Review: Nokia 5230
One of the great truths about smartphones is that you should always match a phone to your actual needs. The Nokia 5230, despite falling short of expectations, is an intelligent device that offers a wealth of unique features. Whether these features match your needs is the real question. Before covering the failings, let’s cover the basic advantages of using this phone. The Nokia 5230 is the bargain-bin version of the flagship phone, the Nokia N97. We say ‘flagship’ as a somewhat slippery term, because the N97 is by no means as powerful as, say, the Google Nexus One and is actually second-rate compared to the much faster Nokia N900. Yet, the N97 is the touchscreen phone set to compete with the Apple iPhone and just about every Android, Palm and Windows Phone device. As the entry-level version of the N97, the Nokia 5230 is about 118, or about half the cost of competing smartphones that run well over 200. That’s an attractive price point one that provides all the functionality of a touchscreen device, apps galore, GPS, media playback, a 2MP camera with advanced options such as setting ISO level, and 4GB of storage (on an included microSD card). No, the Nokia 5230 is not an iPhone or HTC Desire competitor, but does have some powerful features.What you don’t get is Wi-Fi, and that is one of the major problems with this device. Wi-Fi is useful because it means you can continue using the device inside when your carrier service goes AWOL or when you want to download huge files. The Nokia 5230 also lacks a full hardware keyboard, runs a bit slow at times, has a confusing turn-by-turn voice nav for GPS routing (although the phone supports many languages), low camera quality at just 2 megapixels, and a few minor glitches. In the box Nokia has included the typical charger, manual, and a pair of earbuds with a 3.5mm connector that you will likely discard for a much more adequate set. Our test unit included a 4GB card already inserted into a side compartment, which is included with every Nokia 5230.It’s no secret that the Symbian S60v5 OS is an acquired taste. Yet, millions have acquired it, and swear by it, so we won’t debate all of the merits and demerits here. Suffice to say, the OS does not work at all like an iPhone or Android phone. In some ways, it is akin to the Windows versus Linux debate, and Symbian is definitely more like Linux, where you can perform some functions that are not possible or difficult with other phones. For example, when you install an app, it is easy to see how much memory it will use and the version number. While this is a perk for an advanced user willing to pay more for the Nokia N97, it is a problem on the Nokia 5230 intended for new smartphone users or at least those who do not want to pay big bucks for a phone that has every bell and whistle.The Nokia 5230 interface does require a learning period. For starters, there are three hardware buttons along the bottom of the phone: a green Call button, a Menu button that shows you the installed apps and an End Call button. At times, you might wonder if you should press the End Call button to back out of an app (in most cases, you should) or press the Exit or OK button on screen. It’s fairly inconsistent you have to pay attention to what’s on the screen a bit more than with other phones.You also can’t move apps around on the screen, hold down on one to see an option to delete it, or add widgets for, say, adjusting screen brightness quickly. What this means initially is some fumbling around to find basic options. The Nokia 5230 is also not a tremendously speedy phone, at 434MHz, so there are times when you might press a button and the Nokia 5230 fails to register the click. This can seem like a touchscreen quality problem, but the touch sensitivity is quite adequate it is just that the phone is too slow to keep up with simple finger presses at times.Navigating on the phone is a bit tough, but you quickly get used to basic operations. It’s easy to fire up the GPS app (Ovi Maps 3.0) or press the green Call button to access the phone dialler. There are a few cool tricks to using the phone. For example, there’s a dedicated camera button you can use to start the camera app (which shoots photos and video). This button is positioned on the lower right side of the phone (when in a vertical orientation) to encourage horizontal use.Another perk is that the Nokia 5230 happens to have a well-implemented lock button on the right side of the phone. You just slide the button down. This makes it hard to accidentally power up the phone when it is in a laptop bag or in your pocket, which saves on battery power. It also avoids the ‘press this on-screen button to unlock’ annoyance.Anyone who is used to an iPhone or Android device knows you can easily flick on the screen to move down to see additional apps or more content on a website. However, on the Nokia 5230, you have to drag a slider down to see more of the screen. You might find yourself swiping on the screen, only to realise you have started an app. And, adding insult to injury, because the phone tends to run slow, this induces some frustration as you wait for the app to start and then close it. This is one of the 5230′s most annoying quirks.Call quality on the Nokia 5230 is outstanding for a bargain-level phone. With T-Mobile service, we never had any problems with dropped calls, faulty connections, or distortion either on the phone (what we heard) or the other end of the line (what our caller heard). Adding contacts for dialling is also slick and easy, although the Nokia 5230 does not aggregate contacts from multiple