or understated depending on one's opinion. We wish its designers put a little more effort in distinguishing its eco features a tad more.

Build quality is on the usually high Samsung level. The I577 looks like it can take a good deal of daily abuse.

The measures of the smartphone are more than acceptable. They are 122 x 63 x 12mm, while its weight tips the scale at the fairly acceptable 130 grams. The Galaxy Exhilarate is extremely pocketable due to its 4" display which, by today's standards, is fairly small.

There's hardly a more familiar sight on a Samsung smartphone than the 4" Super AMOLED screen of the Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate. The PenTile WVGA unit does a great job with its infinite contrast and deep blacks, but its age begins to show this time around.

The 4" WVGA Super AMOLED is quite familiar by now

Above the screen is where the earpiece, the usual set of sensors, as well as the front facing camera are located. Below it, you have the ubiquitous for all 2011 U.S. Samsung droids, four touch sensitive buttons.

The view above and below the display

The volume rocker sits lonely on the left-hand side of the phone. On the right side, you will find the power/lock key, as well as the microSD card slot.

The volume rocker on the left • the power/lock key and microSD card slot on the right

The 3.5mm audio jack of the handset sits at the top with the latch for removing the phone's battery cover and the secondary microphone keeping it company. The microUSB port and mouthpiece reside at the bottom.

The view on the device's top and bottom

The 5MP camera, its LED flash, the loudspeaker grille, as well as a "Galaxy" logo are sitting at the top of the device's back. There is also a hint of a chin at the bottom.

The view on the back

Under the battery cover, there are no surprises. Along with observing its usual duties, the 1750mAh battery also serves as the source of the phone's NFC talents,.

The view under the battery cover

The Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate achieved the decent endurance rating of 36 hours in our battery test. This means that your phone will make it through a day and a half if you use it for an hour each of telephony, web browsing and video playback daily.

Handling the Samsung Exhilarate is easy. Due to the smaller screen, even one-handed operation is quite easy and comfortable. The back cover has grippy texture, so accidental drops are not likely.

Handling the I577

Overall, we think the design of the Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate deserved a bit more attention. Build quality is on the typically high Samsung level but the overall looks of the device are quite dull.

User interface: Android Gingerbread and TouchWiz 4.0

The Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate runs Android 2.3.6 Gingerbread with Samsung's TouchWiz launcher out of the box. The user experience is the same as with many other recent Samsung devices, which we've encountered in the past. Check it out on video below.

The lockscreen holds no surprises. It can be swiped away in any direction. The cool feature where missed events (messages, calls etc.) get their own unlock patterns is here too.

The lockscreen is business as usual

The homescreen accommodates tons of widgets with lots of functionality. You can have up to 7 homescreens. A pinch zoom brings you to an aggregate view of all homescreen panes, which can be edited: rearranged, deleted or added.

Widgets, shortcuts or folders are pulled onto the homescreen from a drawer that appears at the bottom of the screen once you enter edit mode (press and hold on an empty spot or do Menu > Add).

The Galaxy Exhilarate homescreen • Editing the homescreen

The numbered dots that identify the homescreen panels serve as a scroll bar too. A press and hold on the dots lets you scroll sideways through the resized images of the available homescreen panes in one short go rather than with several swipes.

Scrolling between homescreens

The app launcher is very similar to the homescreen - you can create folders to go with your shortcuts and you can add, remove and rearrange pages just like you would homescreens.

You can choose List view instead of the regular grid view if you prefer.

The app launcher • Rearranging pages in the app launcher • List view

In typical TouchWiz fashion, there are four shortcuts docked at the bottom of the screen that are visible both on the homescreen and in the app launcher. You can swap the first three with different ones (by default the shortcuts are Phone, Contacts, Messaging), the fourth one being locked. It's the app drawer/home shortcut so it makes sense to always keep it in the same place.

The notification area has been slightly remodeled in TouchWiz 4.0, but there aren't any major changes to the functionality there.

The notification area

The custom task manager, which Samsung have preinstalled, offers a lot of functionality. It also comes with a handy widget which shows you the number of active applications right on your homescreen.

The task manager

The Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate comes with a modest amount of preinstalled AT&T apps. Thankfully, most of them can be removed out of the box.

The phonebook is as good as always

The phonebook has a wide range of features and practically unlimited storage capacity.

There are options to filter contacts that have phone numbers, show/hide some of the groups you've created (including groups from social networks) and change the sorting (by first or last name).

The phonebook holds no surprises

The phonebook offers the Quick contacts feature, which lets you tap the contact photo for a popup menu with shortcuts to call, text, or email. The TouchWiz-specific swiping gesture is here too - swipe a contact right to make a call and left to compose a message.

Quick contacts • Swiping is a neat gesture for calling and texting

There are many info fields that you can assign to each contact, but it still remains perfectly organized. You have all the types listed (numbers, email addresses, etc) and there's a plus sign on the right - a tap adds another item of that type. Pressing the minus sign under it deletes the unneeded field.

Editing a contact

Of course, the real flexibility of the phonebook becomes apparent when you sign into your Facebook or LinkedIn account. After syncing, the phonebook will automatically merge contacts (you can do it manually too).

The contact info screen is tabbed. The first two tabs are pretty standard - one displays the person's contact information the other keeps call and message history. The third and fourth tabs handle the social stuff - status updates and the contact's online galleries.

Viewing a contact's details • check out the SNS integration

Weirdly, only Facebook and LinkedIn contacts can be synced with the phonebook - we usually see Twitter contacts in here too.

Top notch telephony

The Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate had no issues with reception even in areas with poor coverage. Sound in the earpiece was crisp and fairly loud.

The dialer and call log have been integrated into the phonebook, each in a separate tab. Smart Dial is available and works like a charm - it searches names and numbers simultaneously.

Only one contact (with contact photo) is shown at a time in the Smart Dial suggestions. You can tap the down arrow to view the rest (a digit above the arrow indicates how many contacts have matched your query).

Smart dial works like a charm

The dialer also offers quick shortcuts for making a video call or sending a message instead.

Thanks to the proximity sensor, your screen will automatically turn off during a call. The available options during a call include taking a note, using the keypad, muting, holding the call or adding another call to this conversation.

The call log is the tab next to the dial pad. It displays all the dialed, received and missed calls in one list sorting your call history by contacts

Call history

Messaging is among the best in business

The messaging department is quite straightforward: there are no folders here, just a new message button. Under that button is a list of all your messages organized into threads.

Swiping on a message header will do exactly the same as in the phonebook - a left swipe starts a new message, while swiping to the right will start a call.

The messaging department and swipe functions

There's application-specific search that lets you quickly find a given message among all your stored SMS and MMS.

To add message recipients, just start typing the corresponding name or number and choose from the contacts offered.

Adding recipients

When you add multimedia content to the message, it automatically turns into an MMS. You can either quickly add a photo or an audio file to go with the text, or compose an MMS using all the available features (like multiple slides, slide timing, layout, etc.). The multiple slides are all shown inside the compose box.

Adding any multimedia content automatically turns an SMS into an MMS

Moving on to email, the Gmail app supports batch operations, which allows multiple emails to be archived, labeled or deleted. Multiple Gmail accounts are also supported.

The Gmail app

There is also a generic email app for all your other email accounts and it can support multiple POP or IMAP inboxes. You have access to the original folders that are created online, side by side with the standard local ones such as inbox, drafts and sent items.

It offers a combined inbox option, which color-codes emails from different accounts so it's easy to tell which email was pulled from which account. Conversation view is also available - it groups related emails into single entries with a number in parenthesis showing the number of emails grouped. A tap on that entry expands it to show a list of the individual messages.

Google Talk handles the Instant Messaging department. The G-Talk network is compatible with a variety of popular clients like Pidgin, Kopete, iChat and Ovi Contacts. Video chat support is also on board here.

As far as text entry goes, you have the standard Samsung keyboard at your disposal, as well as Swype and the standard Gingerbread keyboard. All are fairly comfortable, although if you're coming from a bigger screen, the keys might feel a little cramped. The landscape keyboard should be good enough though.

Gallery, photo editor, and file browser

The Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate uses the standard Android gallery. It automatically compiles the images and videos no matter which folder they are stored in. It even imports the online photos from your Google Picasa web albums.

The standard Android gallery

Little about the Gallery should surprise you. It displays full resolution images and supports double tap and pinch zoom. It supports sharing images over Bluetooth, email, messaging along with uploading to Picasa or using DLNA to push the image to a compatible TV.

You also get an image editor preinstalled. It handles the basics like image rotation, cropping (no resize though) and adjusting brightness/saturation/contrast. You can also make selections (using a smart tool similar to the Quick selection tool in Photoshop). It's not nearly as accurate as the Photoshop tool though.

You can apply effects too but the one feature that caught our eye was Context fill - similar to Photoshop's Context-aware fill tool although, not nearly as accurate.

The image editor

The My Files app is a simple to use but efficient file manager. It can move, copy, lock and rename files in bulk, even send multiple files via Bluetooth. My files will only browse the memory card and the large internal storage (it can't access the system drive).

The file manager

A TouchWiz-ed music player

The Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate uses the standard TouchWiz music player. Samsung have enabled equalizer presets (including a custom one) along with the sound-enhancing DNSe technology and 5.1 channel virtualization.

By default, tracks are sorted into four categories - All, Playlists, Albums and Artists. From the settings, you can add or remove categories to set up the music player just the way you like it.

The music player is great • The DNSe settings • Choosing which categories to use

The album art has a central place in the Now Playing interface, but you can replace it with an equalizer. You can skip songs or FF/rewind by sideways swipes.

A nice feature allows you to quickly look up a song on YouTube or via Google search. The handset also prompts you to select whether to look up the artist, the song title or the album.

The Now playing interface

A nice video player

The video player offers a simple list-based interface. It displays all video files stored on the phone and you can sort them by name, date, type or size. The video player also remembers the last viewed position of the video, so you can resume exactly where you left off.

The video player lets you choose between three crop modes for how the video fits the screen. There's 5.1 channel virtualization and subtitle support. You can change font size and adjust subtitle sync (time them back or forth) but there's no option to manually load subtitles, they have to have the same filename as the video file to load.

The video player has a simple interface but don't let it deceive you

Good audio output

The Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate fared pretty well in our traditional audio quality test. The Samsung smartphone offers pretty good frequency response as well as excellent signal-to-noise and dynamic range scores.

The stereo crosstalk is quite good as well, while the distortion levels are kept well under control. There are no major weak points to its performance, with the volume levels being the only thing average about it.

A solid 5MP shooter

The Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate comes with a 5MP camera and an LED flash. It captures photos at a maximum resolution of 2560 x 1920 pixels.

Its interface looks pretty familiar with two shortcut bars on each side of the viewfinder. On the right you get the still camera / camcorder switch, virtual shutter key and the gallery shortcut (which is a thumbnail of the last photo taken)

The camera interface

On the left, you get the front/back camera switch and the flash control. You can replace those two and add two more (for a total of four) shortcuts to any option in the Settings menu.

As regards image quality, the Samsung Exhilarate rates on the better part of the scale. The image detail is on a nice level, and there is no excessive digital noise whatsoever. The colors look balanced and natural. The white balance is usually spot on too.

Check out a few samples below.

Video recording is acceptable

The video camera interface is identical to the still camera. You get the same customizable panel on the left with four shortcuts.

The camera shoots 720p video at 30fps. Unlike the still camera, you can't use the video-call camera to shoot videos.

The video camera interface

The videos are shot in .MP4 file format, encoded with a bitrate of 12Mbps. Video quality is nice and the videos are as fluid as they get. A minor annoyance is that diagonal lines too often end up jagged due to some sort of image processing.

Here is a 720p video sample for you.

And here goes an untouched 720p@30fps video clip for download.

Connectivity is well covered

The Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate has quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support and quad-band 3G with HSPA+ (21Mbps downlink and 5.76Mbps uplink).

LTE is undoubtedly the connectivity feature which you should care about the most. We had a great experience with the device in New York City with speeds often exceeding 50Mbps.

Moving on, there's Bluetooth 3.0 for fast local file transfers. Then there's Wi-Fi b/g/n support and a Wi-Fi hotspot option.

The AllShare app allows you to stream content to and from various devices (TV or computer) over DLNA.

AllShare app

The handset also comes with Kies Air preloaded. The app connects to the local Wi-Fi network (or it can create a Wi-Fi hotspot) and gives you a URL to type into your computer's web browser.

From there you can manage just about anything on the phone - from contacts, messages (including composing messages), to browsing images, videos and other files straight in your desktop browser. You can grant or reject access to computers and see who's connected to the phone at any moment.

The cool thing is you can stream music with handy playback controls. It works for videos too.

A good web browser

The interface of the Android web browser has hardly changed. Its user experience is, as usual, quite good.

Browsing GSMArena.com

The browser supports both double tap and pinch zooming along with the new two-finger tilt zoom. There are niceties such as multiple tabs, text reflow, and find on page and so on. A neat trick is to pinch zoom out beyond the minimum - that opens up the tabs view.

Yet another neat trick is the browser-specific brightness setting. You can, for example, boost the brightness in the browser to comfortably view your web pages but keep the general brightness low to conserve battery.

Page options and settings

There's Flash 11 support, which means you can watch YouTube videos right in the browser (videos up to 720p worked smoothly) and play Flash games too.

Watching a YouTube video

There is a document editor at your service

The Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate comes with the Quickoffice preinstalled. It's one of the most feature-rich mobile editors around. You can view, edit and create Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents (Office 2003 and Office 2007 are supported) and there's a PDF viewer as well. The app enables searching your office files just like in a file explorer.

Quickoffice

Organizer with a ton of options

The calendar has five different types of view: list, daily, weekly, monthly and annually. Adding a new event is quick and easy, and you can also set an alarm to act as a reminder.

The calendar

The list view (often referred to as Agenda view) shows a list of all the calendar entries from the recent past to the near future. It's a very handy tool when you need to check your appointments for the next few days.

There is also a calculator aboard. It is nicely touch optimized - the buttons are big enough and easy to hit. Turning the phone landscape reveals more advanced calculator functions.

The calculator • Advanced view

The Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate features a decent alarm clock application with a huge number of alarms to be set, each with its own start time and repeat pattern.

The Clock app and the alarm options

The Memo and Mini Diary are self-explanatory. The first app works with text only, while the Diary lets you also attach pictures.

You also get a To-Do app called Task and a Voice recorder to round off the organizer functionality.

The Memo and Mini Diary • Task handles your To-Do list • The Voice recorder

Google Maps

Google Maps is a standard part of the Android package and we've covered it many times before. It offers voice-guided navigation in certain countries and falls back to a list of instructions elsewhere. You can plan routes, search for nearby POI and go into the always cool Street View.

Google Maps

The app now uses vector maps, which are very data efficient and easy to cache. It will reroute you if you get off course, even without a data connection.

The latest version also supports indoor navigation for popular shopping destinations and airports across America. It is still in Beta though.

Google Play Store

The Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate has the latest version of Google Play. Upon launch of the Market app you're greeted with the tiled interface of the Featured window. A swipe to the right takes you to the Categories view.

Swiping to the left takes you through Top Paid, Top Free, Top Grossing, Top New Paid, Top New Free and Trending (the ones with growing popularity). New sections are available such as Staff Picks, Editor's Choice and more.

Google Play

Downloads are easy and won't take more than a couple of seconds. Before you agree to download an app, the Market will show you what features the app requires access to (e.g. Internet connectivity, access to the file system, etc.).

Downloading an app.

Final words

Eco-friendly body aside, there's nothing revolutionary about the Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate I577, and that's not necessarily a bad thing. It offers decent performance, a good camera and solid build quality to go with a low price tag. AT&T's LTE network is a joy to use, where available too. In a nutshell, the Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate is all the smartphone most users will ever need.

Unfortunately however, having the above qualities is no longer a guarantee for success with today's cut-throat competition in the Android world. The Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate lacks the looks to attract many potential buyers. Its ageing OS doesn't help its cause either - in a time when people talk Jelly Bean updates; there's no word if the device will make it even to Ice Cream Sandwich.

If you don't care about all this stuff, then look no further than the I577. Its $29.99 price tag is more than acceptable too. In case you are willing to shop around, here are some alternatives.

The Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G for T-Mobile is almost identical to the I577, save for the 42Mbps HSDPA and the higher-clocked 1.5Ghz, CPU, both of which come at the expense of LTE connectivity. If you are a Samsung fan, make sure you check it out as it is available for free on a contract. The Pantech Burst is also a good alternative. Priced at only a penny on a contract, it offers a faster CPU and more built-in memory than the Exhilarate, without skimping on the LTE.

Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G T769 • Pantech Burst

Unfortunately for the Galaxy Exhilarate, only $20 more allow you to shop for some higher-tier smartphones. The HTC Vivid, LG Nitro HD, and Sony Xperia ion are all AT&T LTE smartphones. Spec for spec, they blow the Exhilarate out of the water. Their bigger screens are a love it or hate it affair, but they are all worth a hard consideration.

HTC Vivid • LG Nitro HD • Sony Xperia ion LTE

As you can see, the Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate has an uphill battle in front of itself. Had it been released shortly after its announcement, it would have racked up considerably better sales' numbers than it is currently destined to be. Thankfully, Samsung do not have high expectations for the device - it is yet another demonstration of the Korean giant's humongous parts bin, only this time it is designed to appeal to those who prefer being eco-conscious.

Nokia Lumia 800 The Dark Knight Rises Limited Edition

2012-08-06T19:06:00.001+05:30

Nokia Lumia 800 The Dark Knight Rises Limited Edition

0 ou

Price: 26422

Buy At: 24999

Warranty DetailsKey features

Screen size :: 3.7 inches
Primary camera :: 8 mp auto focus with carl zeiss optics, 2x led flash and hd video
Special offer :: 2gb of 3g data for 4 months for airtel & vodafone
Mainfeatures :: laser cut batman logo engraved on the rear side
special "the dark knight rises app"

Nokia Lumia 800 The Dark Knight Rises Limited Edition Details

Nokia Lumia 800 is one of the latest Windows Phone from Nokia. Designed to stay in sync with everyday, Nokia Lumia 800 redefines the way customization happens in a Windows phone. You can simply pin your favourite applications to the home screen, and get live updates! So you get hooked to all your favourite social networking sites Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. all in one place. Nokia Lumia lets you edit images, tag them, and share them in seconds. Its super fast browsing with IE 9 helps you access the net without wait. Even the video playback is at a lightning fast speed.

It supports 8 MP primary camera, and 28 mm wide angle lens, which means you’ll get more in the picture.

Apart from seamless Internet accessibility, Nokia Lumia 800 is also plays brilliant music. It has a smart feature that learns the music you love, and gives you updates about new releases based on your music preferences. Nokia Lumia 800 is available in 4 colors- Black, Cyan, White and Magenta.

Free 2GB of 3G data per month for 4 months

Offer applicable on Airtel & Vodafone connections only
For T&C's, please refer operator site.

Detailed specifications for the Nokia Lumia 800 The Dark Knight Rises Limited Edition

Brand	NokiaSee All Nokia Products
Category	Nokia Lumia
Memory	Call records YES Phonebook YES Card slot NO Internal memory 16 GB
Connectivity	Java NO 3g YES, 14.4 MBPS HSDPA; 5.76 MBPS HSUPA Wlan WI-FI 802.11 B/G/N Bluetooth YES, V2.1 WITH A2DP, EDR Wap YES, V2 Gprs CLASS 33 Browser XHTML, HTML5, RSS FEEDS Usb YES, MICROUSB V2.0 Infrared NO Edge CLASS 33
General features	Form BAR Touch screen YES, CAPACITIVE Keyboard MULTITOUCH Sim type SINGLE SIM, GSM
Network	2g network GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900 3g network HSDPA 850 / 900 / 1900 / 2100
Camera	Zoom DIGITAL ZOOM - 3X Video player YES Flash LED FLASH Primary camera 8 MP Camera features GEO-TAGGING
Platform	Os and os version MICROSOFT WINDOWS PHONE 7.5 MANGO Cpu 1.4 GHZ SCORPION
Phone size	Dimensions (lxbxh) 116.5 X 61.2 X 12.1 MM Weight 142 G
Display	Screen type AMOLED CAPACITIVE TOUCHSCREEN Screen resolution 480 X 800 PIXELS
Battery	Battery stand-by time UP TO 265 H (2G) / UP TO 335 H (3G) Battery talk-time UP TO 13 H (2G) / UP TO 9 H 30 MIN (3G) Battery type STANDARD BATTERY, LI-ION 1450 MAH (BV-5JW)
Others features	Games YES Radio STEREO FM RADIO WITH RDS Messaging SMS (THREADED VIEW), MMS, EMAIL, PUSH EMAIL, IM Miscellaneous MICROSIM CARD SUPPORT ONLY SNS INTEGRATION ACTIVE NOISE CANCELLATION WITH DEDICATED MIC MP3/WAV/EAAC+/WMA PLAYER MP4/H.264/H.263/WMV PLAYER DOCUMENT VIEWER/EDITOR VIDEO/PHOTO EDITOR VOICE MEMO/COMMAND/DIAL PREDICTIVE TEXT INPUT Maps NOKIA MAPS, BING MAPS
Warranty	Warranty 1 YEAR MANUFACTURER WARRANTY
Sounds	Loudspeaker YES Ringtones & alert types VIBRATION; MP3, WAV RINGTONES Audio jack 3.5MM JACK
Sales package	Sales package 1 HANDSET (1 CELLULAR PHONE WITH BATTERY,1 CHARGER, 1 DATA CABLE, 1 SOFTCOVER ,1 HEADSET, 1 UG, 1 PRODUCT INFO BOOKLET

Video For "Nokia Lumia 800 The Dark Knight Rises Limited Edition"

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Nokia Lumia 800 The Dark Knight Rises

2012-08-06T18:59:00.003+05:30

Nokia Lumia 800 The Dark Knight Rises limited edition debuts in India

Nokia India has released The Dark Knight Rises limited edition of Lumia 800 in the country today. The limited edition comes with a laser etched Batman logo on the back of the phone along with a number of exclusive The Dark Knight Rises content.According to Nokia, this limited edition will go on sale in Mid-July from its website and will be priced at Rs. 24,999. Company is only putting 200 units of the Batman edition on sale.
In terms of the content, Nokia Lumia 800 Batman edition will come with exclusive trailers, wallpapers, movie information, ringtones, and a game, in which consumers can defend Gotham City.
The limited edition comes with the same specifications as the retail edition, which include 3.7-inch AMOLED display, 8MP camera with LED flash, and 16GB of internal memory.
In addition to the Batman edition of Lumia 800, company also announced the launch of Lumia 610 in the country today. It has been priced at Rs. 12,999.
Nokia Lumia 800 The Dark Knight Rises limited edition key specs

3.7-inch AMOLED display with 800x480p resolution
1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255 processor
512MB RAM
8MP rear camera
Windows Phone 7.5
1450 mAh battery

Nokia Lumia 800 The Dark Knight Rises Limited Edition - Nokia - India

2012-08-06T18:54:00.001+05:30

Nokia Lumia 800 The Dark Knight Rises Limited Edition - Nokia - India

Sony Xperia go review

2012-08-04T08:10:00.001+05:30

Introduction

The Sony Xperia go is not a phone to keep on a short leash. Not your kind of phone either if you'd say no to a dip in the pool because you are expecting an important call. The Sony Xperia go lets you join the fun. The midrange package that Sony just brought to the market aims to offer plenty of bang for your buck - and a bang of a time.

The Sony Xperia go official pictures

The Xperia go is a smartphone that you don't need to constantly look after. The little rugged droid will have you covered in situations very few other phones will put up with, let alone survive. Drop it or sink it, the Xperia go will take it without a flinch. And there's more where that came from. Here's the short version of what the Xperia go is all about.

Key features

IP67 certified for dust and water resistance, wet-finger tracking
Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support
3G with 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA
3.5" 16M-color LED-backlit LCD capacitive touchscreen of HVGA resolution (320 x 480 pixels) at around 165 ppi
Bravia Mobile engine
Android OS v2.3 Gingerbread
Dual-core 1 GHz Cortex-A9 CPU, Mali-400 GPU, NovaThor U8500 chipset
512 MB RAM
5 MP autofocus camera, single LED flashlight, geotagging, image stabilization, smile detection, touch focus
720p video @ 30fps
Wi-Fi b/g/n, Wi-Fi hotspot functionality and DLNA
GPS with A-GPS, Wisepilot navigation
microSD slot (32GB supported, 2GB card included)
Accelerometer and proximity sensor, notification LED
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
Stereo FM radio with RDS
TrackID music recognition
Relevant package of apps
MicroUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v2.1
Adobe Flash support

Main disadvantages

No ICS out of the box
Screen resolution a bit low by today's standards
No arm case and wrist strap in the bundle (ala the Sony Ericsson Xperia active)- available in the Xperia go "Sports Edition"
No hardware camera shutter key
No secondary camera, no video calls
Loudspeaker has below average performance
No DivX/XviD video support, 1080p video playback is a no go, too
No ANT+ support for connection to sports peripherals (unlike the Xperia active)

Now, who said you can only have two out of the three if you're after compact size, rugged build and performance under the same roof. The Sony Xperia go has the brains to go with the toughness and is still compact enough to carry around and slip into any pocket.

To make it even better, Sony has addressed two of the main issues we had with the predecessor - the Xperia active. There's now a capable dual-core chipset under the hood and the screen has grown to the far more usable 3.5". We could have probably used some extra pixels, but the Xperia go sounds like a package that's hard to beat as it is.

The Sony Xperia go at HQ

All we need to do now is make sure its real-life performance can cash the checks written by the spec sheet. The unboxing and hardware overview follow right after the break.

Standard retail package

The box that the Sony Xperia go comes in is shaped like the retail packages of its NXT siblings. It holds all the basics, including an AC adapter, a USB cable that you can use with both your computer and the charger, and a single-piece headset.

