Review : Motorola Atrix 4G Dual Core Android Smartphone

Introduction / Preview : Motorola ATRIX 4G

Motorola ATRIX 4G, the only smartphone that allows you to carry the power of mobile computing inside your pocket. Motorola's revolutionary webtop application changes mobile computing forever by unleashing the power of the smartphone like never before. Designed to bring unprecedented computing to your smartphone, Motorola’s webtop application runs a full Mozilla Firefox 3.6 browser and supports Adobe Flash Player to open up all the rich graphics, animations and video on the web. Motorola ATRIX 4G includes a dual core processor with each core running at 1 GHz, delivering up to two GHz of processing power. Put simply, Motorola ATRIX 4G is the world's most powerful smartphone. 
Motorola ATRIX 4G is designed to essentially become a user's primary digital hub to create, edit and interact with documents, media and content. This is facilitated by Motorola's webtop application and incredible new accessory docks, such as the Laptop Dock, that provide users with a larger screen, keyboard and trackpad enabling them to have an enhanced and more interactive computer-like experience with their devices.
While in the webtop application users can run their Android applications in a window, browse their favorite websites with a full Firefox desktop browser, send instant messages and make phone calls, all at the same time. Calls continue uninterrupted if Motorola ATRIX 4G is removed from a dock. Users can take advantage of the ability to surf the web, view social networking, and use HTML5 web-based applications and supported cloud computing services. Plus, the new Entertainment Center feature lets you show all of the photos, music and videos you already enjoy on-the-go on a big screen in your living room. In the U.S., ATRIX 4G will feature the AT&T U-verse Mobile application, which allows users to schedule recordings, and for qualifying TV customers, download and watch hit TV shows on their smartphones.
Motorola ATRIX 4G provides consumers with instantaneous access to all their emails, files and media. While using the webtop application, business users with an existing Citrix account will benefit from the integrated Citrix Receiver application that provides secure, high performance access to virtual desktops as well as Windows, web and office applications hosted on Citrix XenDesktop. In addition to the full suite of office productivity applications and email applications, users can also access a great number of web applications such as Salesforce.com, Google Docs, and any HTML application or service from the full desktop browser.
Motorola ATRIX 4G runs Android 2.2 with access to more than 100,000 apps and games in the Android Market.
Motorola is introducing two industry-leading companion docks for ATRIX 4G:

• The Motorola HD Multimedia Dock has three USB ports and an HDMI port enabling connections to a keyboard, mouse, speakers and HDMI-compatible monitor for working at your desk/office, or connecting to an HDMI-compatible television and home theater audio system for interacting with content and enjoying video, music, games and more in your living room.
• The Motorola Laptop Dock has an incredibly thin design with an 11.6-inch screen, full keyboard, stereo speakers, 36Wh three-cell battery that delivers up to eight hours of battery life and weighs just 2.4 pounds. Users simply dock their Motorola ATRIX 4G into the back of the Laptop Dock to turn it into an active, connected machine to experience true mobility at work, home and playing on-the-go in a form factor that’s lighter and smaller than most laptops on the market.

Key features and specifications:

• A dual-core processor capable of opening web pages twice as fast as most other smartphones, rendering games faster and displaying HD video on big-screen TVs
• A full 1 GB of RAM for twice the RAM of most smartphones to deliver effortless multi-tasking, such as watching a movie while receiving and responding to email
• The world’s first qHD display for a smartphone, offering high resolution and 24-bit color, making it easier to read indoors and outdoors
• Front- and rear-facing cameras and the ability to record in HD
• Convenient biometric fingerprint reader for easily unlocking your phone while providing extra security
• Up to 48GB of storage (16GB internal and optional 32GB MicroSD card) – enough to store thousands of songs, photos and movies
• 2.4GHz and 5GHz Wi-Fi 802.11n support, enabling as much as 50 percent faster download and upload speeds in WiFi mode compared to most other smartphones
• Optional AT&T Mobile Hotspot service for connecting up to five additional Wi-Fi-enabled devices
• Under 11 mm thin with an extra large 1930 mAh battery for extended standby and talk time
• Two microphones for noise-reduction technology so your calls will be heard loud and clear in even the noisiest environments
• Supports HD video capture and replay for most multimedia standards

Availability
Motorola ATRIX 4G will be available to AT&T customers in Q1 2011.

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Google and Samsung Nexus S review of reviews

 Another month, another potential iPhone-killer. Normally they fall short of grabbing the Smartphone Crown with some pretty basic mistakes – a plasticky-feel to the case, for instance, or a poor camera. Sometimes they’ll even forget to include HD video recording, or iPhone-beating features like a micro SD expansion slot. Will the Nexus S, Google and Samsung’s collaborative effort, fall into this trap? Read our review of reviews.

