Selasa, 12 Mei 2009

HTC Touch Diamond

The Touch Diamond and Touch Pro are undoubtedly game-changers in Windows Mobile land. Soon, VGA resolution will be standard, most phones will utilize accelerometers, and having some sort of Windows Mobile interface replacement will be expected. We have all read a lot of hype surrounding the HTC Touch Diamond and recently a lot of negative comments on how it actually performs, well we have had some hands on experience over the last week and its definitely a phone that will split opinions right down the middle.

The phone comes packaged in a box shaped like a pyramid with the top chopped off and it really is well packaged and looks very enticing. Inside the box is the phone, wired headset, spare stylus, two CD ROM’s with a user manual and extra software, battery, mains charger and a USB cable, all neatly tucked away inside.

The Diamond comes with a GPS receiver built in and we tested this with the pre-installed Google Maps application, this GPS also has an assisted option where updated satellite positions can be downloaded to achieve a quick fix with the satellites, using this system we managed to get a fix in around 30 seconds which was pretty impressive.

The pre-installed Youtube application works great over HSDPA with search functionality and bookmarks, videos streamed very quickly and automatically rotated to landscape view, very similar to the original iPhone application.

The Diamond comes pre-installed with Opera 9.5 and it is definitely a massive improvement on Pocket IE, it renders pages very nicely and scrolling around web pages is very finger friendly. Another good feature on The Diamond is the virtual scroll wheel, circling your finger around the wheel either clockwise or anti-clockwise zooms in or out of the webpage, a nice addition. Actually the whole zooming process is definitely much better with Opera 9.5 simple taps zoom into the area of the webpage you want to see and text is automatically resized to match the screen making web surfing very usable on this device. The phone also has a built in accelerometer so when the phone is rotated into landscape mode the screen automatically does the same although this doesn’t work with all applications.

Text entry as a whole is pretty good, the on-screen soft keyboard is very easy to pick up and get the hang of, once you realise that you have to press the screen firmly to register a character, word recognition was also very effective.

With Touch Flo 3D running it is far from a polished user experience, it is slow and buggy, if HTC really are intent on attracting consumers away from feature phones to experience smart phones they are going to have to do a much better job with Touch Flo 3D than this, it needs to be more fluid, more responsive and intuitive, its a good start for sure but its just not good enough for such a high end device with a high end price to suit.

Turning off Touch Flo 3D this device is a totally different proposition, I enjoyed using it, it is fast, powerful, easy to use and reliable. It is a fantastic size, comfortable to hold and is packed with features, we didn’t even mention the music and video play back or the built in FM Radio which all work great. The screen is gorgeous and at last web surfing is a good experience on Windows Mobile.

The built in storage of 4 GB is a good addition although it would have been nice to have a memory card slot for further expansion if needed.

Battery life as predicted though is poor, less than a day with average use is not acceptable and really needs to be addressed.

source: http://www.okephones.com/

Jumat, 01 Mei 2009

Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH

Known as Samsung S8300 UltraTOUCH or simply Tocco Ultra depending on the market, the latest touch phone by Samsung comes in the slider form factor. Beside the killer looks and slim profile of only 12.7mm, 8 megapixel camera the specs sheet of the Samsung S8300 continues with a 2.8" capacitive OLED touchscreen, and a GPS-receiver with Route 66 navigation.

Construction

Upon opening the packaging, I was quite impressed with what I saw. The S8300 is a nicely styled phone with metal and strong plastic components.

Picking it up in your hand and feeling the weight of it gives you the impression that it is of sturdy construction.

The slide mechanism is flawlessly smooth and precise. The battery cover is well made. And opening it just requires you to pop it out instead of forcing you to pry it open.

Upon turning on the phone and viewing the 2.8in OLED screen light up, I was impressed with the quality of the display.

Colours were bright and well represented. The screen is also supposedly covered with tempered glass to make it scratch and glare resistant.

Well, I didn’t want to do the “keys-in-pocket-with-phone” test, otherwise the nice folks at Samsung would have my head on a stake for messing up their review unit.

As for glare resistance, the screen still suffers from legibility problems under bright sunlight.

It seems that all handphone manufacturers have yet to tackle this problem successfully be it TFT or OLED screens.

The touchscreen response for a capacitive display is a mixed bag. It may be because I have not adapted from a phone with a resistive display.

Rather than just pressing with the tip of your fingers or even your fingernail, you have to use your whole fingertip (read: Skin contact) to get the screen to work.

This may be great in most situations but when the button is tiny or even a tad narrow, you will tend to miss it and will be forced to tap a few times to hit the sweet spot to activate the button.

It is frustrating at times, but let’s hope Samsung can optimise the touchscreen with firmware upgrades.

source: http://www.okephones.com/