Philips 298

The Philips 298 is an entry level slider phone, and is designed as a replacement for the S890. We manage to get our hands on an engineering set.

Design
First things first, the slider is springy, easy to push and looks solid. Closing and opening the slider is a smooth affair without much effort. The 3×3 grid system is proprietary Phillips Software to the core.

The phone’s dimension stands at 95 x 47.5 x 13.9 millimetres. The 298 weights in at 82g and is lightweight and feels great on the hand. The phone is covered with plastics and the front display is covered with a translucent plastic and looks scratch-proof.

This compact phone has large buttons which we really liked – texting was easy and we could avoid cross-typing buttons. The front keypad is simple enough, with two primary buttons, call/end call button and a central navigation keypad. When the slider is pushed up, the phone is activated immediately and the keypad is revealed. The central navigation key allows shortcut keys to the media Player, alarm, user profiles and the tone setup.

The 1.8 inch screen is a 262k TFT display, which is more than some smartphones. The display is bright and crisp, with display pictures coming out strong.

The slider automatically locks out the phone, but it still can be unlocked by pressing both menu and name key one after the other. Sliding out the phone, will automatically unlock the phone and brings out the keypad. The phone still maintains a slim figure, and you’ ll especially notice how thin the screen is when we pushed it out. The backlight for the keypad is also worth pointing out, as the blue not only illuminates but serves as eye candy in the dark.

Keying in our phone number was a peculiar experience though, as the display numbers are multi-coloured, hopefully this is merely the engineering unit’s look.

The left spine of the phone has a microSD slot, which has a rubber pop flap which covers it. The microSD allows hotswapping, which is a great feature. But removing the SD card is a bit of a challenge, especially if you have bigger fingers, as the SD is plugged in deep- carrying something (preferably a pin) that can reach in is a good idea. The pop flaps look a little flimsy, and doesn’t seem to stick in properly, frankly running around with the flaps out is akin to waiting for it to rip out.

Meanwhile, the right spine has the mini-USB port, which is also covered by a rubber pop flap and a quick camera button. The back of the phone has a 1.0 megapixel camera .When we popped opened the cover – the 600mAh Li-ion battery shields the SIM slot.

According to the manufacturer the battery life lasts up to a 220 hours’ on standby time and has a call time of 12 hours.

Features
Philips 298 has an MP3 player which allows music in its entirety. You can refresh your MP3-library at any time, using USB-cable for transmission of  MP3 files from your computer to your phone. You can also use MP3-ringtones on your choice.

The phone itself comes with 1650kb worth of internal memory. A slot for MicroSD can have a maximum of 2GB worth of memory space. With GPRS enabled, the 298 also allows connectivity to the Internet through WAP.

The user profiles allow five profiles for tweaking- General, Meeting, Outdoor, Indoor and Headset. The 298 has a bunch of preset wallpapers and user’s can use snapped photos to be used as wallpaper as well.

The 298 plays AMR, MiDi and MP3s in the audio player, the audio player is relatively simple to handle. Meanwhile, the video player plays AVI files and Motion JPEG codecs.

Data transfer is also relatively easy-to-use, with the mini-USB we just had to copy and paste our files to listen to mp3s.

PIM
The 298 comes with an organiser and has options like alarm, calendar, calculator, e-dictionary, e-reader, to do list, world clock, unit converter and a currency converter. The phone also comes with Phillips health counters, including a Body Mass Index and Menstrual counter for the health conscious.

The organiser also has a file manager for data management for your files. The manager is simple enough with options to move files through and fro between your phone and memory card.

Connectivity
The phone is comes with a few connectivity options, the phone operates under either of the dual-band (GSM 900, 1800MHz) frequencies and for data transfers – the 298 relies on GPRS. The lack of Bluetooth is made up by mini-USB cable.

Camera
Philips decided to pull an upgrade over us with the 298 by placing a 1.0 megapixel camera, with numerous options to tweak the settings of the images, from the colour effects (greyscale, sepia, sepia green, sepia blue and colour inversion) to the white balance (florescent, tungsten, cloud, incandescence). The camera also allows shooting up to 480 x 680 pixels. Picture taken are decent and clean, and is best taken under good lighting conditions.