social networks (like the Motorola Milestone or Palm Pre, or the upcoming Windows Phone 7 devices).Nokia does offer a Facebook app for the Nokia 5230 and, really, social networking apps tend to pop up on the phone in unexpected places. For example, when you snap a photo, you can upload it to your Vox.com blog account.MessagingMessaging lives or dies by how well the soft keyboard works on phones without a real QWERTY keyboard, and the Nokia 5230 is definitely alive and kicking by this standard. The keyboard is responsive and accurate. In fact, we had more problems with accuracy on an HTC Hero than on this phone. The accelerometer that senses whether you are in horizontal or vertical orientation also worked well it’s important in those times when you really need to type a message in landscape mode with the full soft QWERTY keyboard. There were a few times when the Nokia 5230 flipped back to horizontal when we nudged it in the wrong direction, something the Nexus One and iPhone rarely do but a problem that plagues models by HTC.For the most part, the messaging apps for texting and email worked well, but we did notice a slight lag on this phone for basic operations, such as composing a new message. Once again, the slower-than-average processor is just not fast enough to keep pace with a fast-fingered messaging aficionado. We decided to test this theory and did a side-by-side comparison between the Nokia 5230 and a Nokia N900 with its speedy operating system and 600MHz processor. Sure enough, composing an email was much faster on the N900 smartphone.One complaint here is that the Google Mail client for Symbian did not work correctly on the Nokia 5230 it seems to assume you have a hardware keyboard and does not bring up the software version correctly. The simple workaround is to access Gmail from the browser or configure the built-in email client to access your Gmail account.The lack of Wi-Fi means email attachments take a while to download to your phone, but once they do, we had no problems opening Word documents and viewing photos on the Nokia 5230 even if we had to wait a few seconds.There were no huge surprises for internet browsing, other than a nicely configured home screen when you start the browser initially.It shows links to several popular services, including Yahoo Mail, Facebook, news channels and Mapquest. Large icons for making bookmarks, typing in a URL and accessing browser settings make it easy to surf. The only real gripe here is that the phone screen, at 640 x 360 pixels (about the size of two fingers side by side), is a bit small for reading text on a web page.The screen quality while bright and clear does not match the sheer crispness and quality of the Google Nexus One, which uses OLED technology. Of course, the lack of Wi-Fi rears its ugly visage here as well. Sites loaded slowly over a typical 3G connection, and not nearly as fast as they do over Wi-Fi. And, while web page rendering worked fine for sites like ESPN.com and Gmail, there is a long lag on rich sites like IGN.com as they load in the background. Combined with the slow processor, lack of Wi-Fi makes the Nokia 5230 a poor choice as a web device.If the slow speed and lack of Wi-Fi keep coming up as problems on the Nokia 5230, one saving grace is the exceptional camera. The quality is actually no better than an iPhone at two megapixels, you won’t be submitting your stunning images to a glossy photo magazine any time soon. Yet, the Nokia 5230 provides some slick camera features beyond just setting the white balance (which helps you adjust lighting options so that subjects appear the correct colour).For example, this is one of the only phones that lets you set exposure level (amount of light allowed in through the lens) and ISO speed (how quickly the shutter opens and closes). The Nokia 5230 also has settings for a self-timer, multiple shots in sequence, colour and contrast level options, and sharpness level.All of these settings do lead to better photos. In a scene with some ducks on a river, the exposure settings provided a slick way to brighten up a photo before ever using Photoshop. With the self-timer, it was possible to take a family portrait without having to relegate one family member to being the photographer.Unfortunately, like every other cameraphone except the beefier N900 and maybe the Motorola Milestone, the Nokia 5230 is just too light for serious photography. It’s too easy to set up a nice shot, then nudge the camera a bit and take a blurry photo. For video, this lighter-than-air problem is a bigger problem. It is difficult to hold the phone steady enough for any real video clips unless you rest it on a table or chair. Even then, it’s hard to record a video that isn’t jerky and unwatchable.The Nokia 5230 is an entry-level smartphone, and this becomes readily apparent with media playback. It’s just too difficult to find music and movies, and the Ovi store is still a work in progress (at times, the Ovi apps even failed to open the store at all). Lacking the Apple iTunes store or a robust partnership with Amazon for buying songs, the Nokia 5230 is just an average media phone. Playback quality for music was fine, but videos tended to stutter a bit due to the slower processor.The phone has a 3.5mm headphone jack and comes with a 4GB microSD card which is expandable up to 16GB. If you do load up a bunch of songs, the music player is just adequate it lacks any useful album cover viewer (you can view album cover art but you can’t flip through them like you can on the iPhone). There is an FM radio on the Nokia 5230, and it worked well for several