The Sony Xperia go retail package contents

There's also a microSIM to regular SIM adapter supplied, which is a handy tool to have, and perhaps a recognition on Sony's part that they see the Xperia go as a backup handset for outdoor activities. We were disappointed to not find the arm case and wrist strap, which were so thoughtfully provided with the Sony Ericsson Xperia active. If you're lucky enough to find it, there's an Xperia go "Sports Edition", which comes in yellow and the arm case and wrist strap intact.

Sony Xperia go 360-degree spin

At 111 x 60.3 x 9.8 mm the Sony Xperia go is one of the more compact smartphones out there. It's not too heavy either at 110g, which is a nice change over the bulky and heavy rugged handsets from a few years ago.

Build quality and design

Comparisons with the Sony Ericsson Xperia active are inevitable and - as much as we liked the old Sony Ericsson rugged smartphone - we think the Xperia go does well to take a different stylistic approach. In terms of actual size, the Xperia go is taller as it accommodates a bigger screen. It doesn't look as compact and sporty as its predecessor but is way slimmer and will never risk the embarrassment of being underdressed on more formal occasions.

The design of the Sony Xperia go is pretty neat, the subtle chin on the front being its most characteristic feature. We quite like the styling and the slim waistline undoubtedly contributes to that. Playing closely by the NXT series style guide, the Sony Xperia go proves that ruggedness doesn't necessarily result in a face that only a mother can love.

What we are not quite fond of is the choice of finish for the Sony Xperia go's back panel. The plastic used feels almost abrasive to the touch and takes some getting used to. It's unlike anything we've seen before and, sadly, not in a particularly good way. Well, it must be the price that needs to be paid for the extra ruggedness, we guess.

Above the screen is the earpiece, along with the proximity sensor. Unfortunately, there's no front-facing camera here.

The proximity sensor is next to the earpiece

Below the screen, there are three capacitive keys (Back, Home and Menu). You can enable haptics for them. The screen is slightly projecting over the phone's body, providing a tactile reference point. The resulting chin is a lot subtler though than in the Xperia Sola. Just beneath the capacitive keys is the Xperia go microphone pinhole.

The trio of capacitive keys below the screen

The left side only holds the 3.5mm audio jack near its top. It's covered with a protective plastic seal, which you need to keep on to maintain the level of water resistance.

The 3.5mm audio jack

On the right is the covered USB port for charging and transferring files and the volume rocker. There's no camera shutter key here.

The microUSB is joined by the volume rocker on the right

The top has nothing but the power key, while on the bottom you'll find just the lanyard eyelet. Normally you'd also find a microphone pinhole in here, but as we mentioned it has been moved to the front panel of the Xperia go.

The power key on top • Lanyard eyelet and primary microphone on the bottom

On the back of the Sony Xperia go we find the 5MP camera lens and the LED flash. The secondary microphone for stereo recording and the loudspeaker grille are also nearby.

The camera lens, LED flash, secondary mic and speaker grille

Removing the back cover reveals the microSD and SIM card slots. You can't access or replace your battery. The microSD card is hot-swappable, but the SIM card is not - attempting to add or remove a SIM while the phone is on will result in an automatic restart.

A peek under the back panel

The battery is a 1305 mAh unit, which is said to provide about 520 hours of 2G stand-by (460 hours in 3G) or up to 6 h 30 min of talk time (5 h 30 min in 3G).

Display

The Sony Xperia go comes with an HVGA LCD, measuring 3.5 inches in diagonal. The screen is nothing to write home about in this day and age. Even mid-range smartphones often offer WVGA resolution nowadays, so the Xperia go is losing some points here.

The screen quality could have been better

The good news is the BRAVIA-powered screen offers decent image quality. It may not be the sharpest around, but its contrast and colors are good enough for the price range. Sadly, Sony is still unable to fix their displays viewing angles and the Xperia go screen quickly starts to lose contrast when you tilt it to the side. It's what you usually see with phones in this budget range though, so we're hardly surprised.

Handling

The overall design of the Xperia go is in quite similar to the Sony Xperia sola - squarish construction with tightly etched corners, and a characteristic extension of the body below the display. It's certainly one of the good-looking rugged smartphones out there and it provides a nice alternative to the curved lines of the NXT line of Sony smartphones.

Overall we'd say we like the design and the solid, industrial feel of the handset, which still remains lightweight and compact. It's also quite easy to handle due to its compact dimensions. Even one-handed usage was, usually, quite comfortable, although the feel of the back panel is something that takes more than a week to get used to.

Handling the Sony Xperia go

Coming up is our Sony Xperia go software tour.

Yet another Xperia stuck in the past

The Sony Xperia go, like the entire NXT line of Xperias, has a highly revamped custom skin, but it's still Gingerbread underneath (2.3.7). Hopefully the Xperia go will be among the devices, scheduled to receive Ice Cream Sandwich later this year.

Check out a short video of the Xperia go interface below.

The Xperia go has the usual five-pane homescreen (you can't add or delete panes), with four docked shortcuts (two on either side of the launcher shortcut). These are visible on all five homescreen panes and are user configurable: they can be either single icons or folders with multiple items in them.

The Sony Xperia go UI

The homescreen does a neat trick called Overview mode. Pinch to zoom out on any of the 5 homescreen panes and a new screen opens up with a cool transition. All active widgets gather there for easy viewing and selection.

The Overview mode helps you find the widget you are looking for

The Xperia go has some custom-made Sony widgets in addition to the standard set. Those include the Timescape widget (there's a dedicated app too) and a Mediascape-like widget for photos and videos (the actual app isn't there anymore, the standard gallery is back).

Widgets menu • Removing widget • Wallpapers menu

The lockscreen shows notifications for Facebook events too, courtesy of Sony Facebook integration. A cool new addition to the lockscreen, unseen in the old Xperia line, is the music player widget, which lets you control music playback without unlocking the phone - we'll get back to this further on.

The app drawer

The standard notification area and task switcher are of course present and accounted for - no custom touches to them.

The lockscreen • Lockscreen notifications • The standard notification area and task switcher

Synthetic benchmarks

The Sony Xperia go is powered by a dual-core NovaThor U8500 chipset with two cores clocked at 1 GHz and 512 MB of RAM. You shouldn't expect miracles out of the two Cortex-A9 cores as even 1080p is sometimes beyond their reach.

We ran our usual round of benchmarks and compared the Xperia go to Sony's current flagship, the Xperia S, as well as a selection of upper-midrange competitors. The Samsung Galaxy S Advance is among them, powered by the same ST-Ericsson NovaThor chipset, with a slight advantage in terms of RAM - 768MB over 512MB.

Social phonebook

The visually customized phonebook of the Xperia go can store extensive information about all your contacts. A tabbed interface presents contact details, recent calls and info from social networking services.

The phonebook • The quick contacts can save you a click or two

The contact list can be sorted by either first or last name. There are two contact search options - a dedicated search field on top of the contact list, and an alphabet scroll to jump to names starting with a specific letter.

You can sync with multiple accounts, including Exchange and Facebook, and you can selectively show or hide contacts from some accounts (you can fine-filter specific groups from an account), or set the phonebook to display only contacts with phone numbers.

If a contact has accounts in multiple services, you can "join" their details to keep everything in one place. Their Facebook photos and interests (part of the Facebook integration) will show as extra tabs.

Quick contacts are enabled - a tap on the contact's photo brings up shortcuts for calling, texting or emailing the contact.

Each contact can have a variety of fields (and repeat fields of the same type), the + and x buttons let you add and remove fields as needed. The fields cover anything from names (including a field to write the name down phonetically) to addresses, nicknames and notes.

There is an option to redirect calls directly to voicemail. Custom ringtones are enabled too.

Editing a contact

You can "star" a contact, which puts it in the Favorites tab. Also, in each Gmail account there's a special group called "Starred in Android" where these contacts go automatically.

Smart telephony

We had no problems calling and receiving calls on the Xperia go. The built-in secondary microphone is used for active noise-cancellation so calls are loud and clear even in noisy environments.

The Xperia go offers smart dialing. It searches for matches in both the contacts' phones and names. There's voice dialing too (the quickest way to activate it is the dedicated homescreen widget).

Smart dialing • The call log

Thanks to the proximity sensor, the Sony Xperia go automatically disables the touchscreen when you hold it up to your ear during a call, thanks to the proximity sensor.

The call log is integrated in the dialer - it shows a list of recently dialed, received and missed calls in the top half of the screen and the keypad on the bottom half. Once you start typing, the call log is replaced by the smart dial list.

There's a Favorite tab that displays starred contacts, but you can add other contacts to the list too. The tab displays a grid of contact photos with their first name underneath.

We also ran our traditional loudspeaker test on the Sony Xperia go - it scored a Good mark, meaning that it's among the decent performers out there. . More info on our loudspeaker test as well as other results can be found here.

Speakerphone test	Voice, dB	Pink noise/ Music, dB	Ringing phone, dB	Overal score
Sony Xperia sola	60.9	59.0	61.7	Below Average
HTC One V	66.9	65.3	67.7	Below Average
Apple iPhone 4S	65.8	64.5	74.6	Average
Samsung Galaxy Note N7000	64.9	64.6	72.2	Average
Sony Xperia S	72.7	61.8	69.6	Average
HTC One S	65.1	64.6	76.7	Average
Sony Xperia Go	65.8	65.4	76.9	Good
Motorola RAZR XT910	74.7	66.6	82.1	Very Good
HTC Desire	76.6	75.7	84.6	Excellent

Messaging

All texts and MMS are organized into threads. Each thread is laid out as an IM chat session, the latest message at the bottom. You can manage individual messages (forward, copy, delete) and even lock them against deletion.

Search is enabled to locate a specific message in all conversations and you can also activate delivery reports.

The messaging app • Starring a message • All starred messages • Adding multimedia to the message

Individual messages can be starred and you can find all of them in the Starred folder available in the context menu. This is a nice way to mark important messages that you'll need to find quickly later on.

Adding multimedia (photos, videos, sounds, etc.) will convert the message to an MMS.

Sending an MMS

Moving on to email, the Gmail app supports batch operations, which allow multiple emails to be archived, labeled or deleted. The app supports multiple Gmail accounts, but there's no unified inbox for other email services.

Gmail app supports batch operations and multiple (Gmail) accounts

The generic email app can do that however. It can handle multiple POP or IMAP accounts and you have access to the messages in the original folders that are created online.

A preview pane splits the screen in half - one side lists the emails, while the other shows the currently selected email.

This works both in portrait and landscape and you can easily drag the separator between the two areas to make one bigger.

Google Talk handles Instant Messaging. The GTalk network is compatible with a variety of popular clients like Pidgin, Kopete, iChat and Ovi Contacts.

As for text input, the Xperia go offers a customized on-screen full QWERTY keyboard. Typing on the portrait keyboard isn't very comfortable - keys are tall and thin, making for a lot of typos. They're just not as well spaced as on the bigger Xperia S and ion displays.

Both of Xperia go keyboards are okay

Flipping the phone to landscape gives you bigger, easier to press buttons. Word prediction is present in the Xperia go keyboard.

In terms of customizations, the Xperia go keyboard features the so-called Gesture input. It works the same as Swype. Even if you've never used Swype input before, you'll quickly get used to it.

Standard gallery

The Xperia go uses the traditional vanilla 3D Gallery, which hasn't really seen much change since Android 2.2. It still has good functionality, cool 3D looks and nice transition effects, and thankfully shows full resolution images.

The different albums and folders appear as piles of photos, which fall into neat grids once selected. If you have online albums over at Picasa those show up as separate stacks as well.

You should have noticed the two switches at the top by now. The first opens a different gallery section that stores your 3D panorama shots, while the second opens the Sweep Multi Angle shots section.

The standard gallery • The 3D and Multi Angle views

To view the 3D panoramas in 3D, you need to connect your phone to a compatible 3DTV. Multi Angle shots are harder to view outside the device as you need something with an accelerometer and the proper app - you best bet is another Xperia.

The 3D Gallery

Facebook and Picasa albums are distinguished by the small logo of the corresponding service. Facebook pictures can be "liked" with the thumbs up button in the upper right corner and commented upon at the bottom bar.

Liking photos is enabled for Facebook albums

Photos can be sorted by date with the help of a button in the top right corner, which switches between grid and timeline view.

You can use pinch zoom or the old-fashioned +/- buttons. If you pan past the edge of a photo, the gallery will load up the next (or previous) image.

Images can be cropped or rotated directly in the gallery. Quick sharing via Picasa, Email apps, Facebook, Bluetooth, MMS, etc. is also enabled.

The BRAVIA engine enhances contrast and colors by sharpening the image and reducing noise. These steps would normally lead to artifacts, but you'll have to look from really up close to notice. You can switch BRAVIA off, but we recommend keeping it on - it really improves the image quality.

Video player

There is no dedicated video player app on the Xperia go as in most of the droids out there. DivX and XviD videos are supported but the Xperia go has a rather selective filtering and not all videos got through.

The Xperia go's NovaThor processor refused to play any of our test 1080p videos, while 720p videos worked fine.

You can, of course, download a third-party video player off the Android Market like the MX Player with the corresponding codecs - it ran everything, up to 720p, with subtitles.

Watching a video on the Xperia go

Excellent music player

The Xperia go shares the same music player as the Xperia U, P, S, sola, etc. You're welcomed to a Cover Flow-like interface and you can swipe left and right to skip tracks (complete with a smooth 3D effect).

This is the Playing tab, the second tab available is called My Music and it's where your music library is organized. Tracks are sorted by album, artist, playlist, all tracks, SensMe channel, favorites. There's also a link to Sony's Music Unlimited service.

In the Now playing interface, there's the familiar Infinite button - it gives you quick options to find the music or karaoke videos on YouTube for the current song, look for similar tracks on PlayNow, search Wikipedia for info on the artist or look up the lyrics on Google. New features can be added to this menu with extensions available in the Play Store.

The revamped music player • Music library • The Infinite button

SensMe should be familiar from those old Sony Ericsson Walkman phones. In case you've missed it, SensMe filters songs by mood. By default, there are nine "channels" - daytime, energetic, relax, upbeat, mellow, lounge, emotional, dance and extreme.

You need to download SensMe data before you can use this feature. Luckily, you no longer have to use a PC Suite to tag songs - you just need an Internet connection, the phone will handle the rest.

Audiophiles will appreciate the rich selection of equalizer presets. There's a custom preset too - it lets you adjust five frequency bands and there's a Clear Bass slider too.

The More tab offers a Headphone surround option, which can be set to Studio, Club or Concert hall.

If you're not using the headphones, you can turn the xLOUD feature on, which optimizes the sound for the device's loudspeaker.

The equalizer

A new feature is the track info and playback controls available on the lockscreen, which let you control the player without having to unlock the phone. The music controls replace the clock, which might be annoying if you just want to check the time. Still, the clock slides out of view, so you have about a second to see what time it is (or just look at the small clock in the upper right corner).

Music player controls on the lockscreen and notification area

FM radio with RDS, there is TrackID too

The Sony Xperia go is equipped with an FM radio, which has a really neat and simple interface. It automatically scans the area for the available stations and places "notches" on the frequency dial for easier scrolling to the next station. There's a Force mono option to use in case of poor reception.

The FM radio app • TrackID • Licking a radio track on facebook

The TrackID service is also available and works within the radio app. You can even like a song on Facebook.

Decent audio quality

The Sony Xperia go did really well in the first part of our audio quality test. When connected to an active external amplifier the smartphone got some excellent scores , showed no weak points and had just above average volume levels.

The degradation when headphones come into play consists of a rather small hike in stereo crosstalk, but quite a large increase in distortion levels. It's not too bad, but extremely demanding audiophiles might be left slightly disappointed by the Xperia go on this occasion.

5MP that will work under water too

The Xperia go boasts a 5 megapixel camera, complete with a single LED light. It's capable of producing images of 2592Ñ…1944 resolution. An added bonus is that you'll be able to capture stuff under water (no deeper than a meter, mind you), which is especially neat for video recording, we imagine.

The camera controls on the Xperia go are available on two taskbars on either side of the viewfinder. On the left you get four shortcuts to various settings, while the still camera/camcorder toggle, the virtual shutter key and a thumbnail of the last photo taken are on the right. There is no hardware shutter key like on some higher-end Sony droids.

The menu key brings up two pages of extra settings - scenes, resolution, smile detection, geotagging, image stabilization and focus mode among others. You can customize three of the shortcuts on the left (the shooting mode shortcut is fixed).

The Xperia go camera interface

There're five capture modes to choose from: Normal, Scene recognition, Sweep Panorama, Sweep Multi Angle and 3D Sweep Panorama. In Normal, you pick the Scene settings manually or you can enable Scene recognition and let the Xperia go take a guess (it's fairly good at it).

The 3D Sweep Panorama is business as usual - you press the virtual shutter key and pan the phone across the scene. The resulting panoramic photo can be viewed in both 2D and 3D (on a compatible TV).

The Sweep Multi Angle is much more impressive - you take a photo in the exact same way, but the result is very different. It produces something like a lenticular card.

Tilting the phone lets you look at the object from different sides. A shot of a moving object looks like an animated GIF or creates interesting distortions, which can be pretty funny too.

There are some distortions visible even in a static scene, but it's still one of the coolest camera features we've seen in a while. Photos taken in Sweep Multi Angle mode are handled by a separate app called 3D album, and not listed in the regular gallery. And just to be clear, the Xperia go doesn't have a 3D screen. It cleverly relies on its sensors to detect the handset movement and it changes the on-screen image accordingly.

The Sony Xperia go's forte isn't imaging but it still churns out impressive results. Images are very sharp and crisp for this price range. Detail is more than pleasing and the only place where the Xperia go could improve is color reproduction with the images being slightly dull.

Otherwise, the Xperia go offers a very good level of still capturing skills and would easily step in for an opportunist's digicam. Here go the results.

Sony Xperia go camera samples

Macro is another area where we got pleasing results with the Xperia go. It retained the good level of detail from very close and you don't need to switch to any particular scene mode like Close Up or Macro - the camera just focuses on the touch of a finger.

Sony Xperia go macro samples

We have to say we are a little surprised as we didn't expect such excellent results from a device meant to takle rough terrain

Smooth video recording

The Sony Xperia go captures 720p video at 30 fps. It cannot do 1080p even though it offers a dual-core processor. The camcorder has similar settings to the still camera, including focus mode, metering, exposure value, image stabilization and so on. The layout of the shortcuts can be customized here too.

The Xperia go's camcorder features continuous autofocus. It may take a few seconds to refocus after you re-frame but that's better than repeating attempts to lock focus that may ruin a video. In fast-paced videos the continuous focusing could get a little hectic and focus every second or two, but you can turn the setting off.

Switching to camcorder mode

The Xperia go produces good videos with a stellar bitrate of around 12000 kbps and a healthy 29 frames per second. The videos are smooth and focusing is pretty accurate and fast. The continuous autofocus isn't as hectic as on some of the competition (here's looking at you, LG). Detail is good throughout but could be better - it's not spectacular but it does the job.

Check out the video sample we captured with the Xperia go below.

Good connectivity

The Sony Xperia go has quad-band 2G and dual-band 3G. Mobile data speeds are boosted by 14.4Mbps HSDPA and 5.76Mbps HSUPA.

Local connectivity is covered by Wi-Fi b/g/n with DLNA, Wi-Fi Direct and hotspot functionality, and you can easily play media (photos, videos, music) from DLNA-enabled storage devices or push content from your phone to a DLNA TV or music player.

The Connected Devices app handles the DLNA functionality

Stereo Bluetooth is version 3.0. To complete the tally of available options, the Xperia go features a microUSB port for charging and data transfers and luckily, it's is among the few new Xperias to feature an expandable storage option via microSD.

The Xperia go lacks NFC support and also doesn't come with Sony's media remote app preinstalled. ANT+ wireless technology for communicating to various sports accessories is not supported as well.

Browsing

The Sony Xperia go is slightly behind the high-end curb. It features the Android Gingerbread browser, which isn't as productive in terms of JavaScript performance as the ICS one as not as fast as Chrome for Android.

The user interface of the browser is simple, with almost no visible chrome by default. Once the page loads, all you see is the URL bar and the bookmark button at the top of the screen. Once you zoom in and pan around though even that disappears (scroll to the top or press menu to bring it back).

Xperia go web browser

The browser supports double tap and pinch zooming, along with the dedicated virtual zoom buttons. There's text re-flow, which reformats text so that it best fits on the screen.

The browsing performance is excellent - panning, zooming and the text reflow are snappy.

The minimalist UI is still very capable - hit the menu key and six keys pop up. You can open a new tab, switch tabs, refresh the page, go forward, and open bookmarks. The last button reveals even more options (text copying, find on page, etc.).

One of the important features in the web browser is the full Flash 11 support. YouTube videos played smoothly all the way up to 720p - no dropped frames, audio lag or video artifacts. Flash games played trouble free too.

Playing YouTube videos in the browser • Flash games work too

Great organizing skills

The Sony Ericsson Xperia go comes with a solid set of organizing options, including a document viewer.

The app in question is OfficeSuite and it has support for viewing document files (Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF, including the Office 2007 versions). For editing, you will need to get the paid app.

The OfficeSuite reader

Reading documents is okay on the 3.5" screen and panning is blazing fast. There's a built-in file browser and cloud storage integration (Google, Dropbox, Box).

The calendar has three different types of view - daily, weekly and monthly. The lower section of the screen is reserved for a list of upcoming events. Adding a new event is quick and easy, and you can also set an alarm to act as a reminder.

The organizer centerpiece - the calendar

The Calendar also pulls info on upcoming events from your Facebook account. Facebook events appear just like regular calendar entries but you can't edit them on the phone, they are read-only.

There is a calculator aboard. It is nicely touch optimized - the buttons are really big and easy to hit. You can expand advanced functions (trigonometry, logarithms) by turning the phone in landscape.

Regular Calculator • Scientific Calculator

The alarm clock app supports multiple alarms, each with its own start and repeat time. The Alarms app can also work as a desk clock - you have a big toggle for the brightness, as well as weather info and shortcuts to gallery slideshow and the music player.

The Clock • Creating alarm

The app has also offers a World clock along with stopwatch and timer functionality.

World clock • Stopwatch • Timer

The Power Saver app helps you extend your battery life by toggling things like Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth screen brightness, auto sync and background data on and off automatically when the battery charge falls below a certain user-defined threshold.

The Power Saver app

There are three presets in total. The other two are a manual power saver and a timed saver. The latter can, say, keep all those power-hungry features off for the night and turn them back on in the morning.

There are also several fitness apps pre-installed on the phone - such as Adidas miCoach or the pedometer-tracking WalkMate, but these are freely available from the Play store anyway so they do not make that much of a difference for the Xperia go.

Google Maps and Wisepilot navigation

The Sony Ericsson Xperia go comes with a GPS receiver, which took less than a minute to get satellite lock upon a cold start. You can use the A-GPS functionality to get near instantaneous locks. Alternatively, network positioning will do if you only need a rough idea of your location.

3D buildings are shown for some of the bigger cities and you can use two-finger camera tilt and rotate to get a better view of the area.

Google Maps

The latest version uses vector maps, which are very data efficient and easy to cache. The app will reroute you if you get off course, even without a data connection.

You can plan routes, search for nearby POIs and go into the always cool Street View.

Google Street View

Our Xperia go came with a Wisepilot trial with 30 days' worth of full navigation license. The app offers live info on weather, traffic, speed cameras and alerts.

Wisepilot uses online maps by default, so you'll need a data connection - but it works even in countries where Google Maps Drive doesn't. You can purchase offline maps if you like - a 2-year license for the whole of Europe is 5 Euro and North America is 5 Dollars.

If you decide to go with the online-only version, the Abroad mode makes sense. It will reduce roaming data usage and maps are cached (so, you if you start off at home or your hotel with the phone hooked up to a Wi-Fi network, you'll save even more).

Wisepilot navigation

We just can't promise you that your Xperia go will also come with the same Wisepilot license, it may be a market-dependent feature.

Play Store

The Google Play Store is the place to go for apps on Android.

It's organized in a few scrollable tabs - categories, featured, top paid, top free, top grossing, top new paid, top new free and trending. The in-app section is untouched though and it's very informative - a description, latest changes, number of downloads and comments with rating. There is usually a demo video and several screenshots for most apps too.

The Android Market

There are all kinds of apps in the Android market and the most important ones are covered (file managers, navigation apps, document readers etc.).

Final words

Sony may've parted ways with Ericsson but they still seem to hang out at some of the places they used to go together. One thing's for sure, the Xperia go won't mind being around the Xperia active, even if it finds itself under the occasional meter of water.

So, it's a phone that's supposed to make a living off the beaten track, but the Xperia go plays it safe by following closely in the Xperia active's footsteps. Sony have given it a bigger screen and two processor cores and that's as solid an upgrade as any. They've done well to change the styling too, in line with the new NXT series design language.

The Xperia go feels less sporty and muscular than its predecessor but we think it's one of the better-looking durable phones you can get. The solid single-color-body with no flashy accents is perhaps a bit too conservative but we don't mind at all. The Xperia go belongs in a backpack but wouldn't be out of place in an office either.

It's a rugged little handset that will appeal to urban and wilderness adventurers alike. Accordingly, it has some relevant apps preinstalled - like a compass and a torch. There're some fitness applications too in a featured homescreen folder but they're not what we would call a decider. All the apps are available on the PlayStore. There's nothing exclusive about them, any Android phone can have them.

The Xperia go doesn't support ANT+ either. ANT+ is the wireless pairing protocol to use mostly with fitness and health-monitoring devices. The technology was favored by Sony Ericsson but not Sony, obviously. This isn't such bad news though, not as bad, at least, as the absence of some value-adding accessories in the box. The Sony Ericsson Xperia active used to ship with a wrist strap and an arm case, which the Xperia go only offers in the "Sports Edition" version.

