Posted by admin on January 25, 2011 under Mobile Phone Reviews | 
Once upon a time touchscreen phones were once a curio and phones with numeric pads were the norm. That’s all changed now of course and it’s the other way round. With the C3 Touch and Type, Nokia is reaching out to those who prefer the feel of texting and typing on an old-school keypad but want the web-browsing advantages that a touchscreen offers. The second from the Touch and Type range brings a slimmed down, metallic design that reminds us of the good old Nokia 6300. Read on to see if the Nokia C3Touch and Type ticks all the right boxes.
What we like
The Nokia C3 Touch and Type is perfectly sized for this type of phone, like its sibling the X3 Touch and Type. It is just about the right size so that you can comfortably hold it in the hand and operate both the touchscreen and tap away at the keypad with your thumb.
The keys of the numeric pad depress nicely with a satisfying click and each row is neatly separated by a solid metal bar. This helps to cut down on typos and makes it easy for you to hunt for the right key. Having gotten used to newfangled things such as Swype and SwiftKey on our touchscreen smartphones texting the old-fashioned way on the C3 Touch and Type felt like a nice trip down memory lane. Old habits kicked in and we soon started tapping and texting away as we used to in ye olden days.
The build quality is also commendable. The front and back of the Nokia C3 Touch and Type has a quality brushed metal finish, and a reflective strip runs around the edge. It’s actual metal too, not just plastic sprayed silver. The C3 Touch and Type somehow manages to be slim and lightweight, but also feel solid and durable at the same time.
It’s easy to customise the homescreen of the C3 Touch and Type. You can add your own shortcuts to the four at the bottom of the screen by performing a long press and then choosing from the list which pops up. You can change things like the background and the clock/calendar settings in the same way.
A 5-megapixel camera with a single LED flash sits on the back of the C3 Touch and Type. There’s a dedicated shutter button mounted on the side which is pretty responsive and there’s a virtual shutter key on the touchscreen as well if you’d prefer. The on screen controls make it easy to zoom in and out of subject and you get a good range of camera effects like sepia, greyscale and white balance settings. You can also apply some fun effects like screen warp and oil paints to pictures after you’ve taken them which is a nice touch.
Call quality is good on the Nokia C3 Touch and Type. With the volume all the way up we found that it performed well against a backdrop of noisy traffic. The volume rocker on the side of the phone is a little on the small side though, but otherwise useable as normal.
The microSD card slot on the C3 Touch and Type can take cards of up to 32GB in size. The music player app is the same as the ones we’ve seen on other Nokia S40 phones – easy to use and create playlists on. There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top of the phone and exterior volume controls, meaning that the C3 Touch and Type can double as a back up music player as well.
What we don’t like
The small touchscreen, though perfectly sized for this type of phone, isn’t as responsive as we’d like. It’s often slow to respond to simple gestures like scrolling up and down or panning left and right across the screen.
Inputting menu commands occasionally takes a couple of taps of the thumb or a single judicious press. As you can imagine, this makes navigating web pages and social networks a bit of a drag. You sometimes end up clicking on the wrong links as a result of double-tapping.
As the screen doesn’t support multitouch, you’re relegated to using on-screen controls to zoom in and out. Pages occasionally take a while to scale between zooms, even over solid Wi-Fi and 3G/HSDPA connections.
A limitation of the screen’s resolution (240 x 320 pixels) is that you don’t always get a clear idea of how good (or bad) the pictures you take actually are. At least not until you upload them to your computer.
We look a load of shots on our C3 Touch and Type and it turned out that not all of them were as good as we’d thought until we uploaded them. Some that looked fine on the phone’s screen turned out to be incredibly blurry and out of focus. By the same token, some looked amazingly clear and detailed. This isn’t a criticism of the camera (which is very good) more a limitation of the display – it doesn’t give you an accurate idea of the quality of your pictures.
Conclusion
The Nokia C3 Touch and Type boasts great build quality, a decent camera and is available on some very reasonable contracts. Obviously it’ll appeal to those who prefer texting on an numeric pad instead of a touchscreen, and in that sense it’s a great old-school phone. But the unresponsive touchscreen lets things down a bit; it’s not really ideal for surfing the web and and social networking. But it does the essentials admirably, looks great and will satisfy those who want a basic phone for calling and texting but want a new phone.
