Is it a jumped-up e-reader, a cut-price iPad or nothing more than a portable shop window for Amazon’s endless shelves? The Kindle Fire blunders into the tablet wars with something to annoy everyone: an LCD screen to irritate E Ink fans; a GPS-less, camera-less, Bluetooth-less spec to infuriate the techies; and a closed, corporate retail interface that makes a mockery of Android’s open source roots.

And yet Jeff Bezos can’t seem to make enough of them: Amazon will ship several million Fires to cash-conscious consumers this Christmas. At 7-inches in size and under $200 in the US (no UK release plans yet), this top-of-the-range Kindle could be the perfect stocking filler for the mass market eager to embrace our tablety future. Or at the very least, the first in a new wave of tightly integrated devices that don’t need a second mortgage to buy in to.

Substance over style

Anyone hoping for a design as ground-breaking and eye-catching as the original Kindle should adjust their expectations. Whether or not the Fire was designed by Amazon’s ultra-secret “Lab 126” just up the road from Apple in Cupertino, it has all the charm and subtlety of Yorkie bar.

Its best angle is from the rear, where a hard rubberised case has nicely rounded corners and a Kindle logo etched into it. Around the front, it is at least clear and functional, with a small bezel and a tiny rubber seal between the glass and the glossy surround.

The power button, micro-USB port and headphone socket are on one short edge - the Fire’s lack of directionality means you can call it the bottom (if you want the Kindle logo to read the right way up to others) or the top (if you want the headphone cable out of the way). Despite its low price, build quality is very good. The Fire’s 413 grams and 11.4mm thickness are more than you’d want for extended reading with one hand but they do at least provide solidity and rigidity.

Lucky seven?

You can look at the 7-inch, 1024x600 display as either a serious step down from 10-inch tablets for viewing websites and videos, or a jump up from previous Kindles’ 6-inch screens for reading. Either way, it’s hard not to be impressed at the colour, clarity and viewing angle that Amazon squeezes from what must be a budget display.

Detail is excellent at 169ppi (same, in fact, as the luscious Galaxy Tab 8.9), there’s no blurring with motion, and the Fire’s dual-core processor keeps games and animations flowing freely. Touch sensitivity is fine, with a few exceptions. The navigation controls that pop up when you hit the Settings button in the top right corner can be very sluggish. More annoying is an over-sensitive page turn that kicks in the moment your thumb creeps over the slim bezel in the Kindle app, although perhaps this is a homage to the first Kindle, which suffered similar issues with its physical buttons?

Skin in the game

Amazon has done a superb job in skinning the Android 2.3 OS. Almost everything has been redesigned and rebranded, and yet it all remains intuitive to anyone who’s ever had a play with any Android device. Notifications are on the top left, settings on the top right – with a handy menu of features: rotation lock, volume, brightness and Wi-Fi.

In the absence of a volume rocker, this is also the only place you can adjust the volume. Until Amazon adds a mute button, an acceptable alternative when you need quiet in a hurry is just to smother the two small speakers on the top edge. Tapping the settings icon also calls up Android home, back and menu buttons along the bottom.

The main home screen is dominated by a Cover Flow-style carousel of recent books, apps, web pages and albums. It’s a great-looking way to hop between several active apps, but quickly gets long enough to become unwieldy for searching. Don’t expect much help from the search box above it, which only searches the titles of your media or launches a Google query. There’s no searching inside a book, an active web page or among your emails here.

Amazon apps

The home page also has tabs to jump straight to a newsstand, books, music, video, documents, apps or the web. Media links generally take you a bookshelf of your items, with cloud and device tags, and an arrow giving one-touch access to Amazon’s store, where you can purchase more stuff without any further sign-in.

The video experience is sure to be one of the Fire’s most popular features, and not just because the Fire comes with a month of Prime (Amazon’s £49/year free delivery service), including access to thousands of streaming videos. Buying a film or TV show is straightforward, with progress bars detailing progress for download and streams starting in a matter of seconds. Rentals are a generous 48 hours rather than Apple’s 24.

The Fire’s widescreen ratio means that Hollywood films are not actually that much smaller than super-letterboxed vids on the iPad, and speedy scrub and 10-second replay controls are a nice touch. Audio and video quality vary from stream to stream, of course, but generally we found them to be well encoded. However, there is no way to share content to a TV.

Sound and reading

The music player is a less exciting than videos, with a clunky transition from your library, to your cloud player, to the store, but sound quality through headphones (not supplied) was absolutely first class. It was also very easy to download cloud purchases to the device.

The Kindle app will not please bibliophiles. Not only is it essentially identical to the standard Android app, it lacks the much-touted X-ray feature to be found on the Kindle Touch and the swish page turn animations from the iPad.

If the Docs tab seems a little out of place on such a consumer-focused gadget, bear in mind this is a holdover from earlier Kindles, designed to give basic access to PDF, MOBI and text files. And it is just that – very basic.

Email, found under the Apps tab, is better. The app renders HTML messages extremely well and very quickly, there’s a fast search box, and good multiple mail move and delete options. The Android standard keyboard won’t excite anyone but it’s fast and offers to autocomplete spelling without any fuss.

Web and other apps

Amazon’s Silk browser was meant to offer cloud-accelerated smarts and near-instant downloads of popular websites. Don’t believe the hype. Browsing is much slower than the iPad, slower than the Samsung 8.9 and even slower than some 4G Android phones we've tested. Very busy sites also throw the Fire into a bit of tizzy, with pinch-to-zoom slowing or hanging momentarily.

The 7-inch screen is fine for browsing in landscape mode, but flip to portrait and pages start to look very cramped indeed. On the plus side, Flash elements loaded reliably and Flash games played OK, although not with the sleek liquidity of Samsung’s latest tablets.

Amazon’s dedicated market has around 10,000 apps. That sounds limiting but actually most of the big players are represented, and the company does offer a free paid app every day. All the more annoying then, that the pre-loaded Facebook ‘app’ is little more than a link to its website. Genuine apps and games installed and ran just fine – the 1GHz TI OMAP chip handles itself well.

Power and storage

With just 6GB of accessible storage on-board, Amazon is clearly angling for users to embrace its cloud offerings. Any songs or books you buy from Amazon are stored for free in its Cloud Drive, and you can also synch up to 5GB of other music before you have to start paying. There’s no Bluetooth, so you can’t connect a hardware keyboard or sound dock, no GPS and no camera.

On the power side, the Fire will play videoss or surf for around five and a half hours before starting to pop up with intrusive battery alerts. Amazon supplies a charger but, annoyingly, not a simple standalone micro USB cable for side-loading content.

Tags: Tablets eBook readers Amazon Kindle

Amazon Kindle Fire originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 18 Nov 2011 08:21:00 +0000

It’s time to reboot the tablet. Right now, the same word applies to everything from 6-inch jumped-up ebook readers to hulking great 10-inch slabs of glass. Pocket-lint is drawing a line in the sand: everything 9-inches and up is a tablet, everything smaller is a tablette – and here’s one of the finest, the 8.9-inch Samsung Galaxy Tab, er, 8.9.

Like Samsung’s original (7-inch) Galaxy Tab, the sleek 8.9 screams to be picked up, fondled lightly and tossed into a bag. It’s smart and powerful, with 1.2GHz dual-core silicon running Honeycomb 3.1 and Samsung’s impressive TouchWiz skin. It’s got a superb screen and some fun motion features, too.

But with no real USB or HDMI ports, weak cameras and a scarily high price tag (£20 more than the iPad 2 and just £70 shy of its 10.1 big brother), can the 8.9 persuade today’s big screen tablet users that what they really want is an ultra-portable tablette?  

Inbetweener

Don’t tell the PRs but our first test with any new tablet involves both hands and a modicum of torsion. Try a gentle flex test on the metal-backed iPad 2 and you get zero motion, nothing, nada. Try it on the Galaxy Tab 8.9 and there is the faintest hint of a creak. It’s absolutely nothing to worry about but it is what happens when you build your tablette with a casing of brushed plastic instead of the shiny cold stuff.

