HTC Hero

This is quite a delayed post seeing that we had the HTC Hero almost a month ago. Definite fail on our part. However, it is better late than never and we have a full report on the phone and how it is possibly the leading Android based phone in South Africa at the moment.

Design

The first thing you notice about the HTC is the “lip” it has at the bottom of the phone. It is ergonomically designed to allow more comfortable use of the few buttons that actually exist on the HTC Hero. The phone has a sleek finish with very sharp lines, it may not be setting trends in the design of the phone but it definitely looks good in your hand. This means that I am yet to see an Android phone that both breaks the barriers of mobile operating systems and sets the trends in phone design.

Sony Ericsson W205

When I turned 15, I was handed my very first cellular phone (as most of us called them back then) for my birthday. This is back when having a mobile with an antenna was in the norm. My first impression was “Wow, I have a cellular phone!” Needless to say it was an Ericsson (like, I gave a rip).

I have had the Sony Ericsson W205 for the last few weeks . Don’t hold your breath for this if you are an avid Sony Ericsson fan but for everyone else here are my views.

The first thing I did was slide it open so I can check out the buttons. The slide function is superb except one naturally finds oneself slideing open the phone by pushing up against the screen leaving fingerprints on it. As usual, Sony Ericsson got creative with their buttons, so at this point I’m impressed.

Nokia N97 - White

So last week I received the Nokia N97 for review. I’ve had some time to play with it now. And all I can say is… “What an awesome multimedia phone”.

When I first started using the phone, I felt a bit lost and did not like it at all. My very first problem was I missed the menu button completely and had a colleague show me where the button was. Secondly I kept on comparing the phone against the HTC Dream.

As I used the phone I started liking it more and more.  It has a 3.5 inch TFT touch screen with 16 million colours. The touch capabilities are very accurate, even when not using the stylus. You also have three different “desktops”, which you can personalise according to certain aspects of your lifestyle. Example: you can have all your multimedia applications on your one desktop, and all your business like applications on another. You access your different desktops by pressing on the screen and dragging it to either the left or to the right.

One of the things I most enjoyed about the phone, I only found out by accident. While driving in my car I noticed my phone battery was about to die. So I got out the USB cable, attached it to my phone and figured let me see if it will charge if I plug it into my radio’s USB. Yes, it started charging, but wait… It also started playing the music I had on my phone. That’s 32gigs of music with you on the road. So I hear some of you saying, I still have a tape drive in my car. Not a problem, enable your FM transmitter on your phone, and tune your radio to the frequency you are transmitting. There you go, music from your phone over your radio all 32 GB’s of it.

When I was not listening to music from the phone over my radio, I used the built in music player with crisp clear sound over stereo speakers on the phone. When opening up the music player, you have the option of playing the “last played song”, thought that was a nifty feature. Your music library is broken down into Artist, Album and Playlist. Which makes it easy when looking for a song in your 32 gig library.

The Nokia comes with a built in 5 mega pixel camera AND a flash. This allows for some brilliant photo moments to be remembered with or without sufficient light. One thing I noticed while taking photo’s in not so bright times, was that the flash shows up on the photo’s giving you this white flare on the side of the picture.

Sending messages is a dream. Flip open the phone, and use your QWERTY keyboard to start typing and sending your message. One disappointing factor with the messaging of the Nokia N97 is that your messages are not threaded. It’s not a train smash, but it is nice to only have one “Patrick” in your inbox and browsing through the thread, instead of 20 messages from “Patrick” to read through.

Nokia N97 - White

Don’t know how to spell a word or what the meaning of a word is? No problem, open up your dictionary application look up the word and carry on with what you were doing. Need to know how much $20 is in South African currency? Open up your converter application, punch in the numbers and get the currency conversion. The phone has converters for currency, area, energy and length.

So you’ve got your email setup on your phone and you received a office document, no problem you can open up word documents, excel documents, power point presentations and PDF files from your phone.

The Nokia N97 is packed with tons of other applications. RealPlayer for watching videso. Feeling creative, open up the drawing application and do some finger painting. GPS navigation, Message reader, Skype. This is only part of what Nokia has to offer with the introduction of Ovi Store which is Nokia’s application portal for all Nokia devices that support it, more to come on it soon.

This is a awesome multimedia rich phone. And I absolutely love it. You can pick it up in either Black or White.

