Vodacom has been a major mobile player since the beginning, and with the rebranded Vadofone 858 Smart (also known as the Huawei U8160) they are aiming to build on that fact by having a great little Android device ready for the low-end (cheap) smartphone market segment.

Going from using my daily phone (an iPhone 4) to this was a leap of faith, but I am glad I did. I put the iPhone away (actually, I sent it in for repairs), and bit the bullet. I lived with this phone for two weeks, and here are my impressions.

Physical Features
The Vodafone 858 is small. Really small. At 103.8 x 56.8 x 12.6 mm and weighing 104g, I had to pat my pockets a couple of times while riding my motorcycle just to make sure that it was still there.

It’s a plastic build, but feels well-made. It looks cute in the hand, and the bevelled edges really give something to the experience of just holding it. The front of the device houses a 2.8″ TFT black-border-framed capacitive (the good kind) display that is scratch-resistant. It didn’t pick up any scratches in the two weeks I had it, but then I have gotten into the habit of always putting my keys in the opposite pocket from my phone. There are four capacitive buttons at the bottom (home, menu, back and search), so no hardware buttons on the front. The grill earpiece at the top looks good, and the Vodafone branding at the bottom doesn’t detract from the overall aesthetics. You don’t actually see the ambient light sensor, but it’s on the front too.

Power/Lock screen button and 3.5mm earphone jack (normal kind) are on the top, and a long chrome-looking plastic volume rocker on the right. There is a standard Micro-USB port on the bottom, and the (only) camera and external speaker grill are located on the back plate. The back plate seems to be made out of a slightly rougher textured plastic, and it feels good. You don’t have a LED flash, which I always miss. There isn’t anything that flaps open, and that’s good, as flaps (that are usually there to protect ports) tend to break off.

In my opinion, a well thought out, and well-built little phone. There is a website where you can in theory design your own cover for the phone (mine was white), but I can’t seem to find a South Africa button on it.

Display
The display is a 2.8″ TFT capacitive display, 256k colours, with a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels (pixel density of ~143 ppi). So you have a small screen that displays things, and here’s the rub… it does so adequately. This might be what surprised me the most – the screen wasn’t a disappointment for me. I knew it was a lower-end phone, so my expectations weren’t sky-high, and I wasn’t disappointed. It’s not the most beautiful display ever, but it’s fine. I even read a novel on it (via the Amazon Kindle app) to prove a point to myself, and even that was fine. Not brilliant, but fine. In direct sunlight it begged for some shade, which my hand could happily provide.

When it came to the typing, I was once again pleasantly surprised to find that the keyboard was very accurate, and I am sure that if I were to have kept the phone longer, I would’ve been able to learn to type without errors on it. Now, this is not to say that the small screen doesn’t make things more difficult than on a bigger screen, it does – you have to keep a close watch on what you type. But for what it is, once again, it’s fine. Good, even. There were times typing and reading text that I wished the screen was bigger, but these were not deal-breakers for me. I would honestly say, though, that if you have larger than average fingers, and you would know if you do, this phone might just not be for you.

Performance and Battery Life
The Vodafone 858 Smart is powered by a 528 MHz ARM 11 CPU. This means that it’s slower than you would sometimes want it to be. Most applications take a few moments to open. Don’t expect a powerhouse, this isn’t it. I ran Whatsapp, Mxit and Opera Mini on it, and it worked beautifully (there was one odd glitch in Mxit where text would disappear, and re-appear when I tilt the phone, but I accepted it as a hopefully temporary application error).The Facebook app was slow on it, really rather use the web interface, which was fast. Twitter worked beautifully. I played Angry Birds, but I did have to switch off the sound and background animations to make it run smoother.

Battery life is was good. From its 1200mAh Lithium-Ion battery I managed to get two days of light use. Heavy use is of course different, but then again, I can deplete my iPhone’s battery in a few hours playing games, so this doesn’t mean much. I would wager a guess that a normal user would get a good day’s work out of it, and want to recharge it while sleeping.

As for storage space, you get very little on-board (130MB), but the phone did come with a 2GB microSD (expandable to 32GB).

Camera
This was as expected, really nothing to write home about, but adequate for a few quick snaps. The 2 Megapixel camera has no flash, and performed poorly in low-light. You would probably quite happily take photos of relevant things and message them around, but you would not win any photography prizes.

Everything Else
What I found surprising was that for such a cheap phone, you got all of the usual extras. And by this I mean, aGPS (slow, but functional), Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, as well as accelerometer, digital compass, ambient light and proximity sensors. The data transfer rates are fast enough with a theoretical maximum of (HSDPA) 3.6 Mbps. Oh, and FM radio, which worked fine for me.

It does run Android 2.2 (Froyo), though, which I found a disappointment. I hope they have a upgrade to Gingerbread sometime, even if only for multi-touch and better memory management. There is an unofficial build of CyanogenMod out there that takes it up to Gingerbread, but this should be done at your own risk, and possibly by someone who isn’t totally new to tech.

It comes with a few Vodafone branded apps, like Updates, and a Vodafone Opera Mini, subtly called “Internet”, which you should ignore and get the unbranded one from the market (I mean Google Play) immediately. Also installed are the usual Google apps (GMail, News, Talk, Maps, etc.), Facebook, Twitter, File Manager and Office Document Viewer. Clock, Messaging, Contacts, etc. all worked well. The level of Android customization and included bloatware were minimal, which made me happy. There is an optional keyboard you can use called Touchpal, but even though it worked well, I still preferred the normal Android keyboard. Settings were luckily easy to change, so this didn’t bother me.

Sound quality and loudness when talking was good, and the music app could go surprisingly loud, even if it did distort a little at max volume.

Conclusion
I can see a variety of people buying and using this phone: parents for teenagers, young people who want their first smart-phone experience, someone whose phone got stolen and wants something for the last six months before he upgrades, or someone who just wants to buy a good cheap phone. And for all those people, this would be a great phone. I walked into my local Clicks, and it was on sale, prepaid, for R800. And that is an amazing price for a smartphone. You might get something better for R1200, but you won’t find something better for R800, in my opinion. If you accept it for what it is, a cheap, slower, adequate entry-level smartphone, then you won’t be disappointed by the Vodafone 858 Smart.

