Brand New Blackberry Tour (9630)

Brand New Blackberry Tour (9630)
Summary

Targeting the business professional always on the go, whether it’s across the ocean or across town, Canada-based Research In Motion released the first global 3G BlackBerry into the wild. Sharing design features with last year’s Bold and Storm, the Tour marries everything BlackBerry devices are known for with the best Verizon data speeds we’ve seen.


BlackBerry devices scream professionalism from every angle, and the Tour is no different, but the growing number of quality, and quite often-free entertainment apps in addition to productivity apps like Word to Go, Excel to Go, and PowerPoint to Go, make this the perfect phone for both the busy professional and Internet radio junkie alike.

Features and Design

We thought it looked like the Bold at first, but upon closer inspection, the Tour is quite dissimilar. The dimensions are all just a bit different, with the width of the Tour being the most noticeable. At 2.4 inches wide, the Tour fits perfectly in a pants pocket without feeling bulky, but surprisingly the screen is a higher resolution on the Tour than the Bold (480 x 360 vs. 480 x 320).

The Tour features lock and mute buttons in familiar places on the top of the handset, a gunmetal bezel, chrome accents separating the rows of the full QWERTY keyboard, and a chrome camera button, volume rocker, and voice command key. We would have liked to see a standard mini-USB output for charging, though. Enough with every phone having a different receptacle!

We liked the rubberized back cover of the Tour, too. Its grippy surface means you won’t have to worry about dropping the device when taking it out of your pocket, and it feels comfortable in your hand. The inclusion of a standard 3.5mm headphone jack was music to our ears, but the mono-speaker on the handset wasn’t; For voice it was decent, but we had to use headphones for listening to music via the included 2GB Micro SD card or the free Pandora and Slacker Internet radio apps.

RIM smartly changed the color of the trackball to that of what the Bold’s commonly looked like after a few months of use: black. Strangely, the trackball became stuck during our tests, thus making navigation impossible until we cleared whatever it was that was stopping movement.

The keys on the Tour are soft, with a raised edge on them much like a laptop keyboard, making it easy to type out an e-mail, instant message, or text with few mispressed keys. A raised dot on the combination D/5 key gives a centering point for your thumb when dialing the phone without looking. The only gripe we had with the keyboard is that the backlight bleeds through the spaces between rows of keys, making the Tour look on the cheap side.

Setup and Use


As is the case with other BlackBerry devices, setting up our e-mail account on the Tour was a breeze, and we were sending and receiving e-mails within minutes of initially turning the device on. The Tour also supports up to 11 e-mail accounts, ten of them being personal and one being a BlackBerry address. We found ourselves using the BlackBerry e-mail client more often than not when compared to the available Gmail app for a number of reasons. PDF attachments displayed correctly, images and all, rich text HTML e-mails displayed correctly, and it was generally faster at receiving e-mails too, usually by ten minutes. The only gripe we had was that e-mail conversations with the same sender don’t stack, meaning that a series of messages between you and another person appear as multiple messages instead of one that becomes progressively longer.

In addition to Word to Go, Excel to Go, and PowerPoint to Go, the Tour features the BlackBerry App World. While it’s not as bloated with junk apps and clones of cool apps as the iPhone App Store, what’s available on the App World is rock solid. We’re fans of Internet radio here at Digital Trends so we were beyond pleased to find that both Slacker Radio and Pandora have free apps available. TheStreet.com offers stock updates and analysis; Poynt finds local movies, restaurants, and bars; ScoreMobile delivers instant sports updates and stats; and those are just some of the free offerings.

The 3.2-megapixel camera squeezed into the tour is impressive, especially when considering the lackluster image quality of previous BlackBerry cameras. Even when taken at full resolution of 2048 x 1536, images were incredibly sharp. There are multiple settings for flash output, white balance, and image size. The Tour also features video recording capabilities with a 2x zoom.

In our informal tests, the Tour performed admirably in regard to battery life. We were able to squeeze over eight hours out of the battery with heavy Web surfing, Twitter, e-mail, and AOL Instant Messenger use. Once the phone turned the antenna off to conserve what little battery power it had remaining, we were able to work for about an hour in Word to Go before the phone finally died on us. Very impressive.


Network

While we weren’t able to send someone to Europe to test out Verizon’s global 3G service, we’ll take their word that it’s fast – because that’s just what the domestic service is. Loading the DigitalTrends.com homepage (not the mobile version) took eight seconds before we could navigate and 15 seconds before the loading dialog disappeared from the bottom of the display, indicating the load had finished. Loading up the xbox360.ign.com page however, took 50 seconds, which was extremely impressive given the amount of graphics and scripts running on the page. It’s a shame that RIM didn’t include Wi-Fi on the Tour, but when Internet speeds are this fast, we barely missed it.

