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HTC Tatoo

Thursday, April 1, 2010 by Aazar Shahzad
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HTC has embraced the Google Android OS with open arms over the past year, releasing a trio of devices – the G1, Hero and Magic – which show off just why Android has taken the mobile world by storm.

While the Android interface brings a brilliant Google sheen to the mobile market-place, it has come at a price, with most of the handsets packing lengthy contracts or expensive one-off payments.

Enter the HTC Tattoo. Alongside the T-Mobile Pulse, the Tattoo is all about catering for the more budget-conscious phone user who wants to utilise Android, but not pay over the odds for the privilege.

We're not talking about masses of money saved – a tenner a month off a contract here, a £100 off a handset there – but the arrival of the OS on the HTC Tattoo does point to a bright future for mid-range devices sporting Android.

When it comes to comparing the phone with its other Android bedfellows the HTC Tattoo has more in keeping with the HTC Hero than it does with the HTC Magic and G1. This is all because the HTC Tattoo uses Sense UI, which is HTC's own 'skinned' version of Android
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Nokia Surge

by Aazar Shahzad
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Nokia have finally announced the Nokia Surge full-QWERTY equipped side-slider. Packing an extraordinary design the new handset runs on the S60 and packs advanced messaging features and a distinct youthful appeal. We have to admit that the handset looks a lot better on the official photos than it used to on those leaked shots.

Nokia Surge packs a 2.4" 16M-color display of QVGA resolution. Quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE and dual-band UMTS with HSDPA 3.6Mbps support provide the network data transfers, while Bluetooth, USB and a 2.5 mm audio jack cover the local connectivity.

It's worth noting that the Nokia Surge sports the huge 1500 mAh battery that managed to impress us on Nokia E71. The list of interesting features of the device is completed by 128 MB of internal memory, expandable by up to 8GB through the microSD card slot, as well as FM radio, A-GPS and a 2 megapixel camera.

The AT&T-exclusive Nokia Surge also comes complete with a host of carrier-related services, including AT&T Navigator, Yellowpages.com, Where, AT&T Music, Mobi TV, Video Share, JuiceCaster and AT&T Mobile Banking.

Nokia Surge will be available through AT&T stores and at its online shop before the end of the month. It will set you back 79.99 USD with a two-year service agreement and after a mail-in rebate.
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HTC EVO 4G mind blowing..

by Aazar Shahzad
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At least on paper, the HTC EVO 4G from Sprint absolutely crushes. It's not just one killer feature that puts the EVO over the top; the spec sheet reads like a wish list for anyone who's owned a touchscreen smartphone. We won't find out until this summer whether Sprint's exclusive 4G phone makes the best of its features, but in the meantime, here are five things to get excited about:

4.3-inch Touch Screen

Only one other Android phone has a screen that comes close, the newly-announced Samsung Galaxy S, which has a 4-inch touch screen. HTC has tried the 4.3-inch format before with the HTC HD2, but that phone loses points for running the soon-to-be outdated Windows Mobile 6.5. Sprints promise of downloading, watching and editing high definition content on the EVO makes the large screen even more enticing.

Two Cameras

It's about time we saw this feature on a high-end smartphone. On the back the EVO is an 8-megapixel camera -- itself an impressive bullet point -- for photos and "HD-capable" video capture. There's also a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, presumably for video chat and self portraits. Please let this become a standard feature on smartphones to come.

"Leap" to Multitask

As you'd expect, HTC layers its Sense user interface on top of Android 2.1, but with a new feature called "Leap." This is a multitasking manager that reveals every open program when you pinch anywhere on the phone's home screen. It's an idea that's begging to copied -
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Sony Ericsson Xperia Pureness

by Aazar Shahzad
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Sony Ericsson Xperia Pureness. This model is fully justified by its name: Pureness - simplicity, purity and executes only the most basic functions such as reception and making calls, sending and receiving SMS-messages and displays the time.

It can even be attributed to fashionable accessories designed for active, stylish people who do not need many features of modern technology-based phone models. Xperia Pureness is not like any of the previously known fashion phones and has a unique device and unusual appearance. The fact is that in creating this model, the designers have used extremely lightweight materials. The result is a light, almost weightless apparatus, which seems to dissolve in the hand of its owner.

Weighs Sony Ericsson Xperia Pureness only 70 grams and its thickness is 13 mm. Body and screen phone made entirely of plastic, without the use of all of us to the usual metal and glass. However, on the back surface still has a small metal insert, which is designated serial number. Nevertheless, it is so small that practically does not increase the mass of the phone.