Otherwise, build quality is top notch. The screen bezel is the same size as the iPad’s, although with a touch more gloss to it. Unlike the iPad, the default orientation of the Tab 8.9 is landscape. The power and volume rockers are on the top edge towards the left, and the front webcam beneath them is slightly offset to the right.

Size and weight are pretty much perfect for one-handed use. This Tab is a fraction of a millimetre thinner than Apple’s tablet but weighs about 150g less, tipping the scales at a solid and comfortable 447g.   Screening room

Like many new Android tablets, the Tab 8.9 has pixels to spare. Its 1280x800 panel has a higher resolution than the iPad 2 and much higher pixel density (169ppi vs 132ppi). And because of its widescreen (16:10) format, the screen is only 5mm shorter along its long edge than Apple’s tablet. This means that web pages and email are just as easy to read, even if they sometimes feel cut off at the knees.

The multi-touch tech is fast and responsive, and Samsung has added two new motion-sensitive features. Plop both thumbs in the screen while reading a web page and you can zoom in or out by tilting the Tab towards or away from you. It’s a nice effect but really no easier than pinching to zoom – and it still needs two hands.

The other motion feature is even less useful: press and hold an icon then tilt the tablette from side to side to scoot it through the five home screens.  

A touch of wizardry

The Tab 8.9 is running Honeycomb 3.1 but with Samsung’s impressive TouchWiz skin on top, you would be forgiven for thinking you had an early preview of Ice Cream Sandwich. TouchWiz includes such Android 4.0-esque features as resizable widgets (full marks to Samsung for NOT calling them ‘wizgets’), a scrollable multi-tasking list and easy screenshots (here with a soft button).

The 8.9 has five home screens with the usual swish animated transitions between them. Tap the middle of the system bar at the bottom of the screen to pull up a mini apps tray containing a task manager, calendar, clock, memo pad, calculator and music player. These pop-up Windows-style over anything in the screen - nice.

Another thoughtful addition is an expanded notification area with one-tap toggles for Wi-Fi, GPS, mute and screen rotation, although not Bluetooth. You can also control the brightness from here.

Samsung’s Social Hub widget aggregates feeds from Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. It manages to efficiently extract the fun from functional but will do if you really can’t be bothered to switch between separate apps. Other Hubs - Music and Reader - are a pale reflection of pre-loaded Google and Amazon apps for streaming tunes and downloading ebooks.  

Performance

The 8.9’s 1GHz dual-core Tegra silicon keeps things moving swiftly. There are rarely lags even when several apps are open, graphically intense games are running or there’s music streaming in the background. Video in particular looks fantastic. However, we did have several crashes during our test and the Android Market widget seemed particularly flaky.

Voice search worked well enough and the Tab 8.9 comes with no fewer than five different keyboards, although once you’ve switched to the ever-awesome Swype you’ll probably never look back.

The rear camera is a low res 3MP affair but does a surprisingly good job capturing colour and detail, and there’s a small LED flash for indoor portraits. The front-facing 2MP web cam is better than most but still very grainy in low light. I wonder how long it will be before a tablet manufacturer realises that it’s more useful to have a LED light on the front, for video chat, rather than round the back where it never gets used? In video mode, 720p capture is just fine, apart from very weak audio. Shutter delay is around a second.

For music playback, you have the choice between loud, tinny sound through the built-in speakers or mushy audio through the supplied in-ear headphones. To be honest, the speakers aren’t terrible for listening to the occasional song or YouTube video, and come into their own for speech - either radio or video chat via Google Talk (pre-installed).

Bits and pieces

We're not sure how much use GPS is without 3G, but the sat nav was sensitive enough to lock on indoors. It didn’t seem to hammer battery life, which was good at around six to seven hours between charges. The 8.9 has a useful power use graph in Settings, an automatic power saving mode that kicks in at low levels, and an ambient light sensor to adjust the screen brightness.

Apparently, the world has completely embraced DLNA wireless sharing, as the Tab 8.9 has no HDMI or other video output. Its only port is an Apple-alike custom USB connection that serves to recharge (via its wall socket adaptor only) or transfer data to and from your PC.

Tags: Tablets Samsung Galaxy Tab Android

Samsung Galaxy Tab 8.9 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 04 Nov 2011 17:40:22 +0000

With all the fuss over the launch of the Kindle Fire tablet, it would have been easy to overlook the new Amazon product that Jeff Bezos expects to sell "many millions" - the cheapest Kindle ever, slightly confusingly also called the Kindle. (The Kindle 3 has now been renamed the Kindle Keyboard and the original Kindle has simply been erased from Amazon’s history.) We’re nicknaming this model the Kindle 4 just to make things even foggier.

Stripped back and slimmed down, the latest Kindle is the closest thing yet to a pocket money ebook reader, and one step closer to Amazon’s goal of being able to give away readers for the digital content it sells. But with less memory, no cellular coverage and no keyboard, has Jeff cut one corner too many? Pocket-lint sourced one of the very first of the new Kindles off the production line to find out.

Lighter and skinnier

The Kindle family continues its shrinkage, with the current model being 30 per cent lighter than its predecessor and 18 per cent smaller, mostly due to ditching the keyboard. That means the Kindle 4 weighs in at just 130g - around a third the weight of an average paperback.

In use, it is about as small and light as you'd ever want from something to read from. It feels incredibly light and yet comfortably solid, with not a creak or flex from its plastic case. If it does look grey, bland and a little cheap, you can always add a protective case to class it up.

The page forward and back buttons are about right: easy enough to flick through, resistant enough so you’re not bashing through dozens of pages by mistake. There are four dedicated keys - back, keyboard, menu, and home - with a five-way pad nestling in the middle. The power button is hidden away on the lower edge.

Hitting the keyboard button brings up a soft keyboard that you can navigate with the five-way pad. This is at least as awkward as you might expect, possibly more so, and the directional rocker is on the plasticky side. It’s fast and responsive, though, and you can flip between four soft keyboards to accommodate all manner of symbols and foreign letters.

The basics

Amazon’s top design objective is to eventually make the Kindle "disappear", to make using it feel so natural that you forget you’re holding an ebook reader rather than paper. Although it's moving in the right direction, that day is still a little way off.

There's been no change in Kindle E-Ink screens for a while now. The 6-inch 167ppi display is wonderfully crisp, punchy and extremely easy to read. Page-turns remain a somewhat flickery annoyance, although less so than on the first two Kindles.

Using the directional pad lets you select words to look up in the built-in dictionary, or add a note (very, very slowly with the soft keyboard), but there’s no sign of the new X-Ray feature promised for the Kindle Touch.

Amazon hasn’t messed with the basic Kindle interface. The home screen shows a plain text alphabetical list of the books, Kindle Singles, newspapers, blogs and mini-apps you’ve recently accessed, plus a link to older Archived Items. You can sort the home screen by Title, Author, Collection or Most Recent, and archived items by just Title or Author.

The menu button is contextual, but generally links to the Kindle Store - where you’ll see lists and thumbnails of key items - sync and search, settings, font size and screen rotation options. Everything works smoothly, logically and without lag.

Digital library

The 2GB of on-board memory is sufficient to store around 1400 books: fewer than previous models but still more than enough for anyone not facing a life sentence in a Wi-Fi-less jail. Downloading a normal length book over Wi-Fi takes a minute or - usually - much less.

Anyone moving from a 3G Kindle will be impressed with the speed, even if they risk being slightly distressed at not being able to buy new books on the move. In truth, free Wi-Fi is becoming so common that Brits might not even miss the nationwide AT&T hotpot access that American users get thrown in for free.

We also tried out the new digital lending feature, now up and running with over 11,000 public libraries in the US, including our local library system. We started by logging in to the Seattle Public Library website from our desktop PC and navigating their digital collection. After we found a book we wanted, we popped it in their cart and clicked Get Kindle Book. This opened a new tab to Amazon, where we simply logged in again and chose which device to send the book to.

From browsing for a book on the library’s site to it appearing on our Kindle took no more than a minute, making this a fantastic (and completely free) service that significantly increases the value of Amazon’s device to avid readers.

