Monthly ArchiveApril 2007
I-mate | Treo | O2 18 Apr 2007 02:07 am
Treo 680 Review
Palm Introduces a new Treo based on the PalmOs
Long-term users of personal digital assistants (PDAs) who made the inevitable move to smart phones tend to be quite religious about their devices of choice. Users of the old Palm Pilot will find their faith renewed with the new Palm Treo 680. Admittedly, I wasn’t a big fan of the Palm 750V, which marked the opening of a grand alliance between Palm and Microsoft in the push email stakes as they took on their grand nemesis Research in Motion’s (RIM) BlackBerry product.
The 750V was a brave statement of intent on behalf of both companies. It was perfectly suitable as a productivity device, easily accessing contacts and calendar information and checking email and the internet on the move.
For anyone new to the Palm family and au fait with Windows, it was a marriage made in heaven. But I could readily appreciate how alien the 750V must have been for traditional Palm fans who grew up with a particular operating system (OS) since the Nineties that has changed very little since.
It can be said the PDA is officially dead. Players like Dell have killed off production, while research from Canalys shows that year-on-year market growth for converged smart phone mobiles in 2006 was 26pc. With unit shipments set to exceed 77 million by 2009 Palm clearly wants a piece of the action.
The Treo 680 is built on the same chassis as the 750V so it looks identical but the similarities end there.
The 680 is ultimately a return to form for the Palm family, boasting the same standard OS but with a few nifty embellishments.
It has a handy ‘home’ screen for the quad-band mobile phone element of the device that allows you to slip seamlessly between contacts, voicemail, email and Bluetooth.
The quad-band feature lets the device work anywhere in the world. It also comes with 64MB of storage, three times the memory of the original Treo 650 smart phone. Users can also add up to 2GB of storage with expansion cards.
The device is ultimately being positioned as a productivity device, with email on the go, and comes with the ability to view, edit and share Microsoft Word and Excel documents.
My ultimate test for new phones is how quickly and easily I can get it working with my hands-free Bluetooth car kit and in this respect setting it up was very straightforward.
The only drawback for the device is really its size and weight. The BlackBerry Pearl by comparison is slimmer and lighter but performance-wise they do the same things.
The Treo 680 is a return to form for Palm and a relief for die-hard followers. However, I am hoping that Palm is already hard at work on a slim and slinkier version.
It looks like a good upgrade path for the Treo 650 owners though
The price is around 600$ unlocked in the US – 400 to 450 with a new subscription
Motorola 18 Apr 2007 01:42 am
Review of the Motorola SLVR L7
Motorola famous for its thin RAZR series, unleashed another sexy slim phone, this time in a candy bar design, the SLVR or L7
Features and Design
Its metallic Nano-like looks are what will attract buyers to the SLVR. Pitch black with the now-familiar RAZR etched keypad glowing with a bright ice blue backlight and a vivid 2-inch screen (a half inch larger than the Nano’s), the SLVR (4.5 x 1.9 x 0.45 inches, 3.5 ounces) is about half the size of the Nano (3.5 x 1.6 x 0.27, 1.5 ounces), which makes it seem a bit more substantial than Apple’s music-only player. Of course for $199 you get 500-song capacity with a Nano, vs. only 100 songs on the SLVR.
But just how “limiting” are the SLVR’s features? Its 100-song capacity, when compared with even the $69 Shuffle’s 120 song space, seems miserly bad. But at an average of three minutes per song, 100 songs equals around five hours of music, which ought to be plenty for daily commutes, exercise sessions and local trips to the market.
The SLVR includes a pre-installed 512 MB
As an EDGE phone, the SLVR connects to the Web and to the Cingular MEdiaNet store for ringtones, games, wallpapers and application downloads; there’s a soft MEdiaNet link on the splash screen, along with a direct iTunes access soft key. However, even though the SLVR is an iTunes phone, there is no connectivity to the iTunes site to download tracks. That feature may have to wait until Apple produces its own iTunes phone.
The SLVR has the usual spate of helper apps such as a calendar, calculator and alarm clock. But there is an Airplane mode that turns off the wireless so you can use the SLVR just as a music player.
