Popcorn will get you free movie tickets anytime but what in the world will you be able to get when you have a popcorn phone? This is actually the question for those who are eyeing the LG GU280 Popcorn Phone, which is starting to attract attention not necessarily because of its looks, but because of its name.
The LG GU280 Popcorn Phone is LG’s answer to Samsung’s chocolate, not may be in terms of phone features or capabilities but in terms of mass appeal. The popcorn phone will first be seen in Italy but we are pretty sure this will be made available outside of Italy’s borders soon.
The delicious phone comes in a white-pink colored case, which could be a misnomer since popcorn is more like golden yellow to us. This is a slider phone with a 2-inch TFT screen display and a 1.3 megapixel camera. The internal memory of only 20MB is disappointing but it supports a microSD card slot with up to 4GB of extra storage.
The phone has basic connectivity features and by that we mean GSM/GPRS/EDGE and Bluetooth. With up to four hours of talk time and up to 100 hours of standby time, the LG GU280 Popcorn Phone will be a nice gadget to bring with you during the day or night, provided you’re not into marathon texting and calling.
We have always been enamoured with phones that are easy to handle and which allows us to easily slide it in our pockets. This is exactly what is being offered by the Motorola Quantico phone which was specifically made for rough and tumble of everyday life.
The Motorola Quantico phone comes with tough-as-nails exterior thanks to a combination of very durable materials like rubber, mesh, glass and chrome. This rugged cellphone was made with military specifications in mind so you can expect it to be very useful and durable in and out of the water, since it can withstand being submerged in up to one meter of water for thirty minutes. The phone has a water ingress protection IPX7 certification. It is also capable of surviving extreme dust, temperature, shock and all-weather condition.
The phone comes with a 1.3 megapixel camera and provides you turn-by-turn navigation functions thanks to the GPS technology. What is surprising is the affordable price of $99.95. This cellphone will keep you working even if you have to change locations from the air-conditioned boardrooms to the dirty outdoors.
Hands-free call is also easy with the Motorola Quantico phone, thanks to the integrated Bluetooth capability. It even comes with dedicated external buttons which allows you to access your phone’s functions even if the flip of the phone is closed.
Introduction
Hot on the heels of Motorola’s Droid debut, Verizon is adding another sweet treat to its lineup: the LG Chocolate Touch VX8575. The latest in the Chocolate line offers a yummy, slick touchscreen, as well as FM radio, Dolby’s Mobile equalizer and a “Join the Band” feature for all of your music needs. Still, it’s a phone first and foremost — right?
Features and Design
Sadly, this is not the Chocolate we expected to unwrap. Shots of LG’s Chocolate Touch BL40 have been floating around the web for months. However, the company decided to make that a European exclusive (for now). Instead, we get the VX8575. That’s not to say it’s not pretty. It’s just not all that unique, especially when compared to the LG Vu or the Dare.
The unit itself is shiny and pretty thin, at just under a half an inch. On the back, underneath the camera, there are four funky shapes carved out and covered with a soft material. It looks like something that might keep the phone from sliding off the dashboard (yeah, don’t try that). If you don’t like the look of the black shapes, there’s an extra back plate with purple shapes.
However, it’s not the back that’s the prettiest part. The 3-inch display is where things get most interesting, thanks to 262,000 colors and a 400 x 240 resolution. All of that nice imagery will help when flipping through the phone’s many functions. As with most touchscreen products, there will be a learning curve. Even the daintiest digits will be all thumbs until a certain comfort level is achieved. That said, the touchscreen does respond very well, with optional vibrating and audible feedback to boot.
Ports & Connectors
The top of the Chocolate Touch features a 3.5mm headphone jack. The micro USB jack is on left. When swapping out that back plate, you’ll see the microSD card slot right underneath, which can add an extra 16GB of memory to the internal 1GB.