Build Quality: 7/10
Performance and Responsiveness: 6/10
Aesthetics: 7/10
Display: 6/10

Score: 6.5/10

Before he had a cheap Android handset bestowed upon him by fate, Louis was a stranger to the green robot. He’s a professional singer with a keen interest in all things tech, regardless of the brand.

HTC
HTC is gunning to get back to their former glory, with three impressive new devices.

• One X – HTC’s first quad-core device, powered by Nvidia’s 1.5Ghz Tegra 3 chipset (backed by 1GB of RAM). The display is an almost-too-big 4.7 inches sporting an “HD” resolution at 720p. It also features a camera at 8MP, with a backside illuminated sensor (with zero shutter lag), a “dual shutter” that will allow you to take hi-res photos while recording HD video, as well as an f/2.0 lens. Pretty serious hardware.
• One S – The One X’s little brother, with a 4.3 inch qHD display, and a dual-core 1.5Ghz Qualcomm S3 processor (also sporting 1GB of RAM, like the One X).
• One V – Set to be HTC’s new entry-level device, with a single core processor running at 1Ghz, and only 512MB of RAM. It has 3.7 inch WVGA LCD display, a 5MP rear camera, and no front-facing camera.

The two top-tier devices will be running Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) with a brand new Senso 4.0 on top, with the One V running Sense 3.6 – there’s also deeper Dropbox integration, with the solid partnership between HTC and Dropbox giving owners of these devices an additional 25GB of space. Nice.

Samsung
So far the announcements by Samsung have been relatively pedestrian (they’re expected to unveil a revolutionary new phone well after MWC).

• Tab 2 10.1 – Not much different from it’s predecessor, the second (third, actually) iteration of the tab. There’s the same 1GHz dual core processor, also 1GB of RAM, a 3MP camera on the back and VGA camera on the front. What’s different? The design is slightly tweaked (speaker grilles on each side of the display), the display has changed to an WXGA 1280×800 PLS TFT, and they’ve added a microSD slot. It’ll run ICS with TouchWiz 4.0 slapped on top.
• Galaxy Beam – A phone packing a pico projector. This may be a novelty device right now, but we still think it’s a cool idea. The projector itself is a Texas Instruments DLP HD unit. The phone is powered by a 1GHz dual core processor, has a 4 inch 800×480 WVGA display and will launch with Android 2.3 – we can’t wait to give this a spin.
• Galaxy Note 10.1 – Did anybody actually ask for this? Still trying to revive the stylus, this is basically a Galaxy Tab with an updated 1.4Ghz dual-core processor and S-Pen support.

LG
We were actually surprised by LG’s lineup. Fresh designs, proper hardware, and it looks like they’ve let go of their “meh, it’s good enough” software design philosophy (we hope).

• Optimus Vu – LG’s answer to the Galaxy Note, this device features a 5″ IPS LCD display (with a 1024×768 resolution). It’s powered by a dual core 1.5Ghz Qualcomm CPU, backed by 1GB of RAM. It has a 8MP rear camera, and a 1.3MP camera on the front. We like the square design, we don’t like that it’s shipping with Android 2.3.
• Optimus 4X HD – LG’s new flagship is a bit of a monster: 1.5GHz quad core Tegra 3 chip, massive 4.7 inch IPS LCD display with a 1280×720 resolution, a gig of RAM, an 8MP rear camera, and a front facing 1.3MP camera.
• Optimus 3D Max – For us, the original Optimus 3D was a nausea-inducing gimmick. Still, LG are sticking to their guns with a new iteration featuring a 1.2Ghz processor from Texas Instruments, the usual 5MP dual cameras at the rear, and a 4.3 inch display with a disappointing 800×480 resolution.
• L3, L5, and L7 – LG’s new line of budget phones, with displays of 3.2, 4, and 4.3 inches, respectively. The L3 and L5 both sport an 800 MHz processor, and run on Android 2.3 – while the L7 runs on a single core 1Ghz processor and ICS. The L3 has a 3MP camera, and the L5 and L7 both have a 5MP number. None of the devices have front-facing cameras.

Sony
Sony Ericsson announced two new phones that both look to be departure from previous SE handsets’ fake chrome and shiny plastic. Finally. Hello translucent pieces of plastic!
It also looks like we can expect a more minimal, much more polished version of the Timescape UI, now know as “UXP NXT UI”.

• Xperia U – 3.5 inch “Reality” display, 1Ghz dual-core processor, 5MP camera, running Android 2.3, but with a definite ICS upgrade on the way.
• Xperia S – 4 inch “WhiteMagic” (really? who comes up with these names?!) display, 1Ghz dual-core processor, 8MP camera, also running 2.3 with ICS on the way. Also features NFC and HDMI out.

Huawei
So far, in South Africa, we’ve only seen Huawei handsets in various rebranded guises – think the Red Bull Mobile devices, or the low-end Vodafone devices. Now, Huawei has decided that they want to at least attempt to rock the smartphone world, and we really hope that we’ll be seeing these devices over here.

• Ascend D Quad – Features quad-core silicon specially made by Huawei called the K3V2, backed by 1GB of RAM. The display is a 4.5 inch IPS LCD running at 720p. It also has a 8MP camera with a backside illuminated sensor, and 1.3MP front-facing camera.
• Ascend D Quad XL – Same as above, but with a massive 2500mAh battery.
• Ascend D1 – Pretty much exactly the same as above, but with a 1.5Ghz dual core processor, and 1670mAh battery.

Oh, it seems that all these devices run stock-standard Ice Cream Sandwich. That’s right, no nasty manufacturer skins or customizations. Yes please.

ASUS
Ah, Asus. First they get it right with the original Transformer, then horribly wrong with the Transformer Prime (ok, that may be a bit harsh). Now, they’re trying to make up and innovate all at the same time.