General
2G Network GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G Network  HSDPA 900 / 1900 / 2100
HSDPA 850 / 1900 / 2100 – American version
Size Dimensions
117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9 mm, 88 cc
Weight
150 g
Display Type
TFT resistive touchscreen, 16M colors
Size 360 x 640 pixels, 3.5 inches
- Proximity sensor for auto turn-off
- Accelerometer sensor for auto-rotate
- Full QWERTY keyboard
- Handwriting recognition
Sound Alert types
Vibration; MP3 ringtones
Speakerphone
Yes, with stereo speakers
- 3.5 mm audio jack
Memory
Phonebook - Practically unlimited entries and fields, Photocall
Call records – Detailed, max 30 days
Internal - 32 GB storage, 128 MB RAM
Card slot – microSD (TransFlash), up to 16GB, buy memory
Data
GPRS Class 32
HSCSD Yes
EDGE Class 32
3G HSDPA, 3.6 Mbps
WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, UPnP technology
Bluetooth Yes, v2.0 with A2DP
USB Yes, v2.0 microUSB
Camera
Primary 5 MP, 2592×1944 pixels, Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, LED flash, video light
Features Geo-tagging
Video Yes, VGA@30fps
Secondary Yes, VGA@15fps

HTC Touch Diamond 2

I have had the HTC Touch Diamond 2 for a week now and I am left pretty much on the fence in terms of if I actually like the phone or not. My first impression was great, I liked the look of the phone, I liked the way it displayed information and the touch screen seemed pretty decent even though you had to use the stylus.

However as I used the phone more and more certain features become irritating and actually pushed me to the side of not actually liking the phone myself. Let me get into the finer details then.

The phone really does look great, the 3.2 inch touch screen takes up most of it which is something I really like. The stylus also packs nicely away into the phone which is refreshing seeing that it is a common trend to have one dangling off your phone such as the Samsung Omnia and Nokia N97.

Once you get going with the phone the first thing you have to get used to is the navigation, because it running windows mobile it is similar to any Windows Desktop Operating System with the start menu housing all the programs and then “desktop” shortcuts for the apps that you use the most. Now straight away I hit the sms and email features as well as having a browse on the internet via the built in Opera Mini browser. Once again HTC dominate the smsing arena with their threaded SMS views however this is when I noticed the phones first flaw.

I originally tried the touch screen without the stylus which started getting very irritating because it is pressure sensitive which means clicks when you didnt want and nothing when you did want it. Why this irritated me so much is that you have to use the stylus which makes it impossible to right a message of any sort without having to stop whatever else you are doing. It is near impossible to find a number when you are driving which means you have to pull over, get to the number and then drive again while you speak with the provided hands free kit.

When you get over that, which I finally came to terms with, the phone is actually great. It offers so much in terms of the “office experience” with full Exchange/Outlook synchronization and a very nice web browser provided by Opera Mini. This allows you to really function well when you are away from the office even though it will probably be impossible to whilst you are on the move.

Now every modern mobile phone needs great multimedia functionality and the HTC Touch Diamond 2 does cover that pretty well. With a built in 5MP camera you are no doubt going to be able to snap some very nice pictures with your phone but, and this is a problem we have with all the HTC phones, is that there is no flash. Now any decent photographer knows light is everything and the camera on this phone really performs poorly in low light situations. I am really keen to see a flash on future HTC phones.

The music player does well, it gives you a number of options and allows you to create playlists pretty easily. The built-in speaker allows you to listen to the latest tunes and share it with those around you, and it actually does not sound that bad. Now great, lets make aKing – Against All Odds my ringtone because let’s face it, that is a great song. I am yet to find where to do this if it is even possible which is highly annoying. The looks I get when my phone plays the highly annoying “ring ring” ringtone is enough to make any large man quiver.

All in all the phone is not bad. It does not suit my active lifestyle but it really does fit in nicely to my professional lifestyle and it does the job very well. This is definitely going to be dubbed a business phone and I am sure the Microsoft based users will really enjoy them.