This should be enough, comparison-wise. One last thing to note though: there's no difference in the level of water and dust resistance between the two generations. Both the Sony Ericsson Xperia active and the Sony Xperia go are IP67 certified and both have wet-finger tracking for that texting in the rain or with sweaty fingers. That's the main reason why we decided not to put the Xperia go in the fish tank. Torture testing was out of the question - and skinny dipping doesn't quite qualify. And it wouldn't have told us anything new.

Anyway, the Sony Xperia go's water resistance hardly needs much further proof, and we think it's built well enough to take a few knocks on top of the usual wear and tear. The important thing here is that, while the IP67 certification for dust and water resistance is a key selling point, the phone sales will not be solely driven by its rugged credentials.

The design is rather mainstream to begin with, which is by no means a bad thing. Then, the microSIM to regular SIM adapter shows good thinking - the Xperia go will probably be in high demand as a back-up device for outings.

Overall, it's a bit of a niche alternative of the Xperia sola and the Xperia U. Both have the exact same chipset, similar design, but better displays. The Xperia U has a cap on the storage but is probably the cheapest dual-core smartphone on the market. Speaking of which, the Xperia Go is more expensive than both the sola and the Xperia U, but not by much.

Sony Xperia sola • Sony Xperia U

The Panasonic Eluga DL1 is the only other rugged smartphone powered by a dual-core processor. It's IP57-certified, which is a notch below the Xperia go's level of dust protection with the same degree of water resistance. The Eluga DL1 has a 4.3" OLED screen of qHD resolution and an 8 MP camera, which drive the price up and the phone isn't as readily available as the Xperia go.

Panasonic Eluga DL1

Traditionally well placed in the rugged smartphone market, Motorola have what's currently the cheapest tough phone. The DEFY mini costs about 125 euro and obviously fails to match the Xperia go. The mini has a smaller screen, a measly single-core processor and inferior stills and video. For around 180 euro you could opt for a single-core DEFY+, which boasts a much better 3.7" FWVGA screen and a 5MP camera.

Motorola DEFY+ • Motorola Defy Mini XT320

So, the Xperia go has few real rivals: rugged smartphones are gaining popularity but you wouldn't say the niche is too crowded yet. Sony have done well to position themselves on that market and it doesn't look like it has cost them a fortune to build the Xperia go. It can appeal to both urban users who wouldn't mind an extra level of protection against the elements and those who embrace an active, outdoor lifestyle. What they need is a phone that will survive a splash, not make one.

HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE review

2012-08-02T18:37:00.001+05:30

Focusing The Technology: HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE review: Introduction The DROID Incredible line of smartphones for Verizon Wireless, much like the EVO family offered by Sprint, consists of US-...

HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE review

2012-08-02T18:30:00.000+05:30

Introduction

The DROID Incredible line of smartphones for Verizon Wireless, much like the EVO family offered by Sprint, consists of US-only, carrier exclusive devices made by HTC. The HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE is the latest member of the family to come our way and it seems to have ambitions worthy of its rather epic name.

HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE official photos

Unlike its predecessor, which was a minor update over the original, the HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE is a major leap forwards. The smartphone offers a curious blend of high-end features, packed into an already familiar looking and pocket-friendly package. As a matter of fact, you will have a hard time finding a more powerful Android device with similar dimensions on the US market.

Here goes the two lists, summing up the most important things you need to know about the HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE.

Key features

LTE/EVDO/CDMA network support
4 " 16M-color Super LCD capacitive touchscreen of qHD resolution (960 x 540 pixels); Gorilla glass
Android 4.0.3 Ice Cream Sandwich with HTC Sense 4.0
1.2 GHz dual-core Krait CPU, Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8960 chipset
1 GB of RAM and 8GB of storage
microSD card slot
8 MP autofocus camera with LED flash; face detection and geotagging
1080p and 720p video recording @ 30fps with stereo sound
720p front-facing camera for video-chat
Wi-Fi b/g/n and DLNA
GPS with A-GPS
NFC connectivity
Accelerometer, proximity sensor and auto-brightness sensor
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth
MHL TV-out (requires MHL-to-HDMI adapter)
Smart dialing, voice dialing
DivX/XviD video support
HTC Portable Hotspot
Beats audio enhancements

Main disadvantages

Rather thick for a high-end device at 11.7mm
Verizon's UI customizations are extremely intrusive
Ageing looks
No dedicated camera button
No FM radio

As you probably noticed , the HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE is anything but short on processing power. Even when underclocked, the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 with its two Krait CPU cores is more than sufficient to easily pull a smartphone through any task you throw at it.

The fairly compact body of the Incredible 4G LTE is likely its most important feature. The device offers a great alternative to those who think that a Galaxy S III or an HTC One X is a bit too much to handle. Also, we had almost forgotten when was the last time we could handle an Android flagship with one hand.

The HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE does have its disadvantages but depending on your preferences and usage patterns they might not matter too much to you. The phone's looks are hardly revolutionary, but some might prefer to call the design an HTC classic. . Either way, the device is easily recognizable as a member of the Taiwanese company's smartphone lineup.

HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE live photos

As always, we are going to kick our review off with an unboxing of the HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE, followed by a design and build quality inspection.

Retail package is as basic as it gets

The HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE comes in a tiny box, whose look alone is enough to suggest that you will not find much inside. There's a charger, a microUSB cable, as well as a set of booklets and that's that.

The retail package and its contents

Once again, we open a US retail package hoping to see a pair of headphones inside, but end up disappointed. Unfortunately, you will have to get those on your own dime.

Design and build quality

There's nothing revolutionary in the way the HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE looks. In case you were wondering what Verizon's own HTC Rezound would look like if it shrunk, there's hardly a better answer than the subject of this review. That said, the latest DROID Incredible is a decent looking device, albeit lacking the style, which the HTC One Series members offer in spades.

The smartphone is available only in red/black color scheme, which is in line with the previous DROID Incredible offerings. It is also coherent with the Beats Audio branding.

Build quality is typical for a product made by HTC. The DROID Incredible looks and feels superbly put together, though plastic is the predominant material of choice.

Physical measures are among the DROID's advantages. At 121.9 x 61 x 11.7 mm this is one of the most compact smartphones out there, while the handset's weight of 132 grams is pretty easy to swallow too. Thick it might be, but the DROID Incredible is the only top-drawer smartphone, which allows to be handled easily with one hand.

HTC's offering sized up against the Sony Xperia ion

Sadly that comes at the price of a smaller, 4" S-LCD, which doesn't sound like much by today's standards. Nor will its qHD resolution impress anyone given that the HD displays are now considered a standard in this price category. However, thanks to its non-PenTile nature and pixel density of 275ppi, the DROID's screen is quite pleasant to look at. Viewing angles and sunlight legibility are also acceptable, though not the best we've encountered.

The screen does an adequate job

Above the screen, we have the proximity and ambient light sensors, the earpiece, and the 720p video call camera, to go with the ubiquitous Verizon logo. There's also a tiny status LED under the earpiece grille.

Underneath the screen, we find the three controls typical of Android 4.0 ICS which, in the HTC tradition, come in capacitive flavor. The haptic enabled Back, Home and Task switcher keys are well spaced and responsive.

The view above and below the screen

The microUSB port sits lonely on the left side of the DROID Incredible. On the right, you have the volume rocker at your service. A camera button would have looked great there too.

The microUSB port on the left • the volume rocker on the right

The power/lock key and 3.5mm audio jack can be found on top, along with a secondary microphone for active noise cancellation. The mouthpiece is the only thing on the bottom of the handset.

The view on the top and bottom of the DROID Incredible

The 8MP main snapper is on the back of the device with the single LED flash and loudspeaker grille by its sides. HTC, Beats Audio and Verizon 4G LTE logos are all located on the back as well and, coupled with the hump on the cover, make the whole area look quite busy.

The back of the phone is busy

The 1700mAh removable battery, microSD, and microSIM card slots are located under the battery cover. Given the lack of expandable memory in the HTC One X and One S, we suspect that the DROID Incredible 4G LTE will make some users of the aforementioned two smartphones jealous.

Despite its relatively small battery unit, the DROID achieved the impressive endurance rating of 42 hours in our battery test. This means that the handset can go on for almost two full days if you use it for an hour each of telephony, web browsing, and video playback every day.

Handling the HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE is a pleasure. The combination of the relatively thick for today's standards body and the grippy plastic on the back cover allows for a hassle-free one hand operation. It was great to remember that there are high-end Android smartphones out there, which are still up to such an exercise.

Handling the HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE

Overall, we found nothing to complain about the build quality of the HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE. Design is a mixed bag - at the end of the day, it will be up to the user to determine whether the DROID's looks are classic or ageing.

Following next is a look at Verizon's take on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and HTC Sense 4.0.

Sense 4.0 on top of Android 4.0 ICS

The HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE comes with Android 4.0.3 and Sense 4.0 - both the latest and greatest Google and HTC have to offer. We've already seen those in action on the One Series, so there are no surprises, nothing exclusive on the DROID Incredible 4G LTE that is not present on the One Series as well. Actually, there are a couple of notable omissions.

Here's a demo video to get you started:

HTC are famous for their deep customizations of the interface of the host OS and the latest version of Sense is no exception, though the Taiwanese have taken user feedback to heart and worked hard to provide a much more unobtrusive experience.

The brilliant lockscreen has been further improved, sealing its position as the most functional, most customizable lockscreen on a smartphone. By default, it has four shortcuts and a ring at the bottom. You drag the ring towards the center of the screen to unlock the phone.

Or, you can drag any of the shortcuts into the ring to unlock the phone and launch the corresponding app. You can assign any four apps to the lockscreen.

The lockscreen is brilliant

But that's not the end of it - the HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE comes with eight different lockscreens preinstalled. You can access the others from the Personalize menu.

You get all the old ones - a photo album, Friend Stream, Weather, clock and stocks.

There are two new additions though and they're much more functional. The first is called Productivity and lists the latest missed calls, texts, emails and scheduled events.

The second one is People - you pick a group from your phonebook and a rectangular grid of their contact images will pop up on the lockscreen. Grab one of them and drop them on the ring to view their details. You can have more than one page of contacts too.

If you're using the music player, the playback controls show up on the lockscreen (as usual), and you can drag that onto the ring to jump straight into the music player too.

HTC have done a lot to streamline the lockscreen and the same goes for the homescreen. Gone is the scrolling indicator arc, gone is the three button dock which wasn't very useful.

You get an auto-hiding indicator of which screen you're on and a brand new dock with five shortcuts - the middle one is locked to the app drawer, while the other four can be customized as you please (you can even put a folder there, if four shortcuts isn't enough).

The homescreen

Leap view is still here - tap the home key (while on the default homescreen) or do a pinch gesture to zoom out (with an awesome animation) to display the thumbnails of all seven homescreen panes at once. Upon a press and hold you can drag to reposition the homescreen panes. A small "home" icon indicates the default homescreen.

You can have as many as seven homescreens - and with all the excellent preloaded widgets, you might want to keep all of them.

Leap View lets you quickly rearrange homescreen panes

One of the biggest complaints was that the Personalize button was just taking up space in the dock at the bottom of the screen. And it was - it has since been moved to the app drawer, but it still offers plenty of customization options.

An access to the proprietary Scenes is one of them - essentially five custom homescreen setups (Work, Travel, Social, Play and default). Each scene changes the wallpaper and the set of widgets. For instance, the Work scene has a Stocks widget, while the Social offers a Twitter widget. Those can be customized, of course, and you can download new ones.

Switching between scenes takes a couple of seconds, but they're a handy feature if you use your DROID Incredible 4G LTE as both work and personal phone.

Preset scenes • The scenes in action

The HTC Sense has another customization option called Skins. Every skin changes the look and feel of most of the onscreen buttons, application screens, option menus, and other items. They also come with unique wallpaper each and use different colors for various UI elements.

The main menu has the typical grid layout, which is composed of horizontal pages with shortcuts sorted alphabetically. You can set different sorting options - alphabetical, most recent or oldest - but you can't rearrange them manually. There are Search and Play Store shortcuts along with a menu for some options. In the app drawer, you will also encounter a separate tab, where all the Verizon bloatware is neatly organized.

The app drawer

The main menu has a tabbed layout similar to different Sense elements (such as the phonebook). There are three tabs available at the bottom - All apps, Frequent and Downloads. You can rearrange them or remove Frequent and Downloads if you don't need them.

The Personalize app also has Sound customizations - you can pick a Sound set or individual ringtone, notification and alarm sounds.

The Personalize menu does Sound too

Adding widgets to the homescreen is done in similar fashion to Honeycomb and is one of the less successful changes.

You press and hold on the homescreen and everything zooms out so that the homescreen panes are visible as thumbnails on the top row of the screen. You tap a homescreen to select it and then select a widget to add to it (or you can just drag the widget).

Adding a widget to the homescreen

Our beef is with how widgets are selected - they are shown four at a time and there's a lot of scrolling involved. Widgets are available in multiple versions - usually differing in size, but also functionality - and they're all dumped into the list, so you're scrolling through a lot of duplicates.

There's a search option to speed things along or you can choose a widget from the dropdown menu and then select which size you like, but that still feels like an extra step.

Editing the homescreen is different from vanilla Android. You can tap and hold on a widget and you can drag across homescreen panes. While you're dragging a widget (or shortcut or whatever), two "buttons" appear at the top of the screen - Edit and Remove. You drop the widget on either button to perform the corresponding action.

Edit can be used to modify the settings of a widget - e.g. choose a different folder for the Photo Frame album or even choose a different version of the Clock widget. This saves you the trouble of first deleting a widget and then putting it on the screen again to choose a different version, setting and so on.

The second "button" is Remove, which deletes the widget as expected.

Long-pressing a widget gives you options

The notification area no longer has the list of recent apps - it's all available to notifications only. No more tabs and toggles either - you get a Settings shortcut here if you need to power something on or off. There's also a Clear button to dismiss all notification or you can swipe them off one by one. Curiously, Verizon have decided that they should have their input here as well. There is a constant, irremovable notification, which prompts you to turn on your phone's Wi-Fi receiver. It doesn't matter that you are paying for a tiered data plan. The carrier would prefer that you do not burden its network with your data. We found this feature to be particularly annoying.

The notification area has Verizon's input as well

HTC have remodeled the app switching interface - screenshots are displayed of the running apps, turned slightly to the side. They're ordered horizontally (instead of vertically as is the ICS standard) and you can swipe up to remove them. The not so-good news is that you can only see three of them at a time, even in landscape mode - a waste of screen estate.

HTC's task switcher and task manager

Great social phonebook

The DROID Incredible 4G LTE has HTC's all-knowing phonebook with deep social networking integration. It manages to keep things neatly in order, even though it's juggling everything from SMS to Facebook photo albums.

The entire People app (the phonebook) is tabbed - you have the dialer, all contacts, groups (including favorite contacts there), as well as a call log. Once again, you can reorder tabs and remove the ones that you don't need (Groups or Call history).

From a drop-down menu at the top, you can filter contacts based on where they came from - the phone's address book, Facebook, Twitter or your HTC Sense account. In case an account features multiple subgroups (e.g. Gmail's groups), you can toggle them as well.

Phonebook • groups • call log

Selecting a contact displays the basic details: name and photo, numbers, emails and such. That's just the first tab - the other tabs hold further details and means of communication, including email and a call log.

Viewing a contact

The second tab holds the texts, emails and call history between you and the given contact. The next one shows social networking contact updates, and the fourth one called "Gallery" pulls the albums that contacts have created on Flickr and Facebook.

When editing a contact, you start off with just one of the essential fields but you can easily add more.

Editing a contact

Telephony

The HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE had no problems with reception and the in-call quality was clear and loud enough.

The dialer on the DROID Incredible 4G LTE displays your recent calls and the list of favorite contacts underneath. Once you start typing on the keyboard, contacts will be filtered by name or by phone number.

The dialer has smart dialing • calling Johnny Bravo

The DROID Incredible 4G LTE packs the standard set of accelerometer-based tricks - turning the phone in the middle of a call will enable the loudspeaker, "Quiet ring on pickup" will reduce the loudness of the ringtone when you move the phone and Pocket mode boosts ringtone volume if the phone is in your pocket or purse.

Messaging

Being a proper Android powerhouse, HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE is capable of handling all sorts of messages - SMS, MMS, email. Social networking is covered by several apps and widgets, and there's Google Talk, which can connect you to Google's chat network and compatible networks.

SMS and MMS messages are displayed in threads - you see a list of all conversations, each one is listed with the contact's photo, name and the subject of the last message, as well as a part of the actual message (you can choose 1, 2 or 3 preview lines). Tapping a conversation brings up the entire message history with that contact.

To add recipients, just start typing a name or number and choose from the contacts offered - the phone will find the contact you want even if you misspell it.

All threads • viewing a specific thread

The compose box stretches across only about a fifth of the screen in portrait mode or across about a third in landscape. A tap-and-hold on the text box gives you access to functions such as cut, copy and paste. You are free to paste the copied text across applications like email, notes, chats, etc. and vice versa.

Text input on the DROID Incredible 4G LTE boils down to an on-screen custom-made HTC virtual QWERTY keyboard. While it's still not as good as a hardware one, it's more than adequate for any task.

The on-screen QWERTY keyboard in portrait and landscape modes

Converting SMS into MMS is as simple as adding some multimedia content to the message. You can just add a photo or an audio file to go with the text, or you can get creative with several slides and photos.

Attaching a multimedia file turns the SMS to MMS

Two email clients

The HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE comes with two email apps - the traditional Gmail app and the generic HTC Mail app, which merges all your email accounts into a single inbox.

Batch operations let you manage multiple conversations

The Gmail app has the trademark conversation style view and can manage multiple Gmail accounts. Batch operations are supported too, in case you need to handle email messages in bulk.

The HTC Mail app features conversation view in an attempt to mimic the original Gmail client threaded view, which is otherwise missing in the generic inbox. Emails in a thread are grouped and a number of emails and a down arrow appear - tap the arrow to show/hide the messages in that group.

You can add multiple accounts (from multiple services) and view them individually or in a combined inbox. Each account is color-coded, so you can quickly associate each message with its relevant account.

The standard HTC email app

The Mail app has tabs, but they are hidden by default. You can choose Edit tabs from the menu and pull out the ones you want. You can choose from Favorites, Unread, Marked, Invites and Attached.

Email sorting is enabled (in either ascending or descending order) by date, subject, sender, priority and size. The currently applied filter is displayed in the top right corner of the display.

There's hardly anything we can think of that the HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE lacks in terms of email capabilities. The settings for popular email services are automatically configured. POP/IMAP accounts and Active Sync accounts are supported.

Gallery for both offline and online images

The HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE uses the in-house HTC gallery - a custom app, which stacks photos much like the vanilla Android gallery. The app automatically locates images and videos, no matter where they are stored.

A tap on the Albums dropdown lets you view local albums, albums on a network (DLNA) device or online albums. On the cloud side, you get Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox, Picasa or SkyDrive.

The HTC gallery

Ones you pick one of the "stacks" (each standing for a folder), you're presented with a grid of the photos inside. Some photos have an icon indicating it's not a single photo but a burst shot instead. You can later go back and pick the keep or the one to be used as a thumbnail.

Gallery options

You can also mass delete images, but you can't copy/paste images across folders - you'd need a proper file manager for that. There are some basic editing tools - crop, rotate and effects (auto enhance, sepia, vintage, etc.).

Mass delete • Viewing photos

The DROID supports multi-touch and you can take full advantage of it while browsing your images. You can zoom to 100% with a simple double tap on the screen. The implementation here is extra smooth.

Great video player

The video player on the DROID Incredible is built into the Gallery app - there's no dedicated shortcut inside the app drawer. It comes with a view mode toggle (full screen or best fit) and you can scrub through videos. There's a shortcut that lets you adjust screen brightness and another one to take screenshots of videos. Overall the included options are more than enough and they are all implemented in a nice out-of-the-way manner.

The DROID played most files we threw at it - AVI, MP4, MKV - though it did choke on some old XviD AVI videos. Codec support on the video side is excellent - all popular video codecs run at up to 1080p resolution easily. Sound is more problematic and AAC or DTS wouldn't play (that's true for most other phones though).

Speaking of audio, you can choose between Beats Audio, HTC enhancer or No effects.

Subtitle support is available, though you can't manually pick a subtitle file, so you have to name it the same as the video file.

Playing video

DLNA connectivity comes handy too - the handset can stream the videos wirelessly to your TV.

There's the MHL port too - if you have the proper adapter, you can hook up your HDTV using an HDMI cable.

Music player has the Beats for

The Music app starts off by offering you several shortcuts - music library on the phone, TuneIn or Slacker Radio, as well as access to Amazon MP3 store and Verizon's own Backup Plus service. Below is a line that shows a recently played song and further down is the currently playing song.

Once you get into the music library available on the phone you get a dropdown menu to browse it by artist, album, playlist or genre. There's a search tool too.

The music player • the music library

The now playing interface is a Cover-Flow-like visualization of the current playlist - you can swipe sideways to skip songs back or forward. You can opt to view the full playlist if you need to skip more than a few tracks.

You can tap the ellipsis to automatically fetch album art for a track or look it up on Google or YouTube. From the Menu you get a Select player option, which is how you can play the song on a DLNA-enabled sound system or over Bluetooth.

The DROID Incredible has Beats Audio, which means your sound is enhanced to boost the sonic experience - you can use it with any headset you want. You can choose between multiple presets - Beats audio, classical, bass boost and so on. HTC finally allow you to turn the effects completely off, which is great news for those of us who are not that bass oriented.

Beats audio can be switched on or off

Even though the phone doesn't come with a Beats headset it supports several of them - iBeats/urBeats, Beats Solo, Beats Pro or Beats Studio. You should pick the correct one as it adjusts the equalizer according to the characteristics of the headset. There's an "Other" option too, but if you're not using Beats you can just pick the one that sounds best to you.

The Now playing screen

The lockscreen shows the album art and name of the song and artist along with playback controls. You can drag this card into the ring to unlock the phone and go straight to the music player.

Now playing in the notification area and lockscreen

Great audio output

The HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE audio output turned out quite good, according to the measurements in our test.

The HTC smartphone demonstrated faultless frequency response and very good signal-to-noise ratio and dynamic range. The stereo crosstalk is kept well under control, too and so are the distortion levels.

8MP camera does well

The HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE packs an 8MP camera that does stills of up to 3264x2448 pixels and records 1080p video @ 30fps. There's an LED flash / video light, but no dedicated camera button.

The camera interface is the same for both the still camera and the video camera - no they don't "look alike", the camera just has the UI shared between both functions.

The right-hand side features the Effects button, shutter key, camcorder record key and a shortcut to the gallery that shows the last photo taken. On the left is the flash setting toggle, general settings and shot mode (we'll get back to that in a moment).

HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE camera interface

To snap a photo, you tap the shutter key. To record video you tap the button below - and you can still tap the shutter key to take a full-res photo, even while recording video.

The effects button brings out a tab on the left with the usual set of color effects (sepia, solarize and so on). There's also some other cool effects such as shallow depth of field , which lets you blur parts of a photo that fall outside a predefined circular area. It's like having Instagram built right into the camera app UI.

Additional options and effects

All this is pretty cool, but we had one problem with this combined interface - if you want full 8MP resolution still shots, you have to disable the Widescreen option. But then it becomes hard to frame a 16:9 video in the 4:3 view finder. That's made even worse when shooting 720p video. The field of view in that mode is narrower than what the viewfinder shows and framing involves a lot of guesswork.

The DROID Incredible has touch focus and face detection; geotagging and smile shutter are also enabled.

The shot mode button offers some more cool stuff - HDR photos, Panorama (with a gyro horizon), portrait, group portrait, landscape, whiteboard, close-up and finally, low light.

The HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE takes photos with a decent level of resolved detail. Typically for HTC, images have artifacts caused by over sharpening. Colors are adequate and contrast is good, but dynamic range is limited. Overall, the DROID's camera does a decent job, but it has a way to go before it can butt heads with the best in the 8MP realm.

We've prepared a bunch of samples for you guys below, check them out.

HTC are bragging about the instant photo capture during video recording and we decided to give it a spin. The photos are taken in 16:9 aspects and arrive in 3264 x 1840 pixels resolution. The idea is that you can snap fast-paced pics while you're recording a video.

Video recording

The DROID Incredible records 1080p or 720p videos at 30fps and it can snap photos while at it. You can also use touch focus and even toggle the video light - that's during recording!

The videos from the DROID Incredible are, just like the images, with slightly limited dynamic range. They are however nicely smooth, with pleasing colors and good amount of detail to them. Overall, they came out pretty good, if a tad too aggressively processed.

And here's a video uploaded to YouTube for convenience. Don't forget to click 1080p on the FullHD video sample and open the video on full screen.

We've also prepped a 720p video sample taken with the HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE.

Worry-free connectivity

The HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE packs EV-DO CDMA/LTE network support. Sadly, the smartphone cannot be used with a carrier, other than Verizon Wireless in the United States.

LTE is undoubtedly the most important connectivity feature of the DROID Incredible. Verizon has the best established 4G network, so using the phone was a pleasure, although the carrier would much prefer if you take care of you data needs over Wi-Fi.

Verizon's LTE is great

The local wireless connectivity has Wi-Fi b/g/n and full DLNA support (both client and server, for images, videos and music) and Bluetooth 4.0. NFC connectivity is on board as well.

As we already said the death grip problem haunting HTC devices of old is now taken care of and there's nothing to worry about. Wi-Fi reception is strong, as is the cell signal.

HTC has conveniently designed a special options screen, when you connect the handset to a PC. The long list of options includes PC Charge only, Disk drive (mass storage), HTC Sync, USB tethering (the phone becomes a modem) and Internet pass-through (the phone uses the computer's Internet connection). The Charge only and Disk Drive have large, easy-to-press icons, which comes in handy since they are used most often.