Contour Design
T3 are quick to praise Google’s new baby, explaining that “the Google Nexus S is a gorgeous phone. It sports what’s called a ‘Contour Display,’ where the glass is curved slightly to fit the contours of your face.”
Originally designed to improve the user experience, Pocket Lint think that it won’t “make any difference in daily use … [however] looking good is good enough. And look good the Nexus S does.”
There’s universal praise for the phone’s aesthetic between reviewers, but it’s equaled by condemnation of the phone’s build quality. T3 sum it up: “Pick up the phone and the build is disappointing, it just feels very plasticky – far more so than the similarly priced HTC Desire HD and Apple iPhone 4.”
4.0” AMOLED Screen
While the design may be the first thing a user looks at, the screen is what holds their attention. Luckily, the Nexus S has done well. PC Pro sings its praises: “the 4in 480 x 800 screen uses Samsung’s Super AMOLED technology, which means it’s eyeball-searing in its brightness and amazingly colourful.”
We’d elaborate, but almost everyone knows that AMOLED equals awesome screen. Is it better than the iPhone 4? That’s too big a debate for this article, but we’d say that the iPhone’s higher pixel density beats marginally improved colour reproduction (sorry, Nexus S!).
Android 2.3 – Gingerbread
If the reviewers’ consensus is that the design and the screen are much improved over the original Nexus, then the operating system is a minor tweak. On paper Gingerbread offers plenty of modifications, but in the real world our journalistic friends found three bragging points:
Tech Radar: An improved task manager means that “Android keeps an eye on which applications are running in the background and shuts them down if they step out of line.” Electric Pig adds that the new task manger also lets “you see what those [badly-coded, battery-hogging apps] are, and kill them.”
Pocket Lint: “The new keyboard makes it easier to get to numbers, punctuation and special characters using multitouch. Previously you’d have to toggle between character sets, now you simply press and hold the button to access the character set you want, as if using a “shift” or “alt” button on a conventional keyboard.“
CNET: “The Web browser in Android 2.3 seems faster than ever, and it rivals the speed of the iPhone 4′s browser. The Web pages we tested loaded quickly and accurately, and you get the bonus of Flash Player 10.1 support, so you can see every website just as it was designed to look.”
Hardware
Tech Radar sums-up the innards: “A Samsung 1GHz Hummingbird processor in the background (which offers up some fantastic speeds) we weren’t surprised to see judder or freezing kept to a minimum.” And this is with only 512MB RAM – less than the HTC Desire. It’s not all good, however – “One thing we’re very disappointed with Samsung and Google about on the Nexus S is the lack of external microSD expansion. Yes, 16GB of internal storage is good-ish.”
Camera
The first real split of opinion surrounds the Nexus S’ camera. Most people have garnered behind Electric Pig: “The five megapixel camera takes unspectacular, washy images without any of the clarity we were hoping”.  Pocket Lint disagrees: “The camera performance is respectable in good light and copes surprisingly well indoors too.” Although they’ll admit that “the flash brings a slight green cast to things, blowing out close subjects and lacking the power to reach any distance.”
Luckily, the two camps reformed in disgust of the VGA camcorder option. Electric Pig: “you’re restricted to VGA video recording – that’s right, no 720p HD for you. Oh, and notifications aren’t automatically silenced while recording.” Eep.
Buy It
Thankfully, CNET took care of this paragraph for us:

“The Nexus S will be available from 20 December for free on a £35-a-month contract, or £550 without a contract, exclusively from Carphone Warehouse and Best Buy. Either way, the phone will come unlocked so you can use it on any network.”

Conclusion
It seems like if you want the best Android phone, you know where to go – the Nexus S is mostly brilliant. Plan on storing a lot of files, however, or want to capture life’s precious moments in high-quality, and you might find yourself reaching for the HTC Desire HD or Samsung Galaxy S. Which is weird, because you’d think that Samsung would have noticeably improved on their previous product.

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Review : Nokia N8-Director of photography

Introduction

We’ve come to take Nokia for granted in the low end or the business class but it seems it has lost the knack for killer phones, run out of royal blood. It’s up to the Nseries to fix it all up. The Nokia N8 may just turn out to be the right cure. With that kind of hardware, it’s a smartphone you’d be mad to ignore. For a change we are not talking netbook-grade processing power or loads of RAM. Nokia have instead given their flagship an industry-leading camera and stuff like HDMI port and USB-On-the-Go.

Nokia N8 Specs and Features

• 12 Mega-Pixel Autofocus Camera w/ Carl Zeiss Optics, Xenon flash, Face recognition
• 3.5 inches AMOLED capacitive touch screen at 16:9 nHD (640 x 360 pixels) resolution, 16.7 million colours
• 256MB RAM, 512MB ROM
• 16 GB internal memory/built-in storage
• MicroSD memory card slot, hot swappable, up to 48 GB
• Dual cam, secondary camera for video calls (VGA, 640 x 480 pixels)
• High-definition digital 720p resolution
• Bluetooth 2.1 w/ A2DP
• Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n
• Symbian ^3 operating system
• Flash Lite 4.0 that supports a majority of Flash Player 10.1 content
• ARM 11 680MHz processor
• 3D Graphics HW accelerator
• FM Radio with RDS, FM transmitter
• HDMI connection to connect Nokia N8 to home theater system
• Premium-quality Dolby Digital Plus Technology
• GPS w/ aGPS support
• HSDPA Cat9, maximum speed up to 10.2 Mbps, HSUPA Cat5 2.0 Mbps
• 1200mAh Li-Po battery
• Video calling, Video editing, Video ring tones
• MP3, WMA, AAC, eAAC, eAAC+, AMR-NB, AMR-WB, E-AC-3, AC-3; Bit rate up to 320 kbps
• Integrated social networking with a Facebook & Twitter app - Nokia Social client
• Social networking: Profiles visible in phone contacts, events visible in phone calendar
• Full web browsing of real web pages with touch control
• WebTV, Office document editors, Video & photo editor, Mail, Chat etc.

Main disadvantages

• Symbian^3 is still behind Android and iOS usability standards
• No video light
• Camera interface is decidedly outdated
• Relatively limited 3rd party software availability
• No office document editing (without a paid upgrade)
• Video player has some issues
• Battery life is not on par with best in the business
• Battery is not user-replaceable

There’s certainly a lot of pressure on the Nokia N8. People are probably expecting more from it than the very guys who designed it. But the N8 was never meant to compete with the iPhone 4 or the Galaxy S. At least, that’s what Nokia will gladly have you believe.
You see, with the Nokia N8 it’s not about who the competition is. Not about the business benefits of a smartphone, not about the available apps. It’s about the best camera in the business. Now, we’ll have to see about that. Again.

 The N8 already managed to put a dedicated digicam to shame in our recent blind test. But it will take more than that to get the thumbs up at the end of a full review. The camera is certainly impressive but it’s the overall balance and bang-for-buck that count most in our books here so the N8 better have more aces up its sleeve.

Design and construction

Sleek aluminum on the sides and the back and a large AMOLED touchscreen up front – there’s nothing to dislike about the N8. If you have a thing for phones made of metal you will absolutely love it.
For the time of our review we managed to obtain four of the five color options of anodized scratch-proof paint available (we’re only the blue one short of a grand slam).
We can’t force ourselves of course to call them all equally attractive. The Dark Grey and Silver are definitely our favorites but we’re sure that the Green and especially the Orange will find their fans too.
There were obviously enough users who liked them. Each got more than 10 percent approval in the Nokia Conversations recent poll.

