HTC HD 7 Review and Price

HTC HD 7 is a big and heavy phone but one that feels solid and durable. The screen? Well, any bigger and we’re talking tablet. The best thing – and that’s no news by now – the whole package handles comfortably enough. So let’s skip right to the kickstand – after all,it’s what makes the difference from the HD2 and the Desire HD.

To begin with,HTC HD 7 is the only piece of metal on the phone – tipping the scales at 162g already, we don’t think any more is needed. The kickstand is another example of good use of space no the HTC HD7. It folds nicely around the camera deck at the rear. The whole thing has ornamental value too. The chrome kickstand is a nice accent matched by a thin strip further down the rear.

The camera deck itself (housing the lens, dual LEDs and loudspeaker) is flashy yellow – the same color we’ve seen on the internals of some recent HTC phones. With the kickstand folded into place, very little of it is visible – only enough to be a discreet accent. The matt plastic at the rear is reasonably fingerprint-proof.

It’s nearly all-screen up front and it looks good. That’s in terms of sheer size though it isn’t great to look at – for image quality. It’s a regular LCD but that’s not what we’re complaining about.

HTC HD7

To start on a positive note, we have no issues with sensitivity – the capacitive unit has great response and silky smooth, precise performance. Watching videos and browsing, and reading text, are all nice and comfortable on a screen that size and resolution. The viewing angles and sunlight legibility are passable.

It’s the subpar contrast, subdued saturation and surprisingly weak brightness that we’re not happy with. The screen falls obviously short of Super AMOLEDs and the iPhone’s LCD – no doubt about that. But it’s also certain that the image quality is inferior to that of phones like the LG Optimus 7 and even the very own HTC Trophy.

And as if this is not enough – the HTC HD 7’s screen has another problem. Its response time is really poor and that’s most prominent when scrolling listed menus. You’ll notice it in the launcher where some kind of ghosting causes the text labels of the menu items to fade away while you scroll. The same happens elsewhere in the interface where you need to deal with lists. Quite surprisingly, this is less noticeable in the browser (as you’re scrolling or zooming in on text) or the image gallery. That’s what counts after all, but the unpleasant effect in the main menu (and video player, too) is nevertheless hard to ignore.

The HTC HD7 screen is generally unimpressive

Above and below the display glass there are two long and thin grills which can easily be mistaken for stereo speakers. They’re not – we regret to say. They have no purpose at all other than getting annoying amounts of dust – which is nearly impossible to clean at that.

Above the display you will only find the earpiece and a status LED, as well as ambient light and proximity sensors, all embedded beneath the grill. .

Underneath the screen we find the typical Windows Phone 7 controls – Back, Start and Search. They’re all capacitive keys with excellent sensitivity and haptic feedback. Pressing and holding the middle Start key will activate Voice Commands.

The two useless grills at the top and the bottom plus some of the typical controls

The right-hand side of the device hosts the volume rocker and the dedicated camera key. The volume rocker is a thin button that’s quite stiff and with such low stroke there’s almost no confirmation of a press being registered.

The dedicated camera key is also small and thin, but its feedback is much better. It has a different problem though. Because of the peculiar design of the rear panel, the shutter key is closer to the middle than it should be. Being away from the natural position of the index finger – in landscape hold – it’s hard to reach and press comfortably.

There is nothing of note on the left side.

The volume rocker and the camera key are on the right • the left side is empty

The only thing to at the top is the Power/Lock key, which is thin but prominent enough.

Power/Lock key on top

The bottom part of the phone features the microUSB port, the mouthpiece and the 3.5mm audio jack.

The 3.5mm standard audio jack, the microUSB port and the microphone pinhole are all at the bottom

At the rear of the HTC HD7 is the 5 megapixel camera lens, stuck between the loudspeaker grill and the dual LED flash.

The camera lens is centrally placed and it’s still the natural place for your index finger to rest when holding the phone during calls. There’s no lens protection – except for a slight embedding – even carrying it in your pocket you risk getting it scratched.

The camera lens between the loudspeaker grill and the dual LED flash

There are only two positions for the kickstand and you can’t fix it between fully-open and folded. It’s spring-assisted and generally provides solid enough support for the phone. The thing is, the lack of front-facing loudspeakers is felt when you use the kickstand.

The kickstand is a nice accent, and does the job too

Removing the battery cover reveals the SIM bed and the 1230 mAh battery. It is quoted at 320 hours of stand-by and five hours and twenty minutes of talks in a 3G network.

The 1230 mAh Li-Ion battery

The HTC HD 7 is a solid and generally well-built phone. Most of the HTC HD 7 is high quality matt black plastic, but there is some metal too – on the kickstand, which doubles as a camera plating. Good use of space make the otherwise big set comfortable enough to handle.

The screen size is an obvious advantage – though it’s not necessarily how you might feel about it. We think HTC did a great job of building the phone around the 4.3” screen but failed miserably in picking a decent screen in the first place. If you’re uncertain, the best thing would be to give the phone a try before buying it. And make sure you like what you see – the image quality issues are so easily noticeable that it made us even wonder if it’s not our unit to blame though we snatched it off the retail network.

The HTC HD7 is a handful

HTC Desire Z review: Desires A-to-Z (Part 3 – User Interface)

New HTC Sense

The latest version of Android – v2.2 Froyo is an important change on its own too, as we’re about to see in the benchmark section.

The Desire Z however also comes with the newest version of the HTC Sense user interface for Android – we already saw it in our HTC Desire HD review – now it’s time to see how it fits the smaller screen. We’ll also see how it handles on a slower CPU.

Here’s our video starting with a demo of the fast system booting:

At the bottom of the screen there are three virtual keys and an arched scrollbar. The left key launches the main menu. The middle key is a shortcut to the Phone app and the right key brings up the “Personalize” menu. The way to place stuff on the screen has slightly changed but more on that later.