• PadFone – The PadFone itself is powered by a dual core Snapdragon S4, has 64GB of internal storage, a 4.3 inch Superl AMOLED qHD display, 8MP rear (and VGA front) cameras, with 1520mAh battery, running Android 4.0 ICS. The big pull for the PadFone is the tablet dock – a “dumb shell” that turns the PadFone into a 10.1 inch tablet. The tablet dock can then also plug into the existing Transformer keyboard docks. There’s also a bluetooth stylus with built in mic and earpiece that can double as a headset when the device is docked. Interesting.
• Transformer Pad 300 – A lower budget tablet, expected to be priced in the same region as the original Transformer. There’s no skimping on the internals, with a quad core Tegra 3 processor, 1GB of RAM, 10.1 inch IPS LCD display (1280×800), and 16GB of internal storage. Why will it be cheaper? Plastic shell instead of aluminium.
• Transformer Pad Infinity – The next flagship model in the Transformer series also packs a quad core Tegra 3 processor, 1 GB of RAM, 10.1 inch Super IPS LCD display (1920×1200), 8MP rear (and 2MP front) cameras, both capable of 1080p HD video recording, all encased by brushed aluminium. An LTE version was also announced, but we’ll probably see Wi-Fi only over here.

And that’s it. The next few months are going to be interesting, even if only half of this line-up makes it to South Africa…

According to technology news site MyBroadband, cellular operator Vodacom will be the first to offer the Galaxy Nexus, at a retail price of R6999, or on a contract of R279 per month that included 100MB of data. Virgin Mobile will follow, with limited stock being available from the end of the month. Cell C’s time span is end of this quarter, 8ta “possibly” in the second quarter. MTN, have decided not to offer the device at all, saying “they have ranged alternatives to the Nexus that they believe provide greater benefits to customers” – which shows that they miss the point of a device like the Galaxy Nexus by miles.

The Galaxy Nexus is similarly specced to the Samsung Galaxy S II that has been available in South Africa for months, but unlike that phone, the Galaxy Nexus runs a pure version of the latest version of Android, Ice Cream Sandwich, the way Google intended. And, as with previous Nexus devices, you can expect to receive the next two or three iterations of Android before anyone else does.

Specs? Oh, alright. The Galaxy Nexus features a curved 4.65″ HD Super AMOLED display, 1.2GHz Dual-core TI OMAP 4460 processor with a PowerVR SGX540 GPU, a 5MP camera LED flash (and zero shutter lag), 16GB storage (not expandable), and a non-removable 1850mAh battery. For more details, go to the official Galaxy Nexus microsite.

Apps4Africa will be hosting a launch event this Saturday (11 February) to provide information about the South African leg of the competition, which, this year, is built around the theme of climate change. Apps4Africa is a global initiative encouraging individuals to develop technological solutions to environmental challenges.

The stated purpose of the event is to “provide individuals with information about the challenge, inspire attendees with knowledge provided by experts in the field and present a networking opportunity for budding entrepreneurs and innovators”. Registration for the event, which will run from 9 a.m. until 1 p.m. on Saturday, is free.

The categories for entry in the competition, which could net the winning idea $15000, are: Agriculture (Distribution), Early Warning and/or Disaster Preparedness, Resource Management, Forestry/Deforestation, Transportation/Traffic/Emissions, Food Security, Livestock, Health and Sanitation.

For more information, view the Climate Challenge brief, and, of course, attend the launch event!

Moving to the Galaxy Y from my daily driver (a Galaxy S II running an early, but stable, build of Ice Cream Sandwich) was difficult, but I bit the bullet, stashed the S II away in a drawer, and lived with Samsung’s cheapest for just short of two weeks. Read on, as always, for our impressions.

A solid little phone that doesn't feel cheap at all.

Physical Features
The Galaxy Y is tiny. Measuring in at 104 x 58 x 11.5 mm, it’s really tiny. And it’s also very light, weighing in at 97.5g – many occasions found us patting our pockets just to make sure it was still there.

The Samsung Gio showed the first signs of Samsung moving away from the cheap, fragile build philosophy that was found on the Galaxy 550 (and the Spica before it), and it’s no different for the Galaxy Y. Make no mistake, it’s plastic almost everywhere, but they managed to machine and slot everything together in a way that makes for a solid little phone that doesn’t feel cheap at all.

The front of the the device houses a three-inch display, covered by a supposedly scratch-resistant sheet of glass. The glass did pick up a little scratch or two from daily use, but they’re barely noticeable. Below the display there’s a textured plastic home button that looks quite nice, flanked by capacitive buttons on either side (menu on the left, back on the right). There’s an aesthetically pleasing earpiece grille above the display, along with silver Samsung branding and proximity and light sensors. All of this is framed by a nasty chrome-coloured plastic strip.

The power button sits on the right side of the device, with a volume rocker on the left. These buttons all manage to have great haptic feedback, even though they’re almost flush with the device’s body. On the top of the Galaxy Y there’s a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, and a standard Micro-USB port covered by a little plastic flap that will probably break off sooner rather than later.

The back plate of the device is a silver, roughly textured plastic that looks much better than it sounds. It looks like the plastic itself is silver (instead of being painted), so it may age quite well, handling scuff and scratches with aplomb. The back is also where you’ll find the main (and only) camera, and speaker holes.

All in all, the Samsung Galaxy Y is well-built and surprisingly solid for its price class.

The display is quite a disappointment.

Display
These days, the display is a very important component – it defines the device, especially when it’s the primary method of input as well. The Galaxy Y’s 3.0″ QVGA TFT LCD display is quite the disappointment.

Now, being used to a much, much larger (and technologically better) display makes it difficult to look at the 240 x 320 pixel resolution (and resulting pixel density of ~133 ppi) from an unbiased viewpoint, but goodness, this display is bad.

The combination of a very small screen, very low resolution, and very, very low pixel density means that edges are jagged, text becomes fuzzy and hard to read, most apps don’t display correctly (mostly due to developers not bothering with smaller screens anymore) and everything you look at seems like it has a grainy overlay. Another drawback of a display this small is that on-screen typing is frustrating, with the backspace key seeing more use than should be necessary.

We wanted to let it down gently, planning on arguing that you shouldn’t expect better at this price point, but when your eyes hurt and a headache looms after more than ten minutes, we feel it’s our duty to tell it like it is.