Web, PDF and more

Like previous Kindles, number four includes an experimental web browser. Although this is not the all-singing Silk browser that Jeff announced this week, I suspect there is some cloud acceleration behind the scenes. After laboriously typing in "New York Times" on the pre-bookmarked Google page, or actually just "New York" - Google Instant works here too - the Kindle loaded the main page within seconds. It then repeated the trick as we drilled down through the lead stories.

Pocket-lint also flashed up on the screen in just a second or two, nearly as fast as on our desktop. Once the content is there, of course, things slow down. The browser outlines a zoom window that gets you closer in, but navigating with the directional pad is not enjoyable. It’s a browser that you’ll use when you have to, quickly checking Facebook in an airport, say, but it won’t replace anything on your phone, tablet or laptop.

It’s a similar story with the PDF viewer. Although it is simple enough to email your Kindle hefty PDFs, and to zoom clunkily around them, the experience lags a long way behind any smartphone.

Apps and offers

Apps for the Kindle are still stuck at the level of static word games and puzzles, like sudoku and Scrabble knock-offs. They’re the kind of games that sensible parents think are wholesome and educational for bored children, and that the kids themselves generally hate. Your parents will love them, mind, which sums up the Kindle audience in a nutshell. Games are mostly free or very cheap.

We tested the "Special Offers" version of the Kindle 4 (currently US only), which knocks $40 off the price at the expense of having a tiny little ad on the bottom of the home screen and sponsored screensavers. We didn’t find these too annoying at all, but currently it's unlikely British users will ever get a chance to see this reduced-price Kindle, instead they will be able to buy their ad-free Kindle at £89. The ad on the home screen is small enough to ignore and the screensaver, by definition, is only there when you’re not using the device. You could even hard power off each time to avoid seeing it (boot up time is just a couple of seconds).

Tags: eBook readers Amazon Kindle Amazon Kindle Amazon Kindle 4

Amazon Kindle (2011) originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 30 Sep 2011 09:49:00 +0100

It would be cool if the Droid Bionic followed the same storyline as Steve Austin’s cybernetic TV show. Motorola, a company barely alive. A Google voiceover saying we have the technology, we can rebuild it. Then a better, stronger, faster Android phone exploding out to restore American pride and fight off foreign rivals.

As it happens, though, the Droid Bionic phone was already in production by the time Google announced its intention to buy Motorola’s mobile business. As long ago as January’s CES, Moto was talking up the Bionic as the first recruit to an Droid army of large-screen phones powered by dual-core processors and boasting blistering 4G speeds.

Not only is the Bionic a high def, high resolution Android handset in its own right, it comes with optional high tech extras such as a HD dock with USB and an 11.6-inch Lapdock to turn it into a netbook.

But the question in these post-modern, post-hardware times is whether simply being better, stronger and faster is enough. Do users really want more screen and more power (and, inevitably, less battery life)? Or will the smoothly integrated siren call of Apple iOS system prove irresistible? Is it time to go Bionic or should Android fans wait for Motorola’s first all-Google handset?

Better?

Size is not something that mobile devices usually aspire to, and the Bionic duly touts itself as the thinnest LTE handset in the world. The fact that it can claim that and still measure 11mm from front to back says more about the chunkiness of rival 4G phones than it does about Motorola’s design prowess.

Nevertheless, the Bionic still feels solid and well made. A slab of Gorilla Glass promises to soak up everyday bumps and scrapes, a raised shiny plastic surround gives a nice edge feel, and the soft touch back is warm and grippy. The phone bulges slightly at the top end to accommodate the camera optics.

Where bigger is usually better is in the display. The 4.3-inch qHD screen here can’t be faulted for size, brightness or colour, but don’t be fooled by the iPhone-alike 960x540 resolution. Motorola’s controversial (ie. rubbish) PenTile technology suffers from graininess and motion blur that wipes out any benefit from the extra pixels. Some people are more annoyed by it than others -it’s definitely one to try before you buy.

An excellent find on any modern phone is a mini HDMI port, here it nestles alongside the micro USB jack. Although the Bionic doesn’t come with a HDMI cable, mirroring software is built in. There’s a standard 3.5mm headphone socket on top, where you’ll also find a small power switch and volume rocker is to be found on the phone’s right side.

Stronger?

The dual-core processor in the Bionic is a 1GHz OMAP 4430 chip from Texas Instruments. In practice, there’s very little difference between this silicon and the more commonplace Nvidia Tegra 2. This Droid accelerates like the Bionic Man chasing a 1970s muscle car full of spies. Games in both 2D (Angry Birds Rio) and 3D (Eternity Warriors) are simply flawless, with never a hiccup or frozen screen. New levels load in a flash.

In fact, Android apps that you might be used to taking three or five seconds to load now spring to life almost before their animated transitions have faded away. Day to day apps like Navigation have never looked better, although Maps is a still little jerky when rotating and zooming satellite views.

A full 1GB of RAM keeps delays when swapping between apps to a minimum, and the Bionic comes with a healthy 32GB of storage, split evenly between internal memory and a removable microSD card.

Faster?

We’ve tried Verizon’s 4G LTE service before, we loved it then and we still love it now. Download speeds of over 10Mbps are not unusual, and the Bionic regularly bests a domestic cable Internet connection. Put simply, the Bionic makes most 3G mobiles look as if they’re running in slow motion.

The effect of near-instant Internet access is intoxicating -especially when it comes to installing hefty apps and games, or downloading huge email attachments. Web pages are a touch less impressive, as the Bionic still hesitates for a second when making a new connection, but there’s no doubt that this is the real Internet, including Flash, in the palm of your hand.

All this speed comes at a price. Verizon has scrapped its unlimited packages in favour of stepped pricing, and even its most generous package (10GB for $80) represents under two and a half hours of full speed downloads over the course of an entire month.

The other penalty is power. Leave 4G turned on and you won’t get a full day’s intense use out of the Bionic’s standard battery. Switching to 3G gives the handset a new lease of life although a more practical long term solution is to invest another $50 in the Bionic’s Extra Capacity powerpack.

Bionic vision

The Bionic sadly lacks Steve Austin’s 20x zoom and infrared-sensitive eyeballs. 8MP still photos are perfectly serviceable, with natural colouring and generally good levels of detail. However, Motorola’s camera app is a pain to use, sometimes suffering lags of up to three seconds, at other times snapping away without a hitch. Focusing is erratic and you can’t set focus or exposure by just tapping the screen, as you can on pretty much any decent touchscreen cameraphone out there.

Switching to camcorder mode takes two seconds. The Moto’s 1080p HD video is crisp and well-exposed, and the phone copes well with changing focus and light conditions. The gallery app is basic, but fast, letting you share images via messaging, email, social networks and online printing. The Bionic also plays back a decent alphabet of media files, from AAC through to H.263/4 and MPEG-4 to WMA (but not DivX).

Skin and apps

Take a last look at Motorola’s Android skin, no longer known as MotoBlur since their PenTile tech made the name all too accurate. Google is likely to strip back future handsets to something resembling vanilla Android, and the passing of Motorola’s UI won’t be overly mourned.

The Bionic gives you five home screens with the usual contact icons and social widgets. It all works speedily and smoothly enough, but falls far short of the stylish Sense UI from HTC. This Gingerbread (Android 2.3.4) install has the finger-friendly Swype keyboard pre-loaded, as well as a decent bunch of business apps including Citrix Receiver, GoToMeeting and QuickOffice. It’s easy to sort apps into personalised groups.

The headline app on board is ZumoCast, a competent ‘personal cloud’ app that lets you access PC files and media from the Bionic. Installing ZumoCast server software on your PC takes just a few minutes and you can then navigate your desktop hard drive via three tabs -Files, Music and Video.

The Bionic will happily open most Office files, and let you share them from the phone, it even plays nicely with iTunes, for now. One particularly smart feature is that if you click, say, the videos tab, the app filters its results to show only those folders with video content. Unlike a real cloud system, you have to leave your computer on all the time, of course, but it’s a fast, easy solution for anyone who already runs a media server at home.