Selecting a USB connection type • Starting the personal Wi-Fi hotspot

Last but not least is the HTC Portable Hotspot. It can support up to 8 devices, you can WEP, WPA or WPA2 encrypt the hotspot and you can enable "allowed users" only to connect or leave it open for all (unsecure, but the quickest setup).

The app can be set to power off automatically after 5 or 10 minutes of inactivity, saving your battery in case you forget to switch it off when you are done with it.

The HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE comes with an MHL port, so if you plug a MHL dongle in, you can output HD video over a standard HDMI connection. The phone's UI is mirrored on the TV and with the HD resolution of the display, watching on an HDTV is a joyful experience.

Pretty good ICS Browser

HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE comes with the ICS version of the Android web browser. It performs without hiccups.

Most of its UI is out of sight, leaving the entire screen to the web page. And even when it does appear, it consists of a single bar, which holds a back button, a Read button and the standard Menu dropdown on the right. The Read key aims to show some text-heavy web pages in a distraction-free mode to facilitate reading.

HTC has also thrown in some extra buttons at the bottom of the screen, which seemed to pop up randomly, which was getting a bit annoying at times. You see sometime those buttons appeared along with the top bar, whereas on other occasions they remained hidden when the top bar was showing. Those mysteriously behaving buttons let you save a page in your bookmarks or reading list, view bookmarks, saved pages or tabs.

You might also want to enable Quick controls - they let you tap on any point on the edge of the screen and move your finger to select the desired option from a jog-dial menu.

Other than that, once you select some text, you can copy it, do a Google search with that text as the query or share the text over a message or social networking.


Web browsing is hassle free

Tabs can be closed with an X button on their top right corner - they can't be swiped off the screen like you do in the app switcher. Incognito tabs are available if you want to browse without leaving traces.


The bookmarks and History lists • The Tabs interface

The Menu options include a toggle to enable/disable Flash and another one to request the desktop version of a site, instead of the mobile one. Another ICS feature has the phone preload search results that it believes are relevant, speeding up the whole process.

Naturally, the HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE has full Flash support, so playing Flash videos was a walk in the park. Flash games work like a charm as well.

Organizer

The HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE features the usual set of organizer applications, to go with a mobile office app, capable of both viewing and editing documents.

The calendar has four different types of view: daily, monthly, agenda and invitation. Adding a new event is quite straightforward and you can also set an alarm to serve as a reminder.


The calendar

The Agenda view shows a list of all the calendar entries from the recent past to the near future. Invitation view only lists events with invitation info attached to them. The day view also shows the weather forecast at the top of the screen, which is a nice touch.

The Calendar supports multiple online calendars (including Facebook), only one of which you can sync with your computer. You can also easily show/hide the ones you don't want.

There is also a calculator on board. It is nicely touch optimized with big, easy to hit buttons. Flipping it horizontally enables some more advanced functions like logarithms.

The built-in calculator

The World clock (also part of the Clock app) is like a mini Google Earth - it shows a 3D globe and you can rotate and zoom in on it freely. You can add cities that are pinned to the globe (and also visible as a list below it).


The alarm clock, stopwatch and timer

The handset features an alarm clock application, which can handle multiple alarms, each with its own start and repeat time. You also get a stopwatch and a timer in the same app.

Google Play Store

The Google Play Store features several scrollable tabs - categories, featured, top paid, top free, top grossing, top new paid, top new free and trending. Apps usually have several screenshots (some even offer a demo video) so you can get an idea of what the app looks like before installing it. You can also check out comments and ratings, as well as the number of downloads and so on, to help you decide if the app is worth it.


The Google Play Store

There are all kinds of apps in the Android market and the most important ones are covered (file managers, navigation apps, document readers etc.).

Google Maps and HTC Locations show your way around

The HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE has a built-in GPS receiver, which managed to get a lock in under a minute (with A-GPS switched off). If all you need is a rough idea of where you are (within 150 meters) you can use the Cell-ID and Wi-Fi network lock, which is very fast.

Google Maps is a standard part of the Android package and we've covered it many times before. It offers voice-guided navigation in certain countries and falls back to a list of instructions elsewhere. You can plan routes, search for nearby POI and go into the always cool Street View. The latest version of the application also allows you to save maps for offline use - great feature to have when travelling abroad.


Google Maps is an inherent part of the Android platform

Final words

Powerful hardware, LTE network connectivity, (mostly) good software experience - there is plenty to fall for when you look at the HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE. The smartphone has essentially carved a niche in the US market, which is yet to be explored by the competition.

There are still plenty of people out there (including some in our office), who believe that any screen larger than 4" is simply pushing the envelope a bit too far. If you are among them, the DROID Incredible 4G LTE seems like a smartphone perfectly tailored to your needs.

Of course, the smartphone isn't without its issues. Our biggest beef with the device comes from what Verizon Wireless has done with an otherwise superb combination of Android ICS and HTC Sense 4.0. The amount of bloatware is simply too much to handle and you can't get rid (or even hide) most of it. The Wi-Fi indicator in the notification area is particularly annoying - it has no place there.

As for the rest of the smartphone's shortcomings, we do believe that they are much easier to live with, as they mostly boil down to individual preferences.

The HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE is cleverly priced at $149.99 with a two-year commitment to Verizon Wireless. This is a good deal, which puts a lot of smartphone in your pocket.

Like we briefly suggested above, the HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE is currently without direct completion on the market. This is pretty remarkable, given the nature of the Android realm, and the huge number of devices to choose from for almost every taste. If you are looking for the most current hardware, packed in a small body, the DROID is the device for you.

In case you are willing to save a bit of money and compromise a bit on the specs, take a look at the Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate fir AT&T, and its T-Mobile cousin the Galaxy S Blaze 4G, Both devices offer 4" displays and dual-core CPUs from yesteryear. The Exhilarate costs $49.99, while the Galaxy S Blaze 4G can be found as low as free on a contract.

Samsung Exhilarate i577 • Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G T769

The Pantech Burst is also a cheap pocket-friendly alternative, which will cost you nothing on a contract, but can't quite match the processing power or the ICS experience of the HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE. The same goes for the LG Viper 4G LTE.

LG Viper 4G LTE LS840 • Pantech Burst

We are not going to recommend you the giant screen beasts on this instance. Our guess is that, if you are looking at the HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE, you will consider them a tad too large to handle comfortably.

The DROID is yet another solid offering by HTC. Curiously enough, it is the one that has the greatest chance of being successful on the US market. As you probably know, the One Series models have a serious competition from the Samsung Galaxy S III, while the Incredible 4G LTE has its niche almost all to itself.

We are left a bit puzzled (just like with the HTC Evo 4G LTE) as to why would the Taiwanese giant not release a global version of the device. We strongly believe that its powerful hardware and pocketable body will enjoy quite some success in non-US markets as well, but maybe HTC is just too afraid of cannibalizing the One S sales.

Samsung Galaxy S III T-Mobile specifications

2012-08-02T17:42:00.003+05:30

T-Mobile’s Samsung Galaxy S III packs a huge 4.8-inch display of the Super AMOLED sort, while under the hood there’s a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 chip. It should run on TMo’s HSPA+ network making the SGS III a 4G device. The T-Mobile Samsung Galaxy S III also has a mind-blowing 2GB of RAM for outstanding performance.

Dual core processor
Very fast processor (1500 MHz)
Lots of RAM (2048 MB RAM)
Very big display (4.80 inches)
Extremely high pixel density screen, over 300ppi (306 ppi)
High-resolution display (720 x 1280 pixels)
High-resolution camera (8 megapixels)
Fast mobile data support (4G)
NFC
HDMI connector for TV-out (via microUSB)

Design

Device type:
- Smart phone
OS:
- Android (4.0.4) TouchWiz UX UI
Dimensions:
- 5.38 x 2.78 x 0.34 (136.6 x 70.6 x 8.6 mm)
Weight:
- 4.69 oz (133 g)
  the average is 4.1 oz (118 g)

Display

Physical size:
- 4.80 inches
Resolution:
- 720 x 1280 pixels
Pixel density:
- 306 ppi
Technology:
- Super AMOLED
Colors:
- 16 777 216
Touchscreen:
- - Capacitive, Multi-touch
Features:
- Light sensor, Proximity sensor, Scratch-resistant glass

Battery

Talk time:
- 10.00 hours
  the average is 9 h (521 min)
Stand-by time:
- 8.3 days (200 hours)
  the average is 21 days (495 h)
Capacity:
- 2100 mAh

Hardware

System chip:
- Snapdragon S4
Processor:
- Dual core, 1500 MHz
Graphics processor:
- - Yes
System memory:
- 2048 MB RAM
Built-in storage:
- 32 GB
Storage expansion:
- Slot Type:
  - microSD, microSDHC, microSDXC
- Maximum card size:
  - 64 GB

Camera

Camera:
- - 8 megapixels
- Flash:
  - LED
- Aperture size:
  - F2.6
- Features:
  - Back-illuminated sensor (BSI), CMOS image sensor, Auto focus, Video stabilizer, Face detection, Exposure control, White balance, ISO control, Multi shot, Geo tagging, Panorama, High Dynamic Range mode (HDR), Scenes, Effects, Self-timer
Camcorder:
- - 1920x1080 (1080p HD) (30 fps)
- Features:
  - Video calling
Front-facing camera:
- Other

Multimedia

Music player:
- Filter by:
  - Album, Artist, Playlists
- Features:
  - Album art cover, Background playback
Speakers:
- Earpiece, Loudspeaker
YouTube player:
- Yes

Internet browsing

Browser:
- - Yes
- Supports:
  - HTML, HTML5, Flash
Built-in online services support:

Facebook, YouTube (upload), Picasa, Twitter

Technology

GSM:
- 850, 900, 1800, 1900 MHz
UMTS:
- 850, 1700/2100, 1900, 2100 MHz
Data:
- HSDPA+ (4G) 42.2 Mbit/s, HSUPA 5.76 Mbit/s, UMTS, EDGE, GPRS
Positioning:
- GPS, Glonass
Navigation:
- Turn-by-turn navigation, Voice navigation, Points of interest (POI)

Phone features

Phonebook:
- Unlimited entries, Caller groups, Multiple numbers per contact, Search by both first and last name, Picture ID, Ring ID
Organizer:
- Calendar, Alarm, Document viewer (Office 2007, Office 2003, PDF), Calculator
Messaging:
- SMS, MMS, Threaded view, Predictive text input
E-mail:
- - IMAP, POP3, SMTP, Microsoft Exchange

Connectivity

Bluetooth:
- - 4.0
Wi-Fi:
- - 802.11 b, g, n, a
- Mobile hotspot:
  - Yes
USB:
- - USB 2.0
- Connector:
  - microUSB
- Features:
  - Mass storage device, USB Host, USB charging
HDMI:
- - via microUSB
- NFC, DLNA, MHL, Tethering, Computer sync, OTA sync

Other features

Notifications:
- Music ringtones (MP3), Polyphonic ringtones, Vibration, Flight mode, Silent mode, Speakerphone
Additional microphone:
- - Yes
Sensors:
- - Accelerometer, Gyroscope, Compass, Barometer
Hearing aid compatibility:
- - M3
- Voice dialing, Voice commands, Voice recording

HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE review: In small packages - GSMArena.com

2012-07-29T13:29:00.001+05:30

HTC DROID Incredible 4G LTE review: In small packages - GSMArena.com

Nokia in Q2: Lumia sales up, company still in the red

2012-07-22T20:32:00.001+05:30

Nokia is still going through the tough transitional period as confirmed by its Q2 financial results. The report is a mix of good news and bad news - the good news is that Lumia sales are picking up, the bad news is that the Finnish company is still losing money.

There were 4 million Lumia phones sold in Q2 of 2012 (up from 2.2 million in Q1). Stephen Elop commented that Nokia will continue to support current devices "well beyond the launch of Windows Phone 8" (current phones will get WP7.8, but not WP8).

Sales and shipping numbers for Nokia's smart devices declined both year on year and quarter on quarter. This is mainly due to reduced Symbian sales and the falling Average Selling Price (ASP) of the platform. On the other hand, the ASP on smart devices combined went up both QoQ and YoY.

Net sales of Nokia featurephones are down YoY, but mostly unchanged from the previous quarter even though the number of devices shipped went up. The sub-€50 models like the Nokia 100 and 101 were driving sales up, but the pricier higher-end models found it hard to compete with affordable smartphones.

The report mentions declining net sales across the world, except for North America, a market Nokia has been working hard to get back into. Net sales were up 45% there compared to last year's Q2, but the number of shipped units fell by 60%.

Nokia received €400 million pre-payments for intellectual property licenses and €196 million ($250 million) quarterly "platform support" from Microsoft. The Finnish company also sold its Vertu subsidary, which wasn’t essential to its core business. Nokia bought Scalado, a company known for its cool imaging software.

In an effort to reduce expenses, Nokia closed its R&D department in Ulm, Germany and Barnaby, Canada and is working towards closing off a factory in Salo, Finland. The R&D department there will continue to operate.

The bottom line is this - net sales from Devices & Services department of Nokia are down 26% YoY, shipments are down 5% and the operating loss in Q2 was €474 million. The company as a whole posted an operating loss of €826.

You can read more details on Nokia's Q2 2012 performance in the company's press release (PDF).

Source

Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 review

2012-07-20T21:02:00.000+05:30

With the Galaxy S III busy grabbing the headlines, a midrange smartphone has been making its way to a number of markets without much fanfare. But you can bet the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 won't settle for the role of just another sequel. It has a chance to prove the Galaxy S III is not the only superhot smartphone Samsung has released this season.

Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 I8160 official photo

And it's going to use it. Aiming to deliver 90% of the benefits of its extremely popular sibling for a fraction of the price, the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 plays to the company's strengths and might turn out to be one of the unsung heroes of the year.

Dual-core might not be top-dog material in the Android realm any more, but it's enough to run virtually all apps and give you a nice smooth sailing around the interface. The entrance of ST-Ericsson in the smartphone race has enabled Android OEMs to make sub-€250 smartphones, with specs that would be considered high-end on any other platform. Now who would say no to a bargain like that?

Key features

Quad-band GSM /GPRS/EDGE support
3G with 14.4 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA
3.8" 16M-color capacitive LED-backlit PLS TFT touchscreen of WVGA resolution (480 x 800 pixels), Scratch-resistant glass
Android OS v2.3.7 Gingerbread, planned Android 4.0 ICS update
Dual-core 800 MHz Cortex-A9 CPU, 768MB RAM, Mali-400 GPU, NovaThor U8500 chipset
5 MP autofocus camera with LED flash and geotagging, Multi Angle shot
720p video recording @ 30fps
VGA front-facing camera
Wi-Fi b/g/n and DLNA
Built-in GPS receiver with A-GPS
NFC connectivity
4GB built-in storage expandable through the microSD card slot
microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v2.1
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
Stereo FM radio with RDS
Voice dialing
Adobe Flash 11 support
Accelerometer and proximity sensor

Main disadvantages

No Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich out of the box
All plastic construction
NovaThor U8500 is the least powerful of the dual-core offerings on the market
No screen and capacitive key haptics

The recent crop of inexpensive but reasonably powered droids also answers another criticism Android has been facing lately - that it fails to offer performance in a compact package. Sony was first to up the ante with the Xperia U and now Samsung is ready to rise to the challenge.

Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 I8160 at ours

The Koreans have stepped up the pricing of their smartphone a bit, but they are willing to throw in a larger screen and expandable storage, so it's going to be a pretty tough pick between those two. Let's waste no more time then and get down to testing - the answers should be coming as the review unfolds.

Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 I8160 360-degree spin

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 I8160 measures 118.3 x 62.2 x 10.5 mm and weighs 122g. That's a bit bigger - but slimmer - than the original Ace and a little more compact than a Galaxy S.

Standard retail package

There are no surprises in the Galaxy Ace 2's retail package. The phone comes with just a compact charger, a microUSB cable and an unusually designed headset with a single button remote.

Charger, USB cable and a headset: the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 retail package covers the basics

Design and controls

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 resembles a compact Galaxy S, which helps brand identity (the original Ace looked a lot like a certain very popular competitor). The phone remains relatively compact, despite the increase in screen size.

Above the display, there is the proximity sensor, but no ambient light sensor. The new addition here, compared to the original Ace, is a front-facing VGA camera.

Below the display there's an arrangement of three keys, in what's become the trademark Samsung layout. There's a hardware Home key in the middle, with two capacitive buttons on either side - Menu and Back. There's a dedicated setting for the duration of the capacitive key backlighting, and you can even have it always on. But there's no way to enable vibration on press - the entire screen has haptics disabled - just like on entry level handsets like the Galaxy Y and the Galaxy Fit.

The proximity sensor • The three Android keys rest below the display

On the left side of the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 I8160 you get, top to bottom, the lanyard eyelet, volume rocker and a microSD card slot, under a plastic flap. The card slot handles cards of up to 32GB, so you can have plenty of storage even when the built-in 4GB run out. You'd have to get your won card though, there isn't one in the box.

The Power/Lock key is on the right (again, typical Samsung), which makes it accessible with both the right-hand thumb or the left-hand index finger, depending on which hand you're holding the phone with. Some users would still rather have this button at the top though.

The volume rocker and microSD card slot on the left • Power/Lock combo key on the right

On the top side of the phone is the 3.5mm standard audio jack, as well as the small crevice for removing the back panel. The bottom of the phone features the USB port and the mic pinhole. The microUSB port is used for both data and charging.

The 3.5mm jack is on top • The microUSB port located on the bottom

The back of the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 is almost completely flat with a very subtle diamond pattern. The plastic feels nice to the touch and takes almost no fingerprints, but hasn't got any sort of premium feel to it.

Around back, the 5MP camera lens is centrally placed near the top, along with the LED flash. Just like in the original Ace, the lens is exposed and vulnerable to scratches so you'll have to take care not to damage it.

The smudge-resistant back panel and 5MP camera

The back also features the loudspeaker grille, which has a small nub to make sure the sound doesn't get muffled when you place the phone down on a level surface.

Underneath the battery cover is the SIM card slot and the battery. The battery is a 1500mAh unit, which Samsung says should last for up to 7 h 30 min of telephony or 640 h of stand-by on a 3G network. If you stick to 2G you get up to 16 h 20 min of talk time or 670 h of stand-by.

The 1500mAh battery and SIM card slot

Our dedicated battery test found the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 I8160 to be a pretty long-lasting device, the smartphone getting an endurance rating of 43h. That's exactly as much as the Galaxy S III did and slightly better than the Galaxy S II.

Display

Speaking of the screen, it's a very good unit and a major improvement over what the Galaxy Ace had. It's a PLS LCD unit with a 3.8" diagonal. The resolution has been more than doubled and is now WVGA (480 x 800) at 246ppi pixel density.

Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 has a great screen for the class

The image looks sharp, with reasonably good viewing angles and pleasant colors. The brightness could've been better though and the screen is rather reflective, meaning sunlight legibility is less than stellar.

We put the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 through our usual display tests and we are now giving you its results. You can find more about the testing procedures here.

Display test	50% brightness			100% brightness
Display test	Black, cd/m²	White, cd/m²	Contrast ratio	Black, cd/m²	White, cd/m²	Contrast ratio
Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 I8160	0.24	225	921	0.59	500	843
HTC Desire C	0.23	186	814	0.5	360	723
HTC One X	0.15	200	1375	0.39	550	1410
Sony Xperia U	0.35	287	831	0.55	515	930
Samsung S7500 Galaxy Ace Plus	0.27	239	873	0.6	528	888
Samsung Galaxy Pocket	0.31	238	774	0.62	468	753

Handling and build quality

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 I8160 is solidly built and since it has no chin or hump, the phone slides into pockets easily. The Ace 2 is a bit on the wide side at 62.2mm but it's quite comfortable to hold.

We have no gripes with the handling and usability of the phone, the one complaint we do have is the phone's plain plasticky aesthetics.

Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 held in hand

This concludes the hardware part and we're ready to move on to software. With Android 2.3 and TouchWiz 4.0 we don't expect any surprises there. Value for money phones like the Ace 2 aren't supposed to surprise, as long as the functionality is up to standard.

Gingerbread with TouchWiz UX up front

The Galaxy Ace 2 is running Gingerbread 2.3.6 and Samsung's custom TouchWiz 4.0 launcher. It's not ICS (let alone Jelly Bean), but Samsung's customizations make using Gingerbread a smoother experience than the stock UI.

Here's a demo of the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 doing its thing on camera.

The lockscreen of the Ace 2 has the usual integration of missed events but doesn't go any further. It's the "drag your finger outside of the circle" type of lockscreen but no shortcuts like in the Galaxy S III. You do get music player controls though.

The standard Samsung lockscreen

The homescreen accommodates plenty of widgets with lots of functionality. You can have up to 7 homescreen panes. A pinch zoom brings you to an aggregate view of all homescreen panes, which can be rearranged, deleted or added.

Homescreen • Thumbed preview

In typical TouchWiz fashion, there are four shortcuts docked at the bottom of the screen that are visible both on the homescreen and in the app drawer. The first three are user configurable (Phone, Contacts, Messaging), the fourth one being locked. It's the app drawer/home shortcut so it makes sense to always keep it in the same place.

Adding widgets, shortcuts, folders or changing wallpapers is done by a context menu that pops up on demand at the bottom of the screen. The list of available widgets can be swipe-scrolled, enjoying a smooth animation throughout. You can also swipe each of the homescreen panes, which is a nice bonus of TouchWiz 4.0.

Adding elements to the homescreen

The app drawer is very similar to the homescreen - you can create folders and pages by dragging them to the appropriate icon at the bottom of the screen. You can also rearrange pages from the same aggregate view as the homescreen.

List view can be enabled in the app drawer instead of the regular grid view. There's also a preview of all your app drawer screens for quicker browsing.

The app drawer

The notification area has toggles that give you easy access from anywhere in the interface to the following functions: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, silent mode and screen auto-rotation.

With the Galaxy Ace 2 you get a standard Android task switcher with the traditional Samsung modification - it has a button to launch a task manager.

The custom task manager offers a lot of functionality. It also comes with a handy widget, which shows you the number of active applications right on your homescreen.

Notifications area • Task manager

Most of the time, Android does really well when it comes to managing apps by itself (in fact, some claim that using a task manager is detrimental to the performance of a phone), so you would only need the task manager to occasionally kill a buggy app.

Social phonebook

The phonebook has a wide range of features and practically unlimited storage capacity.

There are options to filter contacts that have phone numbers, show/hide some of the groups you've created (including groups from social networks) and change the sorting (by first or last name).

The Galaxy Ace 2 phonebook

The phonebook has the Quick contacts feature, which lets you tap the contact photo for a popup menu with shortcuts to call, text, or email. The TouchWiz-specific swiping gesture is here too - swipe a contact right to make a call and left to compose a message.

Quick contacts • Swiping is a neat gesture for calling and texting

There are many info fields that you can assign to each contact, but it still remains perfectly organized. You have all types listed (numbers, email addresses, etc) and there's a plus sign on the right to add another item of that type. Pressing the minus sign under it deletes the redundant field.

Editing a contact's details

Of course, the real flexibility of the phonebook becomes apparent when you sign into your Facebook or LinkedIn account. After syncing, the phonebook will automatically merge your contacts (you can do it manually too).

The contact info screen is tabbed. The first two tabs are pretty standard - one displays the person's contact information, while the other stores call and message history. The third and fourth tabs handle the social stuff - status updates and the contact's online galleries.

Viewing a contact's details

Weirdly, only Facebook and LinkedIn contacts can be synced with the phonebook - we usually see Twitter contacts in here too.

Smart dialing and video calling

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 had no issues with reception even in areas with poor coverage. Sound in the earpiece was crisp and fairly loud.

The dialer and call log have been integrated into the phonebook, each in its own tab. Smart Dial is enabled for both names and numbers.

Only one contact (with photo) is shown at a time in the Smart Dial suggestions. You can tap the down arrow to view the rest (a digit above the arrow indicates how many contacts have matched your query).

Smart dial is nice

The dialer also has a key for making a video call and another for sending a message instead.

Thanks to the proximity sensor, your screen will automatically turn off during a call. The available options during a call include taking a note, using the keypad, muting or holding the call, or adding another call to the conversation. There's turn-to-mute too, thanks to the accelerometer.

The Call log is the tab next to the dial pad. It displays all the dialed, received and missed calls in one list, while sorting your call history by contacts.

Call history

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 scored Good in our traditional loudspeaker test. The vibration is strong, which will alert you in case you don't hear the ringer in a loud environment. Here's how it stacks up against the competition.

Speakerphone test	Voice, dB	Pink noise/ Music, dB	Ringing phone, dB	Overal score
Nokia Lumia 800	60.9	59.0	61.7	Below Average
Samsung Galaxy Nexus	66.2	60.5	69.0	Below Average
Apple iPhone 4S	65.8	64.5	74.6	Average
HTC Desire C	64.9	64.6	72.2	Average
Sony Xperia S	72.7	61.8	69.6	Average
HTC One S	65.1	64.6	76.7	Average
Samsung Galaxy Ace 2	66.8	66.2	75.7	Good
Motorola RAZR XT910	74.7	66.6	82.1	Very Good
HTC Desire	76.6	75.7	84.6	Excellent

Messaging and email

The messaging interface is quite straightforward: there are no folders here, just a new message button. Under that button is a list of all your messages organized into threads.

Swiping on a message header will do exactly the same as in the phonebook - a left swipe starts a new message, while swiping to the right will start a call.

The Galaxy Ace 2 messaging mode and swipe functions

There's application-specific search that lets you quickly locate a message among all your stored SMS and MMS.

Adding any multimedia content automatically turns an SMS into an MMS

Moving on to email, the Gmail app supports batch operations, which allows multiple emails to be archived, labeled or deleted. Multiple Gmail accounts are also supported.