Performance and Battery Life
The responsiveness that the 832Mhz ARMv6 processor that powers the Samsung Galaxy Y delivers almost makes up for the poor display. Almost. It’s amazing how snappy this little device feels, especially considering that there’s only 160MB of memory available.

Every now and then an application takes a second or two to start up, but never to such a degree that it really matters much. The Galaxy Y’s user interface is responsive, with slight lag once in a blue moon, especially out of the box. We wouldn’t recommend that you try and run the latest and greatest 3D games, but it handled Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader and many similar applications without any problems.

Battery life is pretty good. We managed to squeeze just over two days of regular use out of the 1200mAh Lithium-Ion battery, with Wi-Fi, aGPS, Bluetooth, and 3G enabled.

As for storage space, you get 2GB built in, and as always, this can be expanded by microSD (up to 32GB).

Camera
Another obvious cost-cutting strategy, the 2 Megapixel camera is fine for happy snapping (especially if you put the resulting pictures through a few filters), but don’t expect it to take anything other than just okay pictures. There’s no flash, and it performs very poorly if there’s not enough light.

Everything Else
What is very nice is that you get a full house of the usual extras. There’s aGPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth, as well as a bevy of sensors: accelerometer, digital compass, and light and proximity sensors.

The fact that we didn’t even notice they were there is a good indication of how well things work. These extras have now become so commonplace in Android devices that you only notice they’re there when something goes wrong.

Software
The Samsung Galaxy Y runs Android 2.3.5 (Gingerbread). This may be due to the limits of the hardware, but the level of Android customization and included bloatware is, for once, at almost acceptable levels (the acceptable level at ZADroid HQ is “zero customization and bloatware”). The basic functionality, like the phone itself, contacts, messaging, and other system applications like the alarm clock and calculator are all Samsung variants, which is fine, because they’re all pretty good.

The included applications, like Kies, Social Hub, and Swype are not as intrusive as they are, for example, on something like the Galaxy S II running stock firmware. The version of the TouchWiz launcher running on the Galaxy is also stripped down and not that much of a pain to use.

For a change, we’d go as far as saying that this is a device that is totally fine without loading custom firmware on it. The Galaxy Y is, ironically, running a flavour of Android that is the closest Samsung has come to giving users a vanilla Android experience on one of their devices (excluding, of course, the Nexus devices).

Conclusion
At the insanely low recommended retail price of R1399 (if you look around you’ll find it for much less than that), you get a lot of bang for your buck with the Galaxy Y. It’s a shame that the display somewhat spoils an otherwise solid device. That being said, if you’re getting it on a cheap contract, and you accept it for what it is (a low-end device), you won’t be disappointed.

Build Quality: 7/10
Performance and Responsiveness: 8/10
Aesthetics: 7/10
Display: 5/10

Score: 6.5/10

Physical Features
At 111 x 53 x 9.4 mm and weighing 100 grams the Xperia Ray does strike you as smallish if you are used to the bigger 4″+ phones. On the front you have edge to edge scratch-resistant glass (not Gorilla Glass, but more on that later), some branding, capacitive back and menu keys and a physical home button which resides in a arch at the bottom of the phone.

The sleek front of the Ray.

The build quality is good as we have come to expect from Sony Ericsson. The outer shell is plastic yet the sides feel like metal. It doesn’t quite live up to the quality of the Arc, but didn’t feel flimsy or too light.

There are two things I liked right from the start. Firstly there is a big lack of chrome for a Sony Ericsson phone, with only minimal highlights here and there. Secondly the arch above the home button doubles as a notification light. One negative thing for me, as with the Arc, was the lack of backlighting on the capacitive keys.

The review unit we had was white but you can also get the Ray in black, gold and pink.

Display
Display quality is fantastic. The 3.3″ LED-backlit LCD runs at a resolution of 480 x 854 px which gives a pixel density of ~297 ppi. To put this into perspective, the Super AMOLED Plus on the Galaxy S II is ~217 ppi.

As with the Arc the Ray comes with Sony Mobile BRAVIA Engine.

Sony Ericsson’s website explains:

The Mobile BRAVIA (Best Resolution Audio Visual Integrated Architecture) technology is a suite of image processing technologies. It offers improved image quality from any signal; be it photos, videos, flash animation or websites. Unlike most image enhancing technologies the BRAVIA suite is hardware based using popular APIs such as OpenGL 2.0, Direct3D Mobile and Direct Draw.

Touch sensitivity was good and accurate. The only real issues I had was caused by my own fingers being used to a 4.2″ screen. I didn’t notice any of the “dead spots” on the keyboard that we experienced while reviewing the Arc.

The biggest problem with the display area was the “scratch resistant” surface. It didn’t really live up to what it’s called. Just with the phone in my pocket I started noticing tiny scratches on the device, bar the ones that were already on the review unit. If you are anything like us, then I would recommend a cover or a screen protector, as scratches on a screen aren’t cool.

Performance and Battery Life
Just like its bigger brother, the Ray is powered by a 1GHz Scorpion processor and an Adreno 205 GPU. You also have 512mb of RAM and 1GB of internal storage, although only 300 MB is available to the user. A 4GB microSD is included with the phone. So in a nutshell, you are getting the exact specs from the Arc. However even with the power from the Arc, there was noticeable lag. Nothing too bad but still just enough to be annoying every now and then.

Battery life was good; the phone lived on Wi-Fi when I was at home or at work. Even with the smaller form factor the Ray contains a 1500mAh battery which easily lasted from the morning until I went to bed.

Camera
Again, on paper we have exactly the same spec rear camera as the Arc. An 8MP camera with LED Flash, producing 3264×2488 pixel images and 720p video recording with continuous autofocus and video light. The usual Geo-tagging, face and smile detection, touch focus and image stabilisation is here. Also before you get worried, the “Exmor R” CMOS sensor is still there. If you didn’t read our Arc review, in short the sensor allows low light photos with low noise and better exposures. A technical explanation can be found on Sony’s website.

The back containing the 8MP camera and LED flash.