Review courtesy of Recombu.com, this is not my work but I am providing it to help you get high quality, real life reviews on mobile handsets. To find more useful reviews visit Recombu.com.
Posted by admin on January 20, 2011 under Mobile Phone Reviews |
Coming in at just £99, Orange’s own-branded San Francisco handset is one of the cheapest Android phones around. That low price-tag doesn’t mean you can expect a budget experience though, with the San Francisco offering 3G, Wi-Fi, Android 2.1 (Eclair) and GPS – could it be the low-cost smartphone experience you’ve been dreaming of?
What we like
With a slim design and high-quality materials, the ZTE-made Orange San Francisco has the feel of a more expensive smartphone, although the plasticky buttons do give it away. The screen is fairly responsive and the 400×800 pixel resolution offers a crisp display when perusing menus and texts.
As always, we’re fans of the 3.5mm headphone jack which doesn’t limit you to Orange-made headphones.
We also like having so many homescreens to customise and play with. The Orange widgets and many and plentiful, but can be a little clunky and annoying – we’d rather have the Google Maps app than Orange Maps, for example. It’s quicker and more intuitive.
Sending text messages uses the same interface as most Android phones – you’ve got threaded messages and a fairly basic user interface to play with. Typing in portrait mode is a real pain because the touchscreen isn’t really responsive enough to register each key as they’re so close to one another. That said, swiveling the phone ’round to landscape makes typing a much more pleasurable experience.
What we don’t like
As with many Android handsets, we find it a bit annoying that only the power-button acts as a screen unlock – it’d be more convenient if any button took you to the lock screen for easy access.
We’d like a camera shutter button for taking pictures – the onscreen button can be unresponsive and result in blurry photos. While photos look fine on the small screen, videos are a different story. We suppose we should be grateful to even have the ability to record video but when the output is this low, what’s the point?
It’s great that a low-cost phone can give you such great access to a variety of apps; however, you can’t use the app shop if you’re on Wi-Fi, which seems ridiculous. The other thing to bear in mind is that the handset runs Android 2.1 – which is now two editions behind the latest version. Not all apps will be compatible with the 2.1 software.
The handset doesn’t offer much in the way of internal memory, but Orange bundles a 2GB microSD card with the San Francisco, and you can always upgrade this to a larger capacity card.
Conclusion
This is the best budget Android handset we’ve seen to date. It’s by no means perfect – it can run a little slow, the camera isn’t amazing and the connectivity a little ropey – but it’s a capable handset with a good quality screen and running Android; for £100, you can’t go far wrong.
Review courtesy of Recombu.com, this is not my work but I am providing it to help you get high quality, real life reviews on mobile handsets. To find more useful reviews visit Recombu.com.
Posted by admin on January 16, 2011 under Mobile Contract Offers |
Vodafone are currently offering the fantastic Blackberry Curve for free on pay monthly mobile plans. With its smooth look, and in stunning red, the Blackberry Curve 9300 is on of the markets leading smart phones for those serious about functionality.
Out of the office, not out of touch
With the BlackBerry Curve 9300 in your hand, you can work efficiently even when you’re away from your office. It integrates your contacts, calendar, tasks and notes – and synchronises with your PC, so you can stay fully up-to-date when you’re out and about.
3G – for faster web and email
Unlike the BlackBerry Curve 8520 and BlackBerry Curve 8900, the Curve 9300 gives you the benefit of a superfast 3G connection. As you’ll be able to browse the web and get emails so quickly with it, you won’t notice the difference in speed between your phone or your PC.
The Curve 9300 also comes in either a silver or red finish (the latter is also exclusive to Vodafone for a limited time). That means you can choose the colour that suits you best.
Posted by admin on under Pay as You Go Offers |
As a Happy New Year to the UK’s mobile phone buying population T-Mobile is offering a fantastic 30% off all of it pay as you go handsets. Ad as if that wasn’t enough they are also throwing in unlimited free texts as part of their January mobile sale bundles. The offers are available on a wide range of mobile handsets including the Samsung Monte, Sony Ericsson Spiro, LG Cookie and LG Viewty, Nokia 2220 and many many more. You can see a full list of the available mobile offers at the link below, Happy New Year!