The Gmail interface must be familiar to everyone by now

It offers a combined inbox option, which color-codes emails from different accounts for easier sorting and viewing. Conversation layout is also available - it groups related emails into single entries with a number in parenthesis showing the number of emails grouped. A tap on that entry expands it to show a list of the individual messages.

The standard email app is easy to set up

Google Talk handles Instant Messaging. The G-Talk network is compatible with a variety of popular clients like Pidgin, Kopete, iChat and Ovi Contacts. Video chat support is also onboard here.

As far as text entry goes, you have the standard Samsung keyboard at your disposal, with an XT9 option. Text input is quite comfortable for the range thanks to the bigger screen. Swype comes preinstalled too, you can switch to that in the Language and Keyboard submenu of the general Settings. It would've been more convenient to have that option in the dedicated settings of the keyboard itself.

Samsung Android keyboard

Gingerbread gallery and My Files

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 uses the standard Android gallery. It automatically locates the images and videos no matter where they are stored.

The standard Android gallery

Little about the Gallery should surprise you. It displays full resolution images and supports double tap and pinch zoom. Sharing images over Bluetooth, email and MMS is enabled, and so is uploading to Picasa or using DLNA to push the image to a compatible TV.

The Gallery offers only a few editing and sharing options

The My Files app is a simple to use but efficient file manager. It can move, copy, lock and rename files in bulk, even send multiple files via Bluetooth. My Files will only browse the memory card and the large internal storage (it can't access the system drive).

The My Files app

Music player has DNSe, 5.1ch virtualization

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 uses the standard TouchWiz music player. Samsung have enabled equalizer presets (including a custom one) along with the sound-enhancing DNSe technology and 5.1 channel virtualization.

By default, tracks are sorted into four categories - All, Playlists, Albums and Artists. From the settings, you can add or remove categories to set up the music player just the way you like it.

The music player is great • The DNSe settings • A now-playing interface in the taskbar

The album art has a central place in the Now Playing interface, but you can replace it with an equalizer. You can skip songs by sideways swipes. There's an onscreen scrubber, as well as a volume slider.

Another nice feature allows you to quickly look up a song on YouTube or via Google search by tapping on the track title. The handset will prompt you to select whether to look up the artist, the song title or the album and whether you want to do an Internet search, search your music library or YouTube.

The Now playing interface • Looking up a track

The Music player offers quick shortcuts to play the audio over Bluetooth or DLNA.

In this screen we also found a "Tag" button, which tries to identify the song and automatically fill in any missing ID3 tags (that's info about album, artist, etc.), but that came back with a negative result all too often. The "Lyrics" option in the settings didn't seem to do anything either.

FM radio with RDS

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 is equipped with an FM radio with RDS. The interface is simple - there's a tuning dial and you can save as many as 8 stations as favorites. You can also play on the loudspeaker, but the headset still needs to be plugged in to serve as an antenna.

The FM radio app

Good video player hindered by iffy codec support

The player on the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 can handle the most common video files - MP4, AVI (DivX, XviD) and MKV. But we often ran into problems (even with some old, low-resolution files) and the player would either show a blank screen or fail to play sound.

The video player interface itself is fairly simple, but it covers the basics. You can adjust the brightness independently of the global setting and you can stream the audio over Bluetooth or use DLNA to play the video on another device.

The video player is good, but codec support lets it down

720p files usually played (including DivX, XviD and MKV files), but 1080p didn't work. That is just FYI, since there's no TV-Out and the screen has just WVGA resolution, meaning you'd better stick with SD videos, as it will save storage and you won't see much difference. DTS and AC3 audio aren't supported.

Subtitles in various languages are supported, but you can't load them manually - the video and subtitle files must have the same name. You can adjust the text size and subtitle sync.

Audio output is good

Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 I8160 did pretty well in our audio quality test. The smartphone was nearly perfect with an active external amplifier and more than decent when a pair of headphones is plugged in.

An active external amplifier lets the Galaxy Ace 2 show its full potential and achieve some excellent scores. It's only averagely loud, but that's just the only bad thing we can say about it here.

The degradation when headphones come into play consists of a moderate hike in stereo crosstalk, and some extra intermodulation distortion. Overall it's a really solid performance.

Very good 5MP camera

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 comes with a 5MP camera and a single LED flash. It captures photos at a maximum resolution of 2560 x 1920 pixels. There's a front VGA camera for video calling too.

The camera interface is the same as on previous Gingerbread Galaxy devices with two shortcut bars on each side of the viewfinder. On the right you get the still camera / camcorder switch, a virtual shutter key and the gallery shortcut.

On the left there's the front-back camera toggle, the flash options and the Settings shortcut. You can add a total of four shortcuts above the Settings shortcut - any four you like in any order.

Camera interface

The Galaxy Ace 2 has rich camera functionality - touch focus, scenes, geotagging, panoramas, smile and blink detection, effects and manual settings for things like ISO, exposure compensation and so on.

The Galaxy Ace 2 produces good images overall but not quite the best in the 5 MP league. Our main issue with the results is that they came out with pretty low contrast and are a bit too soft. Still colors are nicely balanced and the detail is enough for the Ace 2 to be considered a good shooter in times of need.

Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 camera samples

720p video recording is uninspiring

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 can capture 720p videos at 30 fps with its main camera and VGA videos with the secondary camera. The camcorder uses the exact same interface as the still camera. You can use effects in the videos, but there's no touch focus.

The camcorder interface is identical to the still camera one

Videos are recorded into MP4 files with a bitrate of 12Mbps, which is pretty good for 720p resolution. The accompanying sound uses the AAC audio codec, but is mono only (64 Kbps bitrate, 44.1 kHz sampling rate).

The framerate hits the 30 fps target easily and videos are very smooth.

We weren't very pleased with the video performance of the Galaxy Ace 2 - despite being smooth the videos lack contrast and the resolved detail isn't nearly as good as on some other 720p-enabled camcorders.

Here's a video sample shot with the Galaxy Ace 2 that we uploaded to YouTube.

720p video recording is uninspiring

The camcorder interface is identical to the still camera one

The framerate hits the 30 fps target easily and videos are very smooth.

Here's a video sample shot with the Galaxy Ace 2 that we uploaded to YouTube.

720p video recording is uninspiring

The camcorder interface is identical to the still camera one

The framerate hits the 30 fps target easily and videos are very smooth.

Here's a video sample shot with the Galaxy Ace 2 that we uploaded to YouTube.

Streamlined and feature-rich connectivity

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 has dual-band 3G and quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support, with HSPA (14.4 Mbps downlink and 5.76 Mbps uplink).

Moving on, there's stereo Bluetooth 3.0 for fast local file transfers. Then there's Wi-Fi b/g/n support, DLNA, Wi-Fi Direct and a Wi-Fi hotspot option.

The AllShare app allows you to stream content to and from various devices (TV or computer) over DLNA.

NFC will be available in select models. For charging and file transfers there's a MicroUSB port and a microSD card extension.

Connect to a PC wirelessly with Kies Air

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 comes with Kies Air preloaded. The app connects to the local Wi-Fi network (or it can create a Wi-Fi hotspot) and gives you a URL to type into your computer's web browser.

The cool thing is you can stream music with handy playback controls. It works for videos too.

Kies Air in Google Chrome

Gingerbread browser is a little behind the ICS/JB curve

The interface of the Android web browser has hardly changed. Its user experience is, as always, flawless.

The Android browser

Zoomed in view

Settings

There's Flash 11 support, which means you can watch YouTube videos right in the browser (videos up to 720p worked smoothly) and play Flash games too.

Flash support in action

Samsung Hubs - games, Facebook and more

The Social hub we've seen before - it combines your email accounts with social networking (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn) and email accounts and shows all incoming messages on one list with handy shortcuts to reply, mark as favorite and so on. There's filtering by message source too, to help manage the inflow of incoming updates.

The Social Hub

The Music Hub lets you browse music online (with search tools, charts, lists of new releases and so on). You can preview songs (30 seconds each) and buy tracks or whole albums.

The Music Hub helps you discover and buy new albums and songs

Finally, there's the Game Hub, which will quickly become your go-to place for finding new games. The titles break down into Social and Premium, and there's a news section, too. You also get to try before you buy. The nice thing about that Hub is it includes the titles by Gameloft, which are otherwise not available on the Android Market.

The Game Hub is great for mobile gaming fans

Impressive office suite

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 comes with Polaris Office preinstalled. It's one of the most feature-rich mobile editors we've seen. You can view, edit and create Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents (Office 2003 and Office 2007 are supported) and there's a PDF viewer as well. The app enables searching through your office files just like in a file explorer.

There are a large number of editing options - from font size and style, justification and bulleting options, to table styles. You can easily pick Excel functions from a list too (a feature commonly missing in mobile editors).

Polaris Office

A plethora of organizational tools

The calendar has four different types of view: list, daily, weekly and monthly. Adding a new event is quick and easy, and you can also set an alarm to act as a reminder.

The calendar

There is also a calculator aboard. It is nicely touch optimized - the buttons are big enough and easy to hit. Turning the phone landscape reveals more advanced calculator functions.

Calculator • Advanced view

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 features a decent alarm clock application with a huge number of alarms to be set, each with its own start time and repeat pattern.

The Clock app and the alarm options

The Memo and Mini Diary are self-explanatory. The first app works with text only, while the Diary lets you also attach pictures.

You also get a To-Do app called Task and a Voice recorder to round off the organizer functionality.

The Memo and Mini Diary • Task handles your To-Do list • The Voice recorder

The latest Google Maps

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 managed to get a GPS lock in just under a minute without A-GPS. A-GPS can speed up the lock (but it involves data traffic). Cell-ID and Wi-Fi positioning are also available if all you need is a rough location, but they need a data connection too.

Google Maps

The latest version uses vector maps, which are very data efficient and easy to cache. The app will reroute you if you get off course, even without a data connection.

3D buildings are shown for some of the bigger cities and you can use two-finger camera tilt and rotate to get a better view of the area.

The improved Android Market

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 has the latest version of the Android Market. Upon launch of the Market app you're greeted with the tiled interface of the Featured window. A swipe to the right takes you to the Categories view.

Android Market

Downloading an app

Final words

At the end of the review, we think we are ready to answer the two most important questions about the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 I8160. The first one's "Is it worth the asking price?" and it couldn't have been a more resolute "yes".

Indeed, the new Samsung mid-ranger offers so much for its modest price tag that it's hard to resist. A capable processor, a pretty decent screen, good build quality and above average media are things you wouldn't normally expect to find in a single device at this price point.

As we said, the ST-Ericsson chipsets are exactly the news that those after solid smartphone experience on a tight budget wanted to hear. One might argue that if you spend little on your phone you can't be a power user, but the extra core and the relatively new architecture make a huge difference no matter what you use your smartphone for.

This leads us to the second question and the fact we're about to ask it says much about how well Samsung have done with the Ace 2. It would hardly surprise you to hear that the Galaxy Ace 2 is excellent value for money but could it be the best bang for your buck?

At first glance the Sony Xperia U is the logical choice, for its slightly faster CPU and cooler curved design. The compact Sony smartphone will give you more power and character for less.

But before you think that the deal is sealed, you should know that there is a catch. The Xperia U has 6GB of user-accessible storage and there's no way of expanding that. This means that if you like to have your music and videos always at hand you might run into trouble.

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 on the other hand offers you a microSD card slot for all the storage you need and a larger screen, which is quite important for gaming and watching videos.

Overall, if the limited storage is of no consequence we'd go for the Xperia U (which should also get ICS next month). But anyone choosing with the head, not the heart, will probably look at the Galaxy Ace 2.

Sony Xperia U

We shouldn't also forget the Xperia sola, which is Sony's direct competitor of the Galaxy Ace 2. It addresses the limited storage and the smaller screen issues, but doesn't look quite as good as the Xperia U and its highly promoted floating touch feature turned out to be pretty useless in real life. Still the sola costs the same as the Ace 2 and should give it a pretty good run for its money.

Sony Xperia sola

Of course there are other options in this price range, but it's hard to see anyone stealing too many customers from those three. The HTC One V, for example, costs just a few bucks more than the Ace 2 and offers superior looks plus Android ICS right out of the box, but it's let down by its chipset. It might seem like a solid option now, but in the long run the Samsung smartphone has it easily beat.

HTC One V

Then there's the LG Optimus L7, which would offer you a much larger 4.3" screen (of the same resolution though) and the ICS experience out of the box, but again fails to come anywhere near the Galaxy Ace 2's performance levels.

LG Optimus L7 P700

If you are willing to look beyond Android for your next smartphone, Samsung can treat you to some Super AMOLED WP goodness with the Omnia W. It was already confirmed that it won't get WP8, but smooth performance and a cooler-looking and consistent (if not nearly as functional) UI on a superior screen has its charm.

Samsung Omnia W I8350

Overall, Samsung have a winner in the Galaxy Ace 2. This is a very meaningful upgrade over the original and ticks all the right boxes to get in the running for midranger of the year. Now it's up to Samsung to release the ICS update (and if we dare dream, Jelly Bean after that). Anyway, the moment it gets the Ice Cream Sandwich, there will be just the Xperia duo between it and its goal.

HTC Desire C review

2012-07-15T22:14:00.002+05:30

Introduction

Are you a seasoned Android user looking for ICS on a budget or a learner ready for that big step into smartphones? Is it the journey or the destination? HTC will be pleased to welcome you on board either way. And they're making sure you start on the right foot.

Meet the Desire C. The little one at the feet of giants. The adopted child of the blue-bloods in the One family. The HTC Desire C is about half the size of a One X and has only a fraction of its processing power but the C in the name doesn't only signify compact, it also stands for comfort and capability.

The Taiwanese have a solid record in the entry-level smartphone segment. To be fair, their pricing is not the most competitive but the build, fit and finish of their smartphones are hard to beat. Beauty anyway is in the eye of the beholder, so here are the solid facts about the Desire C.

Key features

Light and compact
Quad-band GSM and dual-band 3G support
14.4 Mbps HSDPA, 5.76 Mbps HSUPA support
3.5" 16M-color TFT capacitive touchscreen of HVGA resolution (320 x 480)
600MHz single-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S1 MSM7227A chipset, Cortex A5 CPU, 512MB RAM, Adreno 200 GPU
Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) with HTC Sense 4 UI
Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n with hotspot functionality
GPS with A-GPS connectivity
5 MP camera, geotagging, face detection
VGA video @ 24fps
microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v3.0
microSD slot (up to 32GB)
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
Accelerometer, proximity sensor
Polaris Office doc viewer / editor
25GB of free Dropbox
Stereo FM radio with RDS
Smart dialing
DivX/XviD video support
HTCSense.com integration
Adobe Flash support
Surprisingly good audio output

Main disadvantages

Feeble CPU
Modest retail package
Fixed-focus camera
No front-facing camera

That's a long list of features showing HTC have done their homework. Entry-level phones are usually ranked by the best bang-for-the-buck and the Desire C appears equipped well above the average. The biggest doubt is cast by the single-core 600MHz Cortex A5 processor but running Ice Cream Sandwich right out of the box is a nice way to make amends. This market is all about give and take.

The Desire C is super compact and lightweight for an amazingly comfortable feel in hand. It's still very well put together and oozes the usual HTC quality. Follow us after the break for more on the design and construction.

Handling

The HTC Desire C looks good and approaches the low-end market with the right attitude. In terms of build, there's little the HTC Desire C doesn't do right. It's a bit thick for its diminutive size but anything slimmer would probably have been a lot less comfortable to hold.

Don't let this put you off though. We think the Desire C feels great in the hand and the fact that it's extremely light helps a lot too. The red design accents are subtle but effective in a package that isn't trying to impress aesthetically but looks straightforward and reliable instead.

The Desire C in-hand

So far so good. Now, let's see what the Desire C can offer in the software department with the Ice Cream Sandwich treatment HTC has given it.

Display

The HTC Desire C features a 3.5-inch LCD display of HVGA resolution (320x480). It's not the best display by any means, but you do get what you pay for. The bigger 3.5" screen stretches the resolution a little thin and the viewing angles are not particularly good. We've definitely seen worse though.

Colors are okay, but the overly reflective screen and low contrast aren't doing them any favors. Considering the price tag though, it's an overall okay display.

The 3.5 inch LCD display of the Desire C

Standard retail package

The HTC Desire C has the same eco-friendly packaging as the One series phones: a rounded foam box in a sleeve of paper. The phone comes with a standard microUSB cable for charging and transferring data, a set of headphones and a wall charger.

The Desire C retail package

It has the Beats Audio technology, but HTC didn't throw in a Beats headset - it would've been a ridiculously generous bonus to a 200 euro handset. Still, the standard set in the retail package has decent sound.

HTC haven't bundled a memory card either. 4GB of built-in storage should be enough to get you started but a card will soon be a necessity.

HTC Desire C 360-degree spin

At 107.2 x 60.6 x 12.3 mm the HTC Desire C is superbly compact and shaped for a perfect had fit. It's a tad larger than an HTC Explorer or a Wildfire S but we don't think anyone would mind, considering the bigger screen.

What we love about the Desire C is the fact that it fits a bigger 3.5" screen in a package that's visually smaller than 3.2-inchers like the Legend and the Hero. It's also super lightweight at just 98 grams - which also contributes to the comfort of handling.

Design and build quality

The HTC Desire C looks like the One X designers worked on it on their own time. Viewed from the front, it's a miniaturized version of the HTC flagship. Around back is where the differences start to show. Of course the entry level Desire C cannot match the finish of the One X - it's mostly the different feel and lesser resistance to smudges.

The color accents are different too - the back of the Desire C reminds us of the HTC Sensation XE, with the red trim around the camera lens and the beats audio logo.

For the most part, the HTC Desire C is made of plastic, but we like the subtle metallic frame around the screen. The back cover is rubbery for comfortable grip but it does tend to get a bit grimy - nothing though that a good wipe won't handle.

The Desire C may not have the premium feel of the One series but the compact size and neat styling are definite points in favor. The red outline of the lens and the microUSB port are nice accents and the phone's inner body and the battery come in matching color. Popping the battery cover open reveals the red-painted innards - something we saw in the HTC Aria a few years ago, only in yellow.

The HTC Desire C is available in three different colors: red, black and gray. Gone are the funky HTC Explorer colors for a decidedly grown-up look. The Desire C will do for the business hours too.

The Desire C comes in several color options

The earpiece is traditionally placed in the center above the screen. The proximity and ambient light sensors are in the screen bezel nearby. The Desire C hasn't got a front-facing camera, which could be a deal-breaker for some. A notification LED is also missing.

Below the screen is the usual set of three capacitive buttons - Back, Home and Task Switcher. Their white icons are always visible but it takes a tap of the screen to light them up. The keys are small but well-spaced to be comfortable to use. They also vibrate on touch.

Earpiece and sensors • Capacitive Back, Home and Multitasking keys

There's nothing on the left side of the phone but the microUSB port. It's placed near the bottom and serves both charging and computer connections. It's easy to spot thanks to its red lining. The right side houses only the volume rocker, which is prominent enough to locate by touch and solid to press.

microUSB port on the left • Volume rocker on the right

There's a 3.5mm headphone jack at the top and a power/lock button, which stands out with its metal finish. It's quite a slim knob that needs some getting used to but the trick is not to try and push the button itself - you can barely do it by anything but a nail.

The 3.5mm audio jack and power/lock key on the top

The bottom of the device features only the mouthpiece.

The bottom of the Desire C

The back of the Desire C is very grippy, with a nice rubbery feel to it. The 5MP fixed-focus camera lens is centrally placed at the top, with nothing but the loudspeaker next to it. There's no LED flash. The HTC logo is prominently engraved in the middle of the back cover.

The grippy back cover

Undoing the back panel reveals the cool-looking red plastic innards with a regular-sized SIM card compartment and a microSD card slot. The 1230 mAh Li-Ion battery is red too.

Underneath the back panel lie some uniquely-colored insides

Android ICS with the latest Sense

The HTC Desire C comes with Android 4.0.3 and Sense 4.0 - that's no longer the most recent Android release, but as most of its competitors are still stuck with Gingerbread it's still quite an achievement. We've seen this particular combo of ICS and Sense several times already on the HTC One series phones, but it's still interesting to see it perform on a much cheaper device like the Desire C.

The user interface is trimmed down just like it was on the HTC One V - this time around, it isn't just the small screen but the less processing power too.

Anyway, what's missing compared to the One X and the One S is Leap View. The Recent Apps interface is the vanilla ICS layout and the lockscreen cannot be customized: you cannot assign custom app shortcuts - you get Phone, Mail, Messages and Camera, and that's nonnegotiable. There are no different lockscreen types to select from either - the only option the Desire C gives you is the ability to show or hide the default four app shortcuts.

The lockscreen is still quite efficient. There are the usual four shortcuts and a ring at the bottom. You can either drag the ring towards the center of the screen to unlock the phone, or any of the shortcuts into the ring to unlock the phone and launch the corresponding app.

The Sense 4.0 lockscreen

The number of homescreens is locked at five - like on the One V, you cannot add or remove any. There is no leap view either. You get an auto-hiding indicator of which screen you're on and a brand new dock with five shortcuts - the middle one is locked to the app drawer, while the other four can be customized as you please (you can even put a folder there, if four shortcuts isn't enough).

Some of the homescreen sections

Sense offers one of the most full-featured customization suites around. The proprietary Scenes interface lets you choose from various custom homescreen setups, which provide new wallpaper and widget sets that can be further customized to suit your needs. This version of Sense only comes with one preloaded, but hitting the 'Get More' button on the upper right will take you to the HTC Hub where you can download additional Scenes.

Switching between scenes takes a couple of seconds, but they're a handy feature if you want to quickly change your phone's functionality, such as going from work to home.

The preset and downloadable Scenes

Getting various Skins is also easy

The main menu has the typical grid layout, which is composed of vertical pages with shortcuts sorted alphabetically. You can set different sorting options - alphabetical, most recent or oldest - but you can't rearrange them manually. There are Search and Play Store shortcuts along with a menu for some options.

The app drawer in Sense 4.0

The App Drawer uses a tabbed layout similar to different Sense elements (such as the phonebook). There are three tabs available at the bottom - All apps, Frequent and Downloads. You can rearrange them or remove Frequent and Downloads if you don't need them.

You can remove whichever tabs along the bottom you don't need

The Personalize app also has Sound customizations - you can pick a Sound set or individual ringtone, notification and alarm sounds.

The Personalize menu does sound too

Adding widgets to the homescreen is done in a similar fashion to Honeycomb and is one of the less successful changes since Sense went ICS.

Adding a widget to the homescreen

The main problem here is with how widgets are selected - they are shown four at a time and there's a lot of scrolling involved. Widgets are available in multiple versions - usually differing in size, but also functionality - and they're all dumped into the list, so you're scrolling through a lot of duplicates.

There's a search option to speed things along or you can choose a widget from the dropdown menu and then select which size you like, but that still feels like an extra step.

The old setup of picking a widget and then adjusting its size (if applicable) seemed simpler.

Editing the homescreen is different from vanilla Android. You can tap and hold on a widget and you can drag across homescreen panes. While you're dragging a widget (or shortcut or whatever), two fields appear at the top of the screen - Edit and Remove. You can drop the widget on either one to perform the corresponding action.

When it is highlighted, Edit can be used to modify the settings of a widget - e.g. choose a different folder for the Photo Frame album or even choose a different version of the Clock widget. This saves you the trouble of first deleting a widget and then putting it on the screen again to choose a different version, setting and so on.

Dragging a widget gives you options

The notification area no longer has the list of recent apps - it's reserved for notifications only. No more tabs and toggles either, although you get a Settings shortcut here if you need to power something on or off. There's also a Clear button to dismiss all notification or you can swipe them off one by one.

The notification area

Pressing the task switcher button on any screen displays a list of all your recently accessed apps, which you can remove with a swipe to the left or right. This is really just a quick way to access apps you've used recently, as swiping away doesn't kill them.

To actually terminate a running app, you have to close it via the traditional task manager we've become familiar with from Gingerbread. It's simple to use - each running app is listed with an indication of how much RAM it's using (no CPU usage reading though). You can terminate apps one by one and there's a Stop All button too.

The standard task switcher • The task manager

Phonebook has great SNS integration

The Desire C has HTC's elaborate phonebook with deep social networking integration. It manages to keep things neatly in order, even though it's juggling everything from SMS to Facebook photo albums.

The entire People app (the phonebook) is tabbed - you have your contact list, groups (including favorite contacts there), as well as a call log. Once again, you can reorder tabs and remove the ones that you don't need (Groups or Call history).

From a drop-down menu at the top, you can filter contacts based on where they came from - the phone's address book, Google contacts, Facebook, or your HTC Sense account. If an account has multiple subgroups (e.g. Gmail's groups), they can be toggled individually as well.

Phonebook • Groups • Call log

Viewing a contact

The second tab holds the texts, emails and call history between you and the given contact. The next one displays social networking contact updates, and the fourth one called "Gallery" pulls up all the albums that contact has created on Flickr or Facebook.

When editing a contact, you start off with just one of the essential fields but you can easily add more. You can link to another contact or Facebook account pressing the "chains" icon in the upper right of the main contact screen.

Editing a contact • Linking with a Facebook account or contact

The transfer app is here to help you switch from your old phone. It supports many phones from major manufacturers and moves the data over Bluetooth. It's an old but useful feature.

The Transfer app will easily copy your contacts from your old phone

Telephony

The HTC Desire C had no problems with reception and the in-call audio was clear and satisfyingly loud.

The dialer on the Desire C displays your recent calls and the list of favorite contacts underneath. Once you start typing on the keyboard, contacts will be filtered by name or by phone number.

The dialer has smart dialing • Calling Dexter

The Desire C packs the standard set of accelerometer-based tricks - turning the phone in the middle of a call will enable the loudspeaker, Quiet ring on pickup will reduce the loudness of the ringtone when you move the phone and Pocket mode boosts ringtone volume if the phone is in your pocket or purse.