Voice quality was excellent as well, even in rural areas, which are usually torture tests for any mobile phone service.

Price and conclusion

The BlackBerry Tour is available for $199.99 with a $70 mail-in rebate and new two-year service agreement. The fact that it prices out at $100 cheaper than the Bold and offers nearly the same experience is remarkable. While the BlackBerry App World isn’t worth throwing your iPhone away for just yet, the Tour offers the best BlackBerry experience on the Verizon network to date.

Pros:

•Unmatched e-mail performance
•Speedy 3G voice and data network
•Smart design
•Best BlackBerry camera yet

Cons:

•Backlight bleeds through on keyboard
•Nonstandard USB input
•No Wi-Fi
•Slow startup
•Low speaker quality

Sony Ericsson E10i (X10 Mini) Review

Smartphones have multimedia capabilities and the ability to view lots of information at once at their core, and for that you need a large screen, right? Well not according to Sony Ericsson whose Android toting Xperia X10 mini has landed.


Sony Ericsson describes the Xperia X10 mini as ‘compact’ and says it is smaller than a credit card, which is true if you take the on-the-table footprint of 83mm x 50mm as your guide.

The handset is 16mm thick though, so while it won’t fit into your wallet like a credit card does, it will squeeze into all but the smallest of pockets, and at 88g you’ll barely notice it is there.

Our review sample came from Orange and had an exclusive and rather nice lime green backplate. It is free on contract. You can also pick it up from other operators and SIM free for around £230 (we found ours at Play.com).

Now, getting right back to basics, that size means, quite obviously enough, a small screen.

It delivers 240x320 pixels in just 2.55-inches. So, quite obviously, one thing you aren’t going to be doing a lot of with this handset is Web surfing even though Sony Ericsson has worked hard to make this task efficient.

The WebKit Web browser offers a thumbnail of a whole page over which you drag a magnifying window in order to see what you want to zoom into.

Scrolling is efficient too thanks to the capacitive screen, but if you’ve used a large screened smartphone you’ll likely feel that browsing is a very squeezed experience here. Oh, and there’s no Flash support.



There is also a bit of an issue with text entry. The screen simply is not big enough to accommodate a mini qwerty keyboard. Sony Ericsson has again tried to be helpful here with separate slide-out screens offering different characters.

One delivers smileys (scroll up for loads of the critters), @, brackets and other important symbols. Another is a basic 1 to 9 pad, the third your alpha keypad.

Multitap and Quicktext (predictive text) are both on offer and we found the system remarkably quick to get to grips with. We’ll be looking at the X10 mini pro in due course, and that has the added element of a slide out qwerty keypad, but suffice it to say here that if you are an infrequent texter and mobile email user you might find the Xperia X10 mini works for you.

We said at the outset that the Xperia X10 mini runs Android. Sadly it is version 1.6. Why Sony Ericsson can’t populate its handsets with the most up to date version of Android we can’t understand. We sincerely hope an upgrade is coming very soon.

On top of Android Sony Ericsson has overlayed its own user interface. There are multiple home screens which can carry widgets – only one each, but when you add a new one you get a new screen for it. On the main home screen is something called corner control.


This boils down to customisable icons, one in each corner of the screen, for launching oft-used apps. It’s a super idea which works really well. In fact, we’d have liked more shortcuts along some of the straight edges of the screen.

We remain unconvinced by the Timescape app we first saw in the original Xperia X10.

Yes, it shows your texts, calls and Facebook messages in one place, but we didn’t like it on the X10’s big screen and on this one it just feels like too much data to handle. We’re happier with separate apps, to be honest.

Sony Ericsson hasn’t stinted on features despite the small overall size of this handset. It is a 3G phone with GPS (with geotagging support for photos), Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. A 2GB microSD card augments the 128MB of on board memory.



A 5 megapixel camera with light and auto focus has a side button for quick launch and easy use. With the handset being so small we did find our fingers straying over the lens at times – you’ll need to take care with that.

Audio output is of very good quality through the provided speakers and there is a 3.5mm headset jack on the bottom edge.

The 600MHz processor seemed up to the tasks we threw at it. With such a small screen to manage it has to work less hard than is often the case and we were happy with its performance.