news and sports channels, but the music quality, even on earbuds, was just passable. You can record voice memos to yourself, but the Nokia 5230 lacks the advanced features of, say, the Nexus One in terms of easily sharing these memos when you connect to your PC.A light smartphone usually has one drawback: the battery is just not big enough to hold a charge. Fortunately, the Nokia 5230 lasted all day (about 8 hours) playing music and video occasionally, making frequent calls but otherwise having the device on standby without seeing the battery die. The Nokia 5230 battery life benefits from the slide lock button that prevent accidental power-ups, which can even occur on an iPhone.Nokia says the Nokia 5230 will last for several days if you just use it for music and disable all of the other connections, such as 3G and Bluetooth.Battery time over GSM is much longer a rated 7 hours compared to WCDMA, which lasts about four hours. The tricky trade-off here is that it depends greatly on how many calls you make, whether you have music and video playing on the device, and if you use Bluetooth. On the plus side, since there is no Wi-Fi, you won’t drain the battery that way.OrganiserThe Nokia 5230 falls short when it comes to keeping you organised, for several reasons. One is just the phone speed there is often a delay when you pull up a contact or view your Google Calendar as the phone struggles to keep pixels moving on the screen. There were times when it was easier to pop open a laptop and look up a web contact or check a task list on Plaxo than to try to visit these sites on the phone. And, there are precious few apps available for business users who are serious about staying in contact, on schedule, and on task at all times. The Nokia 5230 is an ideal calling phone, has good media options, and lasts all day on one charge, but lacks business features.There is an alarm clock that enables you to set up multiple alarms through the day, and an app for recording memos to yourself, but not the wealth of built-in apps for jotting down notes or managing voice mail like there is on other phones.ConnectivityThe Nokia Nokia 5230 connects to 3G and Bluetooth devices as expected. We were impressed with how the device connected easily to both Mac and PC laptops to upload and download files over a Bluetooth connection, a feature that the iPhone lacks. We tested the Nokia 5230 with multiple Bluetooth adaptors and even in a car with Ford Sync technology and the Nokia 5230 paired quickly and efficiently.The lack of Wi-Fi is an important issue, though, for those who need a speedier connection to download larger files, send images to an online photo service, grab large file attachments or stream audio with an app such as Pandora.One of the great strengths of the Nokia 5230, however, is that it supports GPS navigation (with turn-by-turn spoken instructions) and Ovi maps. Nokia calls this “lifetime GPS” because you never have to pay for the turn-by-turn instructions. The Nokia 5230 also has a free TeleNav app with voice nav, but only as a 30-day trial.OtherIt is also worth mentioning that the Nokia 5230 is a capable, if underpowered, gaming device. Our model included several commercial titles, including Guitar Hero 5 for mobile and Need for Speed Shift.These games are colourful, control well, and have some entertaining gameplay features, but tend to run a bit slow on the Nokia 5230 compared to the N97 and other Nokia models.A smartphone is a trusted gadget you rely on every day. It is not just an accessory you might need occasionally as you type away on a laptop. As such, a phone must be capable of doing much more than just a simple calling device: it must be expandable (both with apps and with more memory) and easy to use.We likedAs an entry-level model at an affordable price, the Nokia 5230 is a good choice for those who can live without some of the latest perks of more modern smartphones, such as Wi-Fi and a full-size hardware keyboard. We dislikedWe question some of the interface challenges on this device menus you have to wade through to find the option you want. And, slow processing speed meant running even simple apps such as the contact manager caused some frustration. While this will be a major issue for more advanced smartphone users, it will only become a minor annoyance for those who primarily just need to access email and text messages, make calls, and browse the web a few times per day. VerdictThe most important realisation with the Nokia 5230 is that it is not intended as a power user device and just does the smartphone basics. However, in our final analysis, we found the Nokia 5230 to be an intelligent device that we would use if the iPhone, Nexus One, and other models were just a figment of our imagination. Basically the Nokia 5230 would be an outstanding touchscreen phone about four years ago. Today, it is just an average buy for the price.Related LinksMore mobile phone reviewsTechRadar’s Reviews GuaranteeRelated StoriesReview: HTC LegendReview: LG Chocolate BL20Review: Acer Liquid S100Review: Nokia E72Review: HTC HD Mini

Virtual WiFi Router For Windows
Say you have a desktop PC with a wired connection to the Internet. Your router only supports wired connections for that matter, which is the main reason for that. You do have a mobile computer as well, for instance a laptop, tablet PC or smartphone that supports WiFi. You want to use WiFi when at [...]

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Beautiful, exclusive and very expensive, the TAG Heuer LINK is a high-end luxury handset that is also a fully featured Android smartphone.

