Here’s the Motorola’s first Android powered phone the CLIQ with MOTOBLUR. It has slide out QWERTY keyboard, HSDPA, Wi-Fi, 3.1″ 320×480 touch-screen display, 5 megapixel auto focus camera with video capture and playback at 24 frames per second, 3.5mm headset jack, a music player with Amazon MP3 and a 2GB SDHC included in the box. IT has support for Google apps, Exchange support and AIM, Live Messenger and Yahoo IM.
Looking for a Bluetooth headset? Check out my Jawbone Prime vs BlueAnt Q1 shootout. Please note I’ll have unboxings and probably more detailed reviews for these headsets later.
The netbook market has been pretty saturated for for sometime now. Prices have come down to the point that you can pick some up for around $200 if not less. So I was surprised when Nokia toss their hat into the crowded netbook market. Still, their entry has some interesting specs (which may or may not be interesting depending on how long it takes Nokia to ship the product):
one piece aluminum body – nice
Atom 1.6Ghz Z530 processor -most netbooks ship with either a 1.6Ghz N270, 1.66Ghz N280 or 1.3Ghz Z520
1GB 533Mhz DDR2 RAM – status quo, I wonder if you can easily upgrade this to 2GB
120GB, 1.8″ 4200RPM hard drive – most ship with a 5400RPM hard drive or slow SSD. A 4200RPM hard drive will kill the performance and make the Booklet 3G feel much slower than it’s piers. The 4200RPM hard drive is a real deal breaker, I’d skip this one till Nokia puts something faster in.
10.1″ 1280×720 display – Some may find 1280×720 on a 10″ display to be too small but if you can handle it, it’s a good thing.
HDMI output – neat
1.3 megapixel camera – status quo
HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth – built in 3G is always a nice thing, it’s optional if you don’t want it.
264×195x19.9mm, 1.25kg – nice
16 cell LiIon battery good for up to 12hrs – 16 cells, damn! Still, you’re going to need all that battery life because you’ll be waiting forever for the 4200rpm hard drive.
The X2 has improved tiles – I wasn’t all that impressed with the X1’s tiles so hopefully the X2’s are really better.
You get a 3.2″ 800×480 display, triband HSDPA (850/900/1900 or 900/1900/2100), with WiFi plus a slide out keyboard.
There’s now a TV out cable and the camera has been bumped to an impressive 8.1 megapixels with autofocus.
It appears as though the screen is now flush with the front of the phone unlike the X1’s retro recessed screen. I also noticed that the X2 is DNLA certified so presumably you can view pictures/videos/music stored on the X2 on a DNLA enabled device like a TV or PS3.
While Maemo has been around for a few years it’s the first time Nokia’s stuck it in a Smartphone.
I use a Mameo powered n810 Internet Tablet from time to time and it’s a very nice device so I’m pretty excited to see that Nokia will be using Maemo in their new n900 phone.
While I like S60 on non Touch devices I’m not so crazy about it on their touch screen ones.
The n900 will have a 800×480 display (like the n810), a pull out keyboard, 32GB of storage with a SDHC card slot, HSDPA 900/1700/2100 with support for up to 10.2mbps down, 5 megapixel camera with the ability to recover 8000×480 video. t’s dimensions are: 110.9 x 59.8 x 18.
It will be powered by a 600Mhz Coretex processor plus a 3D chip (same chip combo as found in the Palm Pre though the Pre’s runs at 500Mhz). To compare the Nokia N97 has a 434Mhz ARM 11 processor.
Looks like Nokia is getting more creative with their model name nomenclature.
To me the most interesting phone here is the X6. It’s a S60 touchscreen device but it has a capacitive touch screen. It will be interesting to see if that makes a big difference over other S60 resistive touch screen devices like the 5800XM and N97. Other specs: 3.2″ 640×360 display, Triband HSDPA (850/900/2100 or 900/1900/2100), WiFi, 434Mhz processor (same as the N97) and 5 megapixel camera with Zeiss lens. It uses the Nokia barrel port to charge.
The n97 mini is very similar to the regular N97 except the mini is slightly smaller (113 x 52.5 x 14.2mm vs 117.2 x 55.3 x 15.9mm, that’s 75cc vs 88cc) and comes with less storage (8GB instead of 32GB). It still has a resistive touchscreen.
The X3 is a slider phone running S40: 3 megapixel camera, no HSDPA.
It’s official, Bell Mobility has launched the 3G Palm Pre!
Voted best mobile phone at the 2009 Consumer Electronics Show, the Palm Pre is available exclusively from Bell.