Paper stays paper and real life situations are always different. There is no exception here as the 8MP camera on the Ray just doesn’t match up to the one on it’s bigger brother. Don’t get me wrong, it’s still good, but not as good as the one on the Arc.

There is also a little bit more as this time around you get a VGA front camera for video calls, a nice touch as the Arc had none. Quality isn’t fantastic, but you can’t expect quality from a VGA camera.

Everything Else
The usual suspects are here with the Ray offering Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, stereo FM radio with RDS, accelerometer, proximity sensors, compass and aGPS.
One thing that has however fallen away is the HDMI-out.

Software
As per usual you are greeted by Sony Ericsson’s Timescape UI. The Ray runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) and aparently has a planned upgrade to ICS. I’m not going to go into detail about Timescape UI as we’ve discussed these in both the Arc and X10i reviews. Instead I’ll be focusing on some other areas of the software.

The first time you boot up the Ray you enter a first time tutorial. For users who are used to Android it might be annoying, but it’s a nice way of showing new users how to use the OS and where everything is. Again, as with almost any other phone you can expect preloaded apps. Luckily this time around Sony Ericsson have given us the option to uninstall some of them. Not all, but at least you can get rid of the Hot Shots and UEFA.com apps if you don’t want them. A licensed copy of Wisepilot was included on our review unit and worked pretty well.

Along with your phone and all the usual cables, headphones etc. you get PC Companion. With PC Companion you get to do five main things:

1. Update the phone software
2. Import contact info onto your phone
3. Transfer music and other media
4. Sync your contacts and calendar with your PC
5. Browse your phone via a desktop file browser.

The software is fairly straight forward and easy to use. It did however require us to download pretty much everything; PC Companion, Contact Setup, Media Go and Sync Zone from the intertubes.
For those who use their phones as a modem, the software includes a “Allow updates when using my phone as modem” tickbox in the settings.

Conclusion
Sony Ericsson has yet again produced a good phone. Its software shares the consistency of its bigger brother and with the added “First Time” guide it has a bit of an edge for new users. Even though the look and feel reminds me of a Nokia from time to time the lack of chrome and sleek finish makes this prettier than its rivals. If Sony Ericsson can fix the software lag and give you an upgrade to ICS for the Ray it would definitely be a strong contender if you are looking at the 3″ to 3.5″ Android phone market.

Build Quality: 7/10
Performance and Responsiveness: 6/10
Aesthetics: 7/10
Display: 8/10

Score: 7/10

The Galaxy Note occupies an odd space in the smartphone segment, positioning itself deliberately between phone and tablet, as evidenced by Samsung’s Galaxy Note microsite. It’s an idea many people seem to approach with skepticism, but I feel it’s a worthwhile tack on the smart device market, even if, at the same time, I wonder whether it is a solution in search of a problem (see also: SOAP).

Physical Features
This thing is big. I mean, it’s really big. At 146.85 × 82.95 × 9.65 mm, it’s not quite Galaxy Tab 7 material, so it’ll fit in your jeans’ pocket, but only just. Also, you’ll have to be prepared for people around you making fun of you for holding up a slab up to your face (expect plenty of “can you hear me now?” jokes). You’ll also have to be prepared for people calling it stupid shit like a “fablet”, because, you know, “it’s not a phone, and it’s not a tablet, but something in between.”

From left to right: Google Nexus S, Samsung Galaxy S II, Samsung Galaxy Note

When I said earlier that the Note is just a big Galaxy S II, I wasn’t kidding. It’s built almost exactly the same, down to the textured back and the layout of the front and side buttons. The Note is slightly heavier though, weighing in at 178 grams: about 60 grams heavier than the Galaxy S II. For completeness’ sake, let’s run through the external features: we’ve got a power button on the right-hand edge of the device, a volume rocker on the left, microUSB socket just beneath the home button at the bottom edge, and a 3.5 mm headphone socket just off the center of the top edge. Finally, hidden away in a snug little slot in the lower right edge of the device is the housing for the Note’s S-Pen. Once inserted, the pen has the slightest of notches to aid in getting the pen out again, and it doesn’t feel like it’ll ever wear down so that the stylus becomes loose in its housing.

Display
This is where it gets disappointing. Most tech outlets have been gushing about the display quality of the Galaxy Note, and, quite frankly, I can’t see where they’re coming from. From the moment I picked the device up for the first time, my eyes were telling me that something wasn’t quite right with the picture. But let’s get the details out of the way first.

The 5.3″ display on the Note is an HD Super AMOLED display, meaning it has a display resolution of 1280 × 800, which equates to a pixel density of about 285 ppi. Because it does not have the Plus designation, it means that the Note’s display uses the PenTile subpixel matrix.

To illustrate what I was talking about before we got into the technical details, we took a few close-up photos of the Galaxy Note’s display, alongside photos of the displays on the Galaxy S II and the Google Nexus S.

Here’s a photo of the Kies Air icon in the applications drawer. As one can see, the PenTile array causes a noticeable stippled effect on the solid orange colour, due to the blue subpixels being deactivated. Another artifact of the PenTile array is that it is physically impossible for the display to render a continuous vertical line, as evidenced by every second pixel only firing a thin green subpixel down the icon’s edge. Yet another annoyance is evidenced by the stippling on the “air” part of the label; for some reason some subpixels are switched off on white-filled text, resulting in a black/white stipple pattern. All of these visual artifacts were clearly visible to my naked eye at a normal distance for a phone.

The image of the Bluetooth toggle button in the status bar, to the right, also illustrates the stippling that occurs on several white graphical elements.

(Click for full-size) Left to right: Google Nexus S (S-LCD), Samsung Galaxy S II (Super AMOLED Plus), Samsung Galaxy Note (HD Super AMOLED)

To give you a better idea of the difference that the Note’s display has when compared to others, the above image compares the Gmail application icon in the applications drawer as rendered by the Google Nexus S, Samsung Galaxy S II, and Samsung Galaxy Note. As you can see, the S-LCD and Super AMOLED Plus displays have subpixel arrays that are arranged in a traditional grid layout, evidenced by the vertical lines produced by the red “M”. The Note’s rendition of the icon, however, suffers from the alternating red/blue subpixel layout PenTile specifies. Notice also that the edges of the icon is ill-defined on the vertical lines, as compared to the other devices.