Multimedia Options
The LG Chocolate Touch is the multimedia master, combining everything one could possibly want in one handheld. Aside from one-touch access to Facebook, MySpace and Twitter, the unit includes an FM radio with 12 presets, audio and video content from Verizon’s VCAST, and even a “Join the Band” feature, which allows users to tap along to music on a virtual piano or drum kit. Our unit also came with demos for Rock Band and The Sims 3. For those many features, the unit has a built-in accelerometer, which automatically flips from portrait to landscape views when the phone is turned. This especially made video a lot more watchable.
Sound Quality
LG has included Dolby’s Mobile equalizer, so that music geeks can tweak music manually or with five presets (Flat, Bass Boost, Treble Boost, Vocal Boost or Classical). During audio and video playback, the phone’s teeny speaker sounded surprisingly awesome. Connect a speaker or slap on some headphones, and this unit would surely take over as your main choice for mobile music.
Phone Functionality
Who knew? This unit has phone features too. The phone book stores multiple numbers and email addresses for 1,000 of your closest friends. Typing on the on-screen keyboard is very easy. During dialing, the numbers are large and easy to poke. Typing in info is a bit more tedious, but the keyboard magnifies every key you touch. When it came to actual calls, we did receive a few complaints about the sound quality on the receiving end. Some said it sounded like we were calling from a tunnel, others said it was obvious that we were on a cell phone, and in one case, we were told that the call was completely unintelligible. However, our end sounded excellent, with absolutely no drops or distortion.
Internet and Online Connectivity
Verizon’s VZW Today service offers easy access to headline news, weather, sports and entertainment. Anything else requires Microsoft’s Bing search engine as a middleman. If you decide to ditch SI.com for ESPN, it doesn’t just happen; it has to go through Bing. However, we were pretty pleased with load times, as well as graphics.
Digital Camera Features
The Chocolate Touch has a 3.2-megapixel camera. Whether inside or out, it takes some very nice photos, with options for five different resolutions. There are also plenty of on-screen effects and editing tools to play around with. Indoor video didn’t have as bright of an image. If you want to send it, you’ll only get 30 seconds’ worth. If it’s a keeper, the recording time goes up to an hour.
Battery Life
Verizon rates the Chocolate Touch with 306 minutes of battery life; that jumps up to 470 hours in standby. For more than 24 hours, we shot photos and video, made calls, played music, video and games, and just let the unit sit on a countertop. Even after that workout, the battery life had barely moved.
Conclusion
LG’s Chocolate Touch isn’t as tasty as the company makes it out to be, but does provide some fun. If music is a must-have feature for your phone, you can’t do much better than this model. Those willing to lock in for two years will get $50 back from Verizon, making the price $79.99 — and a lot more enticing.
Highs:
• Responsive touchscreen with vibrating feedback
• Excellent sound quality for music and video
• Decent camera features
• GPS
• One-touch social networking
Lows:
• Touchscreen has a learning curve
• Callers complain about reception
• Not the best web browser
• Bizarre design on battery cover
This modern sculptural sink can be standing in a corner or up against a wall, or set it free in the center of your space and let it become functional art for the bath. The designer sink is available trimmed with gold leaf, silver, copper, or a velvet finish in a range of colors. Adding function to fashion, Block Up features two sizable storage drawers under the basin, to keep your contemporary bathroom design clean and clutter-free.
With a gorgeous AMOLED display and an excellent camera, the pricey Samsung Behold II will appeal to multimedia junkies with deep pockets.
The Samsung Behold II ($230 with a two-year T-Mobile contract; price as of 11/12/09) smartphone is the latest device to join T-Mobile’s growing army of Android phones, which includes the T-Mobile G1, the T-Mobile myTouch 3G, and the Motorola Cliq. Though the Behold II has a gorgeous AMOLED display and a superior camera, customers might be turned off by the high price (it is more expensive than the iPhone 3GS and the Motorola Droid) as well as the somewhat cluttered TouchWiz interface.
While the Behold II is supposed to be an update of the Behold, which debuted last holiday season on T-Mobile, the two phones couldn’t be more different. Measuring 4.6 by 2.2 by 0.5 inches and weighing 4.2 ounces, the Behold II is slightly larger than the original (which is 4.1 by 2.2 by 0.5 inches and 3.9 ounces).