The front panel of the Nokia N8 is mostly taken by the 3.5” AMOLED display of nHD resolution. Tapered sides and sloping top and bottom make the handset quite comfortable to handle, both portrait and landscape. Unfortunately, the bezel around the screen is a bit too wide for our taste.
Anyway, 3.5” is a good enough size for a contemporary touch phone. And this one has several firsts to Nokia’s credit. The Finns debuted capacitive touchscreen tech on the X6 but only now is Nokia introducing multi-touch support.
Another first is a Nokia AMOLED display to remain perfectly legible under direct sunlight. Previous attempts were pretty poor on a bright sunny day, but this time they got it right.
The indoor image quality, as is to be expected from an AMOLED unit, is pretty good with deep blacks and nicely saturated colors. Not as impressive as Samsung’s SuperAMOLED screens, but certainly competitive elsewhere.
The Nokia N8 has standard screen resolution. At 360 x 640, the Nokia N8 has 44 percent less pixels than the best Android displays (854 x 480 pixels) and just over a third of the iPhone 4 pixel count (960 x 640 pixels).

The N8 display compared to the iPhone 4 Retina unit

 Not everyone needs that kind of pixel density though, and some users probably won’t even be able to notice the difference. We do, that's for sure.
The N8 screen sensitivity is as good as we’ve come to expect from capacitive units.
Vibration feedback does deserve a mention however as it seems impressively well tweaked and does improve the user experience in a surprisingly nice way. Haptics are enabled even when you scroll lists and the icons bump against the end of the screen or when you zoom in on a video using the virtual buttons.
Moving on, we notice the video-call camera in the upper right corner above the display. Near it are the ambient light and the proximity sensors, as well as the centrally placed earpiece.

Symbian^3 user interface

The Nokia N8 is the pioneer of the new Symbian^3 OS, which according to Nokia should be the first step in the company’s fightback against Android and iOS. We wish it could somehow magically leapfrog the two currently leading platforms but those things just don’t happen overnight.
Of course they might have gone for a total overhaul by starting from scratch as Microsoft did but that would mean losing a lot of functionality and that’s probably the reason Nokia went for the evolutionary, rather than the revolutionary way.
The new OS is certainly not up with the best just yet but is certainly a step in the right direction. The Finnish software engineers finally realized that it’s a streamlined interface that people want and got rid of the whole tap-to-select-another-tap-to-activate non-sense approach that made Symbian^1 so inconsistent.
There are still some traces of that illogical interface in the camera interface, but we are hoping those will be gone soon too.

The new OS also brings some nice UI layout and functionality changes. The homescreen is the most evident of those, its size now expanded to three panes worth of space. You are then free to fill them up with widgets and then rearrange them as you see fit. If three panels are too much for you, you can also delete some of them.

 

Impressive audio output

Nokia N8's multimedia prowess wouldn't be complete without high quality audio output. Fortunately, the handset managed to deliver on that one too, achieving some excellent scores in our traditional test. And the thing is pretty loud too.
When attached to an active external amplifier (i.e. your car stereo or your home audio system) the Nokia N8 performs greatly with no weak points whatsoever.
There wasn't much quality deterioration when we plugged in headphones either. Sure, the stereo crosstalk got a bit worse and we recorded some intermodulation distortion but those are rather hard to detect in anything but lab conditions.

Nokia n8 frequency response

Final words

The Nokia N8 is the best Nokia has to offer. A few years back thousands of people would take this to mean the best on the market. Things are not that simple today and Nokia has been learning it the hard way. But the company has been learning.
It’s been a long losing streak for Nokia in the game of touch phones. You can’t expect it to suddenly turn the game around and start beating the snot out of the competition. It makes much more sense to try and be better one step at a time. The best camera in business is one such step.
We’ve given up looking for the ultimate smartphone, haven’t we? The Nokia N8 most certainly isn’t in contention there. And Symbian ^3 is not the best touchscreen experience you can get – although what’s fair is fair – it’s an improvement over S60 5th. And the Ovi store isn’t the best app market, but the guys behind it try really hard.
Symbian sucks on touchscreen – yeah, but there are some nice multimedia features. The web browser is not that good – yeah, but you get USB-on-the-go. There are better screens out there – but no better cameras. Not necessarily in this order.
The Nokia N8 seems capable of sustaining balance. In one particular area, it’s the unquestioned winner. Elsewhere, it’s just fair – there are ups and downs all along its spec sheet. As always, it boils down to picking your priorities.

 

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Review : HTC HD7

The HD7 is HTC’s top-of-the-line Windows Phone 7 smarpthone. It’s the WP7 equivalent of the Android-packing Desire HD with a slight retouches on the exterior design.

The HTC HD7 copies some of the genetics of its year old predecessor, the HD2, although that one was just on WinMo 6.5. The large 4.3″ display wrapped around a combination of metal and polymer body gives it an elegant look.

The edges are lined with a strip of black, polished metal with only the power button, volume controls and dedicated camera in place. The micro-USB port is at the bottom together with the 3.5mm audio port and microphone.

 
The display is pretty large and the screen is crisp and bright. At the bottom end of the glass panel are 3 touch controls — search, home (represented by Windows icon) and back. The single sheet of glass that covers the display is significantly thick and doesn’t touch the top and bottom edge of the front panel. The small gap serves as an opening for the speakers.
I was meaning to write a separate and full review of Windows Phone 7 OS but this is the only time I’ve had a really significant experience with the OS so I might just have to wait a little bit and test how it goes with other models or brands. Nevertheless, my initial impressions of Microsoft’s mobile OS has been pretty good.

It’s pretty obvious that Windows Phone 7 has been developed from the ground up and even if you’re a long-time WinMO user, you’ll definitely not notice any similarities. The OS did not undergo an evolution, it’s been radically mutated. And Microsoft did not just made a 180-degree turn but totally went crazy with the UI. For those who have owned or tried the Zune player, the UI is very familiar.
I’d say the user interface is essentially a breathe of fresh air, especially if you’re coming from iOS or Android. Objects such as shortcuts, widgets, contacts and apps are represented by tiles stacked from top to bottom. You add items by pinning it to the home screen (Start) or remove it by un-pinning them. The tiles are big and bold with options to change color schemes that screams of eye-candy.

