Posted by admin on April 23, 2011 under Mobile Phone Reviews | 
The Nokia E6 is the latest business phone from the Finnish giant. It comes with a redesigned version of the Symbian operating system – Symbian Anna – and features a full Qwerty keypad.
Symbian Anna prominently features a faster browser and offers a cleaner user interface. So if you’ve ever used a Nokia phone before from the last few years, much will be familiar to you here and will (hopefully) be easier to pick up from where you left off.
Ovi Maps has also been revamped alongside Symbian Anna, and you get free lifetime Ovi Maps navigation to boot on the Nokia E6.
Like the Nokia C3 and X3 phones from the Touch and Type range, the Nokia E6 features a touchscreen as well as physical controls like the Qwerty and the central D-pad. This allows you to scroll through web pages and menus with greater ease on the touchscreen, while giving you the consistency of typing, texting and emailing on a physical keypad.
Mail for Exchange is all present and correct, and you get QuickOffice (create and edit Office documents) and JoikuSpot Premium (turn your E6 into a Wi-Fi hotspot) pre-installed for free.
Many of Nokia’s business phones have come with some pretty mediocre cameras in the past – not so the E6. The camera is a hefty 8-megapixel shooter that’s bolstered by a dual LED flash.
Internal memory weighs in at 8GB, which you can expand to up to 32GB with microSD cards. This means you should have plenty of space for storing pictures and playlists.
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 under Mobile Phone Reviews |
The Motorola Xoom finally arrives in the UK under a burden of expectation. First of all it’s the first tablet to hit the shelves that’s running on Android 3.0 Honeycomb – aka the first edition of Android specifically optimised for tablets. Secondly, it arrives in the wake of Apple’s iPad 2, released just a couple of weeks ago. The Motorola Xoom is available in both Wi-Fi-only and Wi-Fi + 3G editions and 16GB and 32GB flavours of both. The review model pictured is a Wi-Fi-only 32GB edition.
What we like
The Motorola Xoom looks and feels like money well spent. It’s a solid, weighty bit of gear that practically bellows ‘TECHNOLOGY’ when you first pick it up. It looks a bit like a digital camera that’s been stretched by one of those seaside machines, the ones that hammer pennies into souvenir tokens (this is a good thing).
On the subject of cameras, we had a lot of fun playing around with the Xoom’s twin camera set up. At 5-megapixels for the main rear-facing camera and 2-megapixels for the front-facer, you’ve immediately got a more powerful imaging set up than that of the iPad 2.
Pictures taken on the front camera look great in the gallery and scale up nicely when you set them as your Xoom’s wallpaper.
You get two speakers with the Xoom; these create a stereo effect making the Xoom ideal for listening to music/watching movies on the go. We gave it the old ‘Pink Floyd – Money Intro’ test and thrilled to the sounds of jingling coins bouncing between two channels. We live in hope of a Sword & Sworcery Android port in the future.
The new YouTube app for Android 3.0 works a charm, gathering results quickly and displaying them as a giant wall of thumbnails. Videos fullscreen quickly and if you’ve got a YouTube channel of your own, you can log in and upload stuff shot on your Xoom right from within the app. Sweet.
Similarly, Google Maps is excellent; thanks to the multi-touch screen you can twist, pan and zoom around on your (ahem) Xoom. Everything you’d expect is there, i.e. Places, turn by turn directions, layers etc. Google Maps both looks and works fantastically well on the big 10.1-inch screen.
If you’ve used an Android phone before, you’ll notice that all of your previously downloaded apps will appear in a separate window the first time you enter the Android Market. This makes it easier to find and re-download all of your favourites. If not, no problem; Android Market on the Xoom looks a lot like the web/desktop version which makes it really easy to search for stuff.
It’s easy to personalise the Xoom’s menus. Holding down on the screen brings up a menu from which you can drag and drop shortcuts to apps, individual contacts and widgets as well as add new wallpapers.
Wallpapers range from a selection of futuristic Tron-style static backgrounds and a couple of nicely animated wallpapers. Again, thanks to the powerful camera set up, pictures taken on the Xoom scale up nicely on the big high definition screen.
Browsing the web on the Xoom is fast, buttery smooth and easy as pie. We loved that you could easily open up new tabs and effortlessly add bookmarks. It felt perfectly natural and had more in common with a browsing experience on a laptop than in did on a smartphone. In short, it felt pretty much as we’d have wanted it to.
What we don’t like
Though the Xoom’s weight gives it an aura of solidity, it also makes it rather difficult to hold in one hand. Most of the time you’ll have it propped up on your lap or something, but both those occasional times when you want to hold it in one hand (like when taking a picture) it can feel awkward and unwieldy.
The size and shape of the Xoom means that it’s occasionally difficult to type when you’re holding it in landscape. If you’ve got big piano player’s hands (like this reviewer) it’s less of a problem. But for those of you not blessed with long lanky digits, you might struggle. Hopefully the forthcoming SwiftKey for Tablets app will alleviate this particular gripe.