Accessories

We didn’t get to try the Bionic with its much-touted laptop dock ($200). But seeing as it’s virtually identical to the one intended for the Atrix, we’ll suggest that you give it an equally wide berth. While the concept of being able to transform your mobile into a netbook is one we adore, this plasticky keyboard and screen combo is over-priced and under-powered. Forego the dubious pleasures of Firefox 4 and a grumpy trackpad, and invest instead in the $100 HD Dock, with three USB ports and a remote control. We also like the ultra-basic Standard Dock with just audio and charging or the Navigation Dock, both of which cost $40.

Tags: Phones Motorola Droid Bionic Google Android

Motorola Droid Bionic originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Fri, 23 Sep 2011 17:00:28 +0100

Now that you can pick up touchscreen smartphones for pocket money prices, premium mobiles have to find other ways to differentiate themselves. 3D is the perfect solution, adding a gloss of techno-cool to imaging and gaming, and promising yet more to come (3D navigation anyone?).

The latest device intent on dragging us kicking and screaming into a new dimension is the HTC EVO 3D, a feature-packed Android phone available on the Sprint network in the US. With twin 5-megapixel cameras to capture 3D photos and videos, and a glasses-free 3D screen for playback, the EVO 3D promises nothing short of a multi-dimensional revolution.

It comes with a deafening array of bells and whistles, including the latest Android Gingerbread OS, a huge 4.3-inch screen, 1.2GHz dual core processor and 4G(ish) connectivity. Like its Korean rival LG, whose Optimus 3D handset is already available, HTC is clearly positioning 3D at the upper end of its range, a luxury feature that sets it apart from duller, flatter phones.

What is less obvious yet is whether there is any demand for mobile 3D, especially when it comes with weight and size handicaps, and uses first-generation technology that can still be annoying and even unpleasant to use.

Three’s a crowd

Some smartphones aspire to exist in only two dimensions, stripping away weight, features and ports in a quest for the ultimately slim profile. Not the EVO 3D. Unapologetically three dimensional, the HTC is nearly 12mm thick, 126mm long and weighs 1.25 iPhones. The 4.3-inch display occupies most of the face, covered by a sheer slab of glass that extends down over the four touch-sensitive Android keys.

The surround is solidly built from plastic and the plastic rear cover is slightly rubberised and heavily textured for grip. The design itself is rather anonymous, enlivened only by red detailing around the twin rear cameras (on the Sprint version, gold on others) and a shiny silver-ish shutter button. A physical switch nearby changes the camera between 2D and 3D modes.

Otherwise, the volume rocker and power buttons are a bit plasticky, and the 3.5mm headphone jack and Micro-USB power/data port are uncovered. Rounded corners help the EVO 3D to sit naturally in one hand, although it is a little too easy to knock the camera controls by mistake.

Flat out

Fire up the HTC EVO 3D and the first thing you’ll realise is that it’s a first class 2D phone. The 4.3-inch screen is qHD resolution (960 x 540 pixels) and looks sharp and very detailed. Colours are good and there are no issues with motion blur. However, contrast is a little lower than on some rivals and the viewing angle is limited, perhaps due to the parallax barrier needed for 3D playback.

The HTC Sense skin is, as always, a joy to use. The lock screen can be set to various useful themes (weather, stocks, social etc.) and the unlock circle jumps you straight into one of four favourite apps. There are seven home screens, some of which come pre-populated with HTC’s Friend Stream, bookmarks, calendar and other widgets. The screens are fast and responsive - perhaps a little too much so if you really get them spinning. Swype is pre-installed for speedy text input.

Throughout our tests, the 1.2GHz dual-core Snapdragon chip kept thing zipping along. We didn’t experience any slow-downs, even when multi-tasking several intensive apps. Having said that, the phone did regularly crash out of apps and return to the home screen, and even hung completely once while loading a game.

3D or not 3D

It’s still early days for 3D, with several different technologies out there and each manufacturer taking a different approach. Let’s start with photography. Clearly, you’ll get a more pronounced stereoscopic effect with a wider separation of lenses and the EVO 3D’s 5-megapixel snappers are a good 35mm apart (each with its own LED flash). That’s pretty good but it’s still only around half the average interpupillary distance in adults.

Enter the camera or camcorder, flick the switch to 3D and you can preview the effect. The first thing you’ll notice is a massive drop-off in both brightness and sharpness. The loss in brightness comes from the parallax barrier allowing only the correct direction of light from the screen to your left and right eyes. The loss in sharpness is because each full frame of your screen now has to provide a separate, half-resolution image for each eye, see the images below.

These losses aren’t too serious indoors but they make it very difficult to frame images outside on a bright day, and virtually impossible to read small menu text in 3D. The best thing to do is get your settings right - and even roughly frame shots - in 2D, before switching into 3D at the last moment. Switching modes takes 2 seconds, and there is about a second shutter lag in either mode.

Parallax barrier is one of the older 3D technologies now, and comes with some issues. As you move your head (or the phone), the 3D effect flickers in and out in a way that it as best disconcerting and at worst nauseating. The 3D-ness of an image also depends on how it was captured, and on the person viewing it. The Nintendo 3DS deals with all this by having a hardware slider to manually adjust the 3D effect, and such a control is sorely missed here.

In fact, there is no way of adjusting the 3D effect at the point of capture. When you review images in gallery, you can at least tweak the parallax effect in the editor for each individual image (though not videos). But there also needs to be a global way of doing the same thing.

Multi-dimensional movies

When the stars (and lenses) align, the HTC EVO 3D is capable of some pretty decent 3D photos at a fixed perceived resolution of 2 megapixels and smooth, flicker-free videos at 720p. You’ll always get the best results by having a variety of subjects in both foreground and background. The camera throws in more than a little distortion and chromatic aberration (purple fringes on bright subjects) but the thrill of shooting real 3D images and viewing them in seconds stays fresh.

Back in two dimensions, 5 megapixel stills are light on detail and heavy on colour. Videos max out at 720p but look best at the screen’s native qHD resolution, sparkling with life. Around the front, there is a respectable 0.9 megapixel webcam.

The HTC EVO 3D is also a dab hand at consuming 3D content. YouTube is the best place to dive into 3D at the moment, with a bunch of 3D clips, trailers and ads to enjoy. The EVO 3D comes with the Ultimate Spiderman Total Mayhem game pre-loaded. The 3D effects here not only look good but can be dialled up or down as you like. 3D doesn’t make a huge difference to the gameplay but it does help mask some graphical rough edges.

That’s about it for 3D content for now. 3D navigation will have to wait until brighter glasses-free technologies arrives and 3D websites are a pipedream awaiting widespread roll-out of HTML5. Talking of which, the EVO 3D is a dab hand at web surfing. Sprint’s WiMAX service may not be genuine 4G but we saw download speeds of over 10Mbps in suburban Seattle. 3G reception and handover is a little dodgier but this is one fast phone ready for the brave new world of cloud services.

Music and memories

On the audio side of things, the supplied player is fair enough for listening to the odd track or two. Which is just as well, as the odd track or two is about all you’ll be able to squeeze in the miserly 4GB of on-board memory. The phone ships with an 8GB microSD card, under the battery cover, to bring storage up to the level of barely acceptable.

In the absence of an HDMI port, you’ll need a mysterious little cable called an MHL adapter (not tested) to watch 3D media on your fancy new 3D telly. And while YouTube accepts 3D videos for upload, good luck finding somewhere to share your 3D photos. One retro solution is to upload them to Fujifilm at www.fujifilmreal3d.com for printing out as scratchy 3D prints (from £4.29 each plus £5 delivery).

Battery life is painfully predictable and predictably painful. With modest usage, you might get two days from a charge, but use the 3D camera or hammer the 4G web regularly and you’d better be carrying the charger with you. (Like Cinderella at midnight, the 3D camera turns back into a 2D pumpkin when the battery falls to 15% capacity.)

Tags: Phones Mobile phones HTC Sprint 3D Android HTC EVO 3D

HTC EVO 3D originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 21 Jul 2011 19:45:29 +0100

Few companies get a second bite at the mobile cherry. Motorola took its initially awesome RAZR phone and flogged it until it wasn’t just a dead horse but little more than neatly canned dog food. With the company’s handset business on the brink of failure, Motorola then bet everything on the Droid - a testosterone-packed Android handset that was everything the iPhone wasn’t. It paid off. Motorola now has a stable of Droid handsets in a variety of sizes, shapes and configurations that share a common clunkiness, geekiness, feature overload and the best ringtone in the Android universe.