T-Mobile January Sale Offers
Posted by admin on January 15, 2011 under Mobile Phone Reviews |
The Samsung Omnia 7 is the first Windows Phone 7 offering from Samsung. It comes with a large 4-inch Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen, and standard Windows Phone 7 specs such as a 5-megapixel camera with LED flash, GPS and Wi-Fi. We took a walk with the Samsung Omnia 7 to see what it had to offer us and how it differed from the other Windows Phone 7 smartphones currently out there.
What we like
Everything both looks and works fantastically well on the capacitive 4-inch Super AMOLED screen. Maps and web pages look pin sharp and scale nicely when you pinch to zoom in and out. We particularly liked the Maps application; it’s got some slick looks, processes direction requests quickly and makes a change from Google Maps, which we’re used to seeing everywhere on phones these days.
It’s very easy to compose emails and texts on the virtual Qwerty keypad. We liked the little confirmation ‘pip’ noise and haptic feedback that accompanied each keypress. The fact that letter tiles change from white to black when you tap on them make it easy to see which key you’re hitting and helps you to spot typos.
The Windows Phone 7 tile interface is unchanged from what we’ve seen on phones like the HTC HD7 or the LG Optimus 7. You can customise the layout of the Omnia 7’s main menu by pinning app shortcuts and icons to the homescreen, like you do on virtually every Windows Phone 7 phone. But again it both looks and works very well, largely due to the responsive touchscreen.
Adding email accounts (Gmail, Hotmail etc) and syncing your Facebook account info into one aggaregated stream is a feature of Windows Phone 7 we really like and we’re pleased to see it working as well here on the Omnia 7. There’s not much we can say here that we’ve not already said before (see our What is Windows Phone 7 feature for more info) so in the interests of space we’ll leave it out of this review.
The 5-megapixel camera is pretty good- it takes some good snaps and comes with a number of adjustable settings. You can easily switch from the camera to the camcorder which can shoot HD video at 720p. Again the sharpness and size of the screen comes into play here; unsurprisingly the pictures look super-rich and dazzingly colorful. The mechanical shutter key, mounted on the top of the phone, depresses nicely and responds well.
In our books there’s nothing worse than a stiff, unresponsive camera key on a phone, as this often leads to Mr. Blurrycam hell, no matter how good the camera itself actually is. So we’re happy to report that the Omnia 7’s camera key stands up to our expectations.
In fact, the overall build quality of the Samsung Omnia 7 is commendable. It feels solid, well-built and durable. The battery cover is a thin, lightweight metal sheet that clips snugly into place and adds a veneer of quality to the whole phone.
What we don’t like
It might sound like the pettiest gripe ever, but the positioning of the on/off power button of the Samsung Omnia 7 is baffling. It’s positioned in such a way that you’re likely to accidentally turn the phone off when holding it in your hand, as we accidentally did once. Once you’re aware of this particular quirk of the phone’s design it’s easily avoided. But it’d be even better if the button was place somewhere more sensible to begin with (like on the top of the phone).
The Samung Omnia 7, like most Windows Phone 7 phones, doesn’t come with a microSD card slot. While the 8GB of internal memory you do get is enough for a few playlists, apps and some photos – the fact that it can’t be expanded in anyway will frustrate some. Given that the camera shoots highly detailed pictures and and records HD video, it won’t take you long to fill up all that memory – here’s where being able to add a microSD card would really come in handy.
The LG Optimus 7 on the other hand has twice the amount of memory at 16GB, currently the only other Windows Phone 7 phone to offer this.
Those who are used to simply plugging phones in and syncing tunes through something like Windows Media Player might find that the set-up process here – which requires you to download Zune software – longwinded and frustrating. But it’s no more annoying than having to set up iTunes when you first get an iPhone for example.
Speaking of iTunes and the iPhone, one area where the Omnia 7 falls down on is in apps. Windows Phone 7 is a new platform and as such there’s not a lot out there in the way of apps at the moment. There’s some good quality games out there (Star Wars: Battle for Hoth, Earthworm Jim HD) but there’s just not as much on offer compared to the likes of the iTunes App Store or even the Android Market. We imagine that over time this will improve but for now there’s just not a lot of Windows Phone 7 apps out there.