Generally, the user experience offered by Android 3.0 is a good one. But here and there we couldn’t fail to notice things like the browser, YouTube and the Android Market randomly freezing up and force closing. This didn’t seem to depend on how much stuff we had going on in the background either and happened more often than we’d have liked.
Though we were wowed by the new YouTube app and Maps, we were less impressed with some of the other pre-installed Google apps.
Google Body, one of the flagship apps demoed at the Honeycomb launch event, feels half done. There’s just one human model at the moment (female), a lot of the polygons look jagged round the edges and when you zoom in closely to something like the brain, things get awfully glitchy.
Same goes for the Film Studio app. With the Xoom’s more powerful camera set up we were hoping that this would be a worthy alternative to iMovie on the iPad 2. Film Studio lets you crop and edit sections of film shot on the Xoom and set MP3s as background music. Though it works (just about) the entire process is not very elegant, laggy and not especially user friendly.
At the time of writing, the BBC iPlayer Android app does not work on the Xoom. With that hi-res widescreen display and stereo speakers, this should be the perfect tablet for watching Masterchef or whatever on the go. Sadly this is not yet the case – we hope that the BBC gets on this asap.
Ultimately, a lot of what we didn’t like about the Xoom came down to app support. Obviously it’s unfair to slate Motorola for third party devs not updating/releasing apps. That still doesn’t change the fact that – right now – there aren’t that many apps out there for you to play with.
Conclusion
The Motorola Xoom is a solid feeling bit of hardware that unfortunately, feels a little unfinished. This is largely down to the many force closes we experienced and the scarcity of available apps – two things which we’re sure will only improve with time (and software updates).
As such, the Xoom represents more of an investment right now than a must have purchase. A die-hard Android fan will undoubtedly find much to love about the Xoom and enjoy seeing more and more tablet-based apps and games become available over the coming months. However more casual tablet users may struggle with it.
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 under Mobile Phone Reviews |
Like the very very similarly named
Nokia C2-01, the
Nokia C1-02 is a cheap ‘n cheerful budget phone with an emphasis on the basics. It’s aimed as a low-cost solution for a back-up emergency phone to use if your main phone is lost/stolen or out of battery. The
Nokia C1-02 is so no frills that it doesn’t even have a camera. Shock horror! Read on to find out if this actually stops the C1-02 from fulfilling it’s function as a mobile phone…
What we like
Though seriously small compared to today’s comparatively huge touchscreens, the 1.8-inch display of the
Nokia C1-02 does the job well enough. Text messages are easily readable and the bright, colourful menus are no trouble at all to navigate.
The big chunky keys of the
Nokia C1-02 allow you to text away easily and the 5-way directional key is as responsive as you’d like it to be. The whole phone feels pretty darn solid all the way through, in typical
Nokia fashion.
We called people on a variety of different networks and landlines on our C1-02 and found call quality to be pretty good. Not crystal clear, perfectly pitched HD audio, but not muffled, sounds-like-there’s-a-sock-over-the-receiver awful either.
Put it this way, calls sound as good as you’d hope them to on a phone that’s being sold on it’s no frills/back to basics-ness.
We liked that there was a microSD card slot tucked away in the C1-02. It can take cards of up to 32GB in size, meaning the C1-02 effectively doubles as an inexpensive MP3 player/iPod/Walkman. We also liked that the memory card slot was a side mounted one, meaning you don’t have to take the battery out to get at it.
Though there were no supplied headphones in the box, the 3.5mm jack means you’re free to use your own headphones.
There are a handful of simple games pre-loaded (Sudoku, Pinball and the Tetris-esque Block’d) provide ample distraction. Not as fun as the ubiquitous Angry Birds mind, but fun enough to kill time on a boring train journey.
What we don’t like
The most obvious drawback of the
Nokia C1-02 is its lack of camera. What more can you really say about this? If you’re a fan of snapping pictures on the fly from your phone then we’d advise you to steer clear of the C1-02.
Another drawback of the C1-02 is the lack of 3G. This means that browsing the web and checking emails is painfully slow (not to mention potentially expensive). This coupled with the tiny 1.8-inch screen pretty much writes off the C1-02 as a mobile browsing/email device.
Said screen is also protected by a shiny reflective layer, which is a big of a fingerprint magnet and reduces legibility in direct sunlight.
Like the similarly-named
Nokia C2-01, there’s no external volume rocker on the C1-02 which limits its use as a music player a little bit.
Speaking of the C2-01… there’s not a huge price difference between the two which kind of undermines the C1-02’s raison d’etre. If there are two phones that are pretty much the same price and one of them has infinitely better spec, well you’re going to go for the better one aren’t you?
Conclusion
It’s really hard to nitpick and find fault with the
Nokia C1-02, a phone that’s so obviously pitched as a bargain basement device. But when you consider that you can pick up the
Nokia C2-01 (which has a camera and 3G) for more or less the same money, we’d pick that if you wanted a phone that you were going to be using on a regular basis.
All in all though, the
Nokia C1-02 does what it’s supposed to do well – make calls and send/receive texts with the minimum of fuss. If you just want a cheap back up phone for use in emergencies, then the C1-02 fits the bill nicely.
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.