Huawei Aims for Top 5 in U.S. Smartphone Market
Huawei plans to become one of the top five players in the U.S. cell-phone market over the next three years, as part of an ambitious, long-term strategy to increase sales and presence.The Shenzen, China-based company announced at this year’s CTIA convention in San Diego it will focus on offering more affordable Android smartphones and sell LTE phones next year.Bill Plummer, vice president of external affairs for Huawei, said this strategy will make upgrades more accessible for consumers who’ve been stuck with feature phones because they couldn’t afford smartphones. It also benefits carriers, letting them “capitalize on their network investments by tapping a new consumer segment,” according to Plummer, who calls it “a win-win for everyone.”Affordability appears to be a theme at the 2011 CTIA, with companies like Samsung and Pantech also announcing less expensive, entry-level smartphones. Both globally and domestically, such devices may be a major draw for consumers who previously thought a smartphone was out of their financial reach, opening up a new market for makers and carriers.According to James Jiang, Huawei executive vice president of product marketing, the company also plans to advertise its own brands more heavily in the U.S. market. Huawei is currently among the top 10 phone makers in the U.S., but the majority of their devices are sold under other brand names, like AT&T and T-Mobile. Globally, however, 80 percent of Huawei’s devices carry their own brand name, and Huawei may be looking to balance that number out in the U.S.Huawei may be emulating the strategy of Taiwanese maker HTC, which gradually became a major player by building partnerships in the market through infrastructure before mass-marketing devices with its own brand name. For now, Huawei will continue creating tablets and phones for major carriers while attempting to increase visibility and demand for its own name brand, allowing it to build trust among top-tier companies while gaining valuable insight into the U.S. market.Following this announcement, big players in the mobile world will surely be watching Huawei over the next few years to see if its multilayered strategy works to fulfill its goals. Globally, the impact may be considerable, with smartphones becoming available to a much wider range of people.Huawei Aims for Top 5 in U.S. Smartphone Market originally appeared at Mobiledia on Wed Oct 12, 2011 11:50 am.

10 of the best Android smartphones of 2011 so far
Read the original article on MobileMentalism.com at 10 of the best Android smartphones of 2011 so farWe’re over half way through the year, so what better time to take stock and have a look at the best Android smartphones that have been released this year. It’s an impressive range of phones from nearly all manufacturers, with…Read the original article on MobileMentalism.com at 10 of the best Android smartphones of 2011 so farRelated posts:5 new Sony Ericsson Android phones to launch after JuneSony Ericsson Xperia Arc now on sale at a surprising priceThe 5 biggest winners from MWC 2011Dual-core Sony Ericsson Android smartphones on their way

Motorola Xoom 2 tablets get snapped again
The recently-snapped Motorola Xoom 2 has now enjoyed a thorough photo-shoot, with the new pictures revealing a second slate and more of its buttons.No need to squint with these shots, with the anonymous photographer obviously au fait with focusing a camera. The shots show off the tablets’ various buttons in all their glory the volume slider and what is likely the power/screen lock button are mounted on the curved edge of the slate towards the back. XoomabilityThere’s also a camera with LED flash and a sticker announcing the models’ code names, with both coming under the Fleming sobriquet and purported to support LTE connectivity. The next-gen Xooms also come with 8.2-inch screens and seems to be very slightly slimmer than the iPhone 4. The prototype’s pictured are running Android 3.2, but Engadget’s anonymous tipster reckons the slates are "buggy as all hell, with frequent reboots and crashes" so we won’t be holding our breath for an imminent launch. brightcove : 1050812308001Related StoriesGary Marshall: Amazon wants to watch your web browsingWeek in Tech: Amazon lights a Fire – but UK gets a single sparklerKindle owns Amazon top 10 listSamsung Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus announcedUpdated: iPad 3 rumours: what you need to know

Review: Samsung Galaxy Portal i5700
Samsung, the famed Korean jack-of-all-technologies, is having another go at mastering the Android phone scene, after making a bit of a mess of it with last year’s original Galaxy.The i7500 Galaxy was a brave first attempt, but Samsung threw it away, alienating early adopters by not bothering to update the phone past its basic Android 1.5 operating system. Seriously, there are petitions all over the place. Some men are still very angry about it all.And now, learning from past mistakes, comes the Samsung Galaxy Portal – which looks pretty much identical and features… Android 1.5. Oh well. Let’s give it a chance. First impressions of the Portal are good. Nobody’s going to be won over by black plastic in this day of hyper-alloy unibody combat cases and NASA-derived coatings, but at least the Portal feels solid – and the grippy, rubberised-effect of the back cover should minimise dropping/pavement catastrophes.In fact, the Portal manages to be thicker and generally chunkier than last year’s Galaxy, measuring 13.2mm thick compared to last year’s model’s 11.9mm. The OLED screen of the previous Samsung Galaxy i7500 has been dumped, in favour of reliable old LCD technology – coming in at a thoroughly middle-of-the-road 3.2-inch in size. It’s bright and big enough, and if you haven’t yet used a modern smartphone you’ll be staggered by the HVGA resolution.The phone’s button layout is a slightly tweaked version of the original Galaxy’s control array, which sees acres of the finest black plastic bent into a curved, yet unintelligible