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Wednesday, September 9, 2009

LG GW520

Introduction

QWERTY is how the Cookie crumbles and LG are quite keen to build on a winning concept. And they sure didn’t work themselves to the bone. When you’ve got a Best Handset Award nominee (LG KS360) and a midrange bestseller (LG KP500), all you need to do is add two and two together. Simple math for a simple gadget: the LG GW520 is a basic touchscreen with a distinct Cookie feel, full QWERTY keyboard and social networking on its mind. Sounds right for keeping the younger crowd interested.

Some of you might know it as the LG Calisto. Never mind the name, it’s the same cute little fella we’re about to review in a sec. What makes it so interesting is not only the competitive price and decent feature set. We’re also curious to find how the blend of KS360 and Cookie works. It’s not about which one gets credit as the real predecessor, it’s what the offspring can do for you.

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LG GW520 official photos

The LG GW520 is pretty much a Cookie with a real friendly QWERTY keyboard and fast data. The touchscreen size is the only downgrade so to say, but the full keyboard, 7.2 mbps HSDPA, push email and notifications and enhanced Widget UI are well worth the trade-off. Well, Cookie seems to rhyme quite well with QWERTY so far, now let’s see how long it’ll go.
Key features:

* 2.8" 256K-color TFT touchscreen (240 x 400 pixels)
* Friendly four-row slide-out QWERTY keyboard
* Quad-band GSM and dual-band 3G (with HSDPA) support
* 3 megapixel fixed focus camera
* Bluetooth 2.0 with A2DP
* 40MB internal memory
* Hot-swappable microSD card slot (supporting card with capacity of up to 16GB)
* Standard microUSB port and Mass Storage mode
* Accelerometer for auto screen rotate
* FM radio with RDS
* Pepped-up Widget interface with Live Square
* Push email and Facebook applications and widgets
* Multi-tasking with a real task manager
* Excellent touch optimized image gallery
* Smart dialing
* Office document viewer
* Affordable and easy to use touchscreen phone

Main disadvantages:

* No Wi-Fi
* Video recording no