The Droid 3 is the ultimate expression of Droid DNA. Motorola has crammed every feature it possibly can into this dual-core Gingerbread device, from an 8 megapixels camera to a five-row slide-out QWERTY keyboard. Like previous Droid devices, the Droid 3 is debuting on Verizon in America network - although without being able to take advantage of the network’s stunning 4G LTE speeds. Does the powerful Droid 3 take Motorola to another level? Or is the company making the same mistakes again, putting all of its mobile eggs into one Droid-shaped basket?

Slide stats

Motorola is right when it says the Droid 3 “makes a big Android smartphone statement”. The operative word here is big. Weighing 50g more than an iPhone and measuring nearly 5-inches top to toe, the Droid 3 lands on a pub table like Optimus Prime on atmospheric re-entry. Motorola notes that the Droid 3 is the thinnest full QWERTY smartphone ever but that’s not saying much: you still have a pocket-stretching 13mm of girth to contend with.

Build quality is excellent, as it must be for any slider (they are inherently un-skinnable). The front face is a slab of ultra-tough Gorilla Glass encased in a band of rounded metal. The body has high-traction rubberised back and sides, let down slightly by a shiny plastic front. QWERTY keys are also rubberised, with good separation and a firm, distinct action. The full row of over-sized number keys is an excellent addition and typing is generally fast and efficient. Having said that, with the ever-excellent Swype pre-installed, you might question the need for real keypad at all.

The slide movement itself is solid, with just enough resistance not to happen by accident. The touchscreen unlock lines up in the same direction, allowing you to fire up the Droid 3 in one smooth motion. In the closed position, there’s a small lip left that doesn’t quite line up with the screen - the first sign of Droid’s middle-aged spread?

The power button and standard 3.5mm headphone jack are on top of the phone. The sides are home to Micro-USB and HDMI ports (neither with a cover), as well as slightly undersized volume controls. In standby mode, a front-mounted green LED blinks handily when you have new notifications.

Screen and skin

It seems as if Android screen inflation has finally, thankfully, ground to a halt. The Droid 3’s 4-inch 960 x 540 display is plenty large enough for games and video, without feeling like a stretch to hold. Touch sensitivity is good and it’s fairly easy to clean off fingerprints and smears.

The Droid 3 uses the same controversial PenTile screen that was blamed for pixelly text and wonky colours on the Droid X2. Things don’t seem to be as bad here, with colour reproduction (especially those tricky greens) looking mostly fine. At full brightness, plain black text on a white background is crisp and clear, but scrolling is painfully juddery. Luckily, games and films remain watchable but it’s still a significant drawback.

The Motoblur skin is very industrial chic, all bold designs, fancy transitions and gruff announcements. On the Droid 3, you get five home screens with an easy way of adding and moving icons, widgets and shortcuts. Four docked icons, which you can swap in and out, hover on the screen next to the four Android keys, and the notification bar is pretty standard. Motoblur also comes with a decent (if sluggish) image gallery and editor, and a bare bones wireless printing app.

Regardless of the phone’s orientation, the home screens stay in landscape mode when the keyboard is slid out and in portrait mode when closed. This can be disconcerting if, say, you’re happily working or gaming in landscape and want to flip into the home screen to check a widget.

The biggest drawback to any manufacturer’s skin, however, is that it can delay the roll out of Android OS updates. Without rooting the Droid 3, there’s no way of returning to the stock Android interface.

Performance

With a 1GHZ Texas Instruments dual-core chip under the hood, the Droid 3 is admirably swift, playing games like NOVA HD and rendering HD videos smoothly. Despite only a modest 512MB of RAM to feed it, multi-tasking did not seem to suffer - although this might be a concern with future firmware.

Where things do slow down are in the gallery - especially when manipulating high megapixel images - and in the camera. Motorola should have left imaging well alone but instead managed to make a camera app that is both underpowered and overcomplicated, and looks a bit rubbish to boot. The shaky, laggy digital zoom is particularly obnoxious to use. Shutter lag is about a second.

When you can finally get your finger on the tiny still/video icon, flipping into movie mode (up to 1080p) takes about 3 seconds. Exposure is spot on and the Droid 3 is pretty good about keeping videos in focus.

Photos have just what you would expect from capturing 8 megapixels through such a tiny lens: gargantuan noise reduction that robs images of any fine detail. Still, pictures are colourful and good-looking, and don’t suffer too badly from distortion. Movies are a similar story - well exposed, good colours and just enough detail to look fine on a flatscreen. Overall, well above average results.

You can save media to either the 16GB of internal memory or a microSD card, whose slot is hidden under the back cover (luckily not under the battery itself).

Sound decisions

The Droid 3 has a hefty pair of lungs, belting out tunes with plenty of volume and good dynamic range. It sounds fine for a minute or two but high notes break down into a tinny clatter and bass notes are sloppy, making for tiring long-term listening. It’s good for talk radio, though. Things are much better though decent headphones, even if still not quite up to the iPhone’s exemplary standards. For voice calls, the Droid 3’s microphone is not terribly sensitive so make sure to speak up (that goes for voice search, too). Incoming calls sound fine, and the front VGA webcam is less blurry than average.

Surfing over Wi-Fi and 3G is speedy without blowing your socks off, and that motion blur rears its ugly head again when zooming or scrolling. It’s difficult to criticise the Droid 3 for lacking LTE when 4G service is still so hard to come by, but that will certainly affect its prospects on the Verizon network. To make up for it, the Droid 3 works over a healthy variety of global networks, including CDMA, HSDPA, GSM and EDGE. Flash is pre-loaded and works with its usual rate of success on Android - about 90% of the time, we’d guess. Google Maps and Navigation keep getting better and the Droid’s GPS and compass work well.

Where the Droid 3 does stand out from the crowd, in a good way, is battery life. You should get well over a full day of real-life usage from one charge, even with some surfing and snapping in the mix. The lower half of the phone gets warm during use but nothing like some handsets we’ve tested (yes, we’re looking at you HTC Thunderbolt).

Tags: Phones Mobile phones Android Motorola Motorola Droid 3 Verizon

Motorola Droid 3 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 19 Jul 2011 10:31:00 +0100

With the arrival of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, the size and form factor of tablets are finally set in stone. A year ago, tablets could have gone anywhere - they could have become neat and compact like the BlackBerry PlayBook and the first Samsung Tab, or they could have bloated into 12-inch Windows monsters.

But with Samsung and Motorola falling into line behind Apple, it seems this is the battleground where the tablet wars will be fought: a 10-inch-ish screen, a premium finish and the minimum of buttons and ports.

On the hardware and design side, the Tab 10.1 is startlingly similar to the iPad 2. It weighs just 5% less than the Apple tablet, boasts a scrap more screen estate and resolution, and is just a fifth of a millimetre thinner. Even the silver-lined black glass bezel is virtually identical - but slightly smaller.

Inside, Tab 10.1 owners get more RAM, a sharper camera and a dual-core chip. This is the game Samsung likes to play. It offers a device that is priced identically to the iPad 2 but that just pips it in terms of hardware. Of course, hardware is only half the story. Can Android Honeycomb compete with the all-conquering iOS? Or will the lack of good apps hold it back? And how well does Samsung’s hardware integrate with Google’s ever-expanding array of cloud services?

Screen and build

The Galaxy’s slimline/widescreen format feels great in the hand. Like the iPad 2, it remains on the heavy side for extended ebook reading, say, but two-handed use is easy and natural. Unlike the Apple tablet, there’s no metal here, just a plastic silver surround morphing into a silver/grey back that has been textured to look like carbon fibre, but isn’t.

Samsung’s quest for slimness means a paucity of ports. An unprotected 30-pin connector serves for both data and power, but there’s no HDMI output, USB or SD card connections. You can get adapters though for all of these to connect to the dock, so if it's essential then you'll need an adapter like you would on the iPad. The only other holes are two tiny speaker ports, a miniscule microphone and a standard 3.5mm headphone jack. A slim power button wakes the Tab up, and there’s a volume rocker beside it.