Here's how the HTC Desire C fares in our traditional loudspeaker performance test. It scored an Average mark placing just below the halfway point of our ranking.

Speakerphone test	Voice, dB	Pink noise/ Music, dB	Ringing phone, dB	Overal score
Nokia Lumia 800	60.9	59.0	61.7	Below Average
Samsung Galaxy Nexus	66.2	60.5	69.0	Below Average
Apple iPhone 4S	65.8	64.5	74.6	Average
HTC Desire C	64.9	64.6	72.2	Average
Sony Xperia S	72.7	61.8	69.6	Average
HTC One S	65.1	64.6	76.7	Average
HTC Sensation XE	65.8	65.4	76.9	Good
Motorola RAZR XT910	74.7	66.6	82.1	Very Good
HTC Desire	76.6	75.7	84.6	Excellent

Very good messaging

Android and the Desire C are capable of handling all sorts of messages - SMS, MMS, email. Social networking is covered by several apps and widgets, and there's the Google+ Messenger, which can connect you to Google's chat network.

To add recipients, just start typing a name or number and choose from the contacts offered - the phone will find the contact you want even if you misspell it.

All threads • Viewing a specific thread • Adding recipients works even if you misspell the contact's name

The compose box covers about a fifth of the screen in portrait mode or about a third in landscape. A tap-and-hold on the text box gives you access to functions such as cut, copy and paste. You are free to paste the copied text across applications like email, notes, chats, etc. and vice versa.

Text input on the Desire C boils down to an on-screen custom-made HTC virtual QWERTY keyboard. Texting takes a bit of getting used to in portrait mode, which is understandable given the small screen size. Still, it's enough to get the job done and things get a little better if you flip the phone to landscape mode.

The on-screen QWERTY keyboard in portrait and landscape modes

Converting SMS into MMS is as simple as adding some multimedia content to the message. You can either add a photo or an audio file to go with the text, or you can get creative with several slides and photos.

Attaching a multimedia file turns the SMS to a MMS

Two email apps

The HTC Desire C comes with two email apps - the traditional Gmail app and the generic HTC Mail app, which merges all your email accounts into a single inbox.

Batch operations let you manage multiple conversations

The Gmail app has the trademark conversation style view and can manage multiple Gmail accounts. Batch operations are supported too, in case you need to handle email messages in bulk.

You can add multiple accounts (from multiple mail services) and view them individually or in a combined inbox. Each account is color coded, so you can quickly associate each message with its relevant account.

The standard HTC email app

The Mail app has tabs, but they are hidden by default. You can choose Edit tabs from the menu and pull out the ones you want. You can choose from Favorites, Unread, Marked, Invites and Attached.

Email sorting is enabled (in either ascending or descending order) by date, subject, sender, priority and size. The currently applied filter is displayed in the top right corner of the display.

There's hardly anything we can think of that the Desire C lacks in terms of email capabilities. The settings for popular email services are automatically configured. POP/IMAP accounts and Active Sync accounts are supported too.

Android-ish gallery

The HTC gallery is a custom job, but stacks photos just like the vanilla Android gallery. The app automatically locates images and videos, no matter where they are stored. You can choose to show/hide camera shots, All photos or All videos.

A tap on the Albums dropdown lets you view local or online albums. On the cloud side, you get Facebook, Flickr, Dropbox, Picasa or SkyDrive.

The Albums app has a new look

Once you pick one of the "stacks" (each representing a folder), you're presented with a grid of the photos. Some files have an icon indicating it's not a still photo but a video instead.

Browsing the image gallery

You can also mass delete images, but you can't copy/paste images across folders - you'll need a proper file manager for that. There are some basic editing tools - crop, rotate and effects (auto enhance, sepia, vintage, etc.).

Mass deleting photos • Basic image editing tools

The HTC Desire C supports multi-touch and you can take full advantage of it while browsing your images. You can zoom up to 100% with a simple double tap on the screen. The implementation here is extra smooth too.

Zooming in on a photo

Capable video player

There's no dedicated video player onboard the HTC Desire C, which means that video files have to be accessed via the Gallery.

The Videos app is part of the Gallery

The video interface offers a view mode toggle (full screen or best fit) and you can scrub through videos. There's a shortcut that lets you adjust screen brightness and another one to take screenshots of videos.

Video support on the Desire C was a mixed bag - as expectd, 1080p and 720p videos were a no go. It was able to play most standard resolution file formats we threw at it - AVI, MP4, MKV - though it did choke on some old XviD-encoded AVI videos.

Unlike the One series, Beats Audio enhancement is not available when viewing videos; it only works when listening to music (more on this below).

Subtitle support is available, although you have to have a subtitle file in the same directory as the video to be able access the subtitle options. These include the ability to select a subtitle file (if there is more than one in the same directory), as well as adjust the character encoding, which can be useful in getting those non-Latin subtitles to work.

Playing video • Adjusting the subtitle options

Music player with very basic Beats support

The Music app starts off by offering you several shortcuts - music library on the phone, SoundHound track recognition or TuneIn Radio. Below is a list of all your recently played songs, and at the bottom there is a ticker for the currently playing song.

Once you get into the music library available on the phone you get a dropdown menu to browse it by artist, album, playlist or genre. There's a search tool too.

The music library

The now playing interface is a Cover-Flow-like visualization of the current playlist - you can swipe sideways to skip songs back or forward. You can also opt to view the full playlist if you need to skip more than a few tracks.

The full-featured music player

The Desire C offers the Beats Audio sound enhancement to boost the sonic experience, although at a slightly dumbed-down variant. Gone are all the Beats Audio presets we're used to in other HTC phones, all you're really able to do on the Desire C is toggle it on and off.

Turning on the limited Beats Audio version

The lockscreen has a widget that shows the album art and name of the song and artist along with playback controls. You can pause playback or skip tracks directly by pressing the relevant button but you cannot unlock the phone into the full featured Music Player by dragging the widget into the ring.

The lockscreen music player widget

SoundHound is the track recognition of choice for HTC and they've even integrated it into the music player UI. It easily ID's a song from just a short sample. Or you can say the name of the artist and song and SoundHound will find it for you, including lyrics.

The SoundHound app

Functional FM radio

The HTC Desire C is also equipped with an FM radio, which has a pretty simple interface. It automatically scans the area for the available stations and allows you to mark some of them as favorite. It also supports RDS and allows loudspeaker playback.

The FM radio UI

You can play the sound through the headphones or the loudspeaker, although you need to have a headset plugged in at all times to be used as an antenna. There's no Beats enhancement here though, or a playback control card on the lockscreen.

If you have a data connection, you can use TuneIn radio instead of relying on your local FM radio stations.

Audio quality is surprisingly good

Despite its modest price tag the HTC Desire C did quite well in our audio quality test. In fact it turned out to be one of the best HTC smartphones we've ever subjected to the test.

An active external amplifier lets the Desire C show its full potential and achieved some pretty good results. But for the cut-off extreme bass frequencies it did perfectly well with no weak points whatsoever. The volume levels were slightly above average too, so it's a surprisingly good overall performance

What's even more surprising is the very little degradation when headphones come into play. The stereo crosstalk rises the tiniest amount (and remains probably the best we have seen in this scenario) and the intermodulation distortion spikes a bit. Kudos HTC!.

Uninspiring 5 MP camera

The HTC Desire C packs a 5MP fixed-focus camera that does stills of up to 2592 x 1944 pixels and records VGA video @ 30fps. There is no LED flash and no shutter key either. Given the lack of autofocus the lack of a dedicated camera is hardly as big an issue, but it still would have come in handy for quickly accessing the camera app.

The camera interface is the same for both the still camera and the video camera - no they don't "look alike", the camera just has the UI shared between both functions, with the option to either take a video or snap a still image all from one screen.

The right-hand side features the Effects button, shutter key, camcorder record key and a shortcut to the gallery that shows the last photo/video taken. On the left are buttons for general settings and shot mode.

The HTC Desire C camera interface

To snap a photo, you tap the shutter button. To record video, you tap the button below it.

The dual interface is convenient to say the least, but it does have a few drawbacks. For one, if you're shooting video at the highest resolution possible, VGA, once you hit the record button the frame shrinks down to 4:3. This can make framing a bit tricky, as you don't get to see the actual dimensions of the image until you start recording.

The effects button brings out a panel with the usual set of color effects (sepia, solarize and so on), while the shot mode button offers just a few very limited options - portrait, landscape, and low light.

As far as the quality of the shots is concerned, the Desire C definitely leaves something to be desired. In our tests it had a hard time getting the white balance correct, and a lot of our outdoor images had some color deviation and underexposure issues. When it works as it should, the level of detail and color rendering is pretty good, although up close photos do have a grainy look .

Overall, the camera is certainly not the best we've seen from, but considering the low-cost package, it could have been worse.



HTC Desire C camera samples

VGA video recording

The VGA (640 x 480) recording capabilities of the Desire C are nothing to write home about, especially in this day and age when it seems that every other device out there is capable of 720p recording.

If you can get past the low resolution, the camcorder itself has quality similar to that seen in the still image samples - slightly-skewed white balance which leads to rather dim outdoor images, and color reproduction that is otherwise accurate.

Videos are stored in MP4 files and have a variable framerate which generally hovers around the 29fps mark. Audio gets recorded at a sampling rate of 44kHz and a bitrate of 96Kbps.

Here is an untouched sample VGA@30fps video clip.

And here's a video uploaded to YouTube for convenience.

Ample connectivity options

The HTC Desire C offers quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and tri-band 3G, and HSDPA speeds of up to 7.2 Mbps. Local wireless connectivity features Wi-Fi b/g/n and Bluetooth 4.0.

You have a long list of options for connecting to a PC - Charge only, Disk drive (mass storage), HTC Sync, USB tethering (use the phone as a modem) and Internet pass-through (the phone uses the computer's Internet connection). The Charge only and Disk Drive have big, thumbable icons, which is great since they are most often used.


Selecting a USB connection type • Starting the personal Wi-Fi hotspot

Last but not least is the HTC Portable Hotspot. It can support up to 8 devices, you can WEP, WPA or WPA2 encrypt the hotspot and you can enable "allowed users" only to connect or leave it open for all (unsecure, but the quickest setup).

The app can be set to power off automatically after 5 or 10 minutes of inactivity, saving your battery in case you forget to switch it off manually.

Great ICS browser

The HTC Desire C comes with the latest Android web browser, and because it runs on Android Ice Cream Sandwich, you can also install Chrome for Android.

Anyway, the browser's interface keeps mostly out of sight, which leaves the entire screen to the web page. You get the standard Menu dropdown on the right, but HTC have thrown in some extra buttons at the bottom of the screen (you have to pan to reveal them, which is a little annoying).

They let you save a page in your bookmarks or reading list, view bookmarks, saved pages or tabs. You might want to enable Quick controls - they let you tap on any point on the edge of the screen and move your finger to select the desired option from a jog-dial menu.

Once you select some text, you can copy it, do a Google search with that text as the query or share the text over a message or social networking.


The ICS web browser on the HTC Desire C

Tabs can be closed with an X button on their top right corner. Incognito tabs are available if you want to bypass History, tracking cookies, form auto-fill stuff and so on.


The Bookmarks and History lists • The Tabs interface

The Menu options include a toggle to enable/disable Flash and another one to request the desktop version of a site, instead of the mobile one. Another ICS feature has the phone preload search results that it suspects you're going to open, speeding up the whole process.

The Desire C comes with Flash support, although the 600 MHz processor has a hard time keeping up. Clicking the 'Enable Flash support' option in the browser settings allowed for all the flash banners on our site to show up, but made the browsing experience so choppy it was pretty much unusable. YouTube videos will load and play in-line, although a lot of times it takes a while for them to show up. Flash games failed to run altogether.

YouTube videos run in-browser, although with a fair amount of lag

Great-looking PIM tools

The usual set of organizer apps are aboard the HTC Desire C, with a mobile Office app to boot, that can both view and edit documents.

The Polaris app has support for viewing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, including the Office 2007 versions and it can create Office 2003 Word, Excel documents and presentations. There is also a PDF viewer to handle PDF files.



Polaris Office handles .doc, .xls and .ppt files

You can format the text style and color, justify the text, do lists (numbered or bullet points) in the Word editor. The Excel editor does support function editing, which some mobile editors don't.

The app also integrates with Dropbox and SkyDrive, which makes syncing documents between your computer and your phone a breeze.

The calendar has four different types of view: daily, monthly, agenda and invitation. Adding a new event is quite straightforward and you can also set an alarm to serve as a reminder.


The HTC Desire C organizer centerpiece: the calendar

The Agenda view shows a list of all the calendar entries from the recent past to the near future. Invitation only lists events with invitation info attached to them. The day view showing the weather forecast at the top of the screen is a nice touch.

The Calendar supports multiple online calendars (including Facebook), one you sync with your computer and easily show/hide events you don't want.

There is also a calculator aboard. It is nicely touch optimized with big, easy to hit buttons. Flipping it horizontally enables some more advanced functions like logarithms.

The built-in calculator

The Desire C features an alarm clock application, which can handle multiple alarms, each with its own start and repeat time. You also get a stopwatch and a timer in the same app. There's a world clock, to display the time in multiple locations, as well.


The world clock, alarm clock, stopwatch and timer

The Voice recorder might be quite useful for making audio notes and the weather app brings Yahoo's weather forecast for your area a click away.

Voice recorder • Weather app

Google Play Store and HTC Hub

The Google Play Store features several scrollable tabs - categories, featured, top paid, top free, top grossing, top new paid, top new free and trending. Apps usually have several screenshots (some even offer a demo video) so you can get an idea of what the app looks like before installing it. You can also check out comments and ratings, as well as the number of downloads and so on, to help you decide if the app is worth it.


The Google Play Store

There are all kinds of apps in the Android market and the most important ones are covered (file managers, navigation apps, document readers etc.).

Not quite an app store, the HTC Hub is a good source of wallpapers and sound customizations - ringtones, alarms and notification sounds and entire sound sets (a set is a whole package that brings together the other three categories).

There are also a handful of apps, as well as customizations for skins and entire scenes as well.


The HTC Hub is your source for customizations

Navigation and location with Google Maps

The HTC Desire C has a built-in GPS receiver, which managed to get a lock in under a minute (with A-GPS switched off). If all you need is a rough idea of where you are (within 150 meters) you can use the Cell-ID and Wi-Fi network lock, which is very fast.

At this point, Google Maps is a standard part of the Android package and we've covered it many times before. It offers voice-guided navigation in certain countries and falls back to a list of instructions elsewhere. You can plan routes, search for nearby POI and go into the always cool Street View.


Google Maps is an inherent part of the Android platform

Final words

HTC has stepped out of its comfort zone with this one. It's not their first attempt at a smartphone for the masses and the Taiwanese are definitely getting the hang of it. The Desire C is firmly in the tradition of the two Wildfires and the Explorer. By another tradition honored by HTC, even their entry level offerings get the latest software and the combination of Ice Cream Sandwich and Sense 4.0 is the phone's key selling point.

What we have here is a trimmed-down version of the Sense UI but it's by no means a massive deal-breaker. After all, even the HTC One V had to accept cuts like the missing leap view and the non-customizable lockscreen. Anyway, with microSD card support, flash playback and ICS, the Desire C is a pretty good catch.

The flipside is, the hardware doesn't quite keep up. It's actually as low-end as it gets. But it suffices for two things - run Ice Cream Sandwich glitch-free and stay within budget. The Desire C is clearly cheaper than some of its direct competitors and that's fairly surprising coming from HTC, which usually prices its phones quite steep. The premium is well worth it most of the time, considering the solid build quality of the gadgets.

The Desire C will not let anyone down in terms of build and finish but it should take account of the fact that the market has evolved to a point where dual-cores are calling the shots in the midrange.

Of course, HTC will tell you it has the One V in the market of the affordable dual-core droids and their Desire C is targeting a different, lower segment. We don't think anyone will disagree but still, a certain Sony Xperia U is priced unsettlingly close.

For a couple of euros more (less than 20 really) you get incomparably more processing power thanks to the two 1GHz cores of the Xperia U's NovaThor chipset. The screen size is the same but with FWVGA resolution Sony's smartphone makes all the difference. The auto-focus still camera and HD videos are important advantages too. We like the glowing strip that matches the screen color too. Overall, we would've told you right away that your money is better spent on an Xperia U, was it not for its limited storage capacity.

Sony Xperia U

The Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 is another recent dual-core droid, which raises the bid with a bigger screen, an autofocus camera and 720p videos. The memory card slot is a massive advantage over the Xperia U and the traditionally solid video codec support should count too. The Galaxy Ace 2 is still running Gingerbread and is even more expensive, and that's something for the Desire C to build on.

Samsung Galaxy Ace 2 I8160

The LG Optimus L5 too fetches a slightly higher price than the Desire C. It has the same Snapdragon chipset but the processor is clocked higher at 800MHz. It comes with ICS right out of the box. An autofocus camera and the slim, Prada-influenced design are its highlights. The LG Optimus L5 has a big 4" screen but we're not sure whether we can actually call it an advantage at the same HVGA resolution as the Desire C.

LG Optimus L5 E610

As for the few options that currently cost less, the Lumia 710 still has a good run ahead of it, regardless of the fact that it's not getting Windows Phone 8. With WP 7.8 confirmed and the good package of apps (Nokia Drive adds quite a lot of value to the deal), the Lumia 710 is still a solid option in the lower midrange. It beats the Desire C with a bigger and higher resolution display, an autofocus camera, and a clearly more capable processor. The limited storage capacity and an app market that's not nearly as well-stocked as the Google Play store are points against.

Nokia Lumia 710

Back to the Android camp, the Defy Mini is a pretty close match - it has the same processor as the HTC Desire C and almost identical looks. The screen is smaller, the camera is 3MP and there's still no ICS - but it costs less and is dust and water-resistant.

Motorola Defy Mini XT321

To sum it up, HTC seems to be taking the entry-level market more seriously than usual. Just look at the multiple versions of the Desire C, including dual-SIM support. Of course, HTC's entry level is different than say, Samsung's. What we mean is, there're obviously cheaper ways to own an Android smartphone. But the HTC Desire C is among the few to give you ICS right out of the box. It looks good and is really comfortable to handle - clearly, it's an easy phone to like.

Maybe it would be a lot harder for many people to forgive the slow, outdated processor. To be clear, most people won't call the Desire C slow, unless they're holding a dual-core in the other hand. That's the thing, though - the other hand.

2012-07-09T22:00:00.001+05:30

LG may have given up on tablets, but not on the Optimus Vu - it's halfway between a phone and a tablet, a hybrid of form factors that we like to call "phoneblets". The Samsung Note was one of the first, but that doesn't mean it can have the market all for itself. The LG Vu pairs the big screen with a handy stylus to enhance tasks like note taking, something that can be a chore on a normal thumb-operated handset.

LG Optimus Vu official photos

The dedicated Notebook app lets you create elaborate, multiple-page notes with images and text, or you can just hit the QuickMemo key, which snaps a screenshot and lets you scribble on it - you can screenshot a website, a part of an email, a document, an image, and just about anything else.

This makes the Optimus Vu a handy tool for putting down reminders or helping you communicate with others - it's much easier to explain what you need when you can take a screenshot and sketch your idea over it. Once you're done, sending the image via email, Dropbox, a social network or another channel is just a tap away.

The phoneblet sure has a lot going for it, but it's not all sunshine and roses - you can go ahead and copy our notes on where it scores and where it misses.

Key features

Dual-band CDMA, 1x EV-DO, HSDPA and LTE connectivity
5" 16M-color capacitive HD-IPS LCD touchscreen of XGA resolution (768 x 1024 pixels)
LG Rubberdium stylus and QuickMemo button
Android OS v2.3 Gingerbread
Dual-core 1.5GHz ARM Scorpion processor, 1GB of RAM, Adreno 220 GPU, Qualcomm MSM8660 Snapdragon chipset
32GB of inbuilt storage
8 MP autofocus camera, face detection and geotagging
1080p @ 30fps video recording
Front facing 1.3MP camera, video calling
Wi-Fi b/g/n and DLNA, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi hotspot
NFC connectivity
GPS with A-GPS
microUSB port (charging)
Stereo Bluetooth v3.0
MHL TV-out
Polaris Office document editor
Smart dialing, voice dialing
Accelerometer and proximity sensor
DivX/XviD video support
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
Dolby Mobile and SRS sound enhancement
Stereo FM radio with RDS
T-DMB TV tuner

Main disadvantages

microSIM cards only
Runs older Android 2.3 Gingerbread
Wide form factor needs getting used to
4:3 aspect ratio not a good fit for video watching
No microSD card slot

With a rich app package, the Optimus Vu has solid business credentials. It features the Polaris Office document editor and an app that can automate backups (with an option to encrypt them).

You also get an NFC app, with which you can easily share your contact details, web site, memos, scheduling info and more. You can share it directly with another NFC-enabled device or write the info to NFC tags that you can hand out to people.

The extensive connectivity options go on - you get fast data connections over LTE, Wi-Fi b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0 and Wi-Fi Direct, then there's the fun stuff like DLNA and a T-DMB TV tuner (ok, that's a Korea-only feature).

LG Optimus Vu at ours

We're not counting on the LG Optimus Vu being very pocketable, but we'll be putting the screen under a microscope (even literally) to find out if it's worth the tradeoff. We'll also look at the rest of the hardware and rummage through the retail box - all that's coming up.

New UI on old Android

At first glance, the LG Optimus Vu user interface looks very much like what we saw on the ICS-running Optimus 4X HD but we did find quite a few differences. And unlike the 4X, the Optimus Vu hides Android 2.3 Gingerbread beneath its colorful custom skin.

So, you'll be missing out on some of Ice Cream Sandwich's usability enhancements (things like the new task switcher, the notifications that can be dismissed individually, etc.), but LG has baked into this Gingerbread a good deal of its own improvements. An ICS update is in the pipeline for the Vu but it's too early to tell whether it will get Jelly Bean.

While it's not Android's latest and greatest, everything works just fine - check out this video to get a feel for the LG Optimus Vu in action.

LG is using a custom lockscreen instead of the stock Android variety, but it's not the one from the 4X HD. It offers a clock with two timezones, visible battery charge info and a shortcut for the dialer.

Using a phone lockscreen on a phoneblet

We feel they could have done more with all the room available - weather info, stock info, a news widget, anything to fill up all that real estate. Also, the ability to pull down the notification area to check new notifications is one of the perks of Ice Cream Sandwich that the Vu is missing out on (for now, anyway).

Getting past the lockscreen reveals the homescreen. You get five shortcuts at the bottom of the screen, which are always visible on all homescreen panes and even in the app drawer: Phone, Contacts, Notebook, Messages and Applications.

You can customize the first four of these shortcuts, the fifth one is always Applications/Home. You can put folders in here too.

The homescreen

Adding stuff to the homescreen works quite differently than in stock Android. A tabbed interface lets you pick between Widgets, Shortcuts, Folders and Wallpapers. You can pick an item in the selected category and drag it out from the drawer (the drawer gets out of the way once you start dragging.

Placing widgets and changing the wallpaper

A pinch zoom gesture on the homescreen brings out the familiar overview mode. From here you can rearrange homescreen panes, select the default one and delete unneeded ones. You can add panes, but no more than 7.

Managing homescreen panes

One interesting feature on the Optimus Vu custom UI is that if you press and hold on a shortcut but leave it in place, a small paintbrush icon appears in its corner. If you tap that, you can choose another icon for that shortcut from a predefined list. There's no way to use external icon files, though.

You can change a shortcut's icon

The notification area features a number of toggles - Sound, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, Data, NFC and Screen Auto Rotation. You can tap them to toggle the related feature on or off, but you can also press and hold on them to get to the relevant page in the Settings. As usual, if you're playing something in the music player, quick controls will show up here.

The notification area features plenty of toggles

The task switcher shows the 8 most recently used apps. There's an app manager button that brings out the task manager with info on each app (CPU and RAM usage). Apps can be terminated one by one or all at once.

The task switcher has a button to launch the task manager

The app drawer has three view modes - page, category and list view. The paged view is scrolled horizontally and you can rearrange shortcuts. Category view should be familiar to LG users - it organizes applications into categories (e.g. Communication, Multimedia, etc.) A pinch zoom gesture lets you manage categories - rearrange them, add new one or delete ones you've added.

The app drawer has three view modes

There's an option to pick a different theme for the homescreen. There are a total of four preinstalled and they change the wallpaper and the look of the icons but not the functionality.

Another cool thing is the Home Selector - if you decide to install a third party launcher (or ten of them) this little app will help you pick which one shows up when you hit the home key.

Overall, LG has added a few interesting features, but there were still a few things we missed that other custom Gingerbreads UIs offer. Hopefully, when LG updates the Optimus Vu to Ice Cream

Sandwich, it will enable the extra enhancements that the 4X HD got.

Tabbed phonebook

The Phonebook has a tabbed interface, in which the third tab lists all contacts alphabetically. Contact images, where available, are displayed and there's a quick alphabet scroll on the right. There's also a regular search bar on top of the contacts list. The other tabs are Dial, Call log and Groups.

Filters keep the phonebook from getting messy - you can choose which groups are displayed and which are hidden (e.g. Family, email contacts, Twitter contacts and so on). The list can be sorted by first or last name and you can choose how contacts are displayed - First Name, Last Name or the other way around.

Quick contacts are available (tap the contact photo to get call, message, email and so on buttons) but LG has used the extra width of the Optimus Vu to include inline buttons for calling and texting contacts, which are even quicker.

Contact display and sort setting

Tapping on the name of a single contact brings up their details. This interface is tabbed too - Info holds the basic contact information, but you can also check call history between you and the contact along with SNS updates and photos from their Facebook account. The Agenda shows events involving that person.

Viewing a single contact

Editing a contact is pretty straightforward; you can add or remove fields as needed, as well as specify the types of phone numbers, email addresses, ringtones and even add notes.