The 298 has a VGA video recorder which has colour settings to white balance, and the video quality could be set range from low to high quality. The camcorder has a 3x digital zoom, it is also possible to set the exposure for the device.

Games

There are three games for the 298- simply named Monkey, Chicken and  Submarine involves keeping a submarine afloat without hitting the bottom and avoiding obstacles at the same time. Meanwhile, Chicken has you manoeuvre a hapless chick from a constantly falling trash compacter like trap while surviving other traps below. Finally Monkey, involves a jumping a monkey from one tree trunk to another (there are three), killing critters by sliding down all the while not getting hit by said critters. Overall, these are all good games and all good distractions.

Verdict
In conclusion, the Philips has a good slider, and the features are easy to get a hang of with only a few things to learn. At RM 299, the Philips 298 drives home its point as a text and call phone with undemanding multimedia capabilities. If you are looking for a phone that has a basic premise without difficult features and a cool slider, the 298 is for you. The 298 will drop in the 2nd quarter of 2008.

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Fly SX200 Sliding Mobile Phone

Fly SX200 Mobile Phone is a value for money device with simple features andnot exaggerated with special feature or big mega pixels along with music player. The network of this phone is available only with Virgin. It is a cheap mobile phone that comes with all latest feature to support your needed communication. Though this phone is positioned in a normal category it never misses out the style and compatibility and it easily sleek inside your pant pocket. This mobile phone provides triband range of GSM network connectivity. It comes with 1.3 mega pixel VGA photo camera and feature along with video camera facility. This mobile phone is also a good companion with entertainment feature like integrated FM radio and MP3.It is slider designed phone with 512 MB internal memory to support smaller files.

Fly SX200 MP3 Mobile Phone offers Bluetooth connectivity in a stereo type that enable you to upload and share limited image and sound files from the other users. The VGA camera does little help in capturing video images as well as still images. Surprisingly this Slider Mobile Phone is enabled with GPRS facility and it has WAP browser along with the internal speaker so you can readily browse through very simple web pages and download images and small MB files. The internal speaker let you to attend hand free calls and it enables you to speak with many voices at the same time. Though the internal memory is small fly has designed this slider model with microSD card slot support so you can extend the memory capacity and store some videos and music files. This mobile phone gives 175 hours of battery life and 2 hours of stand by time with 20 minutes of talk time.

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BlackBerry Storm 2 pics and specifications re-exposed

BlackBerry Storm 2 pics and specifications re-exposed

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July 12, BlackBerry 9550 pictures and some real machine parameters exposed again, in fact, the BlackBerry 9550 is that we look forward to the BlackBerry Storm 2, It is learned that this is likely to be Vodafone mobile phone customization, will be the end of this year’s sale.

BlackBerry 9550 Storm 2 compared with BlackBerry Storm, on the screen made a change in the Storm on the abolition of trial SurePress technology, the screen switch capacitance, in addition to adding a Wi-Fi support. The phone supports quad-band GSM, single-frequency UMTS / HSDPA (2100MHz), as well as CDMA 1xRTT/EVDO Rev.A, mobile phone screen is 360 by 480 pixels and built-in 3.2 million pixel camera.

BlackBerry Storm 2

Storm 2 interface

BlackBerry 9550 Storm 2 will use OS 5.0 operating system, this latest Blackberry handset as a touch screen mobile phone, we are looking forward to this phone listed as in June this year, iPhone 3GS, Palm Pre, Touch Pro2, such as Nokia N97 masterpiece with the launch of almost, but RIM is not action, in June for the whole of the imperial war machine left some regret, hope that the BlackBerry 9550 Storm 2 will give us more surprises at the end of this year.

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Sony Possibly Working on a PSP Mobile Phone

Of late, there have been a lot of rumors that Sony will be developing a PSP mobile phone, but there’s been no clarity from Sony or other reliable sources about this till recently.

However, according to a new report, Sony recently launched a PSP handheld gaming device at E3, which they have labeled as the PSP Go. In a further development, Nikkei, which is a large media conglomerate in Japan, has reported that Sony has definite plans to merge a handheld gaming device along with a mobile phone.