Even so, the Behold II is still quite pocketable and light–and with its curved edges and its brown and black color scheme (Samsung calls it “Mystic Brown”), the Behold II is much more attractive than its boxy predecessor. The face of the phone has a small amount of brown brushed metal below the display, while the glossy piano-black backing features a world-map design in a subtle gold color. It sounds a bit strange, but the overall look is quite striking.
The original Behold had only three hardware keys below the display. The Behold II has six–Home, Menu, Talk, End/Power, a shortcut key to the Cube menu, and Back–plus a four-way navigational wheel with a central OK button. It is nice to have the array of buttons, especially since the handset offers no physical keyboard. I do wish, though, that the Cube key had been replaced with a Google Search key–a useful feature we’ve seen on HTC and Motorola Android phones.
The Behold II has a brilliant 3.2-inch, 320-by-480-pixel AMOLED display, a big upgrade from its predecessor’s 3-inch, 240-by-400-pixel TFT display. I like that the majority of Samsung’s recent higher-end phones, such as the Android-powered Samsung Moment, are sporting the AMOLED technology. The quality is simply unbeatable: Colors are vivid and accurate, animations in the user interface are smooth, and details appear crisp. Because the display is the capacitive-touch variety, you do have to press down firmly to switch between your home screens or to flip through your pictures–something I noticed on the Samsung Moment as well. If you’re used to the Palm Pre or the iPhone, you might find navigating around the Behold II’s interface a bit frustrating at first.
The Behold II has 200MB of internal memory (upped from 180MB in the original) and is expandable up to 16GB (it also ships with a 2GB card). Samsung says that the Behold II offers 6 hours of talk-time battery life, which is pretty good for a smartphone. That’s due in part to the AMOLED display, which doesn’t require a backlight and therefore conserves more battery power.
In my tests, call quality over T-Mobile’s 3G network was good for the most part. Voices sounded clear and natural, with ample volume. One caller on the other end of the line said that I sounded very distant, but most people reported good audio quality overall.
The touch keyboard is a bit small, so people with larger fingers might have some trouble using it. Thankfully, the autocorrect is pretty reliable, and the haptic feedback (a light vibration when you press a touch key) helps the touch keyboard feel more natural. I noticed a slight lag between when I typed and when something appeared on screen–nothing too distracting, but still worth noting.
The Behold II runs TouchWiz 2.0, a touch-friendly user interface running over Android OS 1.5. We’ve seen TouchWiz on Windows Mobile phones, but the Behold II is the first handset to sport the overlay with Android. As with other Android 1.5 phones, here you get three home pages that you can customize with widgets and shortcuts to your favorite apps. To add a widget, you simply press the Menu key, pick ‘Add Widget’, and choose one from a list; it pops up instantly on your screen. To remove a widget, you press down on it, and a red trash can appears. You drag the item toward the trash can, and it disappears from your screen.
On the left of the screen is the Widget Tray tab (if you’re familiar with Android, this is the same as the Launch menu located at the bottom of your screen in the default 1.5 interface). Along the top of the screen is the Notification Drawer, where icons pop up when you receive new information, such as an IM or e-mail. Along the bottom of every home screen are shortcuts to the dialer, your contacts, the Web, and the Quick List, a selection of 12 commonly used applications.
Here’s where things get confusing: The interface also has an entirely separate menu for multimedia applications, called the Cube Navigation Menu. So that’s three different menus with overlapping content, in addition to your three home screens. You can access the Cube from a shortcut on one of your home pages or from the dedicated hardware key. The menu provides access to photos, music, videos, the Web, YouTube, and Amazon MP3.
The 3D-like Cube visualization is quite cool looking, though I’m not sure how often I’d actually use it since I can reach the same applications through other menus. You can roll it around with your finger or shake the phone to move through the different menus. Unlike your home screens, the Cube is not customizable.
The Web browser performed well, and pages looked great on the Behold II’s stunning display. I noticed a bit of stuttering while I scrolled through media-heavy pages, but navigation for the most part was quite smooth. You can copy and paste text, bookmark links, and view your browser history. Unfortunately, unlike the HTC Hero and Droid Eris, the Behold II has no integrated support for Flash Lite, so Flash-heavy sites won’t load correctly.