Samsung’s 10.1-inch screen is 1280 x 800 resolution, which gives it 25% more pixels than the iPad 2 plus a noticeable bump in pixel density, up to 149ppi. Brightness, contrast and colour are all excellent, although the iPad 2’s screen has a noticeable edge in viewing angle, staying crisp and white while the Tab takes on a sickly grey tinge when tilted. Both suffer equally from reflections, glare and fingerprints but are, just, usable outdoors.

There’s nothing to choose between the tablets for touch responsiveness - both are simply excellent. However, the Apple is slightly smoother and speedier when it comes to scrolling and re-drawing graphics.

At home with Honeycomb

Although the Tab 10.1 is one of the first Honeycomb 3.1 devices, there are few visible upgrades - most of the stability and speed boosts are under the hood. You can see a full run-down of the changes in our feature here, or our review of Honeycomb here. 

The OS remains a joy to use, with five home screens that you can populate with all manners of icons and live widgets. A 3D-ish transition between screens helps navigation, as do the icons in each of the corners. Top left gives instant links to Google text and voice searches. Voice searching is, as usual, impressive when it works and irritating when it doesn’t (PRs always blame my English accent with these US-tuned devices).

What is undeniably annoying is that if your voice search fails and you want to try again from the Google page, you’re not given the Voice Search option that now appears in Chrome browsers even on desktops. You have to return to the home screen and hit the microphone icon again.

Back on the home screen, top right is where you manage apps and widgets. Bottom right is the useful notification area and bottom left is where you’ll find the back, home and multi-tasking icons. Honeycomb 3.1 is certainly more stable than Google’s first shot at Android for tablets, but it’s far from perfect. During our tests, we regularly got booted out of the browser and YouTube app for no apparent reason, had to restart the unresponsive camera app on several occasions, and suffered several inexplicable slowdowns and screen flashes.

Image conscious

With a 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 chip inside, it’s no surprise that the Tab 10.1 skips and glides through graphics-heavy tasks. Video playback is faultless, games look fantastic and apps like Google Maps and the grisly new Google Body feel very assured. Tablet-specific games like Angry Birds Rio are now as polished and professional as anything you’ll find on the iPad 2, although obviously there are still far fewer of them. We've been compiling a list of our favourites that you can read here.

Downloading Adobe Flash from the Market open doors that are still locked to the iPad 2. Flash compatibility gets better with each iteration of Android and the 10.1 had no trouble with Flash videos, Kongregate games and the interactive page furniture we came across during testing.

The Galaxy Tab is generally good at multi-tasking, with a few hiccups. Bizarrely, the multi-tasking interface itself, with its rolling column of live screenshots, is a little “sticky” and sluggish. More serious, perhaps, is Samsung’s weak, slow on-screen keyboard that lacks spell correction. Swype for Honeycomb might just be our saviour.

Sound and vision

It’s thumbs up for the Music Beta by Google cloud music service (currently US only). Uploading music from iTunes was slow but steady and the Honeycomb app has a clean, modern 2D graphical interface that’s fast and easy to use. The 10.1 streamed and downloaded songs over Wi-Fi without a hitch. The on board speakers are predictably tinny, even more so than the iPad 2, but they’re fine for occasional listening. Headphones improve the sonics but music still sounds rather muffled.

The camera app needs some work. As well as regularly freezing or falling over, the app is slow to get going. Once it’s awake, there are the usual Android camera options and effects but nothing to rival the quality of the best iPhone apps. Left handers will appreciate the fact that if you flip the Tab 10.1, horizontally or vertically, the type flips but not the location of the shutter or menu buttons - thoughtful.

Image quality is generally good, with the 3 megapixel snaps sporting good exposure and colours. The focus is a bit wobbly and contrast is wishy-washy but compared to the iPad 2’s shockingly bad sub-megapixel snapper, it’s hard to complain.

The 720p video recordings are clear, crisp and wouldn’t shame a decent smartphone, you can find a sample on YouTube here. The sound is hissy and prone to wind noise but, again, this is hard to criticise too much on a device that is unlikely to be your primary music player, camera or camcorder. (Also, geeky shout out to Samsung for the best image file names ever: year/month/day_time/seconds.jpg should be compulsory industry-wide.)

Everything else

The Tab 10.1’s battery life is in the same class at the iPad’s. You can expect to a solid 8 hours web/multimedia from a fresh battery - anything beyond that should be considered a bonus. The device gets quite warm during intense use and if you have the brightness turned way up, the screen will get toasty, too.

The front webcam is a (seriously overengineered) 2 megapixel affair which can handle video chat in HD, should you have the wish for other people to see every curl and wave of your nostril hairs. GPS locked on quickly and effectively, and held its signal well even indoors. We didn’t have the opportunity to check the Galaxy’s 3G capabilities.

Tags: Tablets Samsung Samsung Galaxy Tab 10-1 Android Honeycomb

Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 30 Jun 2011 09:34:00 +0100

The HTC ThunderBolt is one of the very, very few 4G devices to actually be up and running on a 4G network (Verizon’s LTE roll-out in the US). As such, it’s perfectly positioned to act as a lightning rod for all the myths, hype and hassles that come with any step-change in technology: 4G will turn on a broadband fire hose; HD films will stream stutter-free; networks will collapse under the strain; and users will run up massive bills.

All indications are that the shift to 4G won’t be a re-run of the 3G fiasco. For a start, there’s an army of smartphone users who are already squeezing every last kilobit out of existing 3G services. We’ve become used to downloading rich media, launching video calls and using phones as our primary conduits for email, the web, social networks and more.

The challenge now is for operators to meet expectations and match the hype. Will users be happy with pseudo-4G services like Sprint’s Wi-Max? How will 4G devices (and customers) cope with the inevitable speed bumps outside of major cities? And can devices and services keep up with the 4G wave?

The HTC ThunderBolt has a lot riding on it. As Verizon’s first 4G smartphone (the Xoom tablet came out just a few weeks earlier), the impression it makes will set opinions on the whole concept of a next-gen network. Can a non-dual core handset hack it in 4G? And will the ThunderBolt have enough time to make a name for itself before other eagerly-awaited 4G devices, like the Droid Bionic, flex their cybernetic muscles? 

Size matters

You’d expect the first 4G phone to be a monster and the HTC ThunderBolt is a certainly a handful, home to a 4.3-inch 800 x 480 screen and weighing a shade under 180g. But this is solidity that comes from being built well rather than mere pocket-dragging bulk. The case is solid ABS, with a soft-touch curved back that adds grip and shrugs off fingerprints.

The design is nothing special. A large slab of glass incorporates the four (soft) Android keys and the only other controls are a nicely recessed power button and an awkwardly large and plasticky volume rocker. Dimensions are 122 x 62 x 14mm, all of which spells a hefty handset taking up some serious palm space.

If your wrists get weary, the ThunderBolt comes with a secure and well-machined flip-out kickstand. Cleverly, popping out the stand reveals the ThunderBolt’s built-in stereo speakers. The strident, surround-ish sonics definitely benefit from the bass boost of sitting on a table top, and sound fine for speech or even short bursts of pop.

No resolution revolution

It’s hard to see the logic of building a next-gen handset and saddling it with aging features. Unfortunately, that’s a bit of a theme with the ThunderBolt. The 800 x 480 screen is sharp enough and its TFT colours are bright enough, but there’s little here to dazzle anyone who’s ever had their eyeballs massaged by an iPhone or Samsung Galaxy S.

The smarts behind the glass are Android 2.2 (yawn) running on a 1GHz Snapdragon chip. That would be nothing to sneeze at on an entry-level smartphone but looks modest when you’re trying to download a HD video and synch your email over 4G, while making a 3G phone call (theoretically possible, not recommended).

In everyday use, the ThunderBolt occasionally stutters when asked to multi-task above its pay grade. Web pages can take a moment to resize or re-orient, and significantly more than a moment to render complex designs or load Flash interactivity.