collection of icons you might expect to see on the command console of an alien space vessel.You don’t get a trackball or optical pad – directional controls are taken care of by a clickable d-pad reminiscent of old video game controllers. But this is actually fine – text editing is much easier with a reliable, clicky button.Moving the cursor back three characters to correct a typo in an important, what-time-is-dinner-related text message is much easier when you can simply BASH-BASH-BASH a button three times, rather than fiddle about scrolling a little wheel into position – or even worse, trying to poke the screen at the relevant point.The screen is also impressive to use – capacitive tech means it’s solid and glassy, and it’s every bit as occasionally patchy as most other touchscreens out there. You’ll soon get used to pressing a bit harder around the edges. Even Apple hasn’t mastered that yet with the iPhone.The standard Android buttons are all present, but there’s no explanation of what they do. The ‘Menu’ button doesn’t say ‘Menu’ – all you get is an icon that looks a bit like a tray with an arrow on it.The Home button is easy to comprehend thanks to the little house illustration on it, but we can’t help but pity some poor old dad who’s going to get given one of these as a free upgrade and be left utterly confused by it all.The handset also feels very ‘bottom heavy’ – trying to press back or home while holding it in one hand is fiddly, and worse still is the unintelligible approach to button placement – there’s thousands of them. Metaphorically.You get a separate ‘lock’ button on the top-right edge of the case to wake it up and send it to sleep, a camera button on the bottom-right side, and the volume up/down clicker to the left – picking the Portal up without accidentally pressing something requires forceps and a very steady hand.If only Samsung would bite the bullet and copy HTC’s idea (like on the HTC Hero) of having the power buttons also acting as your screen lock – it’d then be possible to do away with at least one plasticky button, shaving fractions of a penny off the manufacturing cost, too.At least there’s a dedicated key for taking photos, which removes the utterly awful concept of operating a camera using a touchscreen button.If you’re not experienced with Android, you’ll find the Portal a confusing phone to get to grips with. For those of you who’ve only experienced Android via a quick fiddle on a demo phone in Carphone Warehouse at lunchtime, the operating system’s basically reminiscent of a simple touch-enabled version of Windows.The desktop, which Google calls Home, spans three screens in the Portal’s standard Android 1.5 (some providers skin this to give you more Home areas and Android 2.1 comes with five), so you’re able to curate three separate collections of shortcuts. This means you can have a page full of all your social tools, a page for your web stuff, then a third desktop space with boring work links.There are two types of Android Home button – icons and widgets. Icons are straightforward shortcuts to apps, a pretty simple concept. Widgets are a little different, coming in all sorts of sizes and offering interactive content.You might download a Twitter widget that sits on your Home screen, taking up three icon slots and letting you watch a live stream of Tweets without having to fire up a custom app. Or there are news apps that load RSS feeds directly onto your Home page, giving you the latest important business (or meaningless celebrity) news without having to open an app at all.Which is the great thing about Android. The Portal’s rather bland and featureless default installation is a blank canvas that can be changed beyond all recognition thanks to a good hour of app downloading through the Android Market, and you’ll soon ditch the bland analogue clock for something much more swish.The Portal’s faster-than-many 800MHz processor (including the Sony Ericsson Satio and iPhone 3GS) means loading apps and swiping your way through pages is very quick, with the Settings and Applications lists populating themselves with data much quicker than they do on some slower Android phones.The phone comes out of standby mode in an instant, and you’re able to pull the menu tab up to start browsing your phone’s content as soon as it’s woken up. Using it’s a breeze. However, the overall feel of the Samsung Galaxy Portal’s interface lacks the smooth gloss of the likes of HTC’s Sense overlay – it just feels a little sparse and featureless.There’s no flashy TouchWiz (like that used on the Samsung i8910HD) or Sense overlay on the Samsung Galaxy Portal; all you get to manage your calling and contacts business is the standard, barely updated Android default system.The Android Contacts list is not your boring old list of numbers. Each entry has a separate field for mobile, home and work numbers, plus you can add as many extra fields as you like, if you have very, very well connected friends.It supports fields for storing instant messaging IDs for your chums as well their postal addresses, and from the Contacts tab you may specify a separate ring tone for each caller if you want advance warning about who it’s going to be on the other end.If you’re sociable and have lots of friends, there’s a separate Favourites list pulled up from a tab within the Contacts, where you can access the numbers of people you call the most – you can also add people to this by pressing the star next to their name in the main listing.You also get a call log of all incoming and outgoing calls, for keeping tabs of who the wife’s been talking to. Calling quality was fine, the same as on the HTC Magic or T-Mobile Pulse – not too digitised and more than loud enough.Sending a message brings up Samsung’s only software enhancement on the Portal – the Samsung keyboard. It’s basically a slightly larger version of the default Android keyboard, along with a customised dictionary, T9 predictive text options and the option of using a 123/ABC numeric style keypad.If you’re a bit old and still stuck in your