Performance and Battery Life
The Galaxy Note is powered by a dual-core Cortex A9 processor, clocked at 1.4 GHz, and, like the Galaxy S II, is built on Samsung’s Exynos chipset, with the Mali-400MP as GPU. In terms of RAM, the Note is loaded up with 1 GB and has the (by now) usual 16 GB of internal storage, with a microSD slot allowing expansion of up to 32 GB. All of this means that, no, performance won’t be much of an issue, and no, storage won’t be much of an issue either. During my time with the Note, my experience was smooth, and the Note was always quick to respond to input. Top marks, right there.

Battery life was somewhat of a mixed bag. For the most part, battery life was well within expectations for my usage pattern, comparing favourably to my current Nexus S and most other review devices I’ve spent time with. I did have one instance where the Note barely lasted 12 hours before reaching critical battery levels, but as that was the exception to the rule, I’m inclined to discard it as an outlier (this also happened during the initial part of the review, so may merely have been an artifact of me playing too much with the device).

Camera
In terms of the camera, the Note has an 8 MP primary camera (with LED flash) capable of 1080p video recording, and a 2 MP front-facing camera. As with most of Samsung’s camera-enabled products, image quality is of a high standard, as evidenced by the camera samples below.

Not much else to say about smartphone cameras, these days, is there?

Everything Else
By now, this part of the review is almost a formality for the bulk of devices that come our way, but let’s run through it anyway, since there is one interesting bit to the Galaxy Note in this section. Here we go: FM Radio with RDS, Bluetooth 3.0 + HS, 802.11a/b/g/n WiFi, WiFi Direct, accelerometer, digital compass, proximity sensor, barometer, light sensor, aGPS. Phew!

Now the interesting bit is that the Galaxy Note can actually run its USB controller in host mode, meaning it can supply power to, and make use of, various USB devices. Unfortunately, we didn’t get to testing this specific functionality, but it should be a simple enough task to find examples of this on YouTube or the Internet at large.

Software
The Android system loaded onto the Note’s firmware is another version of Samsung’s TouchWiz 4.0 user interface, built on top of the Gingerbread (Android 2.3) codebase. That means you can expect the usual Samsung interface: a side-scrolling application drawer with manually-ordered icons, a bevy of Samsung-built widgets to present various bits and pieces of data on the homescreens, and a quick-access dock at the bottom of the screen.

The Note also has two of Samsung’s Hub applications: Social Hub and Readers Hub. Social Hub is, at its core, a one-stop shop to aggregate all your social network feeds into a single location, as well as aggregating all message-based conversations in a single location.

Readers Hub provides various reading applications built-in, such as a version of Kobo’s eReader application to read books. Readers Hub also supplies options for news reading (powered by PressDisplay) and magazines (powered by the popular Zinio service).

When I reviewed the Galaxy S II, I was entirely unimpressed with Samsung’s lockscreen implementation. I’m glad to report that, with the Note, they’ve improved upon that iteration by leaps and bounds, making use of a circle-dragging metaphor that’s more in line with the default lockscreen from Android 4.0/ICS.

The biggest draw of the note, of course, is its software integration of the S-Pen. Tapping the screen with the pen, in most cases, is equivalent to fingering it with your grubby mitts, except it’s a bit more accurate.

Speaking of accuracy, let’s digress for a moment. I tried my hand at some on-device sketching to see how it holds up in practice, and I have to admit, I came away somewhat disappointed. Where I touched the tip of the S-Pen on the screen, and where the application plotted the touch event on the display was, without fail, offset slightly on the vertical axis, making it exceedingly difficult to line up a new stroke with something already drawn, especially when trying to add any kind of detail to a drawing. Unfortunately, there’s no way to calibrate the digitising layer to correct the offset, so any kind of compensation is up to you.

I’m not ruling out the possibility that it may just be an artifact of how I use a pen (I’m a southpaw) and the compensation is 100% fine for other people, or that it was an isolated issue with the review unit we had, but the fact remains that said offset isn’t adjustable.

Anyway, back to the S-Pen and how it integrates with the software on the device. The capacitive menu and back buttons on the device aren’t responsive to S-Pen touches. You can, however, perform those actions by using the button on the pen: holding the button while swiping upwards from the bottom of the screen initiates a “menu” key press, while holding the button and swiping from right to left initiates a “back” key press. Finally, holding the button while momentarily pressing on the screen takes a screenshot,launching an activity where you can clip portions of the image into S Memo, the Note’s note-taking application, making it easy to pull in graphical content from other sources into your notes.

S Memo is relatively simple to use: starting the application presents you with a list of existing memos, where you can edit or view one of these existing memos, or create a brand new memo. Each memo is sized approximately to the portrait resolution of the Note, and there are a couple of backgrounds you can choose from, emulating surfaces such as graphing paper or yellow note paper. There are a few brushes to choose from when creating memos, such as a normal ink brush, or a felt-tip marker. S Memo also supplies a number of differently-sized widgets for use on the home screen, giving you the ability to pin a memo to the homescreen.

As you could expect with a device using pen-based input, the Note also supports handwriting recognition (when using the Samsung-supplied IME). There are two modes of recognition: one where text is recognised on-the-fly, inserting it into the focused text field, and “complete” recognition mode, where you physically have to confirm the recognition results, which allows greater flexibility in editing the text to insert. This pen-based editing makes use of the commonly-used gestures such as a vertical line between letters to split a word in twain, or a short right-to-left stroke doubling as a backspace.

Ultimately, the handwriting recognition performs well, with a good degree of accuracy. It suffers somewhat if your style of writing does things “the wrong way round”, especially if you re-order the strokes of letters: for example, I tend to write the letter T by performing the downward stroke first; when I lift the pen to perform the right-to-left stroke, the recogniser has already inserted an “l”.