With e-mail, you get a couple of options. You can sync your Gmail account with the Behold II, as well as use POP3 Web-based mail accounts such as Hotmail and Yahoo Mail. You can also get push e-mail from Outlook via the Microsoft ActiveSync feature. On top of that, you can sync your Outlook calendar, tasks, and contacts.
The Behold II’s music player integrates nicely with Amazon’s mobile MP3 store. When you’re listening to a track, if you press the menu button and select ‘Find More Like This’, Amazon will dig up DRM-free tracks similar to the song you’re listening to. From there, you can purchase and download additional tracks–without interrupting whatever you’re listening to, of course. The music player supports album art, lets you build playlists, and takes MP3, AAC, and AAC+ files.
As you’d expect, video playback looks terrific on the Behold II’s AMOLED screen. Another benefit of AMOLED is its wide viewing angle: You can comfortably watch video when the phone is lying on a flat surface in front of you. The video player supports MPEG-4 and WMV files.
The 5-megapixel camera is definitely the Behold II’s headlining feature. Snapshots were impressive–both indoors and out–with bright colors, sharp details, and only a touch of graininess in photos taken in dimly lit environments. Along with an LED flash, an 8X digital zoom, and autofocus, you get a variety of fun shooting modes to pick from, as well as brightness controls. The touch-friendly interface makes it easy to adjust your settings while you’re in shooting mode.
You can also opt to have your photos sent to an online album hosted at Flickr, Kodak, Photobucket, or Snapfish. A useful Imaging Tool widget that you can add to your home screen gives you quick access to any of your albums on your phone’s browser.
If you’re trying to decide on an Android phone on T-Mobile, your decision will most likely be between the Motorola Cliq and the Behold II–by far, they are the best out of the four currently available. In terms of interface, the Cliq’s MotoBlur wins over the Behold II’s TouchWiz; it’s simply more innovative and engaging, and you get a cloud storage service with that phone. Heavy social networkers and text messagers will also prefer the Cliq’s excellent QWERTY keyboard over the Behold II’s average touch keyboard. But if you’re looking for a more multimedia-oriented phone and you’re willing to pay a little extra (the Cliq is $200), you’ll want to go with the Behold II. The camera is one of the best I’ve seen on an Android phone, and the quality of the AMOLED display is hard to beat.
If you’re looking at a lower-end handset for the holidays, for your personal use of perhaps for your chauffer or your assistant, then this phone should be included in your list. We are talking about the Motorola “Morrison” phone which will not create even a single firework for lovers of high technology.
The Motorola “Morrison” phone comes with very simple specifications to including a Qualcomm processor with a speed of 528MHz and a RAM of 256MB. This is an Android-powered phone which will sport an HVGA display with a disappointing internal memory, but which supports a microSDHC card.
The phone seems to come with a lot of additional features not normally found in other low end phones like an accelerometer with a four-way screen rotation, magnetometer, proximity sensor and ambient light sensor. For sure, such number of sensorized feature will make you aware even of a ghost coming your way.
The Motorola “Morrison” phone comes with a 5 megapixel camera with a 5.4x digital zoom.
After migrating iTunes to Windows 7, sometimes it wouldn’t sync properly.
Specifically, iTunes would conk out about three-quarters of the way into backing up the iPhone. I literally waited hours, hoping it would eventually finish the process, but no luck.
I won’t bore you with the gory details, other than to say I did a lot of resetting, restoring, waiting around, cursing, and hair-pulling, all to no avail. (I hope it comforts you to know that even we so-called experts run into crazy glitches like this.)
One thing I tried was booting my Vista partition and syncing the iPhone there. And guess what? It worked! That, my friends, is exactly why I’m a proponent of making a gradual migration to Windows 7: If something doesn’t work right, you have a fallback.
Still, I needed my iPhone to sync in Windows 7. But no amount of troubleshooting would solve the problem.