It seems that Sony would like get into competition with the Apple iPhone and its games, but for now you could rest contended with the news that their intention could just be to develop a new mobile phone with better game functionalities and advances in motion gaming. So, while there is still no official word from Sony, the developments could mean that there is indeed a PSP mobile phone from Sony in the offing.

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Sony Ericsson S302 India: Price, Features, Specifications

Sony Ericsson S302 is a snapshot mobile phone designed with extreme good looks, all the eminent features and a compact slim design. This high gloss finish phone is making waves as a sought after handset among the Sony Ericsson models.

Sony Ericsson S302 has a 2.0 megapixel camera with a user friendly camera menu. Sony Ericsson S302 can be used as a digital camera. Sony Ericsson S302 has the photo light and photo fix functions which help consumers get the shots they want. Video recording and playback is also present in Sony Ericsson S302.

Photos thus captured could be easily transferred using USB, Bluetooth or Memory Stick Micro support. Sony Ericsson S302 has up to 20 MB internal memory. It has rightly been defined as a phone for photography enthusiasts. Sony Ericsson S302 is designed so as to make consumers better digital photographers.

Sony Ericsson S302 is available in Crystal Blue and Thunder Grey. If you are looking for a sleek looking mobile with features that you will drool for, at affordable prices then make sure you buy the Sony Ericsson S302.

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LG Viewty Smart GC900 review

The LG Viewty Smart GC900 packs an 8-megapixel camera into a slim package, but, like most camera phones, it can’t overcome its tiny lens and CCD, so its photos are a mixed bag. Its interface is equally two-sided, offering a quick phone dialling pad but a nightmarishly slow soft keyboard that requires a steady hand and nerves of steel to type a coherent message.

You can pick up the Viewty Smart from free on a £35-per-month contract or for £320 on pay as you go, both with O2.

Noisy as a herd of elephants
The Viewty Smart rocks an 8-megapixel camera, but it’s plasticky proof that megapixels aren’t everything. Like all camera phones, you shouldn’t expect to see the same quality pics that you would get from even a cheap compact camera with the same number of megapixels — the tiny lens and small CCD just can’t produce a great image, especially in low light.

Despite the camera’s 8-megapixel resolution, its photos aren’t a match for a dedicated compact snapper

We took a range of photos in bright and dim light to test the Viewty Smart’s photographic chops, and the results were a mixed bag. We appreciated the fairly accurate colour reproduction, good contrast and exposure levels, and true skin tones, but darker areas of the image were streaked with bands of coloured noise. The camera’s LED photo light does a good job of illuminating large areas, but is very harsh against closer objects.

We tested both of the Viewty Smart’s automatic modes — ‘auto’ and ‘intelligent shot’ (IS) — but we didn’t find an appreciable difference in the quality of the photos. One feature of IS that we particularly like is the ability to choose what to focus on by touching the screen. But it takes more than a tap — you have to hold the screen until the focus box goes green, then the photo fires off when you remove your finger. It’s more fun that using the shutter button, although our finger blocked the part of the image that we were most interested in, which could be an issue when waiting for someone to smile, for example.

There is, however, smile-detection capability, and the Viewty Smart had no trouble detecting our gleaming gnashers. Irritatingly, though, whatever setting we chose, everything got reset to default once we exited the camera. The camera’s user interface is clean-looking and pleasant to use, but that doesn’t mean we want to tap through the same options every time we turn it on.

The camera interface is attractive and pleasant to use

A camera phone is perfect for capturing unexpected events and spontaneous pub shenanigans, when shutter lag can be a real pain. But, with the Viewty Smart, the 2-second lag using the auto mode in bright light, and 3-second lag in low light, will definitely put a damper on your paparazzi dreams.

Editing in the slow lane
Once you’ve taken your snaps, there are heaps of image-editing options. One of the quirkiest is ‘fog drawing’, which lets you create a grey haze over your image by blowing into the microphone, and then wiping away areas with your fingertip to reveal parts of the image underneath. It’s like a cheesy iPhone app, without being nearly as fun or elegant. Like many of the editing options we tried, it’s sluggish to use. Long delays between our eager taps, and the phone’s languid response, left us frustrated.

Syncing killed the video star
The Viewty Smart also shoots video, and includes slow-motion and fast-motion options. The video quality didn’t impress us, though. It looks blocky and compressed even though the Viewty Smart’s screen is bright and clear.