The scrollbar at the bottom is just an indication of which homescreen you’re on – it can’t be used for actual scrolling.

The Desire Z has the Leap view option: upon a tap or a pinch, it zooms out to display the thumbnails of all seven homescreen panes at once. With a press and hold you can rearrange the homescreens.

Leap View lets you quickly switch between the available homescreen panes

Seven homescreens is all you get though – there’s no add or delete option. With all those widgets (which are quite useful too) you’ll want to keep all of them anyway.

The HTC Sense UI offers Scenes – essentially six custom homescreen setups (Work, Travel, Social, etc). Each scene changes the wallpaper and the widgets on the homescreen. For instance, the Work scene has a stocks widget, while the Social offers a Twitter widget.

Scenes are now selected from a fancy-looking 3D card interface but other than that, their functionality is mostly unchanged. You can modify existing scenes (older Sense versions prompted you to save modifications as a new scene) and you can get more scenes from the HTC Hub.

Preset scenes

Switching between scenes takes a couple of seconds but sure allows wide customization – the business and personal modes that some competing phones offer seem quite limited compared to the HTC Scenes.

Social scene and Travel scene • Two different themes

The main menu has the typical icon grid layout, but you can switch to a list. In the list layout, there’s an alphabet scroll, which makes locating apps faster. It’s similar to what you used to see in TouchFLO on older HTC WinMo phones.

The grid layout • the list layout • alphabet scroll

Tapping the Personalize button brings out a whole screen of things to choose from – for the display (scenes, wallpapers and skin), for the homescreen (widgets, shortcuts, folders, etc.) and even sounds (ringtones, alarms, notifications and Sound set, which is a sound theme of sorts).

In the widget section, both types of widgets (HTC and Android) are placed on the same page. There are so many of them you may find the seven homescreens short. You can download new widgets off the Market or the HTC Hub.

Plenty of HTC widgets • the Settings widgets are simple one-tap switches

When you select a widget you are prompted to choose between several versions – most widgets have at least two styles. The different versions typically offer at least two sizes of the widget and different skins. For example, there are twelve different clocks. That’s right, twelve!

Some different styles of the Clock widget

Some widget styles even offer different functionality. The Twitter widget for instance – one version shows updates for the people you follow and lets you tweet, while the other version is more compact but only lets you tweet from the homescreen. There’s nothing stopping you from using both, of course.

The two versions of the Twitter widget are functionally different

One of the things that have changed is the notification area – it now features a list of recent apps, just like a task switcher. A press and hold on the Home button works too. Maybe some people will use the notification area as the easier way to switch apps, but we would have preferred some quick switches for Wi-Fi, GPS, etc. rather than duplicated functionality.

The new notification area doubles as a task switcher • the regular task switcher

HTC haven’t really had a long record of QWERTY-enabled Androids. Still, some work has been done to improve the experience. For one, there’s a landscape mode for the homescreen and main menu and there are two customizable shortcuts on the hardware keyboard.

Here are some benchmarks of the HTC Desire Z vs. the original Desire. The Desire is clocked at 1GHz but was still running Android 2.1 Eclair when we tested it. The Desire Z on the other hand has been downclocked to 800MHz but is running the much faster Android 2.2 Eclair.

The two phones are about equal at graphics and the Desire Z’s memory score is lower – but check out that CPU score and speed in BenchmarkPi. The Desire Z is much faster despite its 20% lower clock speed.

HTC Desire Z benchmarks (800MHz, Android 2.2 Froyo)

HTC Desire benchmarks (1GHz CPU, Android 2.1 Eclair)

So, the HTC Desire Z has no performance issues. And the benchmarks are indicative of just how important it is for a phone to get updated to Froyo – it’s as good as a CPU upgrade. The actual CPU upgrade of the Desire Z also helps for its high benchmark scores.

One last thing – HTC have done some magic and the Desire Z boots extremely fast. In fact, it takes more time to press and hold the power key than for the phone to boot. Note that if you take out the battery, the Desire Z will have to do the regular slow boot.

It’s slightly annoying that you have to let go of the power key before the phone would boot – so you have to guess if the press has been long enough (it vibrates only after you let go of the key). Still, it’s pretty cool that apps preserve their state after the restart – so if you were browsing a web site before shutting of the phone, launching the browser after you start it up again brings you to the same page.

HTC Desire Z review: Desires A-to-Z (Part 2 – Design and construction)

Design and construction

The HTC Desire Z doesn’t look much like the original Desire. In fact, there seems to be more of the Google Nexus One in it. The overall styling feels just the right bit more chiseled and angular. Having just reviewed the Desire HD – recycling an old design is not the way to get us impressed. In the case of the Desire Z, we’re glad to report it’s got a distinct and easily recognizable face.

HTC Desire Z

Quality materials and strong build are traditional HTC values, to which the Desire Z remains faithful. Well, for the most part anyway. The phone’s key design element – the Z hinge – is perhaps the most questionable too. But we’ll get there in due time.

The metallic front frame and battery cover both have a soft brushed feel. The rest of the surface is rubbery and very pleasant to the touch. The phone’s body (save for the screen obviously) is slow to take fingerprints and thanks to the light-color finish even when it does eventually get greasy, smudges are hard enough to notice.

The new S-LCD unit is a solid performer indoors although the contrast is decent at best. The sunlight legibility however was a bit of a letdown. Indeed the Desire Z beats the regular LCD of the Desire HD in the bright sun by a whisker but it’s no match for SuperAMOLED or Retina screens.

Now, yesterday we did have a hiccup with falsely identifying the Desire HD’s screen as an S-LCD unit but you can reast assured that’s the only thing we got wrong about it.