Battery life is quoted at up to 4 hours of talktime GSM and 285 hours of GSM standby (3.5 hours and 360 hours on UMTS).

The battery is fixed inside the chassis – you can’t replace it, but the good news is that it seems to perform fairly well. We got two days of medium level use out of it – but heavy GPS, Wi-Fi or music listening will mean daily charging is needed.

In the end, whether or not you like the Xperia X10 mini is going to be about personal choice. If you have large hands you probably won’t like it at all. Whatever your hand size, the small screen and fiddly text entry could be deal breakers.

But anyone with average to smaller hands should not dismiss it without giving it a go. We think you might be pleasantly surprised.

Reference: http://www.knowyourmobile.com/sonyericsson/sonyericssonxperiax10mini/x10minireviews/504673/sony_ericsson_xperia_x10_mini_review.html

Samsung Galaxy S i9000 Review

Samsung Galaxy S i9000 Review
3 Jun 2010

The first thing anyone would notice with the Samsung Galaxy S is the big screen. Measuring at 4 inches, the 480 x 800 pixels super AMOLED touch screen can display 16 million colors beautifully. It also comes with an accelerometer sensor that provides you with automatic rotation of the user interface. Featuring Samsung's own TouchWiz 3.0 user interface, you could easily see how improved the navigation is.

This is actually Samsung's second mobile phone to use a Super AMOLED screen, the first being the Wave, and touch detection is better than ever because it is integrated on the screen itself. It is also very visible even under direct sunlight, brighter and saves up to 20% battery juice.

Like the iPhone 3G S, the Galaxy S comes with two versions: one featuring 8 gigabytes of internal memory and another with 16 gigabytes. Whichever you choose, the I9000 will be ready for all your music and video files right out of the box. In the event that you should run out of memory, you can always pop in a 32 gigabyte microSD card for more.

Powered by the latest Android operating system, the Eclair, you can bet that the I9000 Galaxy S works well with Google products like search, Maps, Gmail, Picasa, Gtalk, Calendar and YouTube. It also features a social hub for your social networking accounts.

Internet connectivity is a vital component of any smart phone, and the I9000 does not disappoint. You can enjoy high speed internet with HSDPA and HSUPA on top of the standard Class 12 GPRS and Class 12 EDGE compatibility. Wireless connections are possible too. Further, you can also connect your mobile phone to any laptop or desktop computer with the microUSB port or via Bluetooth 3.0.

Samsung's latest flagship phone also features the Swype text entry. Instead of tapping on the onscreen QWERTY keyboard, you only have to slide your finger to the letters that you wanted to tap. The high level of accuracy makes inputting text a breeze.


Also, camera work should be splendid on the I9000 with its 5 megapixel camera that takes pictures with resolutions of up to 2592 x 1944 pixels. It can also take better-quality videos that have 30 frames per minute at 720 pixels. A secondary VGA camera is included that is perfect for video calls. Samsung has also thrown in a lot of goodies such as the autofocus, geo-tagging, touch focus, smile detection and face detection.

The I9000 has a music player that can accommodate MP3, eAAC+, AC3, FLAC and WAV files. It can also handle MP4, H.263, H.264, DivX and WMV video files. Further, the handset has a stereo FM radio built-in, image and video editor, document viewer and editor, and a flashlight.

With all these mouth-watering features, you would think that the I9000 would be a bulky handset, but it is actually at par with other smart phones and is even thinner. Measuring 122.4 mm. long by 64.2 mm. wide, this mobile phone is noticeably thinner at only 9.9 mm. thick!

The use of a Super AMOLED screen should mean more battery life for the I9000. It would take more than a month before you would need to charge your handset if you are on standby on a 2G network (24 days on 3G networks), while talk time is significantly increased to 13.5 hours on 2G networks and 6.5 hours on 3G.

Limitations

It would seem that the Samsung Galaxy S is a mobile phone of superlatives. It has the biggest screen among all Samsung phones, and the latest of Android OS's newest technologies. Sadly, it is also one of the most expensive mobile phones that are planned for this year.

On top of the prohibitive price, there are some small nuisances on the I9000 without which would have made the handset perfect. For one, its camera does not have an LED flash. It also has no free GPS navigation.

Further, the browser, great as it is, does not support Flash while the loudspeaker churns out poor quality audio.

Lastly, it is very difficult to keep your I9000 looking clean as its casing can really get covered with your fingerprints!

Reference: http://www.dialtosave.co.uk/mobile/Samsung/i9000+Galaxy+S/review/