The SLVR’s candybar orientation and good looks create their own problems. You don’t want to clothe a phone this pretty in a protective case, but it definitely needs one. Both the metallic keypad and especially the LCD screen exhibit every fingerprint and cheek smudge and require constant buffing to maintain their glamour. Some users may be reluctant to place it in a pants pocket for fear of scratching the surface. You’d want to use the Keylock feature to avoid accidental redials, however it doesn’t work when in Media player mode, so accidental song skipping may occur if you’re jogging with this phone
Performance
The SLVR’s iTunes interface pretty much parallels the iPod’s; but the SLVR is certainly no iPod. Filling the Micro SD card with 100 tracks takes about a half hour, twice as long as it takes to pour 120 tracks onto a Shuffle. Playback is periodically marred by crackle from either the wireless receiver or static electricity. And without a click wheel, using the navigation array to scroll through tracks or artists to find one track is tedious.
Discerning listeners will want to use their own headphones, which makes the inclusion of the mini USB-to-3.5mm adapter welcome. The included hammer-shaped earbuds hang loosely from the ears and easily dislodge with any vigorous movement. Even when the buds do fit snugly, music sounds muddy and is often overcome by ambient noise. But the buds are handy for dual music listening/conversation usage. Hearing your conversation through twin earphones vastly increases comprehension, and center placement of the cord clip on a lapel eliminates the need for idiotically holding the mic up to your mouth. Callers reported relatively clear sound at their end using the earbud/mic, even while walking down a noisy street.
The SLVR automatically mutes the music when a call comes in, which it did, and is supposed to automatically resume when a call is ended, which it didn’t during our tests. More dexterous manipulation of the multi-use button on the in-line mic may result in the result we couldn’t get.
Quad band (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) reception was consistent throughout our usage. Voice volume was plenty high and voice quality was crisp and clean, even from another cell phone. Ringtone volume, however, was low, necessitating a reliance on the vibrate mode if you do decide to keep the phone in a pants pocket.
EDGE Web performance is adequate, with pages filling in eight to 15 seconds. As you’d expect, the VGA camera is useless in anything but bright sunlight, especially since there is no flash — but we doubt anyone would buy the SLVR for its picture taking capability. The SLVR’s 12-hour music playback battery life (6 hours/17 day talk/standby), is only two hours shorter
Conclusion
Since you can count the number of iTunes-compatible cell phones on two fingers — this one and the soon-to-be discontinued ROKR E1 — and since it’s doubtful that the choices will expand until Apple decides if-and-when to enter the cell phone business, iPod users who want to carry only one device are stuck with the SLVR. (Motorola’s upcoming ROKR E2 and RAZR V3x music phones will both be music platform agnostic.) But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The SLVR may be an excellent weekend phone for when music listening trumps staying in touch, and there’s room in your sweat suit for only one portable gadget.
Pros
- iTunes compatible
- Stylish
- Thin and light
- EDGE compatible
Cons
- Limited song capacity (unless you upgrade the Flash memory)
- Easily smudged and scratched
- Poor-fitting, poor-sounding earbuds
Note that in other markets (Europe, Middle East) the L7 comes without iTunes but with a nice “Media Player” that synchronizes with Windows Media Player.
Nokia 17 Apr 2007 08:46 am
Review of the Multimedia Nokia N95 Cell phone
With our review of the Nokia N95 Cell phone
The phone that might do everything comes to us, with GPS navigation, a 5-megapixel camera and a unique dual-slide design. Is it the best phone we’ve seen?
Nokia’s N95 is truly a flagship phone, it is a model of the state of the art. When we saw the phone back in September, we knew two things about it. First, it could do everything. Second, it would never come here. Then, Nokia inexplicably changed their minds. The company started selling the exact same phone in European and U.S. markets, though some of the most advanced features won’t work on U.S. networks. We tested the unlocked phone using a Cingular SIM card in Manhattan and the New Jersey suburbs.
Camera – Very good
The Nokia N95 has a 5-megapixel camera on its back and a VGA camera up front. The rear camera features auto-focus with a two-step shutter release and a Xenon flash, still a rarity on camera phones. The Carl Zeiss optics are hidden behind a lens cover, opened with a switch.
Pictures taken with the phone were among the best we’ve seen on camera phones, with the exception of the Sony Ericsson Cyber Shot line, perhaps, which also use the Carl Zeiss optics. We still don’t think the image will replace a good, dedicated camera, but images from the camera would have been fine for Web publishing or small print jobs.