The Desire Z’s screen is indeed superior to Desire HD’s (it’s fair to note that the pixel density is in the Desire Z’s favor) but by a small margin. The S-LCD screen has better contrast, slightly more saturated colors and superior viewing angles compared to regular LCD. But it falls obviously short of SuperAMOLED – and even Retina – in terms of both contrast and viewing angles.

Desire Z display next to iPhone 4 one

As to screen sensitivity, the Desire Z reacts to the gentlest taps thanks to the capacitive technology. The touch sensitivity is so high that it sometimes detects your finger from a few millimeters as you’re just about to touch it.

The typical Android controls (back, contextual menu, Home and search) are right below the display. They’re capacitive controls – and the transition to and from the touchscreen is seamless..

The optical trackpad is underneath, and outside the touchscreen. It can be used to scroll both menus and lists, and it even lets you select items and launch apps. But it’s not essential really. The touchscreen is more than enough to get you around the interface. The trackpad can come in useful for jumping links on a webpage and that’s probably it. We really couldn’t find a better use of this control.

Above the display you will only find the earpiece and two embedded sensors (proximity and ambient light). There is also a hidden status LED under the earpiece grill.

Trackpad and capacitive controls • earpiece on top

Sliding the HTC Desire Z open reveals one of its key features – the four-row full QWERTY keyboard. Before we get to the sweet four rows of buttons, a word on the actual form-factor. The Desire Z is a slider for the lack of a better term. It’s more of a lift and pivot motion – the upper half gets raised on the Z-hinge before softly dropping into place. It’s unlike the HTC G1 mechanism and in fact it’s unlike anything we’ve seen so far by any manufacturer.

The initial slide requires quite a bit of a push – but surprisingly once you get past the folding point it drops rather flimsily. The worst part is it doesn’t really lock into position. You can’t help but feel the hinge being too soft – almost fragile. Maybe it’s just making the wrong impression, but we do fear the hinge getting worse with use.

Watch the Desire Z go from closed to open in three shots

Our fears aside, upon sliding it up, the screen automatically rotates to landscape orientation. And the fun starts. The brilliant keyboard has great ergonomics, well spaced buttons with excellent press.

The four-row layout is of great help here: the keys are big enough to handle comfortably. Two Function keys and two Shift buttons (one under each thumb) are more than welcome. There are even two user-configurable keys. The top, which accommodates numbers too (no numpad layout here) is very easy to access, with more than enough headroom.

An extra friendly keyboard

The left side of the HTC Desire Z features a long and thin volume rocker next to a microUSB port.

The volume rocker and the microUSB port are on the left

On the right is the dedicated camera key and the battery cover latch.

The camera key and the battery cover latch on the right

At the top, we find the 3.5mm audio jack and the Power/Lock key. At the bottom of the phone, you will see the mouthpiece.

3.5 mm audio jack and the Power/Lock knob • the mouthpiece at the bottom

The HTC Desire Z rear hosts the 5 megapixel camera lens and the tiny loudspeaker grill. There is a LED flash next to the lens.

The camera lens, LED flash and loudspeaker grill at the back

The battery cover will pop softly up as soon as you squeeze the latch to reveal the 1300 mAh battery . The thing to note is the microSD card slot is under the battery so it’s not hot-swappable.

The Desire Z is quoted at 9 hours and 50 minutes of talk time or 430 hours in stand-by in a 2G network (that’s scaled down to 6 hours and 40 minutes of calls and 430 hours of stand-by in 3G mode).

In reality we would just squeeze one day of heavy use out of it – an hour of internet browsing, some music and video playback, 30min of gaming, 30min of using the camera and a couple of hours of getting to know the phone’s interface. Basically the 3.7″ screen was pretty much constantly on. We guess once you get to know your new toy you can even et two days of battery life out of it under moderate use.

Removing the battery cover • the microSD slot is under the battery

The HTC Desire Z is a solid business messenger and it looks it. The finish is excellent and the build quality is nearly perfect. The only suspicious element is the Z hinge – and we’re not even completely sure whether it’s the feel we don’t like or it really is weaker than it should be.

The size of the phone is just right – given the 3.7″ screen and the exceptional QWERTY keyboard. It’s a heavy phone by any standard but well balanced and comfortable to hold and operate. It looks mature and to-the-point and has lots of personality.

The HTC Desire Z: great to handle, but make sure you’re comfortable with the weight

 

HTC Desire Z review: Desires A-to-Z (Part 1 – Introduction)

Introduction
A few months ago, the original Desire was teaching younger Droids the ropes. Though it’s no time to retire just yet, the next generation is ready to take over. And we’re talking no rookie here – the new Desire Z means business with a great QWERTY keyboard and Froyo. The two phones don’t even look distantly related but the Desire genes and the bumped up specs bode well for the droid messenger.

HTC Desire Z official photos
Androids are friendly creatures in general but you might want to be careful with a metal-clad QWERTY messenger. We’ve come to expect solid build quality and premium finish from HTC and the Desire Z is ready to deliver. Another thing to watch for is new S-LCD screen. Froyo is a promise for a major performance boost and the latest Sense is also in the mix.
Key features:
Quad-band GSM and dual-band 3G support
14.4 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA
3.7″ 16M-color capacitive S-LCD touchscreen of WVGA resolution (480x 800 pixel)
Android OS v2.2 Froyo with HTC Sense UI
Comfortable 4-row QWERTY keyboard
800 MHz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM7230 processor
512 MB RAM and 1.5 GB ROM
5 MP autofocus camera with LED flash and geotagging
720p video recording @ 25fps
Wi-Fi b/g/n and DLNA
GPS with A-GPS
microSD slot up to 32GB (8GB card included)
Accelerometer and proximity sensor
Standard 3.5 mm audio jack
Stereo FM radio with RDS
microUSB port (charging) and stereo Bluetooth v2.1
Optical trackpad with confirm action
Quick boot
Metal finish
Smart dialing
DivX/XviD support
Very good audio reproduction quality
Main disadvantages:
The S-LCD screen is average (in terms of contrast, reflectiveness and sunlight legibility)
Non hot-swappable memory card
No front facing camera
Loose hinge
Quite heavy at 180 g
HTC have quite a flair for Android phones. Another thing they’re good at is QWERTY messengers. Not that we’ve seen much proof lately but let’s hope it’s like riding a bike. If they’re good at Android and if they haven’t completely lost the messenger knack, a win should be in the bag for the HTC Desire Z.