Each phone number and email address field has inline call/message keys, which comes in handy when there are multiple numbers and emails.

Editing a contact

Voice and video telephony

The LG Optimus Vu may not have the most comfortable form factor for calling but it does feature full voice and video calling functionality. It also had no trouble holding on to signal even in areas of spotty coverage and the in-call audio is consistently good too.

The Dialer integrates with the rest of the phonebook. It features smart dialing and will show the matching contact (it matches both names and phone numbers) with an added downwards arrow if there are more than one.

The Call log is clever and groups some of the calls, e.g. 3 missed calls from the same contact on the same day. A number next to the contact name shows the number of events. It's a great space saving feature.

The Call log • Smart dialing

During a call you can pop-up the dialer should you need to dial another number. Also you can use the phone while on a call, just hit the menu key and a small green line replaces the notification area and acts like a shortcut back to the call.

Call notification* In-call screen

We also ran our traditional loudspeaker test on the LG Optimus Vu. It scored a Good result, so you probably won't be missing many calls with it.

Speakerphone test	Voice, dB	Pink noise/ Music, dB	Ringingphone, dB	Overal score
Samsung Galaxy Nexus	66.2	60.5	69.0	Below Average
Samsung Galaxy Note	62.9	61.7	68.0	Below Average
Apple iPhone 4S	65.8	64.5	74.6	Average
HTC One X	61.1	66.0	75.8	Average
Samsnug Galaxy Tab 7.7	69.1	66.6	75.7	Average
LG Optimus Vu	66.2	66.6	80.7	Good
Apple iPad 3	66.7	67.0	77.7	Good
Samsung Galaxy S III	75.1	66.5	75.0	Good
HTC Desire	76.6	75.7	84.6	Excellent

Messaging fights spam, schedules texts

The LG Optimus Vu does all common message types: SMS, MMS and email. SMS and MMS are handled through the tabbed Message app. By default it shows you conversation mode, but the other tabs let you view the Inbox, Outbox and Saved messages.


The messaging app • Blocking spam messages

You can customize how messages are kept - all of them or up to some user selectable limit (the default is 300 SMS and 100 MMS). There's also a Spam message box with fairly sophisticated settings at your disposal for blocking spam.

A press-and-hold on the text box gives you access to functions such as cut, copy and paste. You are free to paste the copied text across applications like email, notes, chats, etc. Another cool feature is that the volume rocker controls the text size.


Editing a message* The attach dialog and contextual menu

One cool and potentially very useful feature of the Optimus Vu is the reserved message - you can compose a message and schedule it to be sent out automatically at some point in the future, from within an hour to several months. There are quite a few situations where this could come in handy, for example, making sure you don't forget to send a "Happy birthday" note to someone.

Gmail is part of the core Android experience. It has an optimized interface and can handle multiple Gmail accounts. The extended Gmail features include batch operations, which allow multiple emails to be archived, labeled or deleted, spam report and of course conversation-style email view mode.


The Gmail app

The generic email client supports multiple accounts, and operates in much the same fashion as the Gmail one. If you need to manage multiple accounts (even from different services), the Combined Inbox feature will come in handy, although it has no conversation-style view like in Gmail.


The generic Email client

QWERTY keyboard that can shrink

The LG Optimus Vu offers a standard QWERTY keyboard, which features both portrait and landscape orientation.


The QWERTY keyboards

The keyboard has plenty of room on the screen in portrait orientation, which makes for fast two thumb typing. If you prefer typing with just one hand, LG has you covered - swipe the keyboard left or right to reduce its width by 30% and dock it to the left or right side of the screen respectively. The swipe gesture can be set to change the input mode instead.

Other input options include handwriting recognition (it handled even our poor penmanship) and a 3x4 keypad for old-school multi-tap texting (we're not sure why LG kept this option).



Other input options.

Straightforward gallery

Viewing photos is one of Optimus Vu's strong suits - the large 4:3 screen fits photos with no black bars. That and the good viewing angles mean the Vu can successfully double as a photo frame. It relies on the standard Gingerbread gallery - it automatically locates images and videos no matter where they are stored in the phone's storage.

The Gingerbread gallery

Once selected, you can view an image close up by pinch zooming or double tapping on the desired area. There are plenty of sharing options (from Gmail through messages to NFC) and also simple editing options (crop and rotate).


Gallery options

Media Home is an app that tries to turn the Optimus Vu into a highly functional digital photo frame - it offers big, easy to hit buttons for videos, photos and music. It's easy to start a slideshow or play some music and better still, the app can be set to launch automatically when you put the Vu in a dock or insert an MHL cable.

Media Home app takes care of photo frame duties

If you really want to show off, then you'll need the Video Producer. You choose on of the several predefined styles, add your photos and videos, throw in a soundtrack and you have a colorful, dynamic presentation on your hands.

You can fine tune it too - rearrange photos and clips, add captions and album art to each slide. When you're done, you can export your creation as a video (720p, D1 or QVGA).

Video Producer is an easy way to create great looking photo and video slideshows

Music player does not have the look

The music player is not exactly pretty but it gets the job done. The usual filtering by album and artist is enabled and you have alphabet search and regular search for locating songs quicker. The music player is DLNA-enabled too.


The music player

The Now playing interface places a big album art image in the center with controls above and below it. Swiping the album art left or right is the easiest way to skip songs back and forth.

A press and hold on the album art will bring up a search menu, if you need to look up the title, artist or the album. After that you can pick where to search - your music collection, YouTube or a general Internet search.

There are equalizer presets which become available when you plug in a pair of headphones. Dolby Mobile becomes available only then, too.


The Now Playing screen* The Search feature* Equalizers

When you're playing a song you get music controls on the lockscreen. They are hidden in a sort of notification area style panel that you need to drag down.

Music controls in the lockscreen

Decent audio quality

The LG Optimus Vu did way better than the disappointing LG Optimus 4X HD in our audio quality test. It's not that the phoneblet is perfect, but it should do just fine for most of the users.

When connected to active external amplifier the LG Optimus Vu achieved some pretty good scores for signal-to-noise, dynamic range and stereo crosstalk. The intermodulation distortion was rather mediocre and the extreme bass frequencies have been cut off, but the harmonic distortion was kept well under control. The volume levels were rather low, so we'd call this an average performance.

The good news is there's surprisingly little distortion when headphones come into play. The stereo crosstalk spikes by more than the average amount, but all the other readings remain virtually unaffected. It's certainly the better part of the Vu output.

Here go the scores so you can see for yourselves.

Test Frequency response Noise level Dynamic range THD IMD + Noise Stereo crosstalk

LG Optimus Vu +0.18, -1.69 -87.0 87.0 0.011 0.166 -83.7

LG Optimus Vu (headphones attached) +0.18, -1.58 -86.8 86.8 0.010 0.138 -47.9

LG Optimus 4X HD +0.02, -0.52 -74.8 74.8 0.345 0.318 -81.6

LG Optimus 4X HD (headphones attached) +0.03, -0.51 -70.1 69.9 0.815 0.811 -64.5

Samsung Galaxy Note N7000 +0.04, -0.08 -90.4 88.9 0.0044 0.066 -87.4

Samsung Galaxy Note N7000 (headphones attached) +0.12, -0.06 -89.7 88.4 0.0084 0.112 -51.6

Samsung I9300 Galaxy S III +0.03, -0.05 -90.3 90.3 0.012 0.018 -92.6

Samsung I9300 Galaxy S III (headphones attached) +0.11, -0.04 -90.2 90.2 0.0092 0.090 -53.1

HTC One X +0.02, -0.08 -82.1 82.1 0.137 0.393 -80.7

HTC One X (headphones attached) +0.10, -0.10 -80.6 80.6 0.174 0.459 -60.8

LG Optimus Vu frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.

Capable video player, wrong aspect ratio

The video player has a fairly simple interface, giving you just a list (with thumbs) of all the videos on the device. There's an alphabet scroll to help users locate videos faster but that's about it. You can of course play videos from the Gallery if you prefer its folder-centric organization.

To get the basics out of the way, the available controls during playback include a scrubber for jumping to various parts of the video along with the standard play/pause and skip buttons. There's a Dolby Mobile toggle as well.


The video player

The LG Optimus Vu handled everything we threw at it - DivX, XviD, MKV and MP4/MOV up to, and including, Full HD. The AC3 and DTS audio codecs are supported (those often cause problems on mobile devices), so you don't have to worry about sound compatibility issues either.

Subtitles are supported with settings for font, color, font and size. You can toggle subtitles on and off, but there's no option to manually point to a subtitle file, so the subtitle filename has to match the video filename.

The 4:3 1024x768 screen may not be perfect for 16:9 videos, but even with black borders, the screen is pretty big. On the upside, you can always stream the video over DLNA or better yet hook it up to an HDTV over MHL.

Good 8MP camera

The LG Optimus Vu comes with an 8 megapixel camera, capable of capturing 3264 x 2448 resolution images. There is a single LED flash, but it won't be of much help in most low-light situations.

We found the user interface to be quite convenient, though many of the important settings are inside the extended settings menu, so they take a while to toggle.

From the viewfinder you have access to the front/back camera toggle, digital zoom control, exposure compensation and flash mode. The extended settings let you adjust things like resolution, face detection, geotagging, ISO, white balance, self timer, scene and shot modes (the last two really should have been made available on the top level in the viewfinder).

The camera interface

While there is no hardwired shutter key, pressing the volume keys will snap a photo (either one works). It's not such a good idea though. First, the volume keys don't obviously have half press and second, it's hard to comfortably hold such a wide phone. Of course, there's the virtual on-screen shutter button as well.

Photos from the Optimus Vu have quite a bit of noise in them and the post processing algorithms that try to suppress it wipe out a good deal of fine detail and there are signs of oversharpening. There's still decent detail left, the colors are accurate and the Vu renders shadows well. Photos look at least as good as those coming from an Optimus 4X HD.

Here are a few sample shots we've taken with the LG Optimus Vu.



LG Optimus Vu camera samples

Video camera uses too much compression

The Optimus Vu's camera is capable of shooting 1080p videos at 30fps. The camcorder has the exact same settings available on the viewfinder as the still camera. From the extended settings menu you get a few more - resolution, white balance and color effects.

Videos are recorded in MP4 files with a bitrate of 10Mbps, which isn't enough for FullHD. The framerate is stable at 29fps, but a lot of the fine detail is lost to compression. Colors are okay, but the whole scene gets overexposed. That and the continuous autofocus doesn't know when to stop hunting.

Sound is recorded in stereo, with a sampling rate of 48 kHz and 155Kbps bitrate.

The camcorder UI

Here's a video sample we've uploaded on YouTube. Don't forget to switch the resolution.

Connectivity

The LG Optimus Vu is quite adept at connectivity. The version we're reviewing has CDMA and EV-DO, HSDPA and LTE. Of course, other variants will probably drop the CDMA connectivity but LG is stingy on details for non-Korean versions of the Vu.

Anyway, there's plenty of other connectivity features - Wi-Fi b/g/n with DLNA and Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth 3.0+HS, NFC and MHL. Then there's the T-DMB tuner too, but that's only of interest to Korean users as this standard is not as popular in other countries. It's not to be confused with the more widely available in Europe DVB-T digital TV broadcasting standard.

SmartShare is an app that lets you control a DLNA network - you can play media from other devices (e.g. NAS) on your phone or play something from the phone onto another device (e.g. a DLNA-enabled TV).

The Wi-Fi Direct is a technology, which enables devices to connect to each other without the need for a Wi-Fi hotspot. The beauty of it is in that only one device has to be Wi-Fi Direct-ready for the magic to happen.

Using this technology two (or up to eight) devices can share files in a more advanced, fast and secure way, paving the road to the eventual demise of Bluetooth for short-range file transfers.


**SmartShare* Wi-Fi Direct settings

NFC is also on board in the form of a dedicated app called LG Tag+. With it you can create tags that enable Wi-Fi, GPS, control sound and so on. Just pick your setting, hit write on tag and tap the Optimus Vu on an empty tag.


The LG Tag+ app

There's another NFC app called simply NFC. With it you can share info instead of creating tags, which automate actions. With it you can share a contact, URL, text, a message, trigger a cal or add an event to the other phone's calendar.

Any info you've shared that way is stored for quick access within the application so you can share it again later without having to do it from scratch. The app will also keep a log of tags you've read with the Optimus Vu.

By the way, there are two ways to share info - the first is to share, say a contact, directly with another device and the other is to write the info on an NFC tag that can be later read by other devices.


The NFC app is the go to place for sharing info over NFC or writing that info on tags

We're not done yet - the LG Optimus Vu features an MHL port too - that means you can hook it up to an HDTV to watch movies or photos on the large screen or use a different adapter to enable USB host mode.

Gingerbread browser still has it

The web browser on the Optimus Vu has received some tweaks by LG. The auto-hiding URL bar is on top and has the refresh and bookmark buttons. The bottom control bar houses the back and forward keys, the tab switcher key, and the new tab key. The whole bar auto-hides, leaving only an arrow in the bottom right corner that can be used to bring it back.


The Optimus Vu web browser

When you open a new tab, the screen is populated with the 12 most visited sites, similar to how Firefox or Google Chrome work. A 3D card interface can be used to switch between the open tabs, though you can drop the eye candy and use a simple list.

The browser has Read it later functionality - it's an easy way to mark pages that you want to look at later. That doesn't download an offline copy of the page though, you'll still need internet access. Also, we found no way to sign into Read it later, so we assume it's just a coincidence of names and not the popular service (that was recently renamed Pocket).

The Optimus Vu supports double tap and pinch zoom. There's text reflow too - it adjusts the columns of text to fit the screen width. If you've pinched to zoom in, you need to double tap the screen to make the browser reflow the text.

The dual-core hardware enables the Optimus Vu browser to play 720p Flash videos but 1080p proved too much for it. You can play touch-optimized Flash games too.

Playing YouTube videos and Flash games

Chock-full of organizer features

The Optimus Vu comes with a respectable set of organizing features. We start off with the Office document editor.

The app in question is Polaris Office and it's one of the most advanced mobile editors we've seen. You can of course view documents - Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents and PDF files too. The app lets you add files as favorites or use a two pane file explorer (think Windows Explorer) with support for bulk actions.



The Polaris Office app

Edit mode offers almost a full set of options - text style, justification, paragraph formatting, bullets, even creating tables. If you're editing an Excel file, you get a formula wizard, resize rows/columns, border style, cell merging and so on. Even creating a full PowerPoint presentation is possible.

The Calendar has a tabbed interface so you can easily switch between Month, Week, Day and Agenda views. The app can sync with multiple online calendars and gives you an option to hide the ones you don't want (but keep or turn off syncing for them).


The calendar

Date finder is a useful tool that tells you what date it will be after several days (or what date it was that many days in the past). It makes checking the date a hundred days from now a breeze.

The LG Optimus Vu features an alarm clock application, which allows a lot of alarms to be set, each with its own start and repeat time. The Timer, World Clock and Stopwatch features are also part of this app.


The Alarm* World clock* Stopwatch

The organizer package also includes a useful voice recorder and a nicely touch-optimized calculator. The Memo app allows you to take notes and add media to them, such as images, audio, or location.

Organizer (continued)


The Voice recorder and Calculator • The Memo app

There are also news and weather apps. Both come from Yahoo.

Weather app* News

The so-called QuickMemo function is integrated in the phone's OS, allowing you to capture screen shots of anything (including the lockscreen!) using the dedicated key and scribble notes over them like you would on the LG Optimus 4X HD or the Galaxy Note.

The Vu comes with a comfortable stylus. As you draw, you can pick between different pen styles and colors and an eraser. You can choose to discard the screenshot if you just want to scribble something on an empty background.

When you're done, you can easily share the image or save it to the gallery.

Finally, there is an option to lock the capacitive keys on the front to prevent accidentally getting out of the app before you're done editing.


The QuickMemo function in action

There's another app that uses the stylus - it's called Notebook. It creates "notebooks" with different covers, different page styles (lined, graph, blank) and paper color. Each notebook can have different pages and you can insert regular text, images, videos, locations, dates and memos to complement your sketches.


The Notebook app can do tons more than a plain paper notepad

You have access to several "pen types" (including a spray paint can) and you can change color, thickness and opacity. If you want to draw some really fine detail, you can pull out a magnifying glass from the bottom that gives you a zoomed in view. You can change the zoom and move the magnifying glass around.

The Backup that comes preinstalled on the LG Optimus Vu can backup both pre-installed and downloaded apps, bookmarks, calendar, contacts and call log, messages, how you've arranged your homescreen and your system settings. You can do both manual and scheduled backups.


The Backup app can backup anything and do it on a schedule too

LG Readers is the preinstalled eBook reader on the Vu. The 4:3 aspect ratio is good for reading. The Readers app has a built-in store where you can buy new books.

LG Readers app

Google Play has the apps

The Google Play app market, previously known as the Android Market, lets you download various apps for your device. Upon launch of the Market app you're greeted with the tiled interface of the Featured window. A swipe to the right takes you to the Categories view.


The Google Play market

Swiping to the left takes you through Top Paid, Top Free, Top Grossing, Top New Paid, Top New Free and Trending (the ones with growing popularity).

Downloads are easy and won't take more than a couple of seconds. Before you agree to download an app, the Market will show you what features the app requires access to (e.g. Internet connectivity, access to the file system, etc.). You can also see whether updates are available for your currently installed apps by going to My Apps in the contextual menu.

Google Maps

The LG Optimus Vu managed to get a GPS lock in under a minute without A-GPS. A-GPS can speed up the lock (but it involves some cellular data traffic). Cell-ID and Wi-Fi positioning are also available if all you need is a rough location, but they need a data connection too.

Google Maps is a standard part of the Android package and we've covered it many times before. It offers voice-guided navigation in certain countries and falls back to a list of instructions elsewhere. You can plan routes, search for nearby POI and go into the always cool Street View.


Google Maps

The latest version uses vector maps, which are very data efficient and easy to cache. The app will reroute you if you get off course, even without a data connection.

3D buildings are shown for some of the bigger cities and you can use two-finger camera tilt and rotate to get a better view of the area.

Final words

The LG Optimus Vu is certainly an unusual device - some might see this as an advantage, but there are ergonomic reasons why phones aren't this wide. But the Vu isn't a phone, is it?

While not quite a full-blown tablet, the 4:3 aspect ratio of the screen is actually an advantage when taking notes or just drawing something using the stylus - 16:9 is popular with videos, not notepads or printed media.

It all revolves around the stylus - the Optimus Vu is a fine upper-mid-range device in terms of performance, screen and camera, but it's the stylus and accompanying software that carve out its niche.

As for where else you can get a similar experience, the Samsung Galaxy Note is the closest match. Its stylus is smaller, but tucks inside the Note itself and the 720p Super AMOLED screen is pretty cool too. Oh, and it's already on Android 4.0 ICS.

For the ultimate Android tablet with a stylus experience, we have to point to the Galaxy Note 10.1. The big stylus is even more comfortable than the Vu's and the tablet tracks it while you hover it above the screen, the way professional graphics tablet do. It's the size of one too. The only downside (and it's a big one) is that Samsung is taking its time releasing it due to last-minute adjustments and we are not aware of its launch schedule.

Samsung Galaxy Note N7000 • Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 N8000

Moving back to the realm of the achievable, if a bit off-kilter, the Sony Tablet P has a cooky foldable design and two screens, each 5.5" big. It's a dual-core device as well and it recently got its official ICS serving.

A Panasonic Eluga Power has a 5" 720p screen, a more powerful chipset than the Optimus Vu and it is IP57 certified for dust and water resistance.

Sony Tablet P • Panasonic Eluga Power

The other options don't qualify as "phoneblets" but they certainly blur the line. The Samsung Galaxy S III and the HTC One X come close in screen size - 4.8" and 4.7" respectively - as close as any droid that still counts as a phone has gotten.

Samsung I9300 Galaxy S III • HTC One X**

Both are quad-core ICS-running flagships and are actually comfortable to use as a phone. Plus, you can always buy a third party capacitive stylus and install drawing and note-taking apps from the Play Store, which would bring you just about the same functionality as the LG Optimus Vu - actually more, as they have more computing power and more recent software.

And therein lies the problem that LG faces when marketing the Vu - it's a bit clunky to use (too wide for our hands), still stuck on Gingerbread (that's already two versions behind the latest Android release) and the capacitive stylus, while nice, isn't a feature that can't easily be gotten elsewhere.

The Optimus Vu doesn't quite work as a back-up device either - if you're going to sacrifice portability for a big screen, a $200 Google Nexus 7 tablet would be both cheaper and more powerful (even if you get the $250 16GB version).

To be fair, no-one expected the Samsung Galaxy Note to sell very well either, but it sold in millions. The Optimus Vu probably won't be able to match that (not least due to its more limited availability), but we're always happy to see LG experiment. It's what got us one of the earliest touchscreen phones (yes, even before the ubiquitous iPhone), the original LG Prada, and the LG Viewty cameraphone.

LG Optimus Vu review

2012-07-09T21:59:00.000+05:30

LG Optimus Vu official photos

The phoneblet sure has a lot going for it, but it's not all sunshine and roses - you can go ahead and copy our notes on where it scores and where it misses.

Key features

Dual-band CDMA, 1x EV-DO, HSDPA and LTE connectivity
5" 16M-color capacitive HD-IPS LCD touchscreen of XGA resolution (768 x 1024 pixels)
LG Rubberdium stylus and QuickMemo button
Android OS v2.3 Gingerbread
Dual-core 1.5GHz ARM Scorpion processor, 1GB of RAM, Adreno 220 GPU, Qualcomm MSM8660 Snapdragon chipset
32GB of inbuilt storage
8 MP autofocus camera, face detection and geotagging
1080p @ 30fps video recording
Front facing 1.3MP camera, video calling
Wi-Fi b/g/n and DLNA, Wi-Fi Direct, Wi-Fi hotspot
NFC connectivity
GPS with A-GPS
microUSB port (charging)
Stereo Bluetooth v3.0
MHL TV-out
Polaris Office document editor
Smart dialing, voice dialing
Accelerometer and proximity sensor
DivX/XviD video support
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
Dolby Mobile and SRS sound enhancement
Stereo FM radio with RDS
T-DMB TV tuner

Main disadvantages

microSIM cards only
Runs older Android 2.3 Gingerbread
Wide form factor needs getting used to
4:3 aspect ratio not a good fit for video watching
No microSD card slot

With a rich app package, the Optimus Vu has solid business credentials. It features the Polaris Office document editor and an app that can automate backups (with an option to encrypt them).

LG Optimus Vu at ours

New UI on old Android

While it's not Android's latest and greatest, everything works just fine - check out this video to get a feel for the LG Optimus Vu in action.

Using a phone lockscreen on a phoneblet

You can customize the first four of these shortcuts, the fifth one is always Applications/Home. You can put folders in here too.

The homescreen

Placing widgets and changing the wallpaper

Managing homescreen panes

You can change a shortcut's icon

The notification area features plenty of toggles

The task switcher has a button to launch the task manager

The app drawer has three view modes

There's an option to pick a different theme for the homescreen. There are a total of four preinstalled and they change the wallpaper and the look of the icons but not the functionality.

Another cool thing is the Home Selector - if you decide to install a third party launcher (or ten of them) this little app will help you pick which one shows up when you hit the home key.

Overall, LG has added a few interesting features, but there were still a few things we missed that other custom Gingerbreads UIs offer. Hopefully, when LG updates the Optimus Vu to Ice Cream

Sandwich, it will enable the extra enhancements that the 4X HD got.

Tabbed phonebook

Contact display and sort setting

Viewing a single contact

Editing a contact is pretty straightforward; you can add or remove fields as needed, as well as specify the types of phone numbers, email addresses, ringtones and even add notes.

Each phone number and email address field has inline call/message keys, which comes in handy when there are multiple numbers and emails.

Editing a contact

Voice and video telephony

The Call log • Smart dialing

Call notification* In-call screen

We also ran our traditional loudspeaker test on the LG Optimus Vu. It scored a Good result, so you probably won't be missing many calls with it.

Speakerphone test	Voice, dB	Pink noise/ Music, dB	Ringing phone, dB	Overal score
Samsung Galaxy Nexus	66.2	60.5	69.0	Below Average
Samsung Galaxy Note	62.9	61.7	68.0	Below Average
Apple iPhone 4S	65.8	64.5	74.6	Average
HTC One X	61.1	66.0	75.8	Average
Samsnug Galaxy Tab 7.7	69.1	66.6	75.7	Average
LG Optimus Vu	66.2	66.6	80.7	Good
Apple iPad 3	66.7	67.0	77.7	Good
Samsung Galaxy S III	75.1	66.5	75.0	Good
HTC Desire	76.6	75.7	84.6	Excellent

Messaging fights spam, schedules texts

The LG Optimus Vu does all common message types: SMS, MMS and email. SMS and MMS are handled through the tabbed Message app. By default it shows you conversation mode, but the other tabs let you view the Inbox, Outbox and Saved messages.


The messaging app • Blocking spam messages

You can customize how messages are kept - all of them or up to some user selectable limit (the default is 300 SMS and 100 MMS). There's also a Spam message box with fairly sophisticated settings at your disposal for blocking spam.

A press-and-hold on the text box gives you access to functions such as cut, copy and paste. You are free to paste the copied text across applications like email, notes, chats, etc. Another cool feature is that the volume rocker controls the text size.


Editing a message* The attach dialog and contextual menu

One cool and potentially very useful feature of the Optimus Vu is the reserved message - you can compose a message and schedule it to be sent out automatically at some point in the future, from within an hour to several months. There are quite a few situations where this could come in handy, for example, making sure you don't forget to send a "Happy birthday" note to someone.

Gmail is part of the core Android experience. It has an optimized interface and can handle multiple Gmail accounts. The extended Gmail features include batch operations, which allow multiple emails to be archived, labeled or deleted, spam report and of course conversation-style email view mode.


