Tech Disappointments of 2011 – Mobile Phones

We’ve already had a go at tablets and now it’s time to turn our attention to mobile phones. Today we’ll take ...

We’ve already had a go at tablets and now it’s time to turn our attention to mobile phones. Today we’ll take a look at some of the handsets that were hyped to be something really great, but in reality fell flat on their face, as they simply didn’t work as advertised or were absurdly priced or simply didn’t receive adequate support, either from the manufacturer or community. Sony Ericsson Xperia Play The ‘PlayStation phone’ had a lot riding on it when it launched in April 2011 and it was supposed to ‘revolutionize’ the mobile gaming scene. Sadly, Sony failed to realize that if you are going to launch a niche phone dedicated to gaming, you will need a vast game library and more importantly, top tier exclusive titles. Where’s Metal Gear Solid, Final Fantasy, Toy Story? At least, let us have the old PS One games, which includes more than 100 titles. All 'play' and no games makes Sony a ... Most games found today in the Xperia Play’s library are standard Android games with just the controls mapped to work with the slide-out joypad. The device itself isn’t bad, as it’s similar to the Arc, internally. However, the extra bulk of the joypad is rendered useless without proper support for exclusive titles. HTC Sensation HTC’s first attempt at a dual-core phone didn’t go down too well with end users. The first major issue that cropped up was the ‘death grip’ problem, which mainly affected the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth radios, rather than the cellular radios like the iPhone 4. Not sensational enough, eh? The issue was caused due to the aluminum chassis of the Sensation, which when held in one's palm immediately caused a drop in signal. A more alarming issue, with the touchscreen was found later. Many users around the globe stated that the screen would simply stop responding after just a week’s usage. Replacement units also suffered from the same problem, which put a further dampner on sales. Nokia X7 Nokia is well known for their product placements in big budget Hollywood movies (remember the Nokia 5800 ‘Tube’ from Dark Knight?) and they spared no expense for their X7 media phone. It made a cameo in Transformers 3: Dark of the Moon, but unlike the movie itself, which wasn’t too bad, the X7 was more like Transformers 2. Perhaps Nokia should have used a better movie to promote this Leaving aside the fact that it came with Symbian Anna, it’s priced in a bracket where there’s no shortage of good Android phones to choose from, so why would someone pick this? Nokia targeted it as a media phone when its media capabilities were far from impressive. It could playback 720p videos, but most of it played without audio and it’s not like there’s a third party player to help you out since, hello, it’s the Ovi Store. Something else we can’t fathom is Nokia’s fixation with fixed-focus cameras. Why? You’re charging Rs.20,000, throw in a auto-focus camera! Motorola Fire and Fire XT These are the two most appalling Android handsets, we’ve come across this year and is not something we expected from Motorola. Throwing a wild guess, what could have happened is that while the entire R&D team were busy with the DROID RAZR, they had a bunch of their interns whip up something to pass their time. A poor effort from Motorola While the handsets aren’t built too shabbily, it’s the horrible touchscreen that ruins it. That’s like build a great car and then messing up the steering, it just doesn’t work. The phone - Fire XT also overheated quite frequently, which cased the phone to reboot randomly. We can’t believe we are saying this, but the budget Micromax A70 was a mile ahead of this one. Dell XCD35 Dell didn’t really have any great phones this year, but out of the lot, their worst would have to be the XCD35. Other than the high resolution screen and decent build, the phone pretty much sucked in everything else. Avoid like the plague Although the screen is a capacitive one, the touch input is not the best and there’s a noticeable lag in pretty much anything you do, due to the slow 600MHz processor. There’ also no official support form Dell for a Gingerbread update, so you’re stuck with Froyo. I can go on, but to put it plainly, it’s a strictly average phone that shouldn’t have been priced anything beyond Rs.5,000. BlackBerry Torch 9860 The new Torch 9860 from RIM wasn’t a complete washout, but again it wasn’t a real winner, either. I’m not really going to poke fun at the poor app store, since that’s a given, but even with a 1.2GHz onboard, it wasn’t exactly as blazing fast as you’d hope it would be. All style, no performance Also, with prolonged usage the phone would get a bit sluggish, which could hint at poor memory management. The battery life also turned out to be just about average. For a bit more money, you could get the Bold 9900, which is an excellent phone, so there’s no reason to get this in the first place. That’s our list of what we felt were phones that were either hyped and didn’t play their part or were just simply awful to begin with. So come on, let’s hear your list.