HTC Desire Z live shots
It’s been over a year since we had the pleasure of an HTC QWERTY messenger. You probably remember that the first of the droids came with a QWERTY keyboard. We guess it was only a matter of time for HTC to eventually get back to phones such as the G1, or even the the TyTN and the Touch Pro. Well, it’s finally time for the new droid generation to get its own Pro. The HTC Desire Z is reporting for duty.
Looks like we’re ready to get to business too. Our tour starts right after the break with unboxing and hardware inspection.

Sony W810i Review

Launched in April 2006, The Sony Ericsson W810i is the upgraded version of the highly acclaimed and massively popular Sony Ericsson W800i, the first Walkman™ branded mobile phone.

There are a few physical differences between the W810i and the W800i: the W810i is slightly thinner, has raised keys instead of embedded keys, and has a 5-way navigation button instead of the W800i’s slightly awkward joystick. Apart from this external makeover, the differences between the W810i and the W800i are minor. The W810i has the advantage of EDGE (for faster internet access) an is quadband instead of triband. It also has Fast Port – a system connector that enables faster data transfer from phone to PC and PC to phone, and which also serves as a charging port.

The W810i is designed to be an outstanding music player phone, and it succeeds. The media player supports both MP3 and AAC formats and audio quality is superb. Mega Bass™ enhances bass frequencies for a better overall music experience. There’s loads of memory for storing music, as the W810i comes bundled with a 512 Mbyte Memory Stick PRO Duo™ – enough to store up to 20 full-length audio CD’s. The memory stick is expandable to 1 Gbyte. Software for ripping CD’s is supplied. In addition to the MP3 player there’s an FM radio with RDS. A quality headset is included in the sales package, and the W810i can also be connected to an external speaker system via an optional cable.

On the imaging side, the W810i has the same 2-megapixel camera as the W800i. This features autofocus, for sharper images, a 4x digital zoom, camera light and a video recorder. It’s one of the best camera phones available, and has an outstanding screen to accompany it.

Connectivity is excellent too, with support for all types of external connections: Bluetooth, USB, Infra-red, Fast port plus fast internet connectivity using EDGE.

The W810i is a phone that cannot be faulted. It was one of the best phones of 2006 and is still one of the best in 2008. The W810i finally became unavailable towards the end of 2008. For a possible replacement, consider the Sony Ericsson W705.

Read another Sony Ericsson W810i Review

Nokia X2 Review

Nokia has unleashed new affordable music mobile in the form of the X2. The X2 is the successor of the X3. The X2 has added dedicated keys to music controls to enjoy music seamlessly. The X2 operates on the S40 operating system. The X2 features 5 megapixel camera, wireless FM Radio, dual loud speakers, microSD card slot, a 3.5mm audio port, 2.2” display, social networking, Ovi Store and more. All these come at a very affordable price of Rs. 5550. Readout the full review to find out more about X2.

Design

The Nokia X2 resembles X3 in its design and inherits most of its design elements from X3. It looks stylish, refreshing and youthful. The body has metallic finish with slight glossy ascents. The body is in bold colors. The sides of the X2 are curved slightly. It is available in white/blue and Black/Red colors. It is slim mobile at just 13mm and it weighs around 81grams.

The Nokia X2 sports a 2.2 inches TFT display that has the resolution of 320 x 240 pixels and supports 260K colors. The image quality is quite good.

Below the screen, you will find the navigation array that includes a four way toggle with middle confirmation key, two soft keys, the call key, and the End/Power key. The toggle can be customized with used defined shortcuts. Although the keys are flat, they are tactile and offer good feedback. Below the navigation array, there is an alphanumeric keyboard. Nokia ensured that it provide easy typing.

You will find a camera along with a flash on the back side. The battery has dark chrome ascents that look stunning and it can be removed easily. One point we felt that Nokia has done over designed. There are music controls such as forward, skip and backward buttons are present at on blue colored left spine. A microSD card slot, volume rocker and camera key are present on the right spine. A charger port, a 3.5mm audio-jack port and a microUSB are present at top of the device.

Features

Nokia X2 runs on the Nokia’s S40 operating system. Nokia uses this OS in its XpressMusic phone, now it has extended to the X series phone. You can personalize the screen savers, wallpapers, themes, ringtones, polyphonic ringtones, shortcuts, widgets, icons, and more. We don’t have any problem with this OS.

Connectivity & Internet

You can avail data transfer through USB and Bluetooth with EDR. You can stream audio to Bluetooth headset wirelessly, thanks to A2DP support for Bluetooth. The internet can be accessed via only GPRS with EDGE. It also comes with preinstalled Opera Mini browser that allows faster browsing. The web browser supports the Flash Lite 3.0.

You can avail Instant Messaging via Ovi Chat. It also supports popular email accounts like free Ovi Email account on your mobile, Gmail, Yahoo Mail and etc. services like It provides quicker access to Social networking web sites like Facebook, Youtube, Twitter, MySpace and etc.

Camera

The Nokia x2 comes equipped with whopping 5 megapixel camera with a Flash that captures pictures at a resolution of 2592 x 1544 pixels. The camera features Full focus, 4x zoom, self timer, white balance, and full screen viewfinder and color tones. It can record QVGA videos at a rate of 20fps. You can share the photos and videos with the social networking sites like Flickr via Ovi Share or Bluetooth. Fixed focus is bit disappointment.