- Move seamlessly through open applications with just a flick of your finger
- Link your contacts, calendars, and email from different sources
- Use the Pre’s powerful search function to find what you’re looking for with ease
The Pre features Palm’s brand new operating system-Palm webOS, a 3.1″ touch screen and slide out QWERTY keyboard, built in connectivity-WIFI, Bluetooth, and GPS, a 3.0MP camera, and 8GB internal memory.
Pick up your Palm Pre at any Bell retail location today. Launch pricing on a 3-year term is $199.95 (with voice and data over $45/month). Before rushing out to become the first to have the Pre in Canada, spend a few minutes and watch Howard’s reviews of the device.
So I was grocery shopping the other day. I’m standing in line waiting to pay when it occurred to me how addicted I am to the internet. With that in mind it figured it would be a good idea to find out which phone browser renders pages the fastest. After all surfing the web while in line is a lot more fun than reading the headlines on tabloids, looking at chocolate bars or trying to stereotype people based on what food they buy.
While the idea of figuring which is fastest is simple, actually figuring out required a lot of thought.
Since I spend a lot of time on HowardForums I took the homepage, converted it to a static page and moved all externally hosted images and elements so that they all load from the same server.
You can find it at http://www.howardchui.com/speedtest/
Now before we go to the results let me point out the numerous problems with my test:
First off, the internet is a highly dynamic thing. Sometimes it can be fast, sometimes it can be slow. Outside of paying your bill on time there’s only so much you can do about it.
Secondly, phone browsers are not all created equal, some support flash, others allow you to have multiple pages open at the same time, etc. All I’m testing is how fast a phone renders a page; from when it starts loading to when the load bar is full.
Each carrier is different. Some may take a shorter faster path to the HowardChui.com server while others may be slower.
These tests don’t take into account a phone’s user interface. If a phone is horrible to use but has a super fast browser it will do well on this test.
Some phones allow you to browse the page while it is being loaded while some don’t.
Some devices attempt to speed up page load times by using proxy servers. The proxy servers intercept the page you’re trying to load, compress them (text and images) so that they download to your phone more quickly. For devices like this (mainly Blackberries) I’m not going to bother by passing the proxies since they use them out of the box.
Other things to think about are how accurately a webpage renders a page, etc etc.
For some phones I tested over the mobile network and over WiFi and through my internet connection. My home internet connection is usually faster. This can reveal whether a phone is being held back by a slow processor or a slow internet connection.
How I tested:
To test I grabbed a stopwatch and timed how long it took each phone to load http://www.howardchui.com/speedtest. I repeated each test until I got what I thought were consistent results. I also repeated these tests at different times of the day until I got an idea of the best case scenario.
To ensure browsers weren’t loading pages out of their cache I tried my best to make sure that the browser caches were empty. Here are some examples: for iPhones I opened up a new window, closed the speedtest window, opened up Safari’s options and cleared the cache, then opened up Safari and loaded the speedtest page. For Android phones I opened up a new window, opened up the switch window menu and closed the speedtest window, cleared cache and then opened speedtest again. I tell you, after running these damn tests on a bunch of phones they get really boring.
Thoughts:
Given all the problems with the test I mentioned already I wouldn’t make a big deal if one phone is say 10% faster than another. There are enough factors that you may very well find the opposite to true.
That said, if one phone is significantly faster than another then you can probably draw some conclusions from this graph.
While carriers networks can often theoretically support high speeds more often than not the devices are the limiting factor. Let’s say a phone is capable of 3.6mbps – does that mean it can load a 512kb webpage in half a second? Nope. While the data that makes up a webpage is generally downloaded quickly it usually takes the phone a few seconds (or sometimes many seconds) to render a page. A good example are the Blackberries in my test. I noticed they only take about 3 seconds to request a page, 12 seconds to download a page and then about 25 seconds to process the page.
With it’s blazing processor and lack of multitasking I wasn’t suprised that the iPhone 3Gs dominated the test. I was rather suprised at how quickly the N97 did since subjectively I didn’t find it felt that fast (it didn’t feel slow, just not that fast). While we’re talking about the N97 I didn’t test it’s HSDPA performance since the one I had was a euro varient (no HSDPA support where I live).
Subjectively, I found any browser that takes around 20 seconds or less generally felt ‘fast’.
While Opera on Windows Mobile isn’t a bad browser I’ve never found it to be fast.
Even with their proxy servers the Blackberries finished at the bottom of the test. Below even the LG Xenon which is a non-smartphone (albeit one of the most interesting ones on the market) and the Sony Ericsson K850 (not an old phone but not SE’s most recent). Unfortunately I didn’t have a Bold handy but even though it’s the fastest Blackberry you can buy I don’t think it would do much better.
Anyways, that’s all for now. I’ll add more devices as I get them.