Slide the screen to the right and you get the entire list of links to settings, apps and the whole enchilada. The scrolling list might be bearable if you just have a couple of dozens to a hundred items in there but it could get dizzy once the figure reaches several hundreds (by that time, we’ll be needing folders or groups).
The UI makes a lot of fancy transitions in between screens — it flips, swipes, peels, tumbles and slides every chance it gets. It’s like a magician that takes his time flapping his cape around before executing a trick. It’s amusing most of the time especially if you’re just leisurely navigating thru the phone’s menu. However, if you’re in a hurry, it could get tiresome.

WP7 is integrated with Facebook and Twitter very neatly. After plugging in a new SIM and linking my Facebook and Twitter account to the device, I was surprised that contacts from new SMS came in fully propagated — name, avatar, other contacts and status all pulled off from Facebook.
The built-in Mail client is spiffy, clean and runs quite fast. It lacks a search feature though which I hope they’d add in the next update. The IE browser is light, supports multiple windows or tabs and, frankly, is quite fast too.

The HD7 can be managed by hooking it up to Microsoft Zune and synching multimedia files like music, photos and movies can also be done wirelessly as long as the Zune software and the handset is connected to the same WiFi network. You can also login to Windows Live to manage contacts and calendars on the cloud.
The Windows Live account also has some features to ring, lock or erase the phone remotely. The phone also updates itself by sending GPS location on a regular basis. You can login to Live and locate your phone on the map with matching date and time it last recorded its location.

Apps are very essential to the usefulness of any smartphone and thankfully, the Zune Marketplace on the HD7 has plenty of them. It’s not as extensive as the ones found on the iTunes App Store or the Android Market but it’s got some decent numbers.
The more common social apps were actually developed by Microsoft itself (Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare) so you will notice the tight design integration of these apps into WP7.
The games for the XBox Live though are somewhat on the expensive side where games like Bejeweled and Need for Speed costs $7.99 and Assassin’s Creed and Guitar Hero 5 costs $10.99. There’s an option to try before you buy though (much like the Lite version if you will).
HTC also added several of their own apps (all for free) and featured them in the HTC Hub which also doubles as a weather app.

  The HD7 packs a 5MP autofocus camera and takes some pretty decent to good quality photos. It doesn’t handle night shots or low-light shots very well though. Photos are a bit washed out and blueish at times. See sample photos here. Video recording is much better and can do up to 720p.

The virtual keyboard is well thought of, nicely spaced with unique audio and visual cues for each tapped key. You’ll most probably need both hands to comfortably use the handset due to its sheer size.
The kick-stand at the back doubles as a protection for the camera barrel and flips to the side so you can position the handset in landscape when watching movies. The speakers are just beside it and can do a good amount of volume. You’ll need to set the Audio Enhancer app to use Dolby Mobile so you get better sound quality when watching movies.

 HTC HD7 specs:
4.3″ display @ 480×800 pixels
Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 1 GHz processor
576MB RAM
16GB internal storage
Bluetooth 2.1 w/ A2DP
802.11 b/g/n
HSDPA, HSUPA
5MP camera w/ 720p video recording
GPS w/ aGPS support
Motion G-sensor
Proximity Sensor
Ambient Light Sensor
Li-Ion 1230 mAh
Windows Phone OS 7

Microsoft has made good improvements with Windows Phone 7 OS and pairing it with a powerful hardware like the HTC HD7. We’ve haven’t had much hands-on time with the HTC Trophy and HTC Mozart, both of which are running on WP7 as well, but I can definitely say that the HD7 is looking to be the much better model.
The OS comes with a lot of flair but it still feels a bit half-baked with all the missing little features and basic controls needed. It’s a really good start though and the addition of more apps and future updates should address all that. The only multi-tasking I was able to do is play music while browsing the web or using the camera. Cut & paste is also missing too but Microsoft is said to be working on that in the next update.
A few more software/firmware updates and addition of more useful and affordable apps in the Marketplace could make the HTC HD7 a good alternative to those who are eyeing the Desire HD.

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Review : HTC Desire HD

The HTC Desire HD was announced back in September, and when it was announced it had a range of impressive specifications and features. It comes with Android 2.2 Froyo, and the model we tested is the UK version.

Hardware

HTC has always made quality devices, even back when no one knew who it was. The Desire HD is a shining example of that. The exterior is a unibody, matte aluminum that feels solid and comfortable. The back is elegantly curved while the edges have a slight frontward bevel that adds significantly to the ergonomics of the device.

 One of the first things I noticed while using this device was how cool it was – temperature wise. The aluminum unibody must act like a heat sink, drawing device-killing heat from the innards of the phone to the outside.

 The covers to the battery compartment and the microsd and SIM slots are unusual in that they are two separate pieces -- unlike the single cover we've seen before -- and they are relatively small: not an entire back, or back-plate like other devices have. Unfortunately, the battery compartment cover proved tricky to remove, and frustrating to try and put back iton place. Also, the lower cover never seemed to fit right, leaving a bit of a gap and uneven edges.

The screen on the Desire HD is the biggest feature – and the biggest drawback to the device. It’s big, but not too big. Where it falls short is with the super-high reflective surface of the display. Inside the display isn’t bad, but when you step outside in any kind of moderately bright light, you’ll be hunting for shade to be able to see the image.

Screen resolution is quite good, images are clear, and text is crisp.

Weight: 5.78 ounces

Width: 2.68-inches

Height: 4.84-inches

Thickness: 0.46-inches

Screen: 4.3-inches, 480x800 WVGA

CPU/GPU: 1GHz (QSD8255 45nm Snapdragon)/Adreno 205 graphics

Memory: 768MB RAM, 1.5MB internal storage, 8GB Class 2 microsdhc (included)

OS: Android 2.2 (Froyo) with HTC Sense UI and HTC apps

Connectors: 3.5mm stereo audio/headset jack; microUSB 2.0 port

Radios: WiFi 802.11 b/g/n; Bluetooth; 3G, GPRS, EDGE; USB & WiFi tethering built-in

European Bands: HSPA/WCDMA: 900/2100 MHz; GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz

Asia Pacific Bands: HSPA/WCDMA: 900/2100 MHz; GSM: 850/900/1800/1900 MHz

Battery: 1230mAh

Camera

The camera app on the Desire HD is by far the best I’ve ever used. It’s fast, it’s intuitive, and the video preview fills the entire screen rather than being boxed into a much smaller frame. It comes with everything you’d expect, from geo-tagging, automatic white-balancing, automatic dual-LED flash, and more. Still pictures are an impressive 8-megapixel (3264 x 1952), and video comes set at 800 x 480 with the capability of shooting up to 720p HD (1280 x 720).