T9 ways, it’s handy to have your old numeric mobile typing style replicated – but this does run a bit slower than the stock Android keyboard, with the auto-suggest taking a fraction of a second to pop up its possible words.Elsewhere, it’s a standard Android 1.5 phone. Messaging is, therefore, pretty cumbersome. You send text messages by opening up Messaging or picking a name through the phone’s Contacts, bumbling through way too many message screens in the process and wondering why texting is suddenly 100 times harder than it was on your old Nokia.But that’s not Samsung’s fault. And if you don’t like it there are numerous other text interfaces available on the Android Market – you just have to sift through them a bit to find them.Your Gmail account is handled seamlessly by entering your username and password on startup – the inbox is automatically downloaded and messages update at very frequent intervals (especially if you’re one of those popular sorts we hear so much about).Non-Gmail email is also handled incredibly well. Android’s email client supports numerous external providers, and it seamlessly connected to our Hotmail and BT accounts through its own tool in seconds. It certainly beats the traditional living hell that is guessing your POP3 settings when setting up email on other gadgets.And the other bit of good news – when the expected Android 2.1 lands to turn your Samsung Galaxy Portal into the Google super phone you always dreamed of, that will probably come with Exchange functionality as well.Here’s a rare area where the Samsung Galaxy Portal shines. Its 800MHz processor helps kick web pages into view very promptly indeed – and lets you scroll around them with ease.This is a lot better than the likes of the T-Mobile Pulse or HTC Magic – which aren’t slouches themselves when it comes to web browsing. It’s also a darn sight more fluent than the Samsung Jet – which also has an 800MHz processor, but fails to render web pages well at all.One of the areas the Android OS really shines is its web browser, which somehow manages to be so simple you hardly even know it’s there.Android’s default browser is the model of simplicity. Pages load up without any visible tabs, toolbars or anything else on the display, giving you a full 3.2-inch window into the internet.For keeping track of what you’ve been doing – and to save you having to retype URLs on the touchscreen – you get History and Most Visited tabs, accessible by pressing the Menu button, plus you can organise your own bookmarks through the Menu as well.And no, there’s no “pinch to zoom” – but when you touch the screen while browsing it pops up a magnifying tool, letting you zoom in and out in increments or hit a button to shrink the entire page to fit on the screen, which then gives you a magnified square you can use to examine the page in detail.Also, it’s here you get a great impression of how accurate and responsive the Samsung Galaxy Portal’s touchscreen is – selecting tiny text links from a list is easy, with the most delicate and precise of finger touches selecting what you need.Install one of the alternate Android browsers like Dolphin or Opera and you soon realise how little point there is in trying to do anything too complex on a touchscreen. More buttons and more options means mo’ problems, to misquote the famous hip hop song.And if you’re really after ‘pinch to zoom’ on pages you know which phone to flit off and buy instead, don’t you?The Samsung Galaxy Portal’s camera quality is surprisingly good for a 3.2MP snapper that’s been rammed into the body of a mobile phone.The focus is a bit slow, with the phone pausing, steadying its view, doing a bit more auto-focusing then waiting for you to release the button – and then waiting a little bit longer before deciding to capture what you’re pointing at, if it’s still there.It takes a while, so don’t go expecting to capture anything on the spur of any moments, but at least there’s a dedicated camera shot button, which makes using the clunky default Android camera tool a little bit more bearable.Photos come out at a decent 2,048 x 1,536 resolution, although, as with every mobile phone camera in existence, it’s quite poor in low-light conditions.WIDE SHOT: The camera’s a bit over-eager to emphasise the brightness of things. Shadows are wiped out in favour of exaggerated colours when shooting in good light, with shots often coming out more bright and enhanced than necessaryCLOSE UP: The auto-focus, while slow, does a good job when taking pictures up close – the sample shot we took of our emergency backup Nokia 6680 mobile was surprisingly sharp, even with the camera held around 30cm away from the trusty last-gen brickNO MACRO: There’s no macro option, so don’t expect to be able to take detailed pictures of the back of your hand, but as an all-rounder the Samsung Galaxy Portal’s camera performs very wellLOW DETAIL: Detail tends to fall apart into abstract blotch territory when shooting complicated things like, er, grass and trees, but the output is decent enough to more than handle your social networking photo sharing needsSTRAIGHT LIGHT: Shooting straight into bright light is not advised on the Samsung Galaxy Portal, with very little detail capturedYou can also select “camera nightmode” from the camera menu to enhance brightness, if you don’t mind your shots looking like you’ve taken them within the blast radius of a nuclear detonation.However, the lack of any sort of flash won’t help you snap compromising photos of friends drinking specialist cocktails in specialist bars.Another feature added in is Android lets you upload photos simply, but just clicking on them and sending them to Facebook or Gmail or whatever else you’ve installed. It’s clever like that.The Samsung Galaxy Portal’s videos are recorded in 3GP mobile format and look passable, appearing in a fuzzy, blocky resolution of 352 x 288 – and VLC tells us they run at a frame rate of around eight or nine frames per second. We also encountered error messages about not being able to play the video’s sound