We had no trouble transferring video to our YouTube account using the built-in uploader, but syncing to our PC over USB was a different story — and one with an unhappy ending. LG’s PC Suite III is confusing to use, due to poorly-translated messages, and it’s inflexible, too — it wouldn’t let us define where we wanted videos to be put on our PC, for example.

We could only sync our media in one direction at a time, and we had to change our settings to go the other way. Our test videos made it onto the phone with no trouble, but the files didn’t get converted automatically, so we ended up with an MP4 file on the phone that we couldn’t watch. But we were happy to see that the Viewty Smart supports the DivX and Xvid file formats, which are popular among downloaders.

The Viewty Smart also has Dolby Mobile, a set of digital audio-processing features that aims to make your phone’s audio output sound less like a distant nest of hornets. Dolby says the feature adds ‘surround sound’ and ‘spaciousness’ when you’re using headphones. But there’s no standard headphone jack on this mid-range phone, so you’ll have to use the included headphone adaptor to get the most out of it.

Troublesome typing times
The Viewty Smart features LG’s S-Class user interface. This phone wisely does away with the pointless spinning cube, with its own dedicated button, that we saw on the LG Arena KM900. Instead, there’s just one long button across the bottom that kicks you out onto the home screen. From there, you can swipe your finger across the display to access the four home screens and their shortcuts for things like your favourite contacts. You can also tap the menu icon to see all of the options laid out in rows, iPhone-style.

The user interface isn’t as fast as the iPhone’s, but it’s quick enough to avoid being frustrating. One gigantic exception is the on-screen keyboard, which is far too slow. When you only have a soft keypad to make a call or write a text, any delay between tapping the letter and it appearing on the screen can be frustrating and lead to errors galore.

As we found with the Arena, there’s a slight delay between pressing the keys and the letters appearing, both with the alphanumeric keypad in portrait orientation, and the Qwerty keypad in landscape mode. Also, any keys that we tapped during the lag didn’t register, so we frequently missed letters out, rendering our messages nonsensical. The T9 predictive text didn’t help us when we hit a nearby letter accidentally, unlike with the HTC Magic, and we didn’t find an easy way to reject its over-complicated suggestions.

We found typing on the Viewty Smart irritating, and had to turn off the predictive text and rely on standard tapping. We wouldn’t recommend the Viewty Smart to experienced texters with lightning-fast thumbs.

Smooth surfing but slow zoom
The Viewty Smart’s Web browser does a good job of rendering complex Web pages like those of our favourite site, CNET UK. Although the 76mm (3-inch) screen feels slightly smaller than the display of some other phones because of its big bezel, tiny text is still readable thanks to the WVGA (480×800-pixel) resolution.

The Viewty Smart has multitouch zoom capability, so you can zoom into a page by pinching your fingers together, but we found it sluggish. There’s a delay of about a second between the pinch and the response. As a result, we couldn’t see our zooming in real-time, making it hard to be accurate.

Conclusion
Despite its 8 megapixels, the LG Viewty Smart GC900 won’t be replacing your compact camera anytime soon. Photo positives like good colour reproduction and a pleasant camera user interface are outweighed by shutter lag and noisy dark areas, and the video didn’t impress us much either. Making calls is painless thanks to a snappy dialling pad, but we struggled to send text messages and emails because of the unresponsive on-screen keyboard and poor predictive text.

Touchscreens have evolved a great deal since the much-loved LG Viewty KU990 — look at the Samsung Tocco Lite, for example, which manages to make a resistive touchscreen feel fun, and is free on a £12-per-month contract — so the Viewty Smart has plenty of competition. It’s not without its strengths, but we can’t help feeling it languishes in the land of mediocrity.

Edited by Charles Kloet

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Samsung Tocco Lite Review

The Samsung Tocco Lite aims to take the touchscreen to the streets. Its biggest drawback is its lack of support for 3G, but it’s a surprisingly good phone, considering its bargain price. Its resistive touchscreen is vivid and snappy, and it’s got some fun widgets to keep things interesting.

The Lite is available from free on a £12-per-month contract with Virgin Media, or from £130 on Virgin Media’s pay-as-you-go plan.