Then, I tried something totally crazy: I plugged the sync cable into a different USB port. And believe it or not, that did the trick. The iPhone zipped through the backup process and was back to normal. Hallelujah.
I can’t say this will solve whatever sync problems you might be experiencing, but it’s definitely worth a try. (Just make sure you’re not in the middle of syncing when you unplug the cable.)
The new AEG-Electrolux UltraActive vacuum cleaner makes short work from vacuuming saving time and energy. The bagless vacuum is extremely efficient and its cyclone technology allows for a quick and simple cleaning of the dust container. UltraActive comes with 12 foot vacuum hose, maneuverable wheels and high-performance low-floor nozzle so you can easily reach every corner and under every bed in your house.
Introduction
Yes, the BlackBerry Storm 2 is a vast improvement over the original BlackBerry Storm smartphone. However, that isn’t saying much because, as befitted its name, the latter handset was pretty much a disaster. Worth noting, though: The Storm 2 does have a capacitive touchscreen with software that mimics tactile resistance, unlike the clunky mechanical screen found on its predecessor. Inside, the cell phone also has more features and memory. But even if the Storm 2 steps its game up, so what? If you’re looking for a new Verizon wireless smartphone and your company doesn’t require you to own a BlackBerry, you’re much better off with one of the far superior Motorola Droid phones.
Features and Design
Inside the BlackBerry Storm 2 is a vast array of by-now-familiar BlackBerry and Verizon features such as the V CAST subscription video and music service (with Rhapsody) and Verizon Navigation, which you also have to pay for. (By comparison, on the Motorola Droid for Verizon Wireless you get Google Maps Navigation for free.)
A welcome addition to the Storm 2 is WiFi connectivity. The Storm 2 is also a dual-network world phone and comes with a SIM for GSM UMTS/HSPA 3G access outside the U.S.
Cosmetically though, the handset is nearly identical to the Storm 1, with a 480×320 3.25-inch capacitive SurePress touchscreen. It’s a heavy phone, weighing in at 5.64oz, and, like the Motorola Droid, has no physical control or navigation buttons, just four touch buttons – Send, Menu, Back and End – located along the bottom of the touchscreen.
The original BlackBerry Storm (Storm 1) had a clunky mechanical screen – when you pressed it, the entire screen toggled. Thankfully, manufacturer RIM has replaced this silly arrangement with a software-controlled touchscreen. Now it just feels as if the screen is moving behind your touch.
That said, however, touch presses on the new SurePress screen don’t feel as localized as haptic feedback, and the Storm 2’s screen still requires a firm push. First the selection lights in blue under a light touch, letting you know your firmer push will complete the touch transaction. But when navigating a tightly-packed menu or Web page, we often ended up accidentally activating an adjacent item. And, before realizing the wrong choice lit up, we’d often complete the SurePress push before we could stop ourselves. Worse, your violent pushes quickly smudge up the screen, resulting in an interface that’s messy and annoying in more ways than one.
Like most BlackBerrys, the volume toggle is located on the right spine of the phone, with the camera activation/shutter release button above it and the 3.5mm headphone jack found below. On the left side is the voice dialing/command control, located just above the microUSB power/sync jack. Up top/left is the on/off toggle opposite a handy mute button. On the back is housed the 3.2MP digital camera lens; the microSD slot, with a 16 GB card pre-installed, is found under the battery cover.
Multimedia Features
BlackBerry’s primary advantage over all Android smartphones is its Desktop Manager desktop client, which lets you easily sync PIM information and load photos, video and music. Better yet, the manager even enables you to load unprotected music files from iTunes. As for the Storm 2’s screen ratio, it’s an almost analog TV-like 4:3 rather than the widescreen 16:9 (and wider) models found on competing Motorola Droid phones. This squarer shape doesn’t work well for either widescreen videos, which get letterboxed, or Web pages – you get wider text lines, but shorter pages.
Sound and Call Quality
Voices come through crisp and clear, despite a bit of echo and hollowness. However, those we called from the phone ourselves made frequent requests for us to repeat ourselves – an unusual and odd sign since we’re loud talkers.