The Gmail app

The generic email client supports multiple accounts, and operates in much the same fashion as the Gmail one. If you need to manage multiple accounts (even from different services), the Combined Inbox feature will come in handy, although it has no conversation-style view like in Gmail.


The generic Email client

QWERTY keyboard that can shrink

The LG Optimus Vu offers a standard QWERTY keyboard, which features both portrait and landscape orientation.


The QWERTY keyboards

The keyboard has plenty of room on the screen in portrait orientation, which makes for fast two thumb typing. If you prefer typing with just one hand, LG has you covered - swipe the keyboard left or right to reduce its width by 30% and dock it to the left or right side of the screen respectively. The swipe gesture can be set to change the input mode instead.

Other input options include handwriting recognition (it handled even our poor penmanship) and a 3x4 keypad for old-school multi-tap texting (we're not sure why LG kept this option).



Other input options.

Straightforward gallery

Viewing photos is one of Optimus Vu's strong suits - the large 4:3 screen fits photos with no black bars. That and the good viewing angles mean the Vu can successfully double as a photo frame. It relies on the standard Gingerbread gallery - it automatically locates images and videos no matter where they are stored in the phone's storage.

The Gingerbread gallery

Once selected, you can view an image close up by pinch zooming or double tapping on the desired area. There are plenty of sharing options (from Gmail through messages to NFC) and also simple editing options (crop and rotate).


Gallery options

Media Home is an app that tries to turn the Optimus Vu into a highly functional digital photo frame - it offers big, easy to hit buttons for videos, photos and music. It's easy to start a slideshow or play some music and better still, the app can be set to launch automatically when you put the Vu in a dock or insert an MHL cable.

Media Home app takes care of photo frame duties

If you really want to show off, then you'll need the Video Producer. You choose on of the several predefined styles, add your photos and videos, throw in a soundtrack and you have a colorful, dynamic presentation on your hands.

You can fine tune it too - rearrange photos and clips, add captions and album art to each slide. When you're done, you can export your creation as a video (720p, D1 or QVGA).

Video Producer is an easy way to create great looking photo and video slideshows

Music player does not have the look

The music player is not exactly pretty but it gets the job done. The usual filtering by album and artist is enabled and you have alphabet search and regular search for locating songs quicker. The music player is DLNA-enabled too.


The music player

The Now playing interface places a big album art image in the center with controls above and below it. Swiping the album art left or right is the easiest way to skip songs back and forth.

A press and hold on the album art will bring up a search menu, if you need to look up the title, artist or the album. After that you can pick where to search - your music collection, YouTube or a general Internet search.

There are equalizer presets which become available when you plug in a pair of headphones. Dolby Mobile becomes available only then, too.


The Now Playing screen* The Search feature* Equalizers

When you're playing a song you get music controls on the lockscreen. They are hidden in a sort of notification area style panel that you need to drag down.

Music controls in the lockscreen

Decent audio quality

The LG Optimus Vu did way better than the disappointing LG Optimus 4X HD in our audio quality test. It's not that the phoneblet is perfect, but it should do just fine for most of the users.

When connected to active external amplifier the LG Optimus Vu achieved some pretty good scores for signal-to-noise, dynamic range and stereo crosstalk. The intermodulation distortion was rather mediocre and the extreme bass frequencies have been cut off, but the harmonic distortion was kept well under control. The volume levels were rather low, so we'd call this an average performance.

The good news is there's surprisingly little distortion when headphones come into play. The stereo crosstalk spikes by more than the average amount, but all the other readings remain virtually unaffected. It's certainly the better part of the Vu output.

Here go the scores so you can see for yourselves.

Test Frequency response Noise level Dynamic range THD IMD + Noise Stereo crosstalk

LG Optimus Vu +0.18, -1.69 -87.0 87.0 0.011 0.166 -83.7

LG Optimus Vu (headphones attached) +0.18, -1.58 -86.8 86.8 0.010 0.138 -47.9

LG Optimus 4X HD +0.02, -0.52 -74.8 74.8 0.345 0.318 -81.6

LG Optimus 4X HD (headphones attached) +0.03, -0.51 -70.1 69.9 0.815 0.811 -64.5

Samsung Galaxy Note N7000 +0.04, -0.08 -90.4 88.9 0.0044 0.066 -87.4

Samsung Galaxy Note N7000 (headphones attached) +0.12, -0.06 -89.7 88.4 0.0084 0.112 -51.6

Samsung I9300 Galaxy S III +0.03, -0.05 -90.3 90.3 0.012 0.018 -92.6

Samsung I9300 Galaxy S III (headphones attached) +0.11, -0.04 -90.2 90.2 0.0092 0.090 -53.1

HTC One X +0.02, -0.08 -82.1 82.1 0.137 0.393 -80.7

HTC One X (headphones attached) +0.10, -0.10 -80.6 80.6 0.174 0.459 -60.8

LG Optimus Vu frequency response

You can learn more about the whole testing process here.

Capable video player, wrong aspect ratio

The video player has a fairly simple interface, giving you just a list (with thumbs) of all the videos on the device. There's an alphabet scroll to help users locate videos faster but that's about it. You can of course play videos from the Gallery if you prefer its folder-centric organization.

To get the basics out of the way, the available controls during playback include a scrubber for jumping to various parts of the video along with the standard play/pause and skip buttons. There's a Dolby Mobile toggle as well.


The video player

The LG Optimus Vu handled everything we threw at it - DivX, XviD, MKV and MP4/MOV up to, and including, Full HD. The AC3 and DTS audio codecs are supported (those often cause problems on mobile devices), so you don't have to worry about sound compatibility issues either.

Subtitles are supported with settings for font, color, font and size. You can toggle subtitles on and off, but there's no option to manually point to a subtitle file, so the subtitle filename has to match the video filename.

The 4:3 1024x768 screen may not be perfect for 16:9 videos, but even with black borders, the screen is pretty big. On the upside, you can always stream the video over DLNA or better yet hook it up to an HDTV over MHL.

Good 8MP camera

The LG Optimus Vu comes with an 8 megapixel camera, capable of capturing 3264 x 2448 resolution images. There is a single LED flash, but it won't be of much help in most low-light situations.

We found the user interface to be quite convenient, though many of the important settings are inside the extended settings menu, so they take a while to toggle.

From the viewfinder you have access to the front/back camera toggle, digital zoom control, exposure compensation and flash mode. The extended settings let you adjust things like resolution, face detection, geotagging, ISO, white balance, self timer, scene and shot modes (the last two really should have been made available on the top level in the viewfinder).

The camera interface

While there is no hardwired shutter key, pressing the volume keys will snap a photo (either one works). It's not such a good idea though. First, the volume keys don't obviously have half press and second, it's hard to comfortably hold such a wide phone. Of course, there's the virtual on-screen shutter button as well.

Photos from the Optimus Vu have quite a bit of noise in them and the post processing algorithms that try to suppress it wipe out a good deal of fine detail and there are signs of oversharpening. There's still decent detail left, the colors are accurate and the Vu renders shadows well. Photos look at least as good as those coming from an Optimus 4X HD.

Here are a few sample shots we've taken with the LG Optimus Vu.



LG Optimus Vu camera samples

Video camera uses too much compression

The Optimus Vu's camera is capable of shooting 1080p videos at 30fps. The camcorder has the exact same settings available on the viewfinder as the still camera. From the extended settings menu you get a few more - resolution, white balance and color effects.

Videos are recorded in MP4 files with a bitrate of 10Mbps, which isn't enough for FullHD. The framerate is stable at 29fps, but a lot of the fine detail is lost to compression. Colors are okay, but the whole scene gets overexposed. That and the continuous autofocus doesn't know when to stop hunting.

Sound is recorded in stereo, with a sampling rate of 48 kHz and 155Kbps bitrate.

The camcorder UI

Here's a video sample we've uploaded on YouTube. Don't forget to switch the resolution.

Connectivity

The LG Optimus Vu is quite adept at connectivity. The version we're reviewing has CDMA and EV-DO, HSDPA and LTE. Of course, other variants will probably drop the CDMA connectivity but LG is stingy on details for non-Korean versions of the Vu.

Anyway, there's plenty of other connectivity features - Wi-Fi b/g/n with DLNA and Wi-Fi Direct, Bluetooth 3.0+HS, NFC and MHL. Then there's the T-DMB tuner too, but that's only of interest to Korean users as this standard is not as popular in other countries. It's not to be confused with the more widely available in Europe DVB-T digital TV broadcasting standard.

SmartShare is an app that lets you control a DLNA network - you can play media from other devices (e.g. NAS) on your phone or play something from the phone onto another device (e.g. a DLNA-enabled TV).

The Wi-Fi Direct is a technology, which enables devices to connect to each other without the need for a Wi-Fi hotspot. The beauty of it is in that only one device has to be Wi-Fi Direct-ready for the magic to happen.

Using this technology two (or up to eight) devices can share files in a more advanced, fast and secure way, paving the road to the eventual demise of Bluetooth for short-range file transfers.


SmartShare* Wi-Fi Direct settings

NFC is also on board in the form of a dedicated app called LG Tag+. With it you can create tags that enable Wi-Fi, GPS, control sound and so on. Just pick your setting, hit write on tag and tap the Optimus Vu on an empty tag.


The LG Tag+ app

There's another NFC app called simply NFC. With it you can share info instead of creating tags, which automate actions. With it you can share a contact, URL, text, a message, trigger a cal or add an event to the other phone's calendar.

Any info you've shared that way is stored for quick access within the application so you can share it again later without having to do it from scratch. The app will also keep a log of tags you've read with the Optimus Vu.

By the way, there are two ways to share info - the first is to share, say a contact, directly with another device and the other is to write the info on an NFC tag that can be later read by other devices.


The NFC app is the go to place for sharing info over NFC or writing that info on tags

We're not done yet - the LG Optimus Vu features an MHL port too - that means you can hook it up to an HDTV to watch movies or photos on the large screen or use a different adapter to enable USB host mode.

Gingerbread browser still has it

The web browser on the Optimus Vu has received some tweaks by LG. The auto-hiding URL bar is on top and has the refresh and bookmark buttons. The bottom control bar houses the back and forward keys, the tab switcher key, and the new tab key. The whole bar auto-hides, leaving only an arrow in the bottom right corner that can be used to bring it back.


The Optimus Vu web browser

When you open a new tab, the screen is populated with the 12 most visited sites, similar to how Firefox or Google Chrome work. A 3D card interface can be used to switch between the open tabs, though you can drop the eye candy and use a simple list.

The browser has Read it later functionality - it's an easy way to mark pages that you want to look at later. That doesn't download an offline copy of the page though, you'll still need internet access. Also, we found no way to sign into Read it later, so we assume it's just a coincidence of names and not the popular service (that was recently renamed Pocket).

The Optimus Vu supports double tap and pinch zoom. There's text reflow too - it adjusts the columns of text to fit the screen width. If you've pinched to zoom in, you need to double tap the screen to make the browser reflow the text.

The dual-core hardware enables the Optimus Vu browser to play 720p Flash videos but 1080p proved too much for it. You can play touch-optimized Flash games too.

Playing YouTube videos and Flash games

Chock-full of organizer features

The Optimus Vu comes with a respectable set of organizing features. We start off with the Office document editor.

The app in question is Polaris Office and it's one of the most advanced mobile editors we've seen. You can of course view documents - Word, Excel and PowerPoint documents and PDF files too. The app lets you add files as favorites or use a two pane file explorer (think Windows Explorer) with support for bulk actions.



The Polaris Office app

Edit mode offers almost a full set of options - text style, justification, paragraph formatting, bullets, even creating tables. If you're editing an Excel file, you get a formula wizard, resize rows/columns, border style, cell merging and so on. Even creating a full PowerPoint presentation is possible.

The Calendar has a tabbed interface so you can easily switch between Month, Week, Day and Agenda views. The app can sync with multiple online calendars and gives you an option to hide the ones you don't want (but keep or turn off syncing for them).


The calendar

Date finder is a useful tool that tells you what date it will be after several days (or what date it was that many days in the past). It makes checking the date a hundred days from now a breeze.

The LG Optimus Vu features an alarm clock application, which allows a lot of alarms to be set, each with its own start and repeat time. The Timer, World Clock and Stopwatch features are also part of this app.


The Alarm* World clock* Stopwatch

The organizer package also includes a useful voice recorder and a nicely touch-optimized calculator. The Memo app allows you to take notes and add media to them, such as images, audio, or location.

Organizer (continued)


The Voice recorder and Calculator • The Memo app

There are also news and weather apps. Both come from Yahoo.

Weather app* News

The so-called QuickMemo function is integrated in the phone's OS, allowing you to capture screen shots of anything (including the lockscreen!) using the dedicated key and scribble notes over them like you would on the LG Optimus 4X HD or the Galaxy Note.

The Vu comes with a comfortable stylus. As you draw, you can pick between different pen styles and colors and an eraser. You can choose to discard the screenshot if you just want to scribble something on an empty background.

When you're done, you can easily share the image or save it to the gallery.

Finally, there is an option to lock the capacitive keys on the front to prevent accidentally getting out of the app before you're done editing.


The QuickMemo function in action

There's another app that uses the stylus - it's called Notebook. It creates "notebooks" with different covers, different page styles (lined, graph, blank) and paper color. Each notebook can have different pages and you can insert regular text, images, videos, locations, dates and memos to complement your sketches.


The Notebook app can do tons more than a plain paper notepad

You have access to several "pen types" (including a spray paint can) and you can change color, thickness and opacity. If you want to draw some really fine detail, you can pull out a magnifying glass from the bottom that gives you a zoomed in view. You can change the zoom and move the magnifying glass around.

The Backup that comes preinstalled on the LG Optimus Vu can backup both pre-installed and downloaded apps, bookmarks, calendar, contacts and call log, messages, how you've arranged your homescreen and your system settings. You can do both manual and scheduled backups.


The Backup app can backup anything and do it on a schedule too

LG Readers is the preinstalled eBook reader on the Vu. The 4:3 aspect ratio is good for reading. The Readers app has a built-in store where you can buy new books.

LG Readers app

Google Play has the apps

The Google Play app market, previously known as the Android Market, lets you download various apps for your device. Upon launch of the Market app you're greeted with the tiled interface of the Featured window. A swipe to the right takes you to the Categories view.


The Google Play market

Swiping to the left takes you through Top Paid, Top Free, Top Grossing, Top New Paid, Top New Free and Trending (the ones with growing popularity).

Downloads are easy and won't take more than a couple of seconds. Before you agree to download an app, the Market will show you what features the app requires access to (e.g. Internet connectivity, access to the file system, etc.). You can also see whether updates are available for your currently installed apps by going to My Apps in the contextual menu.

Google Maps

The LG Optimus Vu managed to get a GPS lock in under a minute without A-GPS. A-GPS can speed up the lock (but it involves some cellular data traffic). Cell-ID and Wi-Fi positioning are also available if all you need is a rough location, but they need a data connection too.

Google Maps is a standard part of the Android package and we've covered it many times before. It offers voice-guided navigation in certain countries and falls back to a list of instructions elsewhere. You can plan routes, search for nearby POI and go into the always cool Street View.


Google Maps

The latest version uses vector maps, which are very data efficient and easy to cache. The app will reroute you if you get off course, even without a data connection.

3D buildings are shown for some of the bigger cities and you can use two-finger camera tilt and rotate to get a better view of the area.

Final words

The LG Optimus Vu is certainly an unusual device - some might see this as an advantage, but there are ergonomic reasons why phones aren't this wide. But the Vu isn't a phone, is it?

While not quite a full-blown tablet, the 4:3 aspect ratio of the screen is actually an advantage when taking notes or just drawing something using the stylus - 16:9 is popular with videos, not notepads or printed media.

It all revolves around the stylus - the Optimus Vu is a fine upper-mid-range device in terms of performance, screen and camera, but it's the stylus and accompanying software that carve out its niche.

As for where else you can get a similar experience, the Samsung Galaxy Note is the closest match. Its stylus is smaller, but tucks inside the Note itself and the 720p Super AMOLED screen is pretty cool too. Oh, and it's already on Android 4.0 ICS.

For the ultimate Android tablet with a stylus experience, we have to point to the Galaxy Note 10.1. The big stylus is even more comfortable than the Vu's and the tablet tracks it while you hover it above the screen, the way professional graphics tablet do. It's the size of one too. The only downside (and it's a big one) is that Samsung is taking its time releasing it due to last-minute adjustments and we are not aware of its launch schedule.

Samsung Galaxy Note N7000 • Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 N8000

Moving back to the realm of the achievable, if a bit off-kilter, the Sony Tablet P has a cooky foldable design and two screens, each 5.5" big. It's a dual-core device as well and it recently got its official ICS serving.

A Panasonic Eluga Power has a 5" 720p screen, a more powerful chipset than the Optimus Vu and it is IP57 certified for dust and water resistance.

Sony Tablet P • Panasonic Eluga Power

The other options don't qualify as "phoneblets" but they certainly blur the line. The Samsung Galaxy S III and the HTC One X come close in screen size - 4.8" and 4.7" respectively - as close as any droid that still counts as a phone has gotten.

Samsung I9300 Galaxy S III • HTC One X

Both are quad-core ICS-running flagships and are actually comfortable to use as a phone. Plus, you can always buy a third party capacitive stylus and install drawing and note-taking apps from the Play Store, which would bring you just about the same functionality as the LG Optimus Vu - actually more, as they have more computing power and more recent software.

And therein lies the problem that LG faces when marketing the Vu - it's a bit clunky to use (too wide for our hands), still stuck on Gingerbread (that's already two versions behind the latest Android release) and the capacitive stylus, while nice, isn't a feature that can't easily be gotten elsewhere.

The Optimus Vu doesn't quite work as a back-up device either - if you're going to sacrifice portability for a big screen, a $200 Google Nexus 7 tablet would be both cheaper and more powerful (even if you get the $250 16GB version).

To be fair, no-one expected the Samsung Galaxy Note to sell very well either, but it sold in millions. The Optimus Vu probably won't be able to match that (not least due to its more limited availability), but we're always happy to see LG experiment. It's what got us one of the earliest touchscreen phones (yes, even before the ubiquitous iPhone), the original LG Prada, and the LG Viewty cameraphone.

Galaxy Ace Duos

2012-07-05T22:36:00.001+05:30

Galaxy Ace Duos

Bring out the ACE in you.

Dual SIM support

You’re always on and ready to go. Now, so is your phone!
You’ll not only be able to stay connected with your duty and personal calls at the same time, You’ll have the luxury of choosing between the two SIMs for the stronger signal, or more suitable rate for you. With Samsung’s advanced Dual SIM feature, managing personal life and work get so much easier.

Dual SIM support – Smart DUAL SIM

You don’t need to worry about missing calls. If you got a call from SIM 2 while you’re getting one with SIM 1, Dual SIM (Always On) will catch the call and forward it to SIM 1 to not to miss it. While using data service with SIM 1, Hybrid Dual SIM will catch a call from SIM 2 and help you not to miss it.

Legacy of GALAXY Ace

The new Galaxy Ace Duos has excellence in performance with the addition of Dual SIM convenience! True to form, this mobile features a strong, fast 832Mhz processor, high-end 5MP camera, and unparalleled internet access. You know what you’re getting when they purchase the Galaxy Ace Duos - all the design sophistication and cutting-edge features that deliver premium performance topped off with Dual SIM access!

Rich Smart Experience

Samsung’s GALAXY Ace Duos offers an enriched mobile experience that will keep you in touch with your clients, colleagues, family and friends! The optimised TouchWiz UX works effortlessly as you navigate the mobile’s great features. Keep all your multimedia files close at hand thanks to ample storage. And right out of the box, the mobile comes pre-embedded with ChatON, a great new way to connect and share content with friends!

Easier Data Management with Kies Air

Consumer Benefit:In today’s world of digital convergence, being connected is more important than ever. That’s why this mobile comes with advanced connectivity solutions. Whether you’re syncing data or printing files away from the office, you can do more with your mobile than ever before.

Keep in Touch with ChatON

ChatON is Samsung’s own instant messaging service that uses phone numbers instead of usernames and passwords. ChatON enables single and multi-person conversations, multimedia file sharing and more.

SPECIFICATIONS

Network/Bearer and Wireless Connectivity


EDGE/GPRS	GSM 3G, HSDPA
Network	EDGE/GPRS (850/900/1,800/1,900MHz)
HSPA	HSDPA 7.2Mpbs
Wi-Fi	802.11b/g/n 2.4GHz
Bluetooth Profiles	PBAP, PBA, A2DP, GAP, HSP, HID, PAN, SDAP, MAP AVRCP1.3 HFP1.5

OS

Android, 2.3

Physical Specification


Dimension(HxWxD)	112.74 x 61.50 x 11.50mm
Weight	122g

Display


technology	TFT
Color Depth	262K
Size	8.89cm
Resolution	320 x 480 (HVGA)

Battery


Capacity	1,300mAh
USB Chargeable	Yes
Talk Time	Up to 1,010 minutes(2G)/380 minutes(3G)
Standby Time	Up to 570 hours (2G)/420 hours (3G)

Camera


Camera Resolution	CMOS, 5.0MP
Auto Focus	Yes

Memory


Internal Memory	3GB
Expandable	Up to 32GB

Chipset


Frequency	832MHz

Sensors

Accelerometer

Connectors


USB v2.0	USB 2.0
Earjack	3.5pi 4pin
MicroSD	MicroSD (up to 32GB)
Dual SIM Support	Smart DUAL SIM
Connector	Micro USB(4.5V, 500mA)

Location

AGPS Support, GLONASS Support

Services and Applications


Social Hub(Integrated phonebook with SNS, IM, and Email)	Social Basic 1.0
Music Hub	Music 1.0
ChatON, mFluent IM	ChatON
ActiveSync	Yes

Audio and Video


Video Format	MPEG4, H.263, H.264, 3GP
Video Resolution	QCIF, QVGA, VGA
Video Frame rate	30fps
Audio Format	AAC,AAC+,AMR-NB,AMR-WB,eAAC+,IMY,MIDI,MP3,OGG,WAV

Features and specifications are subject to change without prior notification.

The Lumia brand is more popular than Windows Phone in web searches

2012-07-05T22:15:00.000+05:30

Nokia’s Lumia series of smartphones might have become more popular than the Windows Phone operating system as a whole. Or at least that’s what the Google search statistics might lead you to believe.

A quick look at said stats shows that since its launch late last year, Nokia has made a good job of keeping the Lumia brand in the public eye. Sadly for Microsoft, that’s not the case with Windows Phone.

The graph clearly shows how popular the “lumia” search string is compared to “windows phone”. However, that’s understandable, as more people tend to look what a particular device has to offer them, rather than the OS it’s running. What’s interesting to note is the second graph, which shows how much “windows phone” and “lumia” have appeared in the news. As you can see, they are pretty much neck-and-neck enjoying almost equal media coverage.

Via

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
LG Optimus Vu	+0.18, -1.69	-87.0	87.0	0.011	0.166	-83.7
LG Optimus Vu (headphones attached)	+0.18, -1.58	-86.8	86.8	0.010	0.138	-47.9
LG Optimus 4X HD	+0.02, -0.52	-74.8	74.8	0.345	0.318	-81.6
LG Optimus 4X HD (headphones attached)	+0.03, -0.51	-70.1	69.9	0.815	0.811	-64.5
Samsung Galaxy Note N7000	+0.04, -0.08	-90.4	88.9	0.0044	0.066	-87.4
Samsung Galaxy Note N7000 (headphones attached)	+0.12, -0.06	-89.7	88.4	0.0084	0.112	-51.6
Samsung I9300 Galaxy S III	+0.03, -0.05	-90.3	90.3	0.012	0.018	-92.6
Samsung I9300 Galaxy S III (headphones attached)	+0.11, -0.04	-90.2	90.2	0.0092	0.090	-53.1
HTC One X	+0.02, -0.08	-82.1	82.1	0.137	0.393	-80.7
HTC One X (headphones attached)	+0.10, -0.10	-80.6	80.6	0.174	0.459	-60.8

Focusing The Technology

Samsung Galaxy S4

Key features

Main disadvantages

Sony Xperia V review

Key features

Main disadvantages

Handling

SPECIFICATIONS

Sony Xperia J

Key features

Main disadvantages

Nokia Asha 308 Dual SIM - Fast Touchscreen Phone with Dual Sim - Nokia - India

Da Thadiya Enthaanu Bhai (thecompleteentertainmentblogspotcom) Free Songs Download

Nokia 500 - Nokia 500 - 3G Mobile Phones with a fast processor and Wi-Fi - Nokia - India

Let the world follow you - Nokia - India

Nokia Lumia 510

The Details

Design

Windows Phone

Microsoft SkyDrive

Live Tiles

Price

Design

Dimensions

Height

Width

Thickness

Weight

Volume

Form factor

Phone form factor

Hardware

Connectivity

Connectors

Wireless connectivity

Syncronization

WLAN features

WLAN security

Photography

Main camera

Camera sensor (main camera resolution)

Camera resolution

Main camera focus type

Camera F number/aperture

Camera digital zoom

Camera focal length

Graphics

Graphics format

Data Network

Data bearers1

Power Management2

Battery model

Battery capacity

Battery voltage

Removable battery

Standby time (2G)

Talk time (2G)

Standby time (3G)

Talk time (3G)

Music playback time3

Video recording time

Display and User Interface

Display size

Touch screen technology

Display orientation

Display resolution - Height

Display resolution - Width

Display features

Samsung Galaxy S Relay 4G review

Key Features

Main disadvantages

Samsung Galaxy Exhilarate review

Introduction

Key Features

Main disadvantages

The retail box is eco-friendly too

Design and build quality

User interface: Android Gingerbread and TouchWiz 4.0

The phonebook is as good as always

Data bearers¹

Power Management²

Music playback time³