Both pictures and videos were reasonable, but won’t replace your SLR or dedicated point-and-shoot camera. Video and stills don’t turn out well in low light, which is to be expected. Image quality in moderate-light isn’t as good as I had expected, resulting in dark images, or other sorts of “noise” in the images.

Sample images have been reduced to 550px wide. No other image manipulations have been applied.

Performance

With a second-generation, 1Ghz CPU I expected a little more speed than what I experienced. The overall performance of the device and Sense UI launcher was generally fast and snappy, but I encountered intermittent periods of very noticeable lag in seemingly random places. Restarting the phone resolved the issue.

Music and videos played flawlessly without hesitation, skips, pops, or other anomalies.

Call Quality/Network Speed

Call quality using both T-Mobile's network and Google Voice were clean and clear. The device fits easily in the hand for traditional phone-to-face holding and both sides of the conversation were superb. Calls made using various Bluetooth devices and the included wired headset were equally clear.

Network speed over 802.11g and 802.11n was fast and reliable with network acquisition quick and easy. Since the phone doesn't include T-Mobile's 3G bands I was unable to test 3G performance, but EDGE was reliable and as fast as you'd expect. I tried using a friend's AT&T SIM which should theoretically have provided 3G connectivity, but for some reason that we could not discover, did not; EGDE worked equally as well on AT&T as it did on T-Mobile

Battery Life

When I cracked open the battery compartment for the first time I was honestly surprised to see a 1230mAh hiding inside – it seemed somewhat small. The G2, with a slower processor, small screen, and HSPA+ radio, has a 1300mAh battery.

During the initial several days of using the Desire HD as my daily-use device, the battery was in the red by noon. I don’t put much stock in the battery indicator or battery life for the first week of use. During this period you’ll typically be using significantly more battery life while downloading, installing, and configuring apps, contacts, Tweets, and emails; and the device is still calibrating its measurements of battery itself.

Unfortunately, battery life didn’t improve all that much after the initial break-in period. The phone will last all day, as long as you’re not watching much video, streaming much audio, or doing a lot of eBook or webpage reading. Add in any of those items and you’ll want to have a charger in your car and on your desk. Even more discouraging is that the ability to obtain an extended battery is all but eliminated by the design of the Desire HD’s battery compartment.

Pros

+ Large screen
+ Solid construction
+ Wonderful ergonomics

Cons

- Poorly fitting compartment covers
- Small battery capacity
- Screen is very reflective

Conclusion

The Desire HD is a beautiful phone with respectable performance and speed. As long as you can charge up the battery in the middle of the day, you won’t be disappointed with this large-screen handset.

Rating: 4 out of 5

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Review : HTC 7 Mozart

HTC announced three Windows Phone 7 devices for Australia during Microsoft's launch of its new mobile operating system last month. Of the three, only the HTC 7 Mozart sports a unibody aluminium chassis similar to what's found on the HTC Legend and the latest Desire HD smartphones. It is also the only model among all the launch devices from HTC, LG and Samsung to come with an 8-megapixel camera and Xenon flash (which did not perform to our higher expectations).

• Good: Xenon flash with 8-megapixel camera • Unibody aluminium design • Some useful HTC apps including one for handling incoming calls
• Bad: Camera implementation needs improvement • No panoramic feature for camera • Touch-sensitive keys under screen can disrupt gaming

Design

With a 3.7-inch WVGA screen, aluminium chassis and curved edges, the Mozart looks a lot like the HTC Desire from the front. Those who love metallic materials will be pleased to see that the aluminium extends all around the back, save for two plastic portions on the top and bottom. We feel the non-symmetrical ridges and cut-outs of the unibody design are quite cool-looking, but admit that not everyone will take a liking to it.
Unlike the Desire, the Mozart has touch-sensitive buttons on the front. These are the Back, Start and Search keys as required by Microsoft. While they work well, and we like the haptic feedback we get when we used them, we would have preferred physical shortcut keys as found on the Desire. This would reduce the occurrence of accidental presses when playing games holding the phone in landscape orientation — when we were playing Rocket Riot, the Search key was unintentionally activated, kicking us out of the game. Since Xbox Live is a big part of what makes WP7 attractive, we feel physical keys will reduce the chance of such occurrences.
The Mozart does have some physical buttons around the edges. These include the power toggle on the top, camera shutter on the bottom right edge, and volume controls on the left.

The 800x480-pixel LCD display was bright and showed text and images well. We had no issues with it whether indoors or out in bright daylight.
Like the HTC Legend, the plastic cut-out on the base has to be removed to access the removable battery. The Mozart doesn't come with a memory expansion slot, but you do get 8GB of built-in storage.