on our PC due to a missing Samsung audio codec.When it comes to media on the Samsung Galaxy Portal, there’s Google’s Android YouTube client, which is pleasingly simple and uncluttered, while music playback is handled by the bland default Android tool. It is not glamorous, but will make ‘Bad Romance’ spew out of your headphones in an emergency.The Music Player widget takes up four icon slots on a Home page and is alarmingly simple – you can pause or skip to the next track, that’s it. Tapping the widget takes you to the main Music Player menu, and from there it’s as easy as long-pressing on a song to add it to an existing playlist or to create a new one from scratch.The supplied headphones have a flimsy ‘Pause’ button on the wire, but if you want to offend the artist’s integrity by skipping album tracks there’s no option but to get the phone out and use the touchscreen. At least the phone’s volume control works while the screen is in standby mode, so you’re able to adjust sound levels without having to de-pocket your mobile.If you can live without a way to skip tracks without poking the screen, the Samsung Galaxy Portal’s a workable MP3 player option – but you might need to upgrade the supplied 1GB microSD card if you get bored easily of the same few albums.The photo gallery is the standard old Android one, so don’t expect to be blown away – unless you get very, very easily blown away by things like grey tabs. It also confusingly houses videos as well.If you’re into doing it yourself and downloading video content through ‘unofficial’ channels, the Samsung Galaxy Portal copes well. It was able to play an off-the-internet MP4 of Doctor Who, scaling down the original file’s 640 x 368 video size and making it look superbly sharp on screen – and it played with no glitches whatsoever.A 720 x 416 resolution AVI file of Relocation Relocation (don’t ask) played just as well, despite Samsung only listing MP4 and 3GP formats on its official Samsung Galaxy Portal spec sheet. The other video playback option on the phone comes via DivX, which supplies its DivX VOD Player. To activate it on your phone you must first install the latest DivX Player on your PC or Mac, then synch it with the Samsung Galaxy Portal by copying across a registration code, then play a sample video on your phone.And then, once you’ve gone through that significant kerfuffle, you’re greeted by the option to pay for and stream DivX content on your Samsung Galaxy Portal. We doubt many people ever will. A very capable video player, as long as you don’t mind the rather basic front end.It’s your standard Android 1.5 default suite on here, with only a few nods to the year 2010. Samsung has, for some odd reason, decided to pre-install a copy of location-based app Layar onto the phone, so you’re able to do such clichd tasks as look for branches of Starbucks or search for pizza delivery companies in the vicinity.But honestly, who really uses these tools outside of TV adverts? Who thinks to themselves “I fancy a pizza, I’ll fire up my mobile phone and point it at the sky to see if there’s one nearby”?Of far more use are the other Google services you get as part of the Android spec. You need a Google account to activate the Gmail stuff (and access the Android Market), and it’s essential that you do – as it’s through your Gmail account that all your Contacts are backed up and synchronised.You might not think you need that if you’ve not had an Android phone before, but you really do, as once you’re all synchronised it’s possible to edit your contacts on your PC and have them all automatically copied back to your phone nice and neatly.Need someone’s number but left your phone somewhere else? Google’s got a copy on your Gmail Contacts list. That’s a life-saver, if you’re the sort of person who still makes actual phone calls.Elsewhere under the Apps tab sits a Facebook and MySpace button, if you’re into boasting about your life to people you never really liked 10 years ago.The only other time-saving tool pre-installed by a lackey in the Samsung factory is the Switchers app, which handles shortcuts to quickly toggle settings for Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth and Google’s Autosync option.This means you can turn everything off if you’re in a sulk and want to avoid everyone. Or save a bit of battery through killing the Wi-Fi and Bluetooth when out and about.Get ready for a shock – the Galaxy Portal has a surprisingly decent battery. Samsung’s previous Galaxy, was lambasted by all and sundry for eating battery life willy-nilly, despite having a supposedly more efficient OLED screen.The tables have been turned here, with the Samsung Galaxy Portal’s regular LCD screen somehow staying alive for a full day of in-bed, on-train, in-office, on-train then in-bed-again casual Twitter and web action. Battery enthusiasts will know there’s a good scientific reason for all this – the Samsung Galaxy Portal has a 1500mAh battery, slightly larger than the usual 1400mAh versions or lower you find in other phones. Every little helps.You’ll still spend most of your time worrying about unnecessary apps running in the background guzzling power and leaving you without text access at unfortunate moments, mind – but that’s all part of the modern smartphone game. Battery makers need to get their act together, basically, as they’re seriously holding back technology – although there are some free task-manager applications on the Android Market that can seriously help maintain battery life.You’ll be doing all your home browsing and Tweeting while connected via Wi-Fi, and the Portal does a fine job of instantly hooking itself into your router without whining for attention, then slipping surreptitiously back onto 3G when the signal disappears. There’s a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top of the phone, which is welcome, but the awful, awful supplied headphones, which are the type you have to physically force down your ear canal, are crackly right out of the box. At least ours were – instant upgrades are recommended, and