Philippine Cell Phones

Sony Ericsson XPERIA Rachael

What is even more exciting is that along with the official shots that have obviously popped up a little prematurely, we also received a short video-demo of the Sony Ericsson Rachael UI.

The original resolution of the video is 852 x 480 pixels, which suggests that this will also be the resolution of the Rachael display. Coming with the sweet 16:9 aspect ratio this is the highest resolution screen we have seen so far on a mobile phone.

It seems that Sony Ericsson have put some extra hard work in customizing the Android UI, adding some nice touches of their own. Messaging and social-network integration is pretty duly covered, as suits a full QWERTY-enabled handset.

In case you need a quick memory refresh of the Sony Ericsson XPERIA Rachael features known so far, here it goes. The phone is based on the Qualcomm QSD8250 Snapdragon platform that provides a 1GHz CPU and dedicated graphics acceleration. The connectivity options of the chipset are also top-notch with Wi-Fi, GPS and 3G with HSDPA all onboard.

The fully-touch operated phone comes complete with an 8-megapixel autofocus camera, a 3.5 mm jack and a standard miniUSB jack. Probably the best part of the Sony Ericsson Rachael is its 4″ touchscreen.

The touch screen responds very well to the fingers though the stylus does not work properly in most cases. The front panel of the S5603 has earpiece just above the screen as in most of the mobile phones and the light sensor and the secondary video call camera on the right. The calling keys, the back button and the power buttons are properly placed below the screen. The back button looks like a D-pad and can be mistaken as navigation key. Since the S5603 does not has a navigation key so the users need to manually browse through the menu with their fingers.

There is an all in one jack for the USB connection, charging and the hands free which is a big disadvantage since nothing else can be used while the phone is getting charged. The left side of the phone has got the volume rocker which doubles up as zooming rocker for the text and the camera. On the right side of the phone is placed the screen-lock key and below that the camera key. The back has got a 3.0 megapixel camera with LED flash and speakers at the bottom left. The S5603 has got a slot for the MicroSD card (expandable upto 16 GB) behind the battery. In addition to that there is an Internal storage of 80 MB.

The menu is simple and user friendly and quite easy to recognise which menu clubs with other sub-menus. The quick menu on the right of the screen gives users quick access to the common menus. The quick menu can be dragged and dropped to the main screen/home screen. The photo gallery is a lot of fun as the phone recognises which side it is tilted when viewing in landscape mode. The absense of QWERTY Keyboard is a little disappointing.

Specification: A GPS Navigation3 Megapixel Camera with LED FlashVideo Player (MPEG4, WMV, H263 & H264)2.8 Inch 16 Million Colour Touch Screen (240 x 320 Pixels)Stereo FM Radio RDS3G HSDPA Technology3G Video CallingBluetooth® with A2DPUSB, GPRS, EDGEQuad Band (GSM 850, GSM 900, GSM 1800 & GSM 1900)WAP 2.0XHTML, HTML80 Mbytes Memory Plus MicroSD™ Memory Card Support Up To 16

3.0 Megapixel Camera with Smile Detection
3G/ EDGE/ GPRS/ HSDPA
2.8 inch Touch Screen
TouchWiz User Interface

S5603 Camera Performance
The 3.0 megapixel camera is pretty standard, though the viewfinder quality is quite nice and clear. It can shoot 9 consecutive shots with a single click. The Paranorma feature can stitch upto 6 frames. The Smile Detection feature also comes in handy. There are 6 scene modes including text mode, where users can capture pictures of mewspapers and magazines for a clearer view of the text. The max resolution can be set to 2048×1536. Videos can be shot at 15 frames per second with a 320×240 resolution. Pictures can be added to the phonebook for photo contacts.

Overall, the camera’s performance is one the best among all the 3.0 megapixel camera phones. Sometimes though the LED flash spoils the image due to over exposure, but it also comes less battery as compared to the Xenon Flash.

Entertainment Features
The Samsung Star 3G S5603 is a full fledged media box with enough storage due to the expandable MicroSD card. Its FM reception is pretty good, though at higher frequencies sometimes there is are a lot of disturbances. The voice recording is also quite good.

For the game lovers, the phone is loaded with games like Tumbling Dice, Party Bubble Popper, Crazy Penguine, Pyramidbloxx and Monopoly World. These games are entirely based on motion and touch detection. Though most of the games are only trial versions. I really think big mobile manufacturing companies should load their phone with full version games.

Making Connections
The Samsung S5603 has nice connectivity features. Its Bluetooth pairing with other devices is exceptionally fast. The GPRS, HSDPA and EDGE features give the device an advantage over many other phones in the same range. The FM receiver as we mentioned is very good at lower frequencies and quite good at higher. The 3G enabled tag is an added advantage, however, the absense of Wi-Fi is a big drawback. One other thing which we checked was how the Google Maps work on it, and it was just about perfect.

Overall we can say that the Samsung Star 3G S5603 is a feature packed phone alongwith with sleek  looks and performance. The talktime backup battery time might be a disadvantage but at around Rs. 14000 ($290) its a good buy. It would get good competition from the likes of HTC Touch Viva and the LG’s Cookie.

The Viewty KU-990 is a 5.0 megapixel candybar camera phone from LG which is feature-filled and has full touchscreen capability, HSDPA 3.5G and a flurry of features.

Design
The Viewty is covered in two-tone material with black plastic material and silver etchings. The form factor is a candybar design, and despite all we have heard about big phones, the Viewty is ergonomical and lightweight.

The faceplate is a 262K TFT colour 3-inch display covering the front of the phone. The three buttons on the front of the phone are the call and end buttons. Meanwhile the cancel button is between the two. The faceplate is the typical easily soiled/smudged material but LG decided to give a complimentary screen cover to counter this problem.