The image quality is quite good, thanks to noise reduction functionality. The images look bright, crisp and colorful with good detail. The video quality is also reasonably good.

Multimedia

The X2 being labeled as music phone, it comes packed with nice music features. The X2 comes with simple and convenient interface for its multimedia player is simple. The dedicated keys provide quick access to music play. It supports MP3, WMA, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+ audio formats and video formats like MPEG-4, H.263 and H.264 video formats. The sound quality is excellent. It also features FM Radio with RDS feature. You don’t need to plug-in headphone to hear FM Radio. You can browse the Ovi Music to download and listen latest songs. You can customize media player themes and its support album art and stereo widening. It has the built-in Equalizer that enhances the sound experience. It comes with dual loud speaker system.

The X2 has an internal memory of 48MB. You can extend the external memory up to 16 GB.

Other Applications

The other essential features of the X2 include a 1000 entry phonebook, Calculator, Voice commands, unit & currency Converter, a world clock, a timer, vibrate mode, Flight mode, Note pad, To-do list, Calendar, voice recorder, and speaker phone. It doesn’t feature Document and PDF reader. It features Nokia’s apps like Nokia Money, Nokia Life Tools, Chinese Dictionary, Ovi Share, Ovi Store and Ovi Contacts.

The games are in plenty of numbers. It comes preinstalled with eight games namely Sudoko, Bounce Tales, Diamond Rush, Block’d, Brain Champ, Rally 3D, Snake III and City Bloxx.

Performance

The call quality is quite good. Even Callers another didn’t complained about the call clarity. The sound is louder and clearer. The speaker phone is good.

The Nokia X2 is powered with 850 mAh Lithium-Ion battery. It provides the battery life of 810 minutes of talktime and 540 hours of standby time. On normal usage, you would get around 26 hours of battery life. The battery life is very good comparing to most of the mobiles.

Price

Nokia X2’s price is very affordable. It comes at a price of just Rs. 5550 in India or $113.

Read another Nokia X2 Review

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BlackBerry 9800 Review

The BlackBerry Bold 9800 Slider is going to take things to a new level. While some of the specs that were released early on sounded excellent but lacked any real “wow” factor, the newest updates on what consumers expects delivers that. Whether it is all going to work fantastic is a whole other issue, but for now it looks like the BlackBerry Bold 9800 Slider is going to deliver the goods.

The media player, pod cast apps, and Webkit browser are all really cool things that are going to make plenty of users pleased. The huge thing but is the newly announced on-screen keyboard. It was hinted around for awhile, but nobody was really too optimistic BlackBerry was going to have a viable model in time for the Bold 900. Evidently they did get it working and they are rolling it out.

The BlackBerry Bold 9800 is still going to have a physical keyboard and track pad – which is a excellent thought for several reasons. Some users are more comfortable using that apparatus already, some users have stout fingers that could make using a virtual keyboard problematic, and it is excellent to have a backup just in case it goes south so users aren’t stuck being unable to use any keyboard. Although it was only an unsubstantiated rumor early on, the word was the on-screen keyboard was a small wonky under temperature extremes, but an insider has said that the issue is under control and should present no problems.

Some of the BlackBerry Bold 9800 specs you will want to be familiar with include:

* HVGA Show
* 512MB RAM
* WiFi 802.11n
* 4GB on board storage
*OS 6.0
* On-screen keyboard
* Upgraded Webkit browser
* Enhanced media player

While there is still quite a bit BlackBerry is keeping under wraps, what could be controlled leaks to a few tech sites has revealed a few things that may be present on the BlackBerry Bold 9800 Slider. It is certain that SurePress is on-board to make the touch screen more user friendly, and it is also believed to be capactive. This will be the first BlackBerry smartphone to have a touch screen, physical keyboard, and directional input. The camera may be a 5 mega pixel, but there is no solid confirmation on that yet either.

As for a release date, Blackberry has not given a hard date yet, but it is believed they will be available for pre-order somewhere in the range on the early/mid June timeframe with a delivery date before June closes out – perhaps as early as a week after pre-orders open. All indications from AT&T seem to point in this direction as well a few hints from BlackBerry them self.

Read another Blackberry 9800 Review

Source: Helium

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Nokia N900 Review

Not to be mistaken as the successor to last year’s N97, the N900 succeeds the Nokia N800 Internet tablet.

As Nokia’s current flagship phone, the N900 is the first of its kind to support the new Maemo 5 platform. In terms of physical design, the N900 is really clean and squarish in nature, lacking any buttons on the front panel.

It is comparably thicker than most modern smartphones and it is kind of like a throwback to older N-series phones like the N95.

EASY TO USE: The N900′s homescreen is highly customisable allowing you to place shortcuts, widgets and contacts on a page.

Still, the phone remains at a pocketable size though it may be a little squeeze in a tight pair of jeans.

Featuring a large 3.5in touchscreen, the phone is primarily touch driven. The screen doesn’t use a capacitive touchscreen like the iPhone so it doesn’t do multi-touch gestures like pinch to zoom.

Instead it uses the same resistive touchscreens implemented in other Nokia phone models so it isn’t as responsive as the iPhone’s capacitive screen.

The screen is quite a fingerprint magnet, often leaving lots of smudges and prints after each use. It has a generously large 800 x 480-pixel resolution, which gives the extra real estate needed to render full webpages.

The N900 has a slide-out keyboard that comes in handy for text messaging and web browsing. Though the buttons are well laid out, they are densely packed into a small area so users with large fingers may have problems typing.

The phone also features a pair of stereo speakers that are of decent quality for casual music listening and is sufficiently audible for taking calls on loudspeaker mode.