General - 2G Network GSM 850 / 900 / 1800 / 1900, 3G Network HSDPA 900 / 2100
Size Dimensions – 107.9 x 53.1 x 13.7 mm
Weight – 117.5 g
Display Type -  TFT resistive touchscreen, 65K colors, 480 x 800 pixels, 3.2 inches
Sound Alert types – Vibration; Downloadable polyphonic, MP3, WAV ringtones
Speakerphone – Yes
Memory
Phonebook Practically unlimited entries and fields, Photocall
Call records Practically unlimited
Internal 288 MB RAM, 512 MB ROM
Card slot microSD (TransFlash)
Data
GPRS Class 10 (4+1/3+2 slots), 32 – 48 kbps
HSCSD No
EDGE Class 10, 236.8 kbps
3G HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps; HSUPA, 2 Mbps
WLAN Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g
Bluetooth Yes, v2.0 with A2DP
Infrared port No
USB Yes, miniUSB
Camera
Primary 5 MP, 2592 x 1944 pixels, autofocus
Features Touch focus
Video Yes, VGA@15fps
Secondary VGA videocall camera
Features OS Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional
Messaging SMS (threaded view), MMS, Email, Instant Messaging
Browser HTML via Opera Mini
Radio Stereo FM radio with RDS
Games Yes, incl. motion-based + downloadable
Colors Black
GPS Yes, with A-GPS support
Java Yes, MIDP 2.0
Battery
Standard battery, Li-Ion 1100 mAh
Stand-by Up to 500 h
Talk time Up to 5 h

Nokia N97

Ok, so on Wednesday we received the new Nokia N97. My initial impression when I first saw the phone was, its white and a it’s a bit bulky and I would have loved the black one.

The N97 is a “flip” phone equipped with a QWERTY keyboard and a huge TFT touch screen. The QWERTY keyboard, again was something to get use to. The touch screen is amazing and accurate. The phone comes with a stylus for navigating on the screen, but like I said the touch screen is very accurate for navigating with your fingers.

Do you remember a couple of years back you could add those irritating little things to your phone that lit up every time your phone rang? Well that’s what you have to do with the stylus and that is the reason why I am not using. No thanks.

5 Megapixel camera, with a built in flash = Awesome photo’s. Tried it out last night. All I can say is WOW.

Three quick things worth mentioning:

1. I completely missed the “menu” button on the phone the first time, and had to get someone to show me where its was.
2. When your phone rings, it tries it’s best to announce to you who is phoning. Eventually managed to find out where to turn that off.
3. When your phone is locked and it rings, you can’t answer it. You have to unlock it first and then answer it.

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic

My first impressions of the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic – impressive, easy to use, a phone for the youth and more importantly Nokia are finally putting up a fight in the modern mobile market.

The 5800 XpressMusic is a touchscreen, multimedia orientated phone which includes most of the latest features you would expect from a new mobile phone.

The handset is running the latest Symbian OS, S60 5th edition which means it features all the latest features from Nokia. Nokia have stuck to Symbian and have really created a platform that everyone has become accustomed to.

The 5800’s touch screen works really well and with a smart layout of all the icons it makes the phone very easy to navigate. One thing we did struggle with was that the phone looks like it really wants to have a slide out QWERTY keypad which left us playing around for hours trying to see if it did have one, sadly it didn’t.

The 5800 XpressMusic really is designed for entertainment and multimedia. It is armed with a 3.2 megapixel camera nicely coupled with a flash for those low light situations. It also sports a nice easy to use media player which allows you to play your favourite tracks via the stereo speakers on the phone or you could plug in your favourite headphones via the standard-sized stereo jack.

On the messaging front you can both SMS and email from the phone which seems to be a very standard feature these days. The on screen QWERTY keyboard is easy to get used to. A nifty little feature was the ability for you to whip out the stylus and write your characters manually (old school writing way), it did take a bit of getting used to because most of use have not held a pen in ages!

The GPS is pretty good but unfortunately it comes at a premium as with all Nokia GPS capable phones which is a pitty because it is such a nice feature to have especially when you have free unlimited access to it.

The worst but coolest feature of the phone is the accelerometer which gives the phone information about the movement of the phone. This allows you to turn the phone over to silence an annoying call or do the same to snooze your alarm (the reason I was late for work a few times).

HTC Magic

The HTC Magic was the first phone I had on review and it quite simply blew me away. I have played around a bit with the iPhone so I had a good competitor to compare it to!

The first thing I noticed was the elegant design and sleek look of the phone. HTC have taken the simple looking HTC Dream and packed all it goodness into a smaller phone. Put simply I was very excited to get started with it.

Much like the Dream the Magic has your active desktop with the ability to flick between 3 desktops allowing you to group shortcuts together to suit different “lifestyles”. This includes the ability to add the GMail, YouTube, GTalk and Google Maps icon to the standby screen so that you can easily access your favourite Google applications.

Now for those who don’t know, the HTC Dream is running on the Android system which is Google’s mobile OS. It has really taken the mobile market by storm because of it’s Open Source heritage and with the ability for developers to create apllications quickly and easily.