Screen everywhere and not a vid to see
The Lite is a pocket-friendly phone that mostly consists of screen. By ditching the keypad, Samsung has managed to fit a 72mm (3-inch) touchscreen onto a palm-sized pipsqueak.

The screen is bright, with bold colours — although it’s no match for the AMOLED screen of its much more expensive cousin, the Tocco Ultra. It’s also a resistive touchscreen, which we usually hate – – you need to exert pressure to make them respond, and they feel rather squishy, so they seem less responsive than capacitive touchscreens. But the Lite impressed us with its responsiveness. We found typing and dialling pleasant and quick, and we didn’t feel the need to press hard with a fingernail or stylus. For such an inexpensive phone, the quality of the screen was a very pleasant surprise.

With such a good screen, Web browsing and watching videos should be a pleasure. But the Lite has no 3G or Wi-Fi connectivity, so it’s slow to get online or download files. We tried out some YouTube videos and they were a tiny, garbled mess because of the extreme compression required. We also tried getting videos on the phone using the USB connection, but the Lite isn’t as easy to sync as other Samsung phones we’ve tried — our computer struggled to recognise it. We think your best bet is to invest in a microSD card and load that up with your media instead.

We found the Lite’s resistive touchscreen surprisingly responsive

The Lite has a proprietary headphone jack and no adaptor, so we weren’t able to test its music player with high-quality headphones. It comes with a pair of very basic, plastic earbuds with a hands-free microphone, and, unfortunately, you’ll be stuck with them. But the Lite does support a good range of audio formats, from MP3 to WAV, and it also has an FM radio.

Steady cam
The 3.2-megapixel camera doesn’t have a flash or LED photo light, so it’s no surprise that it struggles in low light, producing very noisy photos. We were happy with the snaps taken in good light, however. As long as we used a steady hand, we were able to capture acceptable close-ups and shots from further away. Colour and exposure are satisfactory, especially considering this phone’s low price.

The Lite puts a good range of camera settings at your disposal, including a smile-detection and panorama mode. Those modes aren’t super-fast, but the smile detection caught our pearly whites perfectly. There’s also a photo editor so that you can adjust, crop and add effects to your snaps.

We sometimes found navigating between the different options difficult, because of the obscure menu icons and lack of labels. Also, some features — like zooming in — aren’t available when you view a photo from the camera. Instead, you have to close the camera and open the photo gallery to get that crucial option, and that’s a waste of time.

Once you’re happy with your snaps, you can take advantage of the phone’s built-in links to Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, Photobucket and Friendster (it’s big in Asia) to get them off the phone. Uploads are pretty slow, thanks to the lack of 3G connectivity, but our tests using Facebook worked without a hitch.

Community matters
The Lite also offers quick links to social-networking sites via a dedicated section in the menu, and widgets that you can drag onto to the home screens. But they’re just links to mobile versions of the Web sites — not built-in applications — so they’re not very impressive.

Some of the widgets available are more useful, such as the weather widget, which shows live updates, or the music player, which lets you control your music from the home screen. We just wish that live updates from sites like Facebook had been included too. It’s also easy to accidentally slide the widgets around the screen with your finger. The Samsung i8910 HD has a lock function to stop this from happening, and it would be good if the Lite had that as well.

Keep on trucking
The Lite’s battery kept us tapping for ages, and was barely dented even after a full day’s testing. Combined with its clear, loud call quality, and responsive dialling screen, the Tocco Lite has the phone basics covered very well.

Conclusion
Compared to other phones in its price range, Samsung’s Tocco Lite is an impressive handset. Although its touchscreen is resistive, it’s pleasant to use and responsive, and dialling and texting poses no problems. The user interface is confusing in places, but, for the most part, Samsung has kept it simple. The biggest drawback is the Lite’s lack of 3G support, which sometimes leaves you feeling like you’re slowly plodding through a muddy field in a pair of wellies.

Edited by Charles Kloet

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LG KF757 Secret : Mobile Phone with Ultra Cool Features

I am a huge fan of LG products especially mobile phones. Since a few days back I am looking for a new mobile phone and while on hunt I came across an ultra cool gadget which has been recently added in the family of LG and is named LG KF757 Secret. It is a handset which has an excellent blend of looks and features. The device supports 2G network and works on frequencies of GSM 900/ 1800/ 1900 MHz. With dimensions of 4.05 x 2.00 x 0.46 inches, handset is compact and light and can be carried anywhere.