The back houses a powerful 5-megapixel camera that takes both photos and videos. A nifty slide-out cover protects the camera lens when it is not in use and instantly activates the camera when opened.

There’s also a little kickstand that holds the phone up on a flat surface at an angle which is useful when you want to watch videos on it.

PROP IT UP: The N900 has a handy little kickstand to prop it up when you want to watch videos on it.

In use

The Maemo 5 operating system is the core of the N900. The first thing that struck us upon using it was just how different it looked and felt in comparison with the Nokia’s Symbian-based smartphones.

The N900’s home screen is an entirely new environment that has been completely rehauled to be visually pleasing.

It is a highly customisable environment that allows you to set your desktop anyway you like it to be.

You can drop widgets, bookmark websites or create shortcuts to your favourite contacts across four panels that you easily switch between by swiping across the screen.

Menu navigation on the N900 feels smooth and seamless, giving users easy access to settings without having to go through multiple windows.

Powered by a powerful ARM Cortex A8 600MHz processor, the N900 runs very smoothly when transitioning between different applications and is more than capable of handling multitasking applications.

Tapping on the upper left icon takes you back to a screen that Nokia calls the “Dashboard” — here you get a full view of all active applications and allows you to freely switch between them.

The web browsing experience on the N900 is much improved and it delivers a browsing experience that very close to the desktop experience.

The flexibility and compatibility of the N900’s default browser is quite astounding and it has full support for Adobe Flash.

This means that visually-rich Flash-based websites are no problem for the N900. We loaded Facebook on the N900 and used it exactly as we would on a desktop, even as far as playing Facebook games like FarmVille on it.

Another cool thing we liked about the new Maemo platform is how the N900 is able to integrate contacts from your phone address book with those online on your instant messaging client.

This means you can pull up a contact and choose between calling, SMS or instant messaging them all within one simple interface.

One drawback to the phone is its short battery life. With 3G turned on, the phone could just barely make it through the day on a single charge.

Applications

Applications for the N900 can be downloaded via the Ovi Store or application manager. However the catalogue of Maemo applications is still very limited.

Though majority of applications are free to download, the Ovi Store lacks applications for Twitter or Foursquare if you’re into social networking.

Sadly, the only two useful Maemo applications that are worth mentioning on Ovi Store are Firefox and Facebook.

However the Facebook ‘app’ has pretty limited functionalities as it can only show you status updates and notifications. It acts more like a widget and you cannot update your own status or do anything else with it.

The only game worth playing that is available on the Ovi Store is Angry Birds, which is ported from the iPhone.

The drawback to the Maemo version of the game is that it is limited to just 21 levels and users will need to pay for additional levels.

Conversely the iPhone version of the game has 63 levels available. There’s also noticeably lag on the Maemo version of the game though it does not impact the gameplay greatly.

There are however a lot more applications you can download through the application manager, either via WiFi or 3G connection. Admittedly this alternative source for applications feels half-baked.

There’s no way to quickly search through the catalogue for applications so you’ll need to manually scroll through hundreds of applications to find something you’re looking for.

Though its application library spans a variety of categories such as games, multimedia and office productivity tools, the selection is rather limited with only a handful that are actually useful.

Still, there are a few gems that can help customise your phone such as a WiFi switcher to turn your connection on or off as when needed; or a brightness adjustment bar on the status/notification menu to quickly access these basic functions.

If you want to play games on the N900, there are also a few emulators that you can download for running Super Nintendo, Sega Master System and Amiga ROMs.

Some of the useful applications preinstalled in the phone include an RSS reader for aggregating news from your favourite websites and a podcast download tool.

The fact still remains though that the Maemo platform still has a long way to go in terms of apps before it can be a contender to the iPhone and Android.

Perhaps with time more applications will populate the Ovi Store and there will be some actual killer applications for the platform.

Great for music and videos

We didn’t quite expect the N900 to be a phone for media playback but the default media player application does a very decent job. Within it you can access your music, videos and even stream live Internet radio.

There are notable improvements to the music player in the N900 — not only does the player look better but it is also easier to find songs now that they are arranged by albums.

The video player is really quite amazing as it supports a wide variety of formats such as MOV, WMV and AVI files out of the box, thus making it useful for watching videos.

You can also download additional video codecs via the application manager to enable the media player to play MKV files as well.

REAR VIEW: The back of the N900 has a powerful 5-Megapixel camera with autofocus.

Video playback quality is reasonably good and smooth for down-coverted videos, though the N900 can also play unconverted movies meant for larger screen resolutions. But the drawback to this is that the videos tend to stutter.

The 5-megapixel camera takes good quality pictures and the addition of a dual LED flash helps it take pictures when it’s dark. The phone can also record videos but we found the performance to be disappointing.

The camera doesn’t auto focus as you are recording videos so when you switch from recording something close up and then pull out to a wider angle, things get out of focus. Additionally there are noticeable dropped frames even as you record and videos subsequently stutter during playback.

Conclusion

Overall, the N900 is an interesting smartphone from Nokia that is a refreshing change from the old Symbian platform. From what we could tell, Maemo 5 is a stable and reliable platform with its main strength being able to run multiple applications simulatenously.

The N900 also serves as a great device for web browsing and its support for Flash means the experience is really close to browsing on a desktop. Also it plays both music and videos very well so you won’t be short of any entertainment when you’re out on the road.

However, the platform as a whole still feels very experimental. Much of the interface is new so there is a bit of a learning curve to using the device.

Furthermore there’s a need for more applications as the current pool is just too limited. Another point of contention is the device’s poor video recording and the short battery life.

But on the whole, the N900 is a great workhorse that let’s you do a lot of things. If you’re a mobile tech enthusiast who enjoys tinkering and customising your phone to suit your needs, this is the phone for you.