Read more »

SICT Mobiles launches new dual SIM, dual band phone

SICT Mobile has rolled out its all-new SICT iV180 handset, a dual SIM, dual band phone powered by an 1800 mAh battery. Besides the regular SMS and MMS support, the new offering supports all the major video formats like AVI, 3GP and MP4 with 20fps playback support. It is also compatible with popular audio formats like MP3, WAV, MIDI, AMR audio formats and comes with 16 GB of external memory support to store multiple songs, videos and photographs. The phone has a 5.6 cm (2.2-inch) display and has loudspeaker support. As part of the features, they’ve bundled in wireless FM, a 1.3 MP camera, a call recorder, a torch and Bluetooth with A2DP profile.

The iV180 Dual SIM phone

The SICT iV180 also comes with a USB cable and a security mechanism to protect the phone book and messages as well as a mobile tracker to shield the phone from theft. They have extended the phonebook to store more contacts with the capability to block unwanted numbers through the Black List feature. The SICT iV180 handset is priced at Rs. 1,675 and is available ex stock.

Read more »

Nokia 801T becomes official, comes with TV antenna

Nokia has announced the launch of its new 801T phone on its official Chinese blog. The new phone sports a 4-inch screen and interestingly comes with a TV antenna. So, in all certainty, it’s going to enable users to receive signals to watch television on their phone. As part of the specification, it comes strapped with the TD-SCDMA network, but no other specifications are available yet. 

TV on the go!

As can be seen from the pics, the device seems to have a metal unibody and has the Symbian^3 operating system on board. As reported by My Nokia Blog, it sports NFC functionality as well. Currently, it’s only available in the Chinese market, so we’re not too sure about its pricing or availability details for India. However, we'll keep you posted as and when more details about this new TV-sporting mobile phone are revealed. 

Read more »

Research exposes vulnerability of GSM phones to new scams

Awell-known expert on mobile phone security says a vulnerability in a widely used wireless technology could allow hackers to gain remote control of phones, instructing them to send text messages or make calls.

Vulnerable to new scams (Image credit: Getty Images)

They could use the vulnerability in the GSM network technology, which is used by billions of people in about 80 percent of the global mobile market, to make calls or send texts to expensive, premium phone and messaging services in scams, said Karsten Nohl, head of Germany's Security Research Labs.

Similar attacks against a small number of smartphones have been done before, but the new attack could expose any cellphone using GSM technology. "We can do it to hundreds of thousands of phones in a short timeframe," Nohl told Reuters in advance of a presentation at a hacking convention in Berlin on Tuesday.

Attacks on corporate landline phone systems are fairly common, often involving bogus premium-service phone lines that hackers set up across Eastern Europe, Africa and Asia. Fraudsters make calls to the numbers from hacked business phone systems or mobile phones, then collect their cash and move on before the activity is identified.

The phone users typically don't identify the problem until after they receive their bills and telecommunications carriers often end up footing at least some of the costs. Even though Nohl will not present details of attack at the conference he said hackers will usually replicate the code needed for attacks within a few weeks.

Read more »

Images from Sony Ericsson 13MP camera phone spotted

Camera phones with a high-resolution sensor aren’t something new. In the past we’ve seen manufacturers like Nokia, Spice and others take on photography with their phones sporting a high-res camera. The Xperia blog shows off the latest from Sony Ericsson LT28at boasting of a 13 megapixel camera. It also gives you a sneak peek into the photos captured using the camera. Earlier Omnivision had revealed that they were working on a 12.6 megapixel camera for phones.

Leaked Image from 13MP phone sensor

The new entrant in the Sony Ericsson clan is expected to feature a 1.5GHz dual core processor, gigantic 4.5-inch Reality display (720 x x1280), LTE and a 720p front facing camera along with a 13MP one embedded on the rear side. Reportedly, the photos displayed have been clicked from this camera phone. The phone is likely to make its presence felt at CES.