Features

Connectivity-wise, you get the usual crop of options available to a high-end smartphone. These include HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and A-GPS for satellite navigation.
At the software end of things, we know Microsoft has dictated how the interface should look, so there's no chance of HTC adding its Sense UI to the Mozart. To differentiate itself from other vendors, the Taiwan manufacturer has included a few proprietary apps.
The starting point of getting a unique HTC experience on the Mozart is through the HTC Hub program. The first thing you'll see upon firing it up is the time and weather — this looks just like the most prominent widget found in every HTC Android phone with Sense. Apart from that, it gives thumbnails of other exclusive HTC apps, which will take you to the Windows Marketplace to download.
Of the available apps, the one we found most useful is called Attentive Phone. This gives the handset extra features for handling phone calls. For example, the "quiet ring on pick-up" option detects when you pick up the Mozart from a table when it's ringing and lowers the ringing volume. The other options include "flip for speaker", which activates the speakerphone during active calls when you turn the phone over; "flip to mute ringer"; and "pocket mode", which detects when your device is in a pocket or bag and increases the ring volume accordingly. These features have all been implemented in the Android-based HTC Sense and we are glad to see them in HTC's Windows Phone handsets.
Other apps include Photo Enhancer for adding effects to images, Sound Enhancer for an audio equaliser, Stocks for checking your quotes, and other extras like a unit converter, notepad and to-do list program. There is also a Flashlight app, but take note that this won't work with the Mozart's Xenon flash as it cannot be turned on persistently like LED lights.
With an 8-megapixel sensor and Xenon flash, the Mozart's camera has the best specifications of all the WP7 launch models. The camera app is pretty responsive and focuses quickly. It also gives options such as portraits, sports and candlelight for different shooting scenarios. Fun filter effects including sepia and negative can also be added.
Taking a photo in auto mode was a bit of a challenge. The Mozart tended to lower shutter speed to compensate for dim lighting. This gave properly exposed shots but also increased the incidences of blurred photos. Typically, it's hard to hold a lightweight camera phone very still, especially when you have to apply pressure to press the shutter button, adding to the difficulty of getting a sharp image without hand-shake blur. We would have preferred it if the camera allowed for a slightly underexposed shot as a compromise for dim lighting.
Of course, using the Xenon flash does go some way to alleviating hand-shake problems. One issue in its implementation is that the shutter sound goes off before the shot is actually taken. A user may instinctively move his hand down before the image is captured, resulting in a missed or blurred shot.
When you do get your shot, images looked decent with accurate colours. Using the sports mode helps to solve the slow shutter speed without flash issue, but image noise becomes more apparent. The HTC 7 Mozart can take 720p HD-quality videos. Click here to see some images and clip.
Overall, we were not impressed with the indoor performance of the Mozart's 8-megapixel shooter. It seems some of these issues could be solved by a software update and we hope HTC releases one soon. It would be good, too, if HTC could add a sweep panorama mode for taking landscape shots, like on the LG Optimus 7.

Performance

With one Live and two Gmail email accounts set to sync every half hour, the occasional phone calls and text messages and social networking, the Mozart battery life lasted slightly over a day of use on a full charge. This is comparable to other smartphones, but given the fact that you can't sync social-networking apps automatically on the Mozart, we expected it to perform a little better.
Call quality was good and we didn't experience any dropped calls during our period of testing. The speakerphone on this handset was good, loud and sufficiently clear. Audio for videos was also decent, though we would suggest using headphones instead of firing up the speakers when in public — it's more civic-minded to do so.
However, on a few occasions, we were not able to connect to the cellular data network in spite of good reception at the location. We tested the network using the same data plan on an iPhone 4 and it worked fine.
Speed-wise, the Mozart performed fine with its 1GHz Snapdragon processor and 576MB RAM. Transitions were smooth and all common tasks such as test messaging and bringing up the address book were done snappily. Loading times were a little long for Xbox Live games, but that slowness has been felt on all the WP7 devices we tried so far.

Conclusion

As mentioned in our Optimus 7 review, the LG has the best set of proprietary apps so far. This opinion has not changed after our evaluation of the Mozart. With better camera specs, this HTC should have rightly aced the imaging aspect but didn't because of some usage abnormalities.

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Review : iPhone 4

Introduction

You can't make a phone that everyone loves and Apple is not even trying. Much like any other iPhone so far, the iPhone 4 is a phone that everybody loves AND hates.
Apple’s latest is always the greatest – you have to give them that. Sometimes it seems they put less effort into making it than in letting people know they did. But with the Apple iPhone 4, they were obviously hard at work. The 4th generation iPhone has an all new look, new feel and plenty of new skill. We already caught a glimpse of the iOS4. But there’s much more: a 1GHz chip, two cameras, HD video and of course the Retina display – the highest-res screen we’ve seen so far on a GSM phone.

Surely there are still enough blank spots on the feature list but that’s Apple and its iPhone. Compromises are being made in every phone out there anyway. But the simple fact is Number 4 is the best iPhone to-date. Let’s see how good that is.

Key features

• Quad-band GSM and quad-band 3G support with 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 5.76 Mbps HSUPA
• 3.5" 16M-color LED-backlit TFT capacitive touchscreen of 640 x 960 px resolution
• Scratch-resistant glass front and rear, with fingerprint-resistant coating
• 1GHz Apple A4 SoC; 512MB of RAM
• 5 MP autofocus camera with LED flash and touch focus
• 720p video recording at 30fps
• Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n
• GPS with A-GPS connectivity; digital compass
• 16/32GB storage options
• Accelerometer, proximity sensor and three-axis gyro sensor
• Active noise cancellation with a dedicated secondary microphone
• Standard 3.5 mm audio jack, stereo Bluetooth v2.1
• Excellent audio output quality
• Slim waistline at only 9.3mm
• Secondary front-facing camera
• Some degree of multitasking
• Rich AppStore

Main disadvantages

• Hardware design is prone to reception issues
• MicroSIM card support only
• No Flash support in the web browser
• No true multitasking for all applications
• FaceTime video calls work only over Wi-Fi
• No file transfer over Bluetooth or USB Mass Storage mode
• No hardware shutter key for the camera
• No FM radio
• No stereo speakers
• No microSD card slot
• No smart dialing
• Too dependent on iTunes for loading multimedia content
• Poor loudspeaker performance

As you can see, most of the main disadvantages are simply passed from one generation to the next but - whatever iPhone you’re coming from - the Number 4 will tick most of your boxes. Upgraders will be used to the shortcomings, and unbiased observers will have less points to complain against.
It just seems some features will be forever missing. The iPhone’s memory isn’t expandable and you can’t use the thing as an external drive (this also means that files are only transferred via iTunes, again). Bluetooth has been upgraded to cover not only for music and calls but a compatible wireless keyboard too. File transfers however are a no-go.
The lack of Flash support in the Safari browser is no surprise given the Apple-Adobe feud. Luckily there’s the good old YouTube app to partly make up for that but Flash games are still out of the question.
There is now a secondary video-call cam but the “reinvented” FaceTime video calls feature only works over Wi-Fi (for now) and between two iPhone 4’s.
As for the multitasking, this is the closest the iPhone has ever gotten but there is no true multitasking, and certainly not for all apps.
You've probably also heard of the user reports of reception issues and you're wondering how much of that is true. Well, we've checked that in detail, too.

