Thursday 19th November 2009

Consumer Technology Review - Smart Phones

What are Smart Phones?

Why are we talking about them?

It's coming up to Christmas, and a lot of phones are being launched, and a lot of other phone manufacturers, and mobile phone providers want a slice of the Social Networking market that the i-Phone has dominated.

Direct remote access to Facebook, Bebo, Twitter and photo sites such as Flickr, while you are out and about and on the move, are now very big business.

That and the "apps" market, which has had a massive effect on the mobile phone market. Apps are basically small applications or programmes that you can run on more advanced phones.

iPhones have this ability and have proved so successful and popular that there are now 100,000 apps available to download.

They cover everything from maps, news, sports results, cookery lessons, comics, jokes, stock markets, planners, horoscopes...

This all continues the idea of "convergence" - the idea that you will carry just one device that can do all of the tasks you want, make phone calls, text, take photos, play games, go on line and update your social network, have almost full access to the internet, and act as a storage/player device for files such as music, text, and photos.

So what are the phones you have been testing that are trying to get a piece of this action?

What do they look like / functions / ease of use?

Nokia N97 - Available from €174 on O2 Bill Pay (18 month contract) at The Carphone Warehouse.

The Nokia N97 is a big screen slider. It has a 3.5 inch long screen on a comparatively big phone, with a slide out keypad.

The keypad slides out from the side, and makes the screen tilt up slightly at an angle. It has a Qwerty keyboard with actual buttons, although they are relatively small buttons, and the space button is strangely placed on the right hand side of the keypad, rather than in the middle of the bottom row, as is normal. It also has a thumbpad on the left of the keypad, which can direct you around the screen.

It has a 5.0MP camera, which can be activated very quickly by flicking open the lens cover on the back - and you can take plenty of pics as it has a 32GB internal memory.

The other selling point for it is the Nokia Ovi store where you can buy or download for free, it comes with You Tube, weather stations, Bloomberg Biz news, AP News, Facebook, and I downloaded frivolous things like a candle app, that you could probably use at a concert, and quench it by pressing the flame on the screen.

It still is a very business oriented handset as it has a PDF reader, Quick Office, and a Zip Manager for compressing large files so you can attach them to an email.

Overall, it is a very sharp top flight handset, with lots of good apps and functions, good camera, although slightly bigger than you might want, but not heavy.

Palm Pre - available on an 18-month contract with the device ranging in price from free to €99 depending on the monthly price plan. The Palm Pre is also available on prepay and retails at €419.

This looks very different to the Nokia N97 or HTC Hero.

It resembles a flat black pebble about 3.5 inches long, with a approx 2.5 inch screen, and also has a keypad, this one slides downward, while the screen slides upwards. The keypad on this also has real raised buttons, and this time the space bar is in the centre of the bottom row, where I think it should be!

The Palm Pre has a very intuitive interface. You call up the programme or app you want, you can even call up several and swap through them by flicking your finger from left to right. Then when you are finished with the app, you flick your finger upwards, and the app disappears. The Pre is able to run several apps simultaneously, which is something the iPhone has not been able to do.

Location services:

Auto Locate - your location automatically provided to applications that request it.

Use GPS - improves accuracy but may impact battery strength.

Geotag Photos - stores the co-ordinates of your location when you use the camera

The Palm Pre also can use the "Touchstone Charging Dock", which powers your handset using magnets! You plug the charger into the mains, and place your Palm Pre on top of it - it aligns itself with magnets and passes the electric charge through the dock to the phone - the dock propping the phone up at an angle. It's a nice gizmo, as well as a technological advance.

Palm App Catalog - this is where you go to get those all important mobile apps - although there are only around 300, which is a very small number, but will grow.

HTC Hero "Android" phone - The handset is priced at €399 on Prepay and from €99.99 on Billpay

Runs on Google Android software - this is the first phone in Ireland to run on this Android software. This is an Open Source Google Operating System.

With access to Android Market, there are thousands of applications available to download. Stock, soccer results, Simpsons jigsaws, even a "Prayer Tracker" which keeps track of who you are praying for! There are

It again looks very different to the two other phones - this one has a cream body (although it also comes in black), it has a 3 inch touchscreen, and a distinctive angled "chin" at the bottom of the phone, than has five buttons and a roller-ball, that is very useful moving through the menu, and scrolling up and down web-pages, without having to touch the screen itself.

There has been a great buzz about this mobile in techie circles, and it has actually won two "Gadget of the Year" awards, from both Stuff magazine and T2 Magazine.

The "Set Scenes" feature

It's not just changing the wallpaper, but moving different apps to the homepage of the phone, depending on what your day will be like - so you don't have to go searching through lots of menus to get to the feature you want to use - eg:

Work: two time zones / calendar / to do list/ email and maps on front page, plus stock and shares just a flick of the finger away.

Social - quick access to Twitter, texts etc,

Play - Photo album, Twitter, weather

Travel - Dual time zones, weather, Footprint

It has an anti-fingerprint screen coating, and apparently the casing is Teflon coated, to keep smudges off the cream coloured shell.

All in all, a very "sexy" phone, if you can call it that - possibly the one to take on the iPhone and bruise it a little.