The phone includes plenty of camera options, including various shutter modes for fast-moving subjects or night time portraits. The phone also has a variety of transfer options, including e-mail, printing, IR transfer and Bluetooth capabilities, as well as direct access to Flickr accounts.
Video looked very good as well. Again, we don’t think the N95 will replace a nice, standalone camcorder, but its recording quality, at VGA resolution and 30 frames per second, means that videos will look just as good on a television as they do on the 2.6-inch screen, though our review unit lacked the TV-out cable included in the retail package. Our only complaint is that we can’t use the front-facing VGA camera for video calls.
Design
The phone has an overall look reminiscent of a simple point-and-shoot camera. Because of its massive feature set, the Nokia N95 was always bigger in our minds than in our hands. Though it is thick for a multimedia phone, with everything it can do, we still expected it to be larger, more like an internet tablet. It is smaller in every way than our Palm Treo 700p, except when the numeric slide makes it a bit longer. The dual-slide design of the N95 looked nice, and worked well, but may have caused more problems than it solved. Though we liked the tactile, not touch-sensitive, playback controls, the slide itself seemed a bit loose, and often, closing the numeric pad, we would pass the nuetral point and open the playback controls. Perhaps these controls could have been placed elsewhere, and the novelty of a dual-slide could have been replaced by sturdier design.
The interface is mostly standard Symbian fare, which is not our favorite, but probably because we lack the extensive experience needed to decode the tiny 3-D figures and swirling geometric shapes that make up the interface icons. Still, Nokia has included an additional media-centric menu, activated through a dedicated button or by sliding open the playback controls. This menu takes a moment to open, but is PC-like in its fluid animation and beautiful icons. For example, the media menu’s background is a soft focus photograph that moves in and out of focus as you spend time browsing the icons. Very classy.
Calling – Excellent
The Nokia N95 makes calls that sound great. We had some occasional noise issues, but listeners reported above average sound at all times. Reception was also top notch, 7 bars (Nokia’s maximum) when our Cingular RAZR had 3/5. Battery life was good for calls, at more than 6 hours for a single charge, probably because calls on the U.S. networks don’t use WCDMA, which requires more power.
In terms of call features, the N95 does everything, a mantra we’ll repeat in this review. It uses Bluetooth 2.0, has a very loud speakerphone, features speaker-independent voice dialing and makes conference calls easily. The contact list is more robust even than Outlook, with three fields each for Internet and Video calling numbers, as well as a slot for Assistant’s name and Assistant’s phone number. Contact list backup is handled through Nokia’s PC Suite software, which can synchronize with Outlook and other PIM programs.
Push to talk is available through Nokia’s proprietary service, which we haven’t seen stateside, so AT&T push to talk fans are out of luck. Because this phone is basically a European guest on our networks, U.S. buyers won’t have access to video calling, among other HSDPA goodies. We’ve been dying to see this feature in action, but instead we’re taunted by the front-facing camera.
Messaging – Very good
The Nokia N95 has a nicely curved, comfortable keyboard, and does a fine job as a basic messaging phone. Though plenty of additional IM options are available for Symbian S60 phones, the Nokia N95 lacks some of our favorite pre-loaded messaging services, such as Yahoo or MSN for e-mail and instant messaging. POP3 and IMAP e-mail is available, and worked nicely. If you really need to do some hardcore messaging, the N95 also has a Bluetooth keyboard profile built in. The screen fit a full outgoing and incoming SMS message at once, and characters were perfectly legible. Sending photos and videos as messages couldn’t have been easier, as this was a top-level menu option from the camera app.
Videos – Very good
Through a special deal with YouTube, Nokia has its own access to an updating list of popular YouTube videos. Over Cingular’s EDGE network, we were pleased with the streaming quality, which was on par with the streaming video applications we’ve seen on most carrier-locked phones.
While this video looked good, with only a slight blockiness, the N95 did an even better job playing MPEG-4 videos. We ripped a Simpsons episode off our TiVo and played it on the N95 – the picture looked as good as any portable media player we’ve seen.