at least there’s no proprietary adaptor to worry about.Sound quality was tinny even with the in-brain headphone fully rammed right into our poor little earholes – Samsung’s headphone quality is usually pretty good, so we’re not sure what’s happened here.You’ll be wanting some proper headphones, or, better still, a proper MP3 player – as Android 1.5′s default music-playing software isn’t the greatest or most user-friendly tool in existence, and you don’t want to hammer the battery of a smartphone any more than necessary.There was a 1GB microSD card in our Samsung Galaxy Portal box, along with a large-size SD Card adaptor if you’ve left your Micro-USB cable in the wrong house and need to copy off some photos. The PC situation is a weird one – on the original Samsung Galaxy i5700, the phone came with Samsung’s New PC Studio in the box.Not so with the Samsung Galaxy Portal – but no worry, as this can be downloaded from Samsung’s website to give you all manner of connectivity.Well, no actually, because it appears that like its bigger Android brother, the Galaxy Portal is not supported by NPS as yet. We’ve no idea why Samsung seems to secretly hate mating a PC and an Android phone, but it clearly does.At least you can drag and drop files to the SD card via the microUSB cable – this means getting media onto the phone is a cinch.Samsung is playing an odd Android game. Korean rival LG is playing the budget-Googlephone game with the likes of the Intouch Max GW620, and across the water HTC is bringing out better and better Android phones like the Legend seemingly every day.But Samsung seems to be happy to wander around making basic Android phones like the Samsung Galaxy Portal and then shouting about its new Bada platform instead.Given that both are based on a Linux kernel you have to question whether Sammy’s heart is really in the Google game.We likedPerformance was robust. Our Portal never crashed or got bogged down with multiple apps open, while the battery lasted significantly longer than this reviewer’s ladylike HTC Magic routinely manages. Turn Wi-Fi and GPS off and you’ll easily make it through a full day of semi-pro use.The capacitive touchscreen is responsive, bright and the phone feels reassuringly heavy and solid. The 3.2-inch screen size is right in the Android ‘sweet spot’ – big enough to see and use, small enough to slip into the tightest of trouser.Android 1.5, although visually rather basic, runs fast and does what a smartphone needs to do – and you can, of course, customise the hell out of it through the Android Market. Plus there’s a beta version of Android 2.1 for the European version of the Portal (known as the Galaxy Spica) floating about online, so an official update for the Portal ought to be imminent.We dislikedWhile Android 1.5 runs the majority of apps on the Android Market, the lack of a few headline modern tools that require Android 1.6 and above will kill this phone stone dead for hardcore Android nerds. If it doesn’t get an update soon, the Portal will be yesterday’s news. The button layout is a mess. Anyone new to Android will be utterly bewildered by the black plastic nightmare beneath the screen, while the Home button, which is squeezed right into the edge of the case, is tricky to press if you’re a right-handed phone user. Left-handed people will love it, though. Perhaps left-handed people is the mystery demographic Samsung is targeting with this amazingly average phone?VerdictThere’s nothing wrong with the Galaxy Portal, but there’s also nothing exciting about it. Offering the same spec a mid-range Android phone would’ve shipped with 12 months ago, there’s little here to boast about – especially when we’ve been bombarded by hype regarding dazzling new HTC glamour-phones for the last few months.Even Samsung itself seems desperate to make the Portal seem more exciting than it is, claiming in print adverts that it comes with a “visual search engine” – when in fact that refers to the Layar app that’s comes pre-loaded, and is freely available on every Android phone via the Android Market.However, the Portal is tough and perfectly functional. The fact it ships with Android 1.5 and Samsung’s poor history in offering updates will put off the geeks, but for the average punter looking for an affordable ‘in’ into Android, it’s ideal. It does come in for 20 a month on T-Mobile (that’s for 24 months, unless you want to pay 360 for the phone), but it’s the Vauxhall Astra of Android – dull but will get you where you need to be.Related LinksTechRadar’s Reviews GuaranteeMore mobile phone reviewsRelated StoriesReview: LG Chocolate BL20Review: Acer Liquid S100Review: Nokia E72Review: HTC HD MiniReview: Nokia 5230

The most momentous month in mobile and how it will change the future
Read the original article on MobileMentalism.com at The most momentous month in mobile and how it will change the futureRegular readers will have noticed things have been a bit quiet around here lately due to a variety of changing circumstances. Happily, I’m back now, though. So, did I miss anything?! Seriously, of all the months for me to be…Read the original article on MobileMentalism.com at The most momentous month in mobile and how it will change the futureRelated posts:Japanese phones reveal the future of mobile techThe future of Android revealed by Google (and it’s not what you think)Get the Samsung Galaxy S for 15 a month – for one week onlyPrice Drop: Nokia N8 for just 20 a month

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Nokia claim that the Nokia 700 is the smallest smartphone ever. It might not look it at first glance, but at less than 10mm thick they might be right.

Another device from ASUS
The stretched expected ASUS Eee Pad Transformer Android Tablet that everybody has been waiting for is lastly coming soon to stores around Europe. Nevertheless of many other usual tablet PCs you may have seen the ASUS Eee Pad takes it that large step further. It can come with a generous keyboard docking station and turn [...]We love mobile phonesAnother device from ASUS