Read more »

Nokia Lumia 800 Review

It’s the end of the year and Nokia has finally announced its “Piece de resistance” handset – the Lumia 800. It’s the first, of course in the series and is based on their MeeGo running N9 device only this one is, of course, running on the latest version of the Windows Phone 7 OS, which is Mango. We’ve already done a detailed preview of the handset where we outlined the kind of features it comes with, but here’s a closer look at the overall functionality. Form Factor The Lumia 800 is built out of a single block of Polycarbonate plastic. Don’t let the ‘plastic’ part sway you as the handset is quite durable. It sustained quiet a few hard knocks and drops from about 2 feet without too much of scratching or any issues with functionality. The 3.7-inch, slightly raised gorilla glass display, although quite a fingerprint magnet, survived quite a bit of torture without giving in to scratches. So, in terms of durability and funky design form, the Lumia 800 is definitely high on our ranking. If the slippery shell doesn’t meet your fancy, worry not as Nokia has thrown in a rubberized case that makes it much easier to manage. Slim and sleek Check out our Hands-On preview for more information on the 800’s design.  Features and Performance Interface Powered by a 1.4GHz Scorpion processor and running the Windows Phone Mango (7.5) OS, the Lumia 800 is a seriously speedy handset. When it comes to functionality, as limited as the OS itself may be, the Lumia 800 manages to do everything it’s capable of extremely well. WP7’s stripped down; visually simplistic user interface is what keeps most of their handsets, irrespective of processing power, running quite smoothly. The Tile and Hub set up is really what makes WP7 so attractive. Unfortunately for Nokia though, this fantastic piece of hardware can’t live up to its true potential that’s curtailed by the OS. The Linpak Benchmark test we subjected it to gave us a score of 49.3 Mflops, which is impressive as far as mobile handsets go. Multi-tasking was, of course, a non-issue. Simple and easy to mange UI Although WP7 is a user-friendly system, like we’ve said many times before, it’s still in its nascent stage and will require a considerable amount of tweaking before it can really give Android or iOS a run for their money. The few things about the Lumia 800 we took issue with, included the fact that Nokia has decided to go Micro SIM on us and also leave out the external memory support. Like the N8, the uni-body design translates to; should your phone hang, restarting it will not be as easy as it used to be. Thankfully, the Lumia 800 functioned without any “hang-ups”. But it seems like a - if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em - type of sentiment is at play here. What we also noticed with the otherwise crystal clear display was that whites usually took on a slightly yellowish tone. This was especially noticeable on websites with white backgrounds. Other than that, visibility in broad daylight from any angle was top-notch.   Media It was quite surprising to see that Nokia missed on including any audio enhancements for the 800 and that is a major downer. Audio quality was consistent with any other high-end smartphone, but it could have surely been better with a few options to personalize the output. We did find the decibel level a tad low, especially in crowded areas. The speaker phone was also a little too low for our comfort level. The built-in FM radio was just fine and even managed to pick up signals quite well on a daily commute through the city. Nokia has pre-installed TuneIn for Internet radio options as well. The audio quality would have been so much better with some enhancement options Once again, we were plagued with the Zune menace, meaning we had to make sure that our videos were first compatible with the software, before it could take its own sweet time transferring to the handset. Once on the handset, the picture quality, Nokia’s Clear Black Display enriched the colors. 16Gigs of internal storage space is also quite a bit to keep media lovers fairly satisfied, even if they can’t extend it any further.  Connectivity The connectivity domain, the Lumia 800 comes across as a very capable smartphone. Packing 3G Wi-Fi capabilities under its belt, you’re good to go wherever you are. What is lacking though is the facility to create a hotspot, something that even the guys at Apple made sure of including with their latest devices. While we’re quite fond of the IE browser on WP7, the lack of Flash and Silverlight support was a bit of a setback. Speed-wise, the browser functions very well. Setting up accounts of any kind is a breeze, just sign-in and let the device do the rest from syncing with People’s Hub for your contacts to e-mail and calendar dates. Social networking, chatting, posting messages is a real easy task on the 800. One of the better mobile navigation tools The Lumia 800 also includes Nokia Drive, Nokia Maps and Bing Maps, which we thought was overkill. Nokia Drive is a real boon for those unfamiliar with cities they’re travelling to or even living in. The interface is easy to read and getting locations and details in the area is also simple and quick. With Bing Maps pre-loaded, Nokia Maps seems a bit redundant, but it’s there, nonetheless. Times Point is another pre-loaded application that gives you all kinds of information on what’s going on in your geographic location. There’s also the Weather Channel and Nokia’s App Highlights that showcases a list of Lumia 800 friendly apps, specifically chosen for the device. You can shake the handset to get new apps displayed. The marketplace is loaded up with all kinds of handy apps and plenty of free Maps for Nokia Drive. Pity no one’s developed a multiple codec supported video player… yet.  Misc. Features Basic mobile functionality from the Calendar for appointments, reminders etc, Alarm clock and a Calculator are also onboard. What you don’t see here, you could easily find on the market place. Microsoft Office with SkyDrive and Office 365 support is also really handy. For work and Play Camera An 8 megapixel shooter is strapped onboard the rear of the Lumia 800 with Dual LEDs comprising of the flash. Settings include scene modes, white balance, ISO settings, a few effects and a Macro mode. Sadly there’s no 1080p HD video recording support, which is another drawback. The maximum resolution is 720p HD for video. Image quality was not what we expected from a Nokia device. Image focus was a problem in most areas when talking about quality in slightly low lit outdoor conditions. Video recording, in stark contrast was quite good with pretty decent audio levels. Not as good as we hoped Battery A 1450mAh battery sits under the Polycarbonate shell and is quite capable of providing users with a fairly decent battery life. In our stand alone video test, with all connectivity turned off, the Lumia 800 ran for 6 hours and 35 minutes before shutting down. In our tech2 Loop Test, we ran the handset for 8 hours and 20 minutes non-stop. Usage, with EDGE running constantly, included 2 hours of video, 2 hours of audio, 2 hours of audio streaming, 2 hours and 20 minutes of calls. On 3G though, don’t expect too much as we were barely able to use it for a full day before it required a charge. A warm yellowish glow off the display The Bottom Line Nokia has priced the Lumia 800 at Rs. 29,990 (MRP), which does make it one of the more expensive WP7 handsets on the market today. This could be a problem for the company as cheaper options like the HTC Radar could pose as a competitor. Granted we’re talking about a company that was once held in extremely high regard in this field, but if Nokia is looking to make a serious comeback, the Lumia 800, as well-built and powerful a device as it is, is just too damn pricey. The last thing we need right now is another “premium” type product with limited functionality; I think we’ve gone way past that curve.  Should the new WP7 updates bring features like hotspot creation, Flash or at least Silverlight support, HD video recording and most importantly reduce dependency on specific content transfer software like Zune, the Lumia 800 is just the handset to take Nokia back up a few notches on the list. Price : 29000 rs