The HTC Sense skin is as steadfast as ever. The seven home screens are easily populated with widgets and very smoothly navigated with a pinch-to-zoom gesture. Friend Stream aggregates Facebook, Twitter and Flickr feeds efficiently but with all the joy of a prisoner stamping number plates: it’s too easy to hit a dead end where clicking on a tweet or update just refreshes the same screen.

Not a Thor loser

All of which might make it sound as though the ThunderBolt is all sound and no fury. Far from it. Touch the innocuous internet icon and this phone starts to spit sparks. In a solid 4G area, Google searches load almost literally instantly and info-dense, image-heavy sites like Pocket-lint spring to life on the screen, fully populated with media and links.

Streaming audio and video buffers in next to no time and generally proceeds with a minimum of interruptions, although you will definitely notice the difference when reception is dodgy or you have to down-shift to 3G.

Firing up the Ookla Speed Test app makes it official. In our tests, the ThunderBolt reliably pulled down about 10Mbps of data, with upload speeds of about half that. Experiencing mobile download speeds nearly twice that of the average UK domestic broadband connection feels like being handed Thor’s hammer. No longer are you always hunting for a Wi-Fi signal to piggyback: Verizon’s 4G LTE service is faster, safer and more stable.

While foes will tremble at the sight of your bandwidth, you might find yourself quailing when your phone bill arrives. At 10Mbps, you could run through a monthly 1GB data allowance in under 15 minutes. US operators have admitted that carrying data over 4G phone is cheaper than using 3G networks but don’t hold your breath for the return of truly unlimited tariffs. (Having said that, Verizon here in the US is still offering an unlimited data option for monthly users.) 

Scorching hotspots

4G also makes turning your phone into a mobile hotspot into a viable proposition. You can’t channel the full power of LTE through Wi-Fi but the ThunderBolt makes a good stab at it. Connecting an iPad 2 to the Thunderbolt gave speeds of around 3 to 4Mbps, peaking at 8.5Mbps. That’s more than enough to stream a big screen film, although it’s unlikely the HTC’s battery would make it through a full Hollywood blockbuster - more on that later.

The ThunderBolt can share data with up to five devices simultaneously. In our tests with two smartphones, it managed to keep both online with excellent (5Mbps+) connections. Range was impressive, also. The Thunderbolt maintained a decently nippy link over about 10 metres, indoors.

Media matters

The ThunderBolt is perfectly respectable for audio-visuals. The decent on-board speakers are a high point, with slightly thin and mushy headphone playback proving a little disappointing. Video playback is fast, crisp and confident, and has plenty of colourful punch. The ThunderBolt is a great handset to sample the new Music Beta by Google service: songs start streaming in a couple of seconds and play solidly throughout.

On the image side of things, the ThunderBolt has an 8-megapixel autofocus camera and can capture video at up to 720p, 30fps. The stripped-down camera app has just a single row of icons (for playback, visual effects, flash and video toggle) and an undersized shutter button - the remaining camera settings (ISO, focus, etc.) are found in the simple menu.

Shutter lag was virtually non-existent and flipping between still and movie capture is also very fast. Results are well above average. Exposure and colour rendition are excellent, and the autofocus is generally reliable, with touch-to-focus working well. Still photos have acceptable levels of detail but dive deeper at your peril - aggressive noise reduction and intense sharpening means images can’t compete with standalone snappers. The twin flash LEDS are fine for portraits although too weak for anything further off.

Don’t fret too much about the lack of Full HD filming. While 720p footage is rich and detailed, you can already see the ThunderBolt struggling to render complex scenes. The phone is happiest shooting at 480 lines. 

Rounding up

Call quality is fine indoors and, appropriately enough, the ThunderBolt shines in foul weather. Twin noise-cancelling mics did a fantastic job of cutting through a windy day, holding a call after an iPhone 4 descended into unlistenable crackling.

Other basics include a generous 32GB microSD card pre-installed, a sensitive GPS, digital compass, DLNA streaming and a light sensor. Voice recognition and search work well and the front webcam is sharp enough - although annoyingly there’s not yet a Skype client for the ThunderBolt.

The biggest irritation by far, though, is battery life. Make a couple of calls, listen to a few songs and tinker with some web apps and the ThunderBolt might, just might, last a whole day. Stretch its 4G legs, fire up the camera or enjoy HD video and you’ll be hunting for an outlet within a matter of hours.

Try anything really impressive, like the Wi-Fi hotspot feature, and you’d be well advised to just leave the ThunderBolt plugged in, preferably on a heatproof slab of concrete so that it doesn’t melt its way to the centre of the earth.

Tags: Phones Mobile phones HTC HTC Thunderbolt Verizon 4G

HTC ThunderBolt originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Tue, 17 May 2011 14:05:00 +0100

In the lightning-fast world of mobile tech, few manufacturers ever recover from a run of poor devices. They might get swallowed up (like Ericsson or Siemens) or simply fade away (like Motorola?) but it’s the rare company that makes a Rocky-style comeback and gets to duke it out with the big boys again.

With the Pre, Palm might just be that contender. For a start, the 3G EVDO Pre is utterly beautiful. Nestling in the hand like a shiny black egg, the Pre looks and (despite a slightly plasticky housing) feels like a class act. The sliding mechanism is rock-solid, revealing a QWERTY keyboard that might not impress BlackBerry users but is well up to the job of tapping out URLs and emails.

What really catapults the Pre into the Premier League, though, is its multi-tasking, baby oil-smooth capacitive touchscreen. Like the iPhone, you can effortlessly swipe, flick and pinch your way through applications. Unlike the iPhone, though, the Pre can have multiple apps running at the same time.

So if you really want to check your email while you’re downloading a video, or stream some fine Pandora tunes while you’re browsing the web, you can. That might sound like a luxury but it’s incredible how quickly you get used to it - going back to the iPhone’s in-and-out, one-at-a-time apps can be a bit of a shock.

By showing each app as a separate card, it’s easy to either zoom in to one app or throw it into oblivion. Loading times are generally excellent although things slow down significantly if you have more than a handful of apps open - also if you’re working on processor-intensive tasks like the functional but sluggish PDF viewer.

Web surfing and Google Maps are almost exactly the same as the iPhone, which should come as no surprise as they both use the WebKit engine. That means speedy rendering but a distinct lack of Flash browsing (although there is a dedicated YouTube viewer on board).

Don’t get excited by the much-hyped cut and paste. It only works on live text fields (you can’t grab info from incoming texts or emails) and is virtually useless compared to the iPhone’s 3.0 cut and paste. The 3-megapixel camera will also come as a disappointment if you’re used to crystal-clear Nokia or Sony Ericsson optics. The LED flash is great and auto geotagging works but detail is extremely smeary. There’s no video capture.

Palm’s PDA heritage shines through on the organiser side. Within minutes, the Pre will import, process and integrate hundreds of contacts and diary entries from Facebook, Google, Outlook and more. When you just start typing on the keyboard and see all your friends’ details gathered together, plus birthdays and profile pictures from Facebook, you realise that this is the way all address books should work.

Texting, emailing and phone calls are straightforward, and media playback is first rate (if you dump the supplied headphones, naturally). I managed to synch music and photos from iTunes but, be warned, by the time the Pre arrives in the UK, Apple is likely to have restricted this feature.

We can tell a product’s battery life is going to be weak when the "reviewer notes" recommend turning off wireless, switching into flight mode, checking email less frequently and "avoiding excessive use of IM". The Pre is dutifully dreadful, lasting at most for a day and occasionally needing a top-up around teatime. However, you can swap batteries ($50) yourself and the optional Touchstone wireless charging dock ($70) is extremely cool.

Related links:

• Photos - Palm Pre
• News - Palm Pre webOS details emerge

Tags: Phones Mobile phones Palm Palm Pre

Palm Pre originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Thu, 25 Jun 2009 09:23:31 +0100

According to Amazon, Kindle users buy 2.6 times as many books as other customers - and even purchase the same number of printed books that they did before. So why did one attendee of Book Expo America last month confess to wanting to punch an owner of the ebook reader?

My guess would be he’s a bookshop owner. Buying a book (or magazine or blog) on the new Amazon Kindle DX is as easy and as tempting as ploughing through a whole packet of Hob-Nobs in one sitting. The 3G wireless link is faster and more reliable than ever, presenting a great looking Kindle store with most bestsellers at half the price of traditional bookshops - all available to start reading in moments, day or night.