As with Samsung’s other Android devices, the Galaxy Note also has access to Samsung Apps. The Note’s version, however, adds an additional storefront, accessible from the applications list as “S Choice”, which presents a list of applications optimised or a good fit for the Note’s unique capabilities. (It should be noted at this point that Samsung intends to release an SDK giving general access to the S-Pen’s capabilities.) I downloaded Catch notes, as it’s a note-taking application I regularly use on my own devices, and it was advertised as having support for the S-Pen. Unfortunately, the Catch implementation was rather underwhelming, managing to be vastly inferior to Samsung’s own offering. Hopefully things have changed between then and now, or will in the future.

Finally, the Note has the usual suite of software Samsung loads onto their devices, such as AllShare, Samsung’s DLNA-based streaming solution, Kies Air, Mini Diary and Polaris Office.

Conclusion
Everything about the Galaxy Note points to a very specific segment of the market, which is people who want a single unified device to do everything on, as opposed to having both a phone and a tablet to do things on. Ostensibly, the pen input would also be a drawing (ha!) feature, but with the way mainstream tech reporting has managed to make any kind of pen input a negative thing, conjuring up images of Microsoft’s long-dead Windows Mobile operating system (find me a recent article about a stylus-based device on which the author doesn’t heap ridicule, and I’ll buy you a drink), this is questionable at best.

I can’t fault much about the software stack on the Galaxy Note: in the time I used it, it was perfectly stable. The display, however, is a major let-down for me, and this is something that seems to have polarised opinions on the Internet at large. Personally, the artifacts introduced by the PenTile matrix were visible to my naked eye at a normal viewing distance, especially the “stippling” effect when viewing certain colours. For the price the Note retails at, you expect better.

Ultimately, though, if this is what you want, you can’t go very wrong by the Galaxy Note. It does what it needs to in a form factor that’s more comfortable than it looks. If, however, you’re already rolling your eyes and thinking up phone-tablet portmanteau jokes, give this one a skip, because it probably isn’t for you.

Build Quality: 10/10
Performance and Responsiveness: 10/10
Aesthetics: 6/10
Display: 5/10

Score: 7/10

One the criticisms surrounding Android from the beginning is that there’s never been an official set of design guidelines and interface patterns. The result was a slew of very functional, but very spartan (some might even go so far as saying ugly) looking applications. When Google appointed UX expert Matias Duarte, things started heading in an altogether more consistent direction. Today, Android finally gets something that other platforms have had from the get go: a guide dedicated to both design standards and best-practices for user interfaces and interaction patterns.

The site, dubbed simply Android Design, aims to both give developers and application designers a deeper understanding of the creative vision and principles for Android going forward, in addition to being a straightforward, to-the-point resource for the best way to create a consistent, beautiful user experience on the Android platform.

Speaking to Wired, Matias Duarte points out that the launch of the Android Design Guide was inevitable:

“We haven’t really had a style guide,” Duarte says. “We haven’t really given you a lot of guidance on how to migrate your application from a phone, perhaps, to a tablet. We’ve done so only by example.”

“Android has had a lot of terrific developer API level documentation,” Duarte tells me, speaking of the code that developers use to understand how Android works, and how to make applications for the platform. “But within our style guide we have things [where] we think, unequivocally, this is the way to make it Android.”

“This is the second part of our Ice Cream Sandwich launch,” he says. “As this site goes up, I can feel like it’s finished. Like ICS is truly complete.”

The site has three main focus areas. Style, which covers everything from from themes through to typography. Patterns tells you how the user expects to interact with your application. Building Blocks is a “directory” of the standard user-interface elements that are available for development of an Android application.

A device with a reassuring heft to it.

Physical Features
The Optimus 3D won’t win any prizes for being the lightest or skinniest device out there, and we like it that way. Measuring in at 128×68.8×11.9mm, with a weight of 168g, this is a device with a reassuring heft to it. The utilitarian design and quality materials used for construction come together to produce a device that feels like it will survive nuclear war.

The front of the device is a solid sheet of glass flanked on the top and bottom by small strips of what could be brushed metal, but is more likely a durable plastic made to look like it. The top strip has a dark metal grille covering the earpiece, while the bottom one is bare. The glass covers what is mostly display, with a row of four capacitive buttons below it (menu, home, back and search), and the LG logo, as well as proximity and light sensors just above it.

Around the back of the Optimus 3D, there’s a strip of brushed stainless aluminium containing the dual cameras and flash, set into that rugged soft-touch plastic that we like so much. There are also holes for the speaker and another LG logo. The back curves up to the sides of the device, meeting a strip of harder, shinier plastic, giving it a subtly curved, bevelled look. The left side of the Optimus 3D houses the volume rocker, which is nice and clicky, as well as a dedicated 3D button (more on what this does later). The right side has micro-USB and HDMI ports covered by those nasty plastic flaps that will probably break off after a while. Along the top there’s a standard 3.5mm headphone jack, and the power/lock button.

As mentioned before, we love solid, chunky devices when they’re designed with subtlety and high-quality materials just as much as we love those skinny, lighter-than-air devices. The Optimus 3D fits the bill, feels good in hand, and will unquestionably last you well past your next upgrade or two.

Display & 3D
The Optimus 3D’s 4.3-inch LCD capacitive touch display runs at a resolution of 480×800 pixels, giving it a pixel density of ~217 ppi, which isn’t shabby at all. Colour reproduction is good, and brightness and contrast is on par with the best LCDs out there. However, the technology that enables glasses-free viewing of 3D content on the display, an electronic parallax barrier that sits between the subpixels and the backlight of the display, is noticeable when not enabled, and may cause edges that would normally be quite sharp to become fuzzy – which makes this one of the less-ideal displays to read copious amounts of text on.

Predictably, there's a sweet spot.

That being said, the Optimus 3D was never intended to be a device to read on. Its big selling point is stereoscopy. Both the display, and the dual cameras make that pretty obvious. The aforementioned parallax barrier technology that enables you to view 3D content without glasses is very similar to what is being used on Nintendo’s 3DS. Without getting going into specifics, there are tiny slits that enables the display to send a different image to each eye (however, technically, in this implementation it is two slightly different sources of light).