Pros: Great for web browsing; Flash support; superb video and music playback; able to multitask.

Cons: Limited number of applications at the moment; poor video recording; poor battery life.

Nokia N900 Specifications

Touchscreen smartphone
CAMERA: 5-megapixels (dual LED flash)
DISPLAY: 3.5in, TFT resistive touchscreen (800 x 480-pixels)
OPERATING SYSTEM: Maemo 5
MESSAGING: SMS, E-mail
CONNECTIVITY: Bluetooth, GPRS, EDGE, WiFi
PHONE MEMORY: 32GB
EXPANSION SLOT: microSD (up to 16GB)
BATTERY: 1,320mAh lithium-ion (BL-5J)
STANDBY/TALK TIME: 10 days/6 hours
OTHER FEATURES: Full keyboard, A-GPS, geotagging, accelerometer, FM radio, Media Player with DivX/XviD support, Maemo Internet browser, Ovi Maps
DIMENSIONS (w x h x d): 110.9 x 59.8 x 18mm
WEIGHT: 181g
PRICE: RM2,280

Read another Nokia N900 Review

Motorola Milestone Review

Unlike other Android 2.1 smartphones, the Motorola Milestone is the only one that has a physical Qwerty keypad.

REAR VIEW: The Milestone has a 5-megapixel camera and dual-LED flash as well as built-in stereo speakers on the back.

We have certainly seen a lot of Android phones released in the past few months.

The latest we managed to get a hold of is the Motorola Milestone which runs on the latest Android 2.1 operating system.

In the United States, this slider phone is known as the Droid and only works on the CDMA network. In countries that rely on 3G and HSDPA networks,we get the Milestone.

Also, unlike the Droid, the Milestone has multitouch capability and comes with Motonav navigation application.

Not so boxy

As it is a slider phone, the Milestone is made of two parts – the top is taken up mostly by a 3.7in capacitive touchscreen and the bottom holds the Qwerty keypad.

The screen, which has a resolution of 480 x 854-pixels, is bright and clear. We had no trouble viewing it under bright sunlight.

If not for the cascading design, the phone would look boxy and boring. Also, the phone weighs 165g which is slightly heavier than other Android offerings. For instance, the Nexus One tips the scale at 130g.

The Milestone’s body is made of brushed-metal which felt solid, durable and nice to hold.

Just like other Android phones, below the screen are four standard touch-sensitive buttons – Back, Menu, Home, and Search.

Located around the edges are the volume control rocker, dedicated camera button, mini USB port and audio jack.

REAR VIEW: The Milestone has a 5-megapixel camera and dual-LED flash as well as built-in stereo speakers on the back.

On the back you’ll find a 5-megapixel camera with dual-LED flash. Also, the built-in stereo speakers are visible under the strip of gold crosshatch pattern.

Field-test

The Milestone started up in 45 seconds which is pretty fast in our book. It runs on Texas Instrument’s OMAP3430 600MHz processor.

Although the display is very quick to register even the slightest touch but the phone itself is a little laggy.

It’s particularly slow when too many things are done at once, such as scrolling too fast or switching between several apps.

SAME SETUP: Just like other Android models, the Milestone’s screen has four touch-sensitive buttons for Back, Menu, Home, and Search functions.

Of course, the user interface is the same as other Android 2.1 models. Having tested the Nexus One recently, we were quite disappointed to see that the animated wallpapers are no longer interactive.

The water does not ripple when touched and the Nexus neural network wallpaper is conspicuously missing.

At least the swirling galaxy, blades of waving grass, and an analogue sound meter with a needle that moves to the music you’re playing, remain the same.

The Milestone has five homescreens, which you can populate with shortcuts, folders and widgets. Also, the upper left hand of the homesreen is reserved for notifications.

As the toucscreen is capacitive, the phone supports multitouch and one of the apps that takes advantage of this capability is the web browser.

The web browser has a clean interface and is fast but has no Flash support. However, viewing YouTube videos is not a problem as the device comes with a standalone app for it.

Also, like other Adroid smartphones, the Milestone is also loaded with a suite of Google mobile applications for accessing Google Search, Google Maps and Gmail services.

Additionally, users can also access thousands of applications and widgets from the Android Market directly from the device.

Since our Nexus One review in April, the marketplace has expanded rapidly and now has over 50,000 apps.

However, we are still very disappointed that it’s still not possible to purchase apps as this limits our choice.

alternative input

We have said this many times and we’ll say it again here – the virtual keypad found on most phones are just not as good as the one on the iPhone.

The Milestone’s virtual keypad is too crammed especially in portrait mode and it is easy to hit the wrong letters, so expect to make lots of mistakes.

In landscape mode the keypad fared only a little better.

However, this isn’t really a problem for the Milestone as it is the only Android 2.1 phone that has a physical Qwerty keypad.

The keypad’s sliding mechanism felt a bit stiff but this probably just means that it won’t get loose very fast and will last longer.

When the keypad is slid out, the display changes orientation to landscape automatically.

The keyboard certainly gives the Milesone an edge over other Android phones but sadly you won’t be winning speed typing competitions any time soon with it.

Just like the virtual keypad, we found the spacing for the keys too tight.

More often than not we resorted to using our fingernails to type.

Still, having a Qwerty keypad has its advantages – you can now view the fullscreen when typing as there won’t be a virtual keypad blocking it. Also, the keyboard comes with a large navigation pad on the right.

Loud and clear

The built-in stereo speakers are really outstanding, they are loud enough to be heard even when the phone is in another room.

In fact, setting the volume anything higher than medium was earsplitting at close range.

Equally good is the 5-megapixel camera which shoots decent pictures. However, it’s a little slow to focus but as long as you have a steady hand this won’t be a big deal.

The camera is especially good in broad daylight and the colours turned out pretty decent.