Again, another drawback of the Samsung Omnia 7, stems from the fact that it’s a Windows Phone 7 phone. Because the minimum specifications for Win Pho 7 phones is so high, there’s not much to differentiate this from, say, the HTC HD7. For example the Omnia 7’s screen is slightly sharper and nicer looking than that of the HD7 as it’s a Super AMOLED. But the HD7’s screen is 4.3-inches – 0.3 inches bigger than the Omnia 7’s 4-inch screen. There’s not massive amount of difference between the two in terms of design or capabilities.
Conclusion
The Samsung Omnia 7 is a great looking handset with a decent camera and a large Super AMOLED touchscreen. It’s easy to use, websites, pictures and maps look great and the overall experience is a very slick and polished one. On the other hand, because of Microsoft’s high minimum specifications for Windows Phone 7 phones, there’s not much on offer here that’s different from similar devices.
Review courtesy of Recombu.com, this is not my work but I am providing it to help you get high quality, real life reviews on mobile handsets. To find more useful reviews visit Recombu.com.
Posted by admin on January 10, 2011 under Mobile Phone Reviews |
The Nokia C6-01 is the second of the two Nokia C6 phones that’ve been released this year (the other was the Nokia C6-00). This one comes with an 8-megapixel camera, dual LED flash, and runs on the more recent Symbian^3 operating system.
What we like
The Nokia C6-01 comes with that durable, reliable feel that only Nokia phones can exude. The phone is covered in a matt metal jacket and the battery cover is a single piece of metal that gracefully slide off and clicks back into place. The volume rocker, unlocker and camera shutter key on the right hand side perform their respective functions well and feel like they’re built to last.
There’s three homescreens which can be customised with a variety of widgets and app shortcuts. This means you can have quick access to the features you use the most without having to dive in and out of millions of menus.
The screen itself is a 3.2-inch AMOLED; pictures, menus, homescreens and webpages all look crisp, hi-res and vibrant. It features Nokia’s ClearBlack Technology which apparently makes for greater visibility in direct sunlight. It being gloomy and wintery at the moment made it difficult for us to test this out. But it’s safe to say that the Nokia C6-01′s display is very easy on the eyes indeed.
Wi-Fi and 3G is supported, which makes checking Facebook and Twitter and downloading apps from the Ovi Store (Nokia’s app store) a speedy affair. Ovi Maps comes installed which allows you to pinpoint your location using the phone’s GPS as well as get directions. We were pleased to see this particular app working well even in low signal areas.
Other basic utility apps like a File Manager, Voice recorder, QuickOffice (which lets you view Office 2007 documents) come included. There’s an amusing message reader app too, which dictates texts and emails in your inbox back at you in a computerised voice which reminded us of the Xtranormal bears.
The 8-megapixel camera is really worth writing home about. We were really impressed with the quality of both the pictures and the videos we took. You get a range of useful settings and features like the grid, which helps you to line pictures up, white balance, contrast, and face detection. There’s 9 levels of exposure and some fun effects like sepia, black and white and a ‘vivid’ option which saturates colours.
What we don’t like
Our main gripes with the Nokia C6-01 correlate with problems we’ve had with other recent Nokia phones. The build quality of the Nokia C6-01 itself is great. It feels solid, reliable and is nice looking. But the reverse is true of the software; it’s often slow to respond to commands, slow to load menus and both looks and feels really clunky.
There’s often a real noticeable lag between you pressing a menu option or on screen shortcut and the phone actually processing your command. This lag can occasionally lead to things such as typos and you opening a different menu or app by accident. We also noticed that when panning between the three homescreens, app icons wouldn’t always display immediately; sometimes they’d pop into existence a few seconds later. This looks messy.
Simple things like replying to a text message feel needlessly complicated. When a message from someone arrives in your inbox, you have to go to Options, choose ‘Reply’, then choose the ‘Via Message’ option before you start start composing a reply. Something simple like just having a single ‘Reply’ button instead of having to go through three different menus would cut corners and save time.
We’re not enamoured with the default virtual keypad. It uses a an old-school numeric pad-style interface when the Nokia C6-01 is held in portrait mode. T9-style predictive texting makes sense on a phone with a physical numeric pad but not on a touchscreen display, where there’s room for a Qwerty-style interface. Perhaps it would have been better if there was a choice between this and a more modern Qwerty layout.