How effective is it? Well, predictably, there’s a sweet spot. If you don’t view the display from exactly the right angle, things are a blurry mess. When you get it right, though, it works quite well, and is pretty impressive (but, effectiveness seemed to differ depending on both the content, and the person viewing that content). Doubly so for content you’ve created yourself using the dual cameras. There is just something about being able to capture depth (and, to a degree, scale) in a photograph that, for a fraction of a second, doesn’t make this seem like a novelty. You’ll get this feeling every now and then as you watch 3D videos on YouTube, or play games that support 3D via OpenGL ES (although, with an upgrade, most games that make use of OpenGL ES become compatible). After a short while, though, your eyes start feeling funny. Your head buzzes and somewhere deep down below a tinge of nausea tugs at your very being – and suddenly it all feels very wrong, and you realize that this particular flavour of glasses-free 3D display is nothing more than a novelty after all. The future will have to wait just a little while longer.

Performance and Battery Life
LG claims that the Optimus 3D features the world’s first (they love that phrase) “tri-dual” configuration: a dual core (1GHz ARM Cortex-A9 CPU), dual channel, dual memory architecture based on the TI OMAP 4430 chipset (which also features a PowerVR SGX540 GPU). We can say that this device is very, very snappy. No stutters, lag or noticeable slowdowns were experienced, even with LG’s usual half-arsed software customizations present. We’re guessing the Optimus 3D has to be a powerhouse in order to be able to pump out two images when 3D is enabled, and it shows, even with only 512MB of RAM.

As for storage, there’s 8GB internally available, which can be expanded with a microSD card. The battery is a relatively large capacity 1500mAh number that would just-just make the end of a day of moderate use. If this is going to be your daily driver, you’re either going to have to keep a close eye on battery levels, carry a cable with you, or both.

The cameras are spaced just far enough apart to simulate what the human eye sees.

Camera(s)
With the Optimus 3D you get not one, not two, but three cameras. Two 5MP cameras (with an LED flash) at the back, and a 2.1MP camera on the front. When you’re taking a picture with the main cameras, you can choose whether you’d like to shoot 2D (which uses only one of the cameras, giving you a picture with a resolution of 2592х1944 pixels), or 3D. 3D mode, predictably, makes use of both cameras at once. The cameras are spaced just far enough apart to simulate what the human eye sees, and they actually take two pictures at once. The file is saved as a JPS file – which is just a JPG file with an extra bit of metadata to help compatible devices (such as the Optimus 3D) recognize it as a stereoscopic image and display is accordingly. Renaming it to JPG gives you a stereoscopic image file that can be viewed cross-eyes, glasses-free (see examples below). Nice of LG to use a recognized, standard format so that the viewing 3D content isn’t limited to their devices.

The cameras themselves are very competent, performing as well as expected in low light, but really coming into their own with enough light. Colours were pretty spot-on, and well saturated. 3D mode works really well if you’ve got multiple “layers” to given context to, and accentuate, depth.

As for video, you get 1080p in 2D mode, and 720p in 3D mode. Results aren’t bad at all, but there is a bit of wobbliness (a known problem for mobile cameras) that doesn’t go too well with stereoscopic video.

Everything Else
Yes, it’s all here. Accelerometer and Gyroscope? Present. Proximity and light sensors? Present. All manner of radios? aGPS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, HDSPA/HSUPA, all here.
Everything works as you would expect, with no hiccups experienced in our time with the Optimus 3D.

As mentioned earlier, there’s also HDMI-out, which is a nice touch, but something we didn’t get around to testing. This means that, theoretically, you could play back 3D content from this device, on any TV that can handle it. Nice.

Software
The LG Optimus 3D we reviewed was powered by Android 2.2, but this can be upgraded to 2.3 (and apparently this is one of the LG devices that will also see Ice Cream Sandwich). LG’s Optimus UI 2.0 sits on top of Android (we don’t rate it too highly – read our LG Optimus Black review to see why) – and you would think that LG would have tweaked it here and there to make the most of their main selling point, the glasses-free 3D display, but no. All you get is a duct-taped-on suite of separate 3D applications lumped into a group in the application drawer.

These include: a 3D meta-menu of sorts (accessed by pressing the dedicated 3D button on the side of the device), a 3D gallery application, 3D camera mode, and two or three bundled 3D games from Gameloft. Poor show. Oh, and 3D content on YouTube works as well. Granted, all of these worked well, and as intended, but as seems to be the case with LG’s software side of things, it kind of feels like an afterthought. Hopefully this strategy will change from Android 4.0 onwards.

Conclusion
LG has a solid, desirable piece of hardware in the Optimus 3D, at a very good price point. Yes, the 3D part of it, which is their selling point, is little more than a novelty, but when that novelty wears off you’re still left with one powerful, very competent device. If you can live with the software, which does what it does with no frills (and no gusto, it seems), then the LG Optimus 3D is a pretty good device, but not one we can wholeheartedly recommend if you’re not really interested in the stereoscopic angle.

Build Quality: 9/10
Performance and Responsiveness: 7/10
Aesthetics: 7/10
Display: 7/10

Score: 7.5/10

The EVO 3D is an impressive piece of hardware, powered by a dual core 1.2GHz processor, which is backed by 1GB of RAM. Around the front, the device’s 4.3-inch qHD display features parallax-barrier glasses-free stereoscopic technology, which you can use to view the 3D images and videos that can be captured with the dual 5MP cameras.

As with all HTC’s devices, the EVO 3D comes with HTC Sense, albeit a version tweaked for its 3D display, featuring 3D menus and an active lockscreen, and all the usual value-adds that we’ve come to expect, like free maps and navigation, and HTC Watch.

The HTC EVO 3D is the second device of its kind, after LG’s Optimus 3D was released earlier this year, but we have a feeling that the EVO 3D will give you a more polished experience overall (keep an eye out for our review of the Optimus 3D later this week).

The HTC EVO 3D’s RRP is R6888, and it looks like second-tier service providers like Altech Autopage, Nashua Mobile, and Virgin Mobile will be the first to offer it. You can also buy it directly from Lab88.

See HTC’s website for more.