Back to the phone. The Magic does not have much on the Dream in terms of functionality. In fact, the Dream has most of the functionality the Magic except for 1 thing. As this is not the first phone from HTC that has the Android OS they decided to take it a step further and offer Exchange Active Sync. This means that HTC are now not only offering a OS phone but also extending on it’s functionality with propriety apps like Active Sync.

The phone is really great, messaging is a dream with the threaded messages which allows you to read and respond to an sms without every changing screens. The on-screen keyboard did take a while to get used to though and was very irritating in the beginning which had me pressing characters I didn’t want to. However once you get used to it is a real dream to type with.

Just like the Dream the biggest flaw of the Magic is the lack of a flash with the camera. The camera is really great but there is no way you can get a good shot in bad lighting with out one. A phone that comes bundled with so many multimedia applications like YouTube and GMail having a great capturing device is a must.

The phone is great though and by the sounds of it we can expect a whole lot more from HTC this year.

HTC Dream

So I’ve been testing out the HTC Dream for about two weeks now and I have 1 word for it, awesome!

The first cool feature of the HTC Dream is the “swappable desktops” which you can access by touching the display of the phone and either dragging your finger to the left or to the right. As with any desktop you can add shortcuts of your most used applications such GMail or YouTube  as well as some cool “widgets” like a clock and Google search bar. This coupled with the “swappable desktops” allows you to divide your desktop into different sections which can change as and when you feel like it. Adding shortcuts to your “desktop” was an easy feat; once they are there how do you get rid of them? I Only found out by accident that you had to press down and hold your finger on the shortcut, then your menu button changes to a trashcan. Drag and drop and the shortcut is history.

Let’s get to sending messages, oh boy. So you’d think “Ok, I use a QWERTY keyboard on my pc, how hard can it be to send messages?”. It’s not that easy to start of with but after a few messages I soon became used to the QWERTY keyboard on the phone.

Your messages are broken down into threads. All your messages are stored under one name of the person who sent or who you sent a message to. This is a nice way of storing the messages, no more do you have to scroll through twenty messages on your phone looking for something. Just go into your message application, select the name of the person of the message you want to go through, and scroll through the thread.

HTC Dream

The HTC Dream has a built in 3.2 mega pixel camera. The one thing I found disappointing is that the camera does not have a flash. When you are in a well lit room, the picture quality is awesome but when the light in the room is not sufficient, don’t even try to take a picture.

There’s a neat little notification area in the top left corner of your desktop that displays small icons of the events that happen on your phone. Be it getting a message, email, or event failures, all you do is touch the upper left corner with your finger tip and drag the area down to get a detailed description of the event that occurred. From there you can click on the notice to open up the email, read the message or resend the message that did not send.

The HTC dream comes preloaded with Gmail, Google maps and the Gtalk application. Setting up email and Gtalk it is just a matter of signing in and it works exactly the same as if you were using it on a desktop computer.

Getting your HTC Dream setup on a wireless network is a piece of cake. Enable your wireless on the phone, let it scan for available networks and connect.

I copied some music to the phone to test out the music player and sound quality. I was very impressed with the sound quality and how loud the speaker actually can go without distortion. The one thing I could not figure out was how to stop the music after it started to play. The only buttons available to you are previous, pause and next. You eventually end up pausing your music when you are done listening to it.

I found the battery life of the phone surprisingly long. I had to recharge the phone every four to five days and I was using the phone a lot during the day, sending messages, browsing the internet, and chatting on G-Talk. When I did have to charge the phone a awesome feature I found was being able to charge my phone through the USB port of my car radio.

All in all the HTC Dream is a very nice and sleek looking phone. Definitely replacing my old phone with one of these.

Sony Ericsson F305

We just got the Sony Ericsson F305 for review and are pretty dam excited to get our hands on it and play with all the features including the Motion Gaming which will set it apart from all the other mobile phones.

The Motion Gaming does exactly what it says, basically the principle behind it is to allow the user to use his motion to intergrate into their gaming experience.

It comes with Sony Ericsson’s usual goodies like a great media player and 2.0 megapixel camera. Another great accessory to this phone is the optional power pack which allows you to boost your phone whenever you need with this handy device that you can connect to your key ring.

HTC Dream and HTC Magic

We just took the HTC Magic and HTC Dream out their box and are about to give them ago. If you have not heard we wrote about both the phones coming to South Africa 2 weeks back (HTC Magic and HTC Dream).

Both phones are running the Google Android operating system and offer all the Android system has to offer. However they differ in appearance and the HTC Magic comes with a few HTC modifications such as Exchange Active Sync which will give it better thrust in the corporate market.

In depth review in the next week.