 All that (and a bit more) aside, the new goodies seem to merit at least some of the iPhone 4 hype. The Retina display is gorgeous. The 3.5” capacitive TFT touchscreen has four times the resolution of the older iPhones. At 640 x 960 pixels, it’s the best we’ve seen – statistically. But perhaps the most impressive too, for its actual performance.
There’s a generational leap in imaging too. The first two iPhones had a single 2MP fixed focus camera on board. Last year’s 3GS tried to make some sense with a 3-megapixel autofocus snapper. With the iPhone 4, Apple are finally beginning to look good. The primary 5-megapixel autofocus camera not only takes impressive images but shoots 720p videos too. Oh, and it has a LED flash.

iOS 4.0: at full throttle

The iOS 4 is can be installed on any iPhone 3GS and – technically – 3G. We see no point porting it on a 3G though – the whole thing gets dismally slow and some of the new features are not supported anyway. What matters now is how the OS performs on the iPhone 4. There's a quick video you may have already watched in our blog.
Thanks to its gorgeous new screen, better still camera and vastly improved camcorder, gyro sensor and video-call camera, the iPhone 4 is the device on which users can genuinely appreciate the potential of iOS 4. iPhone 3GS can run it almost without any compromises but you’ll get the fastest and most seamless performance on the iPhone 4 and its 1GHz Apple A4 platform.
On an iPhone 3G you will get neither homescreen wallpapers nor multi-tasking. The rest of the stuff is there, but the performance drop is too much to bear.
But let’s be positive here – we have an iPhone 4 and a 3GS to enjoy, which is more than enough. You might have already been through our iOS 4 review – you'll find it's got a lot of common with the following part of the iPhone 4 review. You will find identical wording, don’t you worry, we’ve made sure all the details are updated with iPhone 4 specifics.
Let’s start with the changelog:

General UI changes

• Homescreen wallpapers
• Applications can be organized in folders
• Multitasking – fast app switcher with app specific pause or backgrounding
• You can do Google/Wikipedia searches straight from Spotlight
• Minor icon facelifts
• Video call support (only in iPhone 4 and only over Wi-Fi)
• Settings menu gets you the last toggled setting screen

Text input and management

• Keyboard layouts now cover QWERTY, QWERTZ, and AZERTY
• Spell checker

Contacts

• Simplified contact adding and editing

Messaging

• SMS character counter
• SMS search
• Email threading
• Unified Email inbox
• Email archiving is now available as an option when you setup Gmail

Camera

• 5x digital zoom in still camera
• Touch-focus in video capture

iPod player

• iPod music player can now create, edit and delete playlists

Bluetooth

• Bluetooth keyboard pairing support

iTunes store and AppStore

• Free iBooks e-book and PDF reader
• iMovie adds advanced video editing to the iPhone 4 (paid app)
• iAd service allows for free, ad-supported apps

And the stuff iOS 4 failed to deliver

• No Flash support in the web browser
• No true multitasking for all applications
• No quick switches for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or 3G on the homescreen
• No social networking integration in the contact list
• No lockscreen or homescreen info widgets or plugins
• No new ringtones or SMS tones
• SMS,,email, and calendar tones are still not customizable
• No proper file browser or access to the file system
• No USB mass storage mode
• Screen has no vibrating haptic feedback
• No Bluetooth file transfers to other mobile phones
• Contacts lack a swipe-to-delete or mass delete feature
• No SMS/MMS delivery notifications
• No smart dialing (but Spotlight is a somewhat of a substitute)
• No DivX or XviD video support and no official third-party application to play that
• The whole iPhone is too iTunes dependent and you’re also limited to syncing particular types of content only with ONE computer..

General user interface and key features

The traditional flat interface should be all too well familiar by now. Tap an icon to open an application; press the hardware Home key to close the application and return to the Home screen. That's all there is to it. Only the Settings section goes several levels deep. Basically that’s all you need to control your iPhone.

 

Gallery displays Albums, Events, Faces and Places

The iPhone’s gallery is rather simple and easy to work with. It hosts all you pictures organized in different albums or tabs. When you open a specific album you can scroll through the images with swipe gestures.

There is one interesting thing though. The iOS 4’s gallery opens every image slightly zoomed in so fits the whole screen without leaving black bars. If you want to view the full picture, you’d need to pinch or double-tap to zoom out.

 If you use iPhoto software on any of the Apple computers, you are now able to sync your Events, Places and Faces image holders. In iPhone’s gallery you will notice the respective four tabs available at the bottom – Albums, Events, Faces and Places.
As usual, Albums holds all of your synced, downloaded and captured images.
The Events and Faces folders on your iPhone 4 can only be filled with content from the iPhoto photo organizer on your Mac. You can’t populate them with photos from your iPhone’s camera.
All geotagged photos (saved from web or shot with the iPhone) appear in Places where they show up as pins on a map. Tapping a pin shows a small thumb with basic information about the image.

The better iPod

The iPhone 3.0 OS enabled local search in the iPod player, as well media scrubber, shake-to-shuffle, third-party app access to your library and stereo Bluetooth headset/speaker support.

 

The iOS 4 treats the iPod player to a single, but important upgrade. You are now able to create, edit or delete playlists straight on your mobile (as opposed to only getting them from iTunes).

Audio quality impresses

It's hardly a secret that all the previous iPhones had perfectly clean audio output with relatively low volume being their only problem. However Apple have obviously done the right thing and fixed that here, making the iPhone 4 one of the best music player among the mobile phones that we have seen.
In fact the iPhone 4 is identical to the iPad tablet as far as audio output is concerned (volume levels included), which makes us suspect that Apple have somehow managed to squeeze similar hardware inside.
But let's cut the small talk and give you the results so you can see for yourselves what a great music player the iPhone 4 is. It might be about time that you retired that old iPod of yours.