Read more »

Android 2.3.5 for HTC Wildfire S begins rolling out

It was reported recently that HTC was seeding their latest build of Android – Gingerbread 2.3.5 to the Incredible S and the Desire HD smartphones. Along with the aforementioned HTC handsets, the HTC ChaCha is also getting the update. These Gingerbread updates are being rolled out in a phased manner, across the globe. Along with the operating software, HTC is also updating the Incredible S and the Desire HD to their Sense UI 3.0. According to a report by GSMArena, another handset from HTC’s stable is said to be receiving the update - the HTC Wildfire S. But like the ChaCha, the Wildfire S will not receive Sense UI 3.0. The HTC Wildfire was launched with Android 2.2, so getting an Android 2.3.5 update will be apt. Global update for HTC Wildfire S to Android 2.3.5 begins These updates are being released in the form of over-the-air updates. Users have informed the mobile related site that this update fixes bugs that affected the unlocking feature and the call answering problems that were present earlier. No other word is available on what other improvements the latest OS brings to the Wildfire S. If any of you have received the update, do let us know what changes you see and if there are any noticeable improvements.

Read more »

1st pictures of the Sony branded smartphone surface

Early this month, we had reported about Sony taking over the Sony Ericsson branding, and was fast working on launching the handsets under this new branding, preferably by mid-next year. However, till this moment, no one had a clue as to what to expect on the first Sony handset. A report by SEMC Blog has revealed that the first handset to come under the Sony branding is the Sony LT22, codenamed Nyphon. This handset may probably be Sony’s first flagship handset and will come with Android Gingerbread. It will reportedly feature a 1GHz dual-core U8500 chipset from ST-Ericsson. Apart from the specifications, there are image leaks also of the Nyphon, giving us a preview of what the handset will look like. Sony Xperia Nyphon to be the first Sony smartphone? (Image credit: IT168) Here are some of the rumoured specifications of what the Sony Xperia Nyphon may feature: Android Gingerbread 4-inch qHD display 1GHz dual-core U8500 chipset 1GB RAM 16GB of internal storage 8MP Exmor R camera The smartphone looks pretty stylish Although it will come with Gingerbread at the time of launch, the report claims that it will get Android Ice Cream Sandwich, later. Sony Ericsson is expected to be re-branded by mid 2012 and probably we won’t see this handset, until then. Let us know your reactions about the first handset from Sony in the comments below.

Read more »