Also, the built-in A-GPS can geotag all your photos which will make it easier to categorise them later.

What really surprised us was the quality of the video recording. The device is capable of shooting at up to 720 x 480-pixels and produces decent quality videos.

However, we detected two problems – videos sometimes look a little over sharpened and the built-in image stabiliser doesn’t seem to work in video mode.

Also, the audio quality was good in all of our test shots.

The Droid which is available in the United States, includes Google Maps Navigation – the free GPS navigation system with voice guidance – but it is a shame that we don’t get it with the Milestone.

Yes, the Milestone supports the Google Maps application but if you want the voice guidance feature then you have to pay for the Motonav software.

A trial version of the app comes preinstalled with the Milestone and it expires after 60 days. To continue using the application you will have to pay a hefty sum of US$60 (RM198) per year.

With normal usage, the Milestone’s battery lasted up to two days which is decent for a smartphone.

Conclusion

Android phones come in many shapes and sizes but the latest batch of phones have one thing in common – all of them only have virtual keypads.

So, technically the physical Qwerty keypad of the Milestone gives it an edge over the competition. However, that’s not really the case as we were quite disappointed with the keypad.

While the keypad helped, it just wasn’t as useful as we expected it to be. Or perhaps our fingers were just too fat for the keys.

Also, the phone is let down by its user interface which is a bit laggy. However, the Milestone is not all bad – we like the design, the really loud stereo speakers and the 5-megapixel camera.

In the end it all boils down to if you really want a physical keypad with your Android 2.1 smartphone. If you do, this phone may be ideal for you.

Pros: Nice screen; solid sliding mechanism; really loud speakers; decent camera and video recording functions.

Cons: Physical keypad could be better, no Flash support; laggy user-interface.

Motorola MILESTONE
Android smartphone
NETWORK: GSM 850/900/1800/1900, GPRS/EDGE, HSDPA 900/2100
OPERATING SYSTEM: Android 2.1
DISPLAY: 3.7in capacitive touchscreen (480 x 854-pixels)
CAMERA: 5-megapixel with autofocus, dual-LED flash
CONNECTIVITY: Bluetooth, WiFi, microUSB
MEMORY: 256MB RAM, 256MB storage
EXPANSION SLOT: MicroSD (8GB card included)
STANDBY/TALK TIME: 350 hours/6.5 hours
OTHER FEATURES: H.263, H.264, WMV playback support, proximity sensor, accelerometer, magnetometer
DIMENSIONS (W X D X H): 115.8 x 60 x 13.7mm
WEIGHT: 165g
PRICE: RM2,299 (Latest Price List)
RATING: 3
Review unit courtesy of Motorola Malaysia, (03) 7800-7026

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Review

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 is Sony Ericsson’s first foray into the world of the Android phone. The X10 would enter the market as a flagship product, so this is quite a unique occurrence in that Sony Ericsson has decided to move away from its UIQ Symbian flagship phones and try out something new.

It is a tad confusing, to say the least. The Satio and Vivaz and their similarly named cousin models are Symbian phones while the earlier Xperia phones were Windows Mobile devices. Ericsson is an associate member of the LiMo foundation so that OS may be a future feature on Sony Ericsson devices. One can’t help but wonder if the indecision is any indication of a confused product roadmap in the future.

Exterior
The review device we had was the White one, and it is rather like a large wafer. The paintjob on the back of the device will likely get scratches from repeated contact with wherever you put it down. Almost the entire front of the device is the screen itself, and a lot of care has to be taken so as not to crack or scratch the screen.

The power button and USB port is on the top of the device, while a volume toggle and the camera hotkey run down the right side of the device. The three buttons below the screen are mainly softkeys to navigate around the interface, so what we can surmise from this arrangement of buttons is that the USB port does double duty for charging the phone and also for any data transfer that you might want to do with your computer.

The screen is four inches or 10 cm across diagonally, so that would make it the largest Android screen handset on the market right now.

Software
The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 comes with Android 1.6, which is also known as the Donut variation of the OS. Most of its competitors are launching Android 2.1 models right now, so this is rather outdated, and it is reflected in the occasional slow response of the device despite having the 1GHz Snapdragon processor inside.

The onscreen keyboard is a little small and it doesn’t respond to taps with a pen. One would have to aim the fingers very accurately to type something out. But the input is fairly decent, and the dictionary guesses the incomplete words pretty accurately so that would save a lot of typing once you get used to the short-forms that activate the longer word.

Camera/Video
The camera comes with an 8.1 megapixel rating, which is the best rating on offer for a retail Android device at the time of writing. The camera comes with the usual assortment of effects, but I did not like that most of the interface did not really respond to my touches and it did take a little concentration to actually press where you wanted to on the screen so as to get a response from the phone.

It was a devil of a task to try to find the setting to activate the flash. It wasn’t in the usual place and apparently it is activated from the advanced settings menu and the light stays on the entire time you are framing the shot. It serves to reason that the subject of the photo would be more than a little miffed at you after a while if you keep pointing the annoying bright light into his or her eyes

Connectivity
This is a HSDPA 7.2 Mbps phone with HSUPA 2Mbps. It supports 3G and 802.11b/g WiFi. The full specifications can be found here: http://www.mobile88.com/cellphone/Sony-Ericsson/Sony-Ericsson-XPERIA-X10/specification.asp

Editor’s Opinion
The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 retails at just over RM 2200 for an official set. There is a headset in the box and this is rather reasonable price from the much more expensive prices Sony Ericsson used to command. Right now, it is about two-thirds the price of an iPhone and boasts a much better rating for the camera.

Generally, most reviews on this device complain about the funny way that the OS behaves, or rather does not behave, which is to say that it does not behave in the way that it is supposed to. It would be safe to say that this phone will take some getting used to as it would not behave in the usual manner.

Read another Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Review or X10 mini review