Phone Functionality
You get three touch keyboard choices – a Pearl-like keyboard and a multi-tap alphanumeric dial pad in portrait mode, or a full QWERTY in either portrait or landscape modes. Why anyone would choose anything but a full QWERTY option confuses us, but that’s besides the point. Typing on any of these selections takes a bit of getting used to – you have to press unusually hard to register a character or action, which slows down messaging. Worse, the main QWERTY keypad has only one punctuation mark – a period, which isn’t even necessary since a double space bar tap produces one. To get a comma, @, question mark, etc., you have to access the numeric keyboard – a pain in the rump. Additionally, once on the numeric keyboard, you can only press one character before the Storm snaps back to the alpha array. If you need to type a string of numbers, you have to press the key to access the numeric keyboard for each numeral, which we found unreasonably annoying.
Web
Perhaps more distressingly still, even though the BlackBerry Storm 2 accesses Verizon’s usually speedy EV-DO Rev. A network, the Web is unusually sluggish to access. Mobile-optimized pages such as CNN and The New York Times take 5-6 seconds to load, nearly twice as long as on Droid handsets. Non-optimized pages take 25-30 seconds or more, depending on the amount of visual content featured, also loading slower than on a Droid, or most other of Verizon’s wireless smartphones. There’s no multi-touch browsing either – you have to use the soft zoom button to increase text size, which you’ll definitely need to do. Further slowing you down, you’ll also need to access and scroll down the pop-up menu to get to your bookmarks, instead of there being a soft menu option for this oft-used function.
Digital Camera Features
The BlackBerry Storm 2 has a below-average 3.2 MP camera (both Droid phones are equipped with above-average 5MP imagers). Color consistency varies from shot-to-shot and leans toward the green end of the spectrum. Details often are fuzzy, as if the camera has poorly interpolated the image. Indoor shots lack color and it’s difficult to keep the camera still enough to get a crisp shot as well.
Battery Life
Fortunately, you’ll be able to chat for hours – more than 6 during our hands-on evaluations, longer than the phone’s official total, which is set at 5.5 hours.
Conclusion
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the BlackBerry Storm 2 is a good phone or a bad one – hint: per the above, it’s an average performer at best – because it will appeal only to a narrow, captive constituency: Verizon BlackBerry users who don’t mind using a touchscreen keyboard. If you’re not a BlackBerry user and even remotely choosy though, take a pass. The reality is that you’re far better off with one of the vastly superior Droid smartphones instead.
Highs: BlackBerry with a touchscreen, Large, bright display, WiFi connectivity, Long battery life, Pre-installed 16 GB microSD card included
Lows: Annoying user interface, Slow Web connection, Below-average camera performance, Heavy, Poor voice quality at caller end
Popcorn will get you free movie tickets anytime but what in the world will you be able to get when you have a popcorn phone? This is actually the question for those who are eyeing the LG GU280 Popcorn Phone, which is starting to attract attention not necessarily because of its looks, but because of its name.
Introduction
This modern sculptural sink can be standing in a corner or up against a wall, or set it free in the center of your space and let it become functional art for the bath. The designer sink is available trimmed with gold leaf, silver, copper, or a velvet finish in a range of colors. Adding function to fashion, Block Up features two sizable storage drawers under the basin, to keep your contemporary bathroom design clean and clutter-free.
With a gorgeous AMOLED display and an excellent camera, the pricey Samsung Behold II will appeal to multimedia junkies with deep pockets.
If you’re looking at a lower-end handset for the holidays, for your personal use of perhaps for your chauffer or your assistant, then this phone should be included in your list. We are talking about the Motorola “Morrison” phone which will not create even a single firework for lovers of high technology.
After migrating iTunes to Windows 7, sometimes it wouldn’t sync properly.
The new AEG-Electrolux UltraActive vacuum cleaner makes short work from vacuuming saving time and energy. The bagless vacuum is extremely efficient and its cyclone technology allows for a quick and simple cleaning of the dust container. UltraActive comes with 12 foot vacuum hose, maneuverable wheels and high-performance low-floor nozzle so you can easily reach every corner and under every bed in your house.
Introduction