The touch screen TFT is 2.4 inches in size and produces a resolution of 240 x 320 pixels and consist of features like Accelerometer sensor for auto- rotate, scratch resistant surface, touch navigation facility etc. The LG KF757 Secret has an integrated 5 MP camera which produces a resolution of 2592 x 1944 pixels and has features like Face detection, auto focus, digital zoom etc. It also has a additional camera which can be used for the purpose of video calling. In 100 MB of internal memory which is expandable up to 4 GB with the help of microSD (transflash) card, you can store plenty of things in this ultimate device like 1000 phone book entries, record of 40 dialled, received and missed calls. For smooth in and out flow of data between compatible devices, one can use technologies like Bluetooth, GPRS, EDGE, 3G and USB whereas for access to Internet you can use Wi-Fi and WAP browser.

To keep you entertained 24×7 the device is jam packed with cool multimedia features like Stereo FM radio with RDS, camera which can be used for both clicking and recording images, 6 preloaded games which are motion based etc. Once you get bored of playing them you can download more as per your interests. What’s more? This remarkable handset is being offered in variety of colours including black, ruby violet and titan gold. The battery of LG KF757 Secret delivers a talk time of 3.8 hours and standby time of 259 hours. So, I have made my choice, when will you?

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CES 2009: LG Shows First ‘Market Ready’ 3G Touch Watch Phone

Proving that innovation (insanity) is by no means dead, LG was very proud to officially demonstrate the world’s first 3G Watch Phone with a touchscreen, making an early entry into the most spurious “world’s first” claim of 2009 in the process. As noted in December, the Touch Watch Phone (model no.: LG-GD910) is to be sold exclusively in Europe in the second half of 2009. It’s a 3G quad-band…erm…phone and Skott Ahn, President and CEO of LG Electronics Mobile Communications Company, had this to say about it:

“Our new 3G Touch Watch Phone is stylish, sophisticated and the height of technology, but it’s also undeniably fun. How else can you reenact (sic) those scenes from your favorite (sic) sci-fi or spy movie?”

So, if you want something to mess around with the GD910 should keep you amused for about five minutes, but there is a little more substance to it, too. 7.2Mbps HSDPA and a front facing video camera makes video calling very easy and voice commands can be used to place calls and look up contacts, without connecting a Bluetooth headset.

It also features a colourful 1.43in touch sensitive screen. Naturally enough the menus are designed with this in mind, with large buttons that LG reckons should make using the GD910 painless. Pricing is unknown, but if a watch phone with a touchscreen will bring you eternal happiness, 2009 is going to be a good year for you

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Hyundai Mobile Launching Wristwatch Phone

So it seems manufacturers do want us all talking to our wrists in the future…

This week Hyundai Mobile joins LG in launching its own mobile phone watch in the shape of the ‘MP-910’. Essentially a more budget friendly alternative to the GD910, the similarly model numbered MP-910 goes back to basics.

It uses a 132 x 176 pixel 65k colour touchscreen display, has support for Bluetooth 2.0 for streaming calls directly to a wireless headset, supports SMS and MMS (come on, if a watch can do it Apple…), and lasts a remarkable 70 hours in standby and a more typical three hours in call.

At just 58 x 44 x 16 mm and weighing a mere 58g the MP-910 is also pretty light. As for the omissions, they range from the disappointing (3G) to the more realistic (camera, GPS, WiFi). There’s also no word on whether support will be included for either MP3 playback or expandable memory. That said with the watch phone coming in at a reasonably competitive £200 sim free (we’re unaware of any networks adopting it at this stage) it could prove something of a slow burn fashion accessory.

“The Hyundai Mobile brand is about the latest cutting edge technology at a price point which is accessible to the masses,” said Hyundai Mobile director Roland Prinz. “We have high hopes for the MB-910’s entry to the UK market. We are delighted to confirm that we intend to make the MB-910 available in the UK and we will announce our specific plans shortly.”

So that’s two phone watches in quick succession and I’ll be interested to see whether they mark the start of a new trend or just the latest passing fad…

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