Review At first glance the Sony Ericsson Yari gives a very good impression of a lowish-end slider, with its so-so looks and smallish screen. Look a little closer, however, and it becomes clear that the Yari is a lot more fun than it first appears, with Wii-style gesture-recognition gaming, a 5Mp Camera, aGPS and HSDPA fast internet access.
The Yari is a small, lightweight handful at 100×48x16mm and 115g with rather dull black looks, although it’s also available in white or silver with red or pink highlights. Above the LCD screen are two gaming buttons – more on those later – and below it are a couple of programmable soft keys, with call start and stop, shortcuts and cancel buttons flanking a circular five-way navpad. Pressing the edges of this offers shortcuts such as music player, contacts and messaging, with the ability to programme it to whichever functions you fancy.
Around the sides are SE’s familiar, but doomed, two-pin FastPort power/sync socket, barely visible volume rocker, a micro SD card slot (like the FastPort, SE is moving steadily away from its Memory Stick option) covered by a plastic grommet and a Camera shutter button. Around the back, which is covered in a tactile rubberised plastic casing, is the recessed lens of the Camera with LED flash and Stereospeakers. Read the rest of this entry »
Review LG has produced a slew of good-looking handsets recently, not least with its sleek ‘n’ smooth Chocolate series. With its S-class UI it’s also got a snappy icon-based interface which gets a little bit of an update with the LG GM750.
LG’s GM750: all the trimmings, but lacks finesse
The phone is exclusive to Vodafone and echoes the good looks of LG’s higher end smart phones as well as much of their specs, including a 3in touchscreen, Windows Mobile 6.5, a 5Mp Camera, Wi-Fi and HSDPA 3G with downloads up to 7.2 Mbps. Even so, actually using it turned out to be a bit of a pain
Looking not hugely different from other LG touch screen phones such as the Arena and Cookie, the GM750 is fairly chunky at 110×54x13mm and 120g but it has slick bevelled sides and corners to lessen the effect.
Above the touchscreen is a VGA Camera for video calls, light sensor and speaker, with touch-sensitive call start and stop buttons below with a navpad in-between. This is nicely sensitive by the way, and often proved preferable to using the screen itself, as we’ll see. Read the rest of this entry »
Review Less, they say, is more, and that’s certainly a maxim LG believes in if the Pop – aka the GD510 – is anything to go by. This is one small phone, yet it presents a full touch-based user interface and simple, clear styling that will make some wonder if it’s one answer to the long hoped for iPhone Nano.
LG’s Pop: nice and small
Should Jobs and co worry? Alas no, because as impressive as the Pop looks, it’s let down by its key component: the touchscreen.
The phone we use every day has a capacitive screen, but we’ve been testing phones with resistive touchscreens for years – HTC offerings, mostly. After all that stabbing away with fingers and stylii, not triggering a tap unless we pushed really hard, here, thanks to capacitive touchscreen tech was a display that was never less than totally responsive.
Capacitive is, without question, the way all of today’s touchscreens should be.
And LG’s gone and put one of the old-style ones on the Pop. Right from the off, it makes using the phone more of a chore than it ought to be, simply because it slows you down. If a tap or a swipe of your fingertip doesn’t work first time, you have to try again. And sometimes one or two times more. The Pop’s display will respond eventually, but how much time will you have wasted? Read the rest of this entry »
Review Apparently, you are nobody today if you aren’t connected to hundreds of other people through a web of social networks. If you aren’t poking, tweeting, linking, posting, chatting, emailing and texting, you’re living in the past.
Samsung’s H1: built for Vodafone 360’s social network centric UI
No wonder, then, that everyone in the communications biz wants a piece of the social network action. Vodafone’s latest attempt to cash in is to launch its own service, Vodafone 360, and to do so with an exclusive handset, Samsung’s H1. The H1 runs a new operating system, sort of. That’s three things for potential buyers to get their heads around, and we aren’t sure they’re going to want to.
The H1 isn’t a bad phone. But we aren’t convinced by Vodafone 360. While it’s easy to use once configured, and has the great pluses of cloud-based backup and a usable web-based service so you can also access your information on a computer, it’s complicated to set up, isn’t sufficiently two-way and ultimately relies on people signing up for 360 itself. Read the rest of this entry »
Review The E72 is the latest in Nokia’s line of Qwerty handsets, beefing up the popular E71 with a slightly sleeker look, improved software and some interface tweaks. It’s very slim – only just over 1cm thick, 58.3mm wide, and 114 tall, weighing 128g. The 2.36in screen is only QVGA, though arguably on a unit this size, a higher resolution wouldn’t make much difference.
Fast talker: Nokia’s E72
Below the screen are two soft keys, call and end buttons, plus four dedicated buttons. The home/menu key can’t be reassigned, but the others can, with one function for a short push, and one for a long one. By default, for example, pressing the calendar button briefly shows the calendar, while a long press creates a new entry.
Between these is the Navikey, a standard looking four-way navpad. However, it’s not entirely standard, as it has an optical sensor as well. So, you can scroll through menus and lists by wiping a finger or thumb over it, which makes for much faster navigation – although some third party apps did seem to be a little confused by it at times. On the whole, it works well, and is a good improvement. Read the rest of this entry »