We were disappointed that the memory tops out at 2GB, and even if Nokia surprises us with microSDHC card support, we would have liked to see a few gigs tucked away inside for real media fans. Still, playback controls worked well with the video functions, and we were pleased to find that A2DP support works for videos as well as audio content.
Audio – Very good
The Nokia N95 is a musical powerhouse, with support for a wide range of file types, including MP3, AAC and even some DRM WMA files. The music controls work well, and we definitely prefer the tactile control to touch-sensitive buttons, even if the buttons were a bit stiff. On the Nokia 5300 XpressMusic phone, pressing play on the music controls activates the music immediately, and though we like that music is generally the default app on the media menu, we would have liked an instant-on feature for the playback controls.
Nokia’s PC Suite includes a music transfer application, and this works better than some other manufacturers’ apps, but pales in comparison to iTunes. Still, the phone and software read ID3 tags better than some we’ve seen, so our album information was preserved, though our artwork was lost.
The music player is simple on the surface, but packs some impressive options, including an equalizer with presets that you can manually fine tune, and a nice, though not too trippy, visualizer. FM radio is built-in, with an app that can download local frequencies and radio call letters.
Perhaps best of all, the phone features a 3.5mm headphone jack, so you can use whatever cans you choose, in addition to A2DP for stereo Bluetooth. Without the headphones, the phone is straddled by stereo speakers that are almost as loud as the Samsung YP-K5, the micro-boombox MP3 player.
GPS – Excellent
Though it takes a moment to warm up and find your location, once the GPS sensor on the Nokia N95 is tracking you, it can be tenacious. The sensor and included software are easily the best we’ve seen on a phone, even with the additional subscription fee for navigation and voice directions.
The map works as a 2D top-down or 3D map, and it tracked our location quickly and accurately, turning with us as we went through intersections. The zooming globe map clearly takes advantage of the graphical firepower of the N95, as visual effects are smooth, and the map zooms better than any map we’ve seen.
Web browsing – Very good
The Nokia N95 features the same Web browser we liked so much on the Nokia E62, with its smooth scrolling and mini-map navigation panel. The phone chewed up any web page we could throw its way, including The New York Times and our own infoSync World home pages. Of course, more advanced AJAX pages won’t work, but most pages come through accurately, and navigation is a breeze with the accelerating pointer.
Gaming
With Nokia’s N-Gage system soon to be available on N-series phones like the N95, we are happy to report that gaming performance on the N95 is much closer to a portable console system than to an average cell phone. Games looked clean, with textures and smooth 3-D animation that reminded us more of a PSP than a RAZR. Phone controls aren’t desirable for gaming functions, we’d like to see a joystick or more sensitive control scheme, but the processing power seems to be there.
Office
The Nokia N95 includes the QuickOffice suite for reading Office documents and Adobe’s Acrobat PDF reader. For a fee, users can upgrade to a more fully-featured QuickOffice that allows for document editing. We found QuickOffice to be reliable and accurate on Excel and Word documents, though it did leave out our hidden comments on both. PDF files had perfect layout and typesetting, and navigation was generally easy, though we would have preferred less digging through the menus.
Battery life
Though we got a satisfying amount of talk time from the phone, battery life is more of an issue as you turn on more features. Navigation uses a tremendous amount of power, with its combination of sensors, always-on backlighting and voice directions. Music and video drain the battery further. Wi-Fi access is another battery hog.
I imagine, with every bell and whistle blaring, you could drain the battery in under an hour. In our few days of testing, with above-average use, we needed to charge the phone every night before bed, and it died once on our commute home, while we were navigating.
Value
The Nokia N95 costs $750. There are more expensive phone out there, but most of these fall into the luxury category and involve precious metals and/or stones. For U.S. importers, who won’t even get some of the best capabilities of the phone, the 3G networking and video calling, the phone couldn’t possibly be worth the price. And yet, it literally does everything. If you want the best phone on the market that has all the features you could ask for, this is the phone, and the price might not matter as much as the resume.
Uncategorized 10 Apr 2007 09:20 am
Hello world!
Welcome to WordPress. This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start blogging!
Uncategorized 03 Apr 2007 05:17 am
Photos: mobile phone with built-in DLP projector
Texas Instruments has demonstrated a 'pico-projector' that fits into a mobile phone. Check out our photos.