Pureness is not noted due ostentatious luxury and chic, which use to do a lot of modern premium phones. It does not contain gold and leather inserts, inlays and exclusive pictures. The maximum possible simplicity and purity of lines – that’s the success of the phone Sony Ericsson Xperia Pureness. In stand-by mode, the symbols on its keys and the screen is not visible at all, but when activated, on the contrary, it is filled with light and charm. The main feature of this model is the unusual translucent screen. This unique part allows you to simultaneously see the digital clock or other characters on the display, plus the other real items through it. Despite to such an unusual structure, the phone has a very user-friendly interface, and the information shown on the screen is clear and readable.

Sony Ericsson Xperia Pureness has much in common with the classical models of Sony Ericsson. It contains the same interesting themes, very user-friendly menu, several variations of digital clock, etc. In addition, Pureness has 2 GB of internal memory and one of the best Bluetooth-headsets in the kit. By the way, the headset Sony Ericsson IS800 is the most miniature of all known at the moment.

The manufacturers of Sony Ericsson Xperia Pureness offer their customers a special service, delivery by courier to any specified address. By the way, in the box with the device is indicated a special telephone number. If the phone has something wrong, you can call this number and within 48 hours it will be replaced with a new high-quality phone in any country. However, such cases are a rarity, but the service, as they say, above all else.
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Nokia N900 review

by Aazar Shahzad
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Nokia stands at a fascinating fork in the road. Let's consider the facts: first, and most unavoidably, the company is the largest manufacturer of cellphones in the world by a truly sobering margin. At every end of the spectrum, in every market segment, Nokia is successfully pushing phones -- from the highest of the high-end (see Vertu) to the lowest of the low (the ubiquitous 1100 series, which as far as we can tell, remains the best selling phone in history). The kind of stark dominance Nokia has built over its competition certainly isn't toppled overnight, but what might be the company's biggest asset has turned out to be its biggest problem, too: S60. In the past eight years, Nokia's bread-and-butter smartphone platform has gone from a pioneer, to a staple, to an industry senior citizen while upstarts like Google and Apple (along with a born-again Palm) have come from practically zero to hijack much of the vast mindshare Espoo once enjoyed.

Of course, mindshare doesn't pay the bills, but in a business dominated by fickle consumerism perhaps more than any other, mindshare foreshadows market share -- it's a leading indicator. Put simply, there are too many bright minds with brilliant ideas trying to get a piece of the wireless pie for even a goliath like Nokia to rest on its laurels for years on end. Yet, until just very recently, it seemed content to do just that, slipping out incremental tweaks to S60 on refined hardware while half-heartedly throwing a bone to the "the future is touch!" crowd by introducing S60 5th Edition alongside forgettable devices like the 5800 XpressMusic and N97. A victim of its own success, the company that had helped define the modern smartphone seemed either unwilling or unable to redefine it.

Not all is lost, though. As S60 has continued to pay the bills and produce modern, lustworthy devices like the E71 and E72, the open, Linux-based Maemo project has quietly been incubating in the company's labs for over four years. What began as a geeky science experiment (a "hobby" in Steve Jobs parlance) on the Nokia 770 tablet back in 2005 matured through several iterations -- even producing the first broadly-available WiMAX MID -- until it finally made the inevitable leap into smartphone territory late last year with the announcement of the N900. On the surface, a migration to Maemo seems to make sense for Nokia's long-term smartphone strategy; after all, it's years younger than S60 and its ancestry, it's visually attractive in all the ways S60 is not, and it was built with an open philosophy from the ground up, fostering a geeky, close-knit community of hackers and devs from day one. Thing is, Nokia's been absolutely emphatic with us -- Maemo's intended for handheld computers (read: MIDs) with voice capability, while S60 continues to be the choice for purebred smartphones.

So, back to that fork in the road we'd mentioned. In one direction lies that current strategy Nokia is trumpeting -- continue to refine S60 through future Symbian revisions (with the help of the Symbian Foundation) and keep pumping out pure-profit smartphones in the low to midrange while sprinkling the upper end of the market with a Maemo device here and there. In the long term, though, running two platforms threatens to dilute Nokia's resources, cloud its focus, and confuse consumers, which leads us to the other direction in the fork: break clean from Symbian, develop Maemo into a refined, powerhouse smartphone platform, and push it throughout the range.

Our goal here is to test the N900, of course, but fundamentally, that's the question we tried to keep in the backs of our minds for this review: could Maemo ultimately become the platform of Nokia's future? Let's dig in.
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