On the right spine of the phone, the KU 990 has digital camera functions, where there is a dial to push between photo, video and gallery options. The camera shutter button is here too, as well as the hardware lock/unlock key, which doubles as the camera’s image stabilizer.

Interface
The Viewty KU 990 user interface is based on Flash technology, and while not a smartphone- the proprietary OS has some neat functions and features. The home screen has battery status, main menu and the ringtone profiles on top.

The bottom of the homescreen has four shortcut keys to access the main menu, the dial function, messaging and phonebook. The homescreen can also display either clock or calendar or both at the same time, or you can tweak it to show a clean screen.

If you look closely at the homescreen, there will be arrows pointing to both ends of the screen like a neon sign pointing towards a burger, flicking either of them brought us to a quick menu for the Viewty. It has a 3×3 grid to frequently used programs. When you are done with the quick menu, with another flick the grid slides neatly and quickly back in.

Messaging
The Viewty messaging department gets a nifty feature, namely handwriting recognition. You can use the stylus to input text or you can even edit text that has already been typed.

There are several text input methods - keypad, QWERTY keyboard, handwriting on the screen, and handwriting in box.

Unfortunately, the handwriting recognition doesn’t score as high as it suppose to. It is slightly unresponsive and needs little getting used to when writing quickly, which we don’t recommend. The handwriting in box is another feature we don’t understand- the box doesn’t serve any purpose either than to box up our letters.

The QWERTY keyboard is perhaps the most functional for messaging, as you switch the phone into landscape mode and type into it using your thumbs. The keyboard is slightly reminiscent of the iPhone but we won’t knock something that works. It’s easy to get the hang of and especially if you are familiar with the PC’s keyboard.

The final one is the keypad function which is basically a virtual version of a keypad. SMS junkies will find the virtual keypad with less tactile feel compared to a physical one.

Specifications
2G Network             GSM 900 / 1800 / 1900
3G Network             YES
HSDPA                 YES
Video Call             YES
Dimensions             103.5 x 54.4 x 14.8 mm
Weight                 112
GPRS                 YES
Bluetooth             Yes, v1.2 with A2DP
USB                 YES
Internal Memory         100 MB shared memory
External Memory         microSD (TransFlash), up to 2GB
Camera     DUAL
Camera Resolution         5 MP, 2592х1944 pixels, autofocus, video(VGA 30fps, QVGA up to 120fps), strobe flash;secondary VGA videocall camera
Camera Resolution Search     5M
Flash                 LED
Display Type             TFT touchscreen, 256K colors
Display Size             240 x 400 pixels, 3.0 inches
Type                 BAR
Touch Screen             YES
OS                 LG
Messaging             SMS, EMS, MMS, Email
Browser             WAP 2.0/xHTML, HTML
Battery Type             Standard battery, Li-Ion 1000 mAh
Stand-by             Up to 430 h
Talk time             Up to 4 h
MP3                 YES
Video Support             YES
Speaker             MONO
Games                 Yes

Camera/Video Performance
The Viewty’s 5.0 megapixel Schneider-KREUZNACH camera is the main highlight of the phone. It comes with ISO technology and an Image Stabiliser to assist with taking photos. The camera is able to snap up to 2592×1944 pixels of resolution with a 10 second self-timer. As mentioned, the Viewty has a hardware jog-dial at the camera lens, which works manual zoom in/out for the camera.

The gallery application launched by this switch is really wonderful - all your images and videos are shown as a shuffled deck of pictures. A touch on any of the images brings it to the front; a second touch on the image corner displays image info.

The camera interface has wide-ranging settings. You can use several preset scene modes (landscape, beach, party, portrait, night, sport, high sensitive), plus there are some special shooting modes (continuous shot, panorama and frames).

The Continuous shot mode shoots several pictures at the same time, while the Panorama mode makes panorama images out of several consequent shots. Meanwhile, frames mode is for comedic purposes. You can fit your best friend’s face in a pirate wardrobe.

The photos really impressed us, as pictures came out with much of the colour intact. At maximum settings, the quality was pretty close to a digital camera quality.

The Viewty’s video recording is compressed with the DivX 5.0 encoding, to ensure a balance between video quality and video size. The Viewty’s also records up to 120fps, which is extremely high framerate compared the usual 24fps.

At 120fps, the recording switches to slow-motion recording, LG calls the mode QVGA QVS and while the capture occurs at 120 fps, the resulting AVI file is stored at 15 fps slowing down the recorded action 8 times.

Multimedia
The LG KU990 comes with a good 100MB of internal memory and a microSD memory card slot. It’s really mind-boggling why the memory card slot is not available to the user without removing the battery as this represents a serious hit on user-friendliness. The file manager appears as a My stuff item in the menu. It includes separate factory-preset folders for different multimedia content. You can copy or move files to the external memory or send them via Bluetooth, and for all of those options you can rely on multiple selection. However, we did notice a huge lag in folder browsing, once the memory card started to fill up. The LG plays DivX videos, but not Xvid though. The Viewty 3-inch screen is prefect for videos. Thought the internal memory does scream for an upgrade for movie files, which the average size mostly stands at 700 MB.

The Muvee studio is also a fun little program, which automatically sync pictures you have taken to preloaded MP3s. It is extremely easy to use, just click the pictures you want to put in, choose your music and the program will churn out a video.

Connectivity
As far as network connectivity is concerned, the phone features tri-band GSM (900/1800/1900 MHz), GPRS, EDGE plus HSDPA 3.6 Mbps. There is also Bluetooth 1.2 with A2DP stereo support.

Via mobile88