Hoping for a solution, we downloaded Swype from the Ovi Store. After we’d installed it we had to reboot the C6-01 before we could start using it. And after all that fuss we found that Swype only works in landscape mode on the C6-01. It seems like Nokia don’t want people to use Qwerty keypads when holding their phones in portrait.
It took us a good twenty minutes to log in to the Ovi Store, even over a strong Wi-Fi connection. Bear in mind that most of those twenty minutes were spent staring at a loading animation waiting for something to happen.
Conclusion
The Nokia C6-01 is a solid-looking phone with a good camera that has an exhaustive range of settings. However we feel that, as with the Nokia N8, good hardware is let down by unresponsive software and slow loading times.
Review courtesy of Recombu.com, this is not my work but I am providing it to help you get high quality, real life reviews on mobile handsets. To find more useful reviews visit Recombu.com.
Posted by admin on January 5, 2011 under Mobile Phone Reviews |
Taking the best of Samsung’s Galaxy S, namely its super vivid super AMOLED display, and combining it with the technical know-how of Google, the Nexus S is Google’s second ‘branded’ phone. Crammed with the latest version of Android, with an NFC chip capable of, well, we’re not sure just yet, this is the bleeding edge of Android phones.
What we like
You may not be able to tell from the front, but from its side, the phone is slightly curved across its display, and the base of the phone slightly sticks out behind. Mysteriously, the base really helps to keep the phone in your hand and not skidding down the pavement. The curved front also protects the screen if you put it face down. The screen is brilliant; literally. Websites are very readable, and videos look great, and there are some nice little touches like the screenlock, which ‘switches off’ the screen, as if it was your telly from 1992.
The on-screen keyboard is also a great improvement from the last Android, and it’s now on par with the iPhone’s.
The Nexus S comes with the latest version of Android, Gingerbread. And it doesn’t disappoint, though it doesn’t really stand out that much from the previous version, either…
The most noticeable difference is the speed. Apps load quickly, and even complex webpages (Adobe Flash is supported.) zip along. We found that Google Maps really benefited from the speed boost. We were able to try the latest Google Maps 5 on the Nexus S, and the new cached maps meant that we could check where we were heading from the train station even without reception. We had to install the new version ourselves, and the Android store remains simple and quick, and there’s no need to continually log in for purchases.
We found that the batterylife was able to withstand a day of heavy email checking, map use and occasional video-watching, though with moderate use the phone will last a few days. Call quality is good, and the Nexus S benefits from Google’s noise-cancelling technology, which often significantly improved our calls on busy roads and noisy offices.
What we don’t like
Aside from the screen, the rest of the phone feels slightly lightweight and cheap. The back of the phone is a single black shell; and for over £400, you’d be expecting some sort of high-end metal/glass/diamond backing.
We were a bit on edge when taking the back panel off to fit our sim card in. It took a bit of strength to lift off the
back, and it felt like it would snap in half. There’s no memory card slot, so this shouldn’t be a big problem. The phone is very stripped down, it’s THE Android phone, and so you’ll have to drag what you want from the phone’s menus onto the main page. Initially, there’s a bewildering amount to choose from, and feels like the phone is aimed towards the more hard-core user. Other phones come with the typical messaging and email icons visibly available from the start.
Like several other Android phones, there’s so much to dabble with, it’s often hard to find what you want. It was difficult to confirm which apps were using 3G and which were using wifi. After eventually finding the option to transfer phone numbers across from the sim card, we struggled to take our contacts across from a T-mobile sim, though it later worked fine with O2.
The camera was okay, but, again, at the high-end phone scale, we were expecting a respectable if not first-class camera. The Nexus S doesn’t offter HD video recording, but whatever you do record can be instantly shared on Youtube, Twitter and the rest.
Conclusion
There’s no doubting that this is the best Andoid phone available, and the screen looks great. Everything runs at a great speed, and crashes are very rare. Yet it’s not quite perfect, and the big question is whether people will choose this over the iPhone. It’s a bit complicated, and the camera isn’t as good as it should be. There’s no way we can try out the much-touted Near Field Communication (NFC) chip yet, but this phone shows off what is possible on Android. The Nexus S is one of the best phones available (for now), but it comes at a price.
Review courtesy of Recombu.com, this is not my work but I am providing it to help you get high quality, real life reviews on mobile handsets. To find more useful reviews visit Recombu.com.