The larger, 9.7-screen will appeal to almost everyone, from lazy readers like myself who enjoy small fonts and a minimum of (still annoying) flickering page turns, to older readers who can finally fit more than a handful of large-print lines on one screen. The DX retains the Kindle 2’s iPod-alike smooth edges and brushed metal back, but now you’ll need two hands to manage its half-kilo weight. The smart leather cover with a magnetic latch ($50) is a must-have accessory.

Unfortunately, the DX also keeps its smaller sibling’s tiny, sharp joystick and cheap-feeling page turn buttons. The keyboard is fine for tapping in URLs on the (very, very basic) web browser but Amazon was wise to avoid any feature creep - it’s too flat and unresponsive for email, say.

The auto-rotating screen is more of an annoyance than an advance - it’s very slow to spin, books look plain weird and both websites and newspapers still display in a single column. Some PDFs (which the Kindle now reads natively) do look better in landscape mode, although you can’t zoom in, rotate or manipulate these files. At least you can turn the rotate function off.

With the extra Flash memory (now up to 3.3GB), it’s astonishing that Amazon hasn’t overhauled the Home screen, which still shows a single list of everything on the reader, sorted by date. Get more than a couple of dozen items on-board and it becomes a real mess. At least a decent search function helps you locate items, and look up words in the dictionary or online.

Away from pure reading, the text-to-speech function might be helpful for some readers (although not blind users, as it doesn’t work on the Home screen and menus), while the background MP3 player sounds better than expected, especially through headphones.

Battery life is fantastic - I’ve charged the DX once since getting it a couple of weeks ago – and the build quality feels very solid. But, unlike my old Kindle 1.0, the DX hasn’t shifted from the sofa: it’s just too large and cumbersome to find its way into my bag for day trips.

Tags: Gadgets ebooks Amazon Kindle Amazon Kindle DX Ebook eBook readers Amazon Kindle

Amazon Kindle DX ebook originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 24 Jun 2009 09:00:00 +0100

Everyone has a 3G smartphone, iPhone or netbook these days, right? Wrong. Just 15% of people with a mobile phone currently use email on the move, inspiring US start-up Peek to launch this low-priced messenger for the masses.

Costing just $70 (£46) in the US, the metal Peek boasts a QWERTY keyboard, a 2.5-inch colour screen and an iPhone-shaming 10mm waistline.

For a $20 (£13.30) monthly fee (no contract required), Peek owners get all-you-can-type email and text messaging throughout the US over T-Mobile’s GPRS GSM network. (That might sound a lot to international users but is about the same as most US carriers charge for a basic data plan). What Peek users don’t get, however, is any kind of voice communications, a camera, MP3 player, office apps or games.

Peek’s aim is simple - to offer mobile email in minutes, without the hassle or complexity of normal handsets. And that, at least, it delivers. Peek’s back-end (actually virtual servers in Amazon’s new Elastic Computing cloud) already know the settings for the big webmail sites and thousands of ISPs across the globe, letting you simply type in your email address and password to start receiving mail. You can even download your contacts from webmail services.

For other addresses, such as POP3 mail (but not yet IMAP) through a personal domain, a 5 minute call to customer services to deliver SMTP settings was enough to get messages flowing. The interface is BlackBerry-esque, with a single inbox accessing up to three addresses. A right-mounted jog wheel lets you scroll (somewhat slowly) through emails and texts, open, forward and reply to them.

The keyboard uses blister-style keys for easy thumb tapping. It’s as good as a BlackBerry and much better, of course, than a touchphone or number pad. And that’s about it. The Peek does a fair job of displaying attached images on its 320 x 240-pixel QVGA screen but you can’t read text documents, PDFs or other files, or search your inbox. Battery life is fine, too, about 3 days in our tests.

It’s early days yet for the Peek. The company is promising unlimited instant messaging and push email for the New Year, although upgrading the Peek’s firmware will require sending the handsets back to the manufacturer. There are rumours of a possible UK launch (with a certain satsuma-coloured network) during 2009.

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Tags: Gadgets peek Phones Mobile phones peek

Peek handheld email device originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 17 Dec 2008 12:00:00 +0000

At last night’s Sony Ericsson launch there wasn’t a Walkman or Cyber-shot in sight as the phone maker rolled out four new handsets with an emphasis on design.

Pocket-lint managed to get a brief hands on with the new T650 from Sony Ericsson, so should you be opting for the latest T? We find out.

Following on from the company's T Series, the Sony Ericsson T650i is a comprehensive update of the venerable T600 chassis. The top half of the 3G phone is now finished in stainless steel, obsessively worked in an eight-stage process (apparently) to capture the light and give a classy "ray" effect.

Unfortunately, the lower half is less impressive. The number keys have shrunk to vestigial metallic nubs and the initial two colour options – Growing Green and Midnight Blue – have a yawn-inducing dullness that suggests they were the last two colours left in the box.

So back to the sexy top half, where the 1.9-inch screen boasts a scratchproof "mineral glass" coating. Unlike the "animal" or "vegetable" glasses to be found on rival handsets, we suppose.

It seemed tough enough, at least, and the Sony Ericsson PR bods didn’t mind us giving it a rap to check it out. The screen also has a new bonding technique that gives a wider viewing angle.

Likewise the phone doesn't include the more interesting colourful themes found on the S500i which is a cheerful 2.5G sliding handset whose colourful themes spill off the screen and keypad to multi-colour strips running down each side.

These can be event-based (alerting you to texts and calls) or just deliver a cheesily hypnotic light show. Inside its 14mm shell, it’s got a 2MP camera, Bluetooth 2.0, media player and Picture Blogging software.

Where it does win out however is the T650i’s 12.5mm slimness. This thin design - which is almost as thin as the Walkman W880 (just 3mm in it) is marred only slightly by the protruding autofocus 3.2MP camera lens on the back. Sony suggest pairing the phone with its new HBH-DS980 Stereo Bluetooth headset, which looks plasticky but sounds excellent.

Tags: Phones Mobile phones 3G Sony Ericsson First look

Sony Ericsson T650i mobile phone - First Look originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 09 May 2007 17:12:00 +0100

Is the mobile phone market growing up at last? At last night’s Sony Ericsson launch there wasn’t a Walkman or Cyber-shot in sight as the phone maker rolled out four new handsets with an emphasis on design.

Pocket-lint managed to get a brief hands on with the new smartphone from Sony Ericsson, so should you be dumping your BlackBerry or Treo? We find out.

The Sony Ericsson P1 is a slimmed-down smartphone that’s 25% smaller than the P990. Clad in corporate silver and grey metal tones, the 3G Symbian P1 has a 2.6-inch QVGA touchscreen, push email (including ActiveSync and BlackBerry Connect) and comes enabled for VoIP – although it remains to be seen how many networks will permit the disruptive technology.

While the dual-way rocker QWERTY thumbpad is still a handful, handwriting recognition feels a touch faster than in previous models in our brief look.

The Opera browser looks great on the transflective display, although the addition of Wi-Fi (802.11b only) connectivity doesn’t quite make up for the surprising lack of high speed HSDPA data transfer, something of a must for the mobile businessman away from all those mesh networks in London.

One of the most popular features at the launch was the Business Card Scanner software, which uses the P1’s autofocus 3.2MP camera to capture and recognise contact data, with an admirably low error rate - you know like the new feature on the Compaq 2710p, also announced today, that this will be one of those show off items at business meetings.

Out of office hours, you get an FM radio, stereo Bluetooth and a 512MB Memory Stick Micro to feed the P1’s on-board media player. 3G talk time is estimated at just 3.5 hours, and the quoted 350 hours standby time seems unlikely given the size and brightness of the P1’s screen.

With stylus, card and battery, the P1 weighs in at a very reasonable 124g and ships with a neat USB/charging desk dock.

Tags: Phones Mobile phones 3G Sony Ericsson

Sony Ericsson P1 - First Look originally appeared on Pocket-lint on Wed, 09 May 2007 16:45:33 +0100