Test	Frequency response	Noise level	Dynamic range	THD	IMD + Noise	Stereo crosstalk
Apple iPhone 4	+0.01, -0.07	-90.1	90.0	0.0068	0.012	-89.6
Apple iPad	+0.01, -0.07	-90.1	90.0	0.0068	0.012	-89.6
Samsung I9000 Galaxy S	+0.03 -0.04	-90.7	90.6	0.014	0.019	-90.6
Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10	+0.07 -0.37	-85.4	85.3	0.018	0.068	-83.6
Google Nexus One	+0.19, -0.55	-86.1	85.8	0.023	0.088	-85.2
HTC HD2	+0.39, -2.99	-89.0	89.1	0.057	0.960	-87.5
Apple iPhone 3GS	+0.01, -0.05	-92.1	92.1	0.0035	0.011	-95.0
Apple iPhone	+0.34, -1.16	-90.8	91.3	0.0050	0.016	-91.4
Apple iPhone 3G	+0.52, -1.05	-89.9	90.1	0.0033	0.016	-93.1
Apple iPod Touch 2G	+0.04, -0.05	-91.4	91.5	0.0027	0.012	-90.0

The Apple iPhone 4 frequency response is simply perfect

iPhone 4 advantages over iPhone 3GS

• Sexy new design, exclusive glass panels
• New display has 4x the resolution and contrast ratio, wider viewing angles
• 1GHz Apple A4 platform is faster than ever before
• Double the RAM amount (now reaching 512MB)
• Quad-band 3G with HSDPA and HSUPA
• 802.11n Wi-Fi support (though conclusively faster even in G mode)
• Three-axis gyro sensor for unsurpassed motion control
• 5MP AF camera with backside illuminated sensor and LED flash
• Camcoder shoots 720p HD videos at 30fps
• Front video-call camera (FaceTime calls)
• Active noise cancellation with a dedicated mic
• Improved battery life

So, to wrap it all up – we admit we enjoyed the company of Apple’s latest toy and we would like to keep it around. We wouldn’t mind a Samsung Galaxy S either to watch some movies or a Nokia N8 to take some cool pictures and videos. And we wouldn’t say no to a Moto DROID X that gets along with European networks.
No, there isn’t a perfect smartphone out there. There’s always something for anyone to love or hate. What makes the iPhone so special is that it takes love and hate with the loftiness of a royalty.

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HTC Desire review: A desire come true

Key features:

• Quad-band GSM and dual-band 3G support
• 7.2 Mbps HSDPA and 2 Mbps HSUPA
• 3.7" 16M-color capacitive AMOLED touchscreen of WVGA resolution (480x 800 pixel)
• Android OS v2.1 with kinetic scrolling and pinch zooming
• Slim profile and great build quality.

 

• Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 1 GHz processor
• 576 MB RAM and 512 MB ROM
• 5 MP autofocus camera with LED flash and geotagging
• WVGA (800 x 480 pixels) video recording @ 15fps
• Wi-Fi and GPS with A-GPS
• microSD slot, bundled with a 4GB card
• 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 which doubles as a button
• Smart dialing

Main disadvantages:

• Disappointing video quality
• Limited storage available to the user on the system partition (you are left with only 120 MB for installing apps)
• No DivX and XviD video playback
• No voice dialing
• Non hot-swappable memory card

HTC Sense likes it on big screen

HTC Hero pioneered the Sense UI on Android handsets to tap the company’s existing user base. The Tattoo was the next HTC-customized device, but Sense just didn’t feel natural on the QVGA screen.
HTC Desire is Legend’s bigger brother upping the CPU and RAM, along with screen size and resolution. It runs the latest Android v2.1 and takes full advantage of its performance boost and full color support. As a result, the pre-loaded Sense UI is faster, more attractive and fluid.
The main differences between this Sense UI version and the one back on the Hero are the new context icons, a bunch of new wallpapers and the unified Widget section. Whether you are using the People, Mail, Music or Gallery Tabs, the scrollable icons at the bottom will please you with new color skins. We like it this way – the old ones looked a bit dull against the otherwise graphically rich and colorful UI.
We should also acknowledge the role of the AMOLED display in making the new Sense UI look even more attractive compared to HTC Hero’s. Let’s take a closer look for those who haven’t met the latest Sense UI yet.

Good 5 megapixel snapper

HTC Desire has a 5 megapixel sensor for a maximum image resolution of 2592 x 1936 pixels, and a LED flash. This is becoming pretty much the norm for recent upper mid-range and high-end Android handsets so the HTC seems to be on level ground with its competitors.
However thanks to Android 2.1, the Desire boasts a camera interface that is quite competitive outside the Google OS world too. There are a number of customizable settings ranging from ISO speed to aspect ratio and auto focus. Now, that makes perhaps the Omnia HD owners sneer but it’s a nice improvement for Android.
We are yet to see modern-day features such as face and smile detection, for example, but the gap is closing.

Here are some screen shots using the 5 megapixel HTC Desire:

Final words

The Google Nexus One was given the grace of a market head start but it’s no longer standing lonely at the top. And even if it looks like a brotherly reunion, the HTC Desire is in fact a formidable rival. That’s between HTC and Google though. Users have hardly reasons to complain.
The limited availability of the Nexus One only works in the HTC Desire’s favor. The HTC Desire ships worldwide and its current street price is around 440 euro. That’s just a bit more than the Google Nexus One and it won’t be long perhaps before they’re level.
As to the differences, the HTC Desire seems to get the upper hand but it’s not just quite as capable as promised. DivX support and 720p video recording didn’t make it on time, although there’s word of including them in a future update. The HTC Desire comes with the company’s proprietary Sense UI on top of the E'clair and Flash support in the web browser. We do prefer the hardware buttons to the Nexus One’s capacitive controls but the trackpad doesn’t quite cut it. We’d take the trackball any day.

Google Nexus One

 Now, the complicated family issues aside, let’s look at a real competitor. The recently unveiled I9000 Galaxy S is Samsung’s most powerful Android smartphone – and quite keen to challenge for the top spot. Featuring a breathtaking four inches of Super AMOLED display and a fast 1GHz processor, the Galaxy S also runs E'clair and offers a 5-megapixel snapper. What’s more, codec support and high-res video are all there so HTC better hurry with that upgrade.

Samsung I9000 Galaxy S

 The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 has the older Donut (Android OS v1.6) and its price is steep. The X10 is still quite a catch though. It has a Snapdragon inside and a bigger screen too. The real edge over the Android rivals however is the 8-megapixel autofocus camera.

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10

 So, this is the latest in Android and we have no reason to be disappointed. The Desire is confidently taking charge of the HTC Android lineup. With gadgets like the Hero and the Legend behind it, this is one of the most impressive droid fleets these days. The HTC Desire has the background and the inspiration, and it has some bonus hype, courtesy of the Nexus One. Out of two identical phones, most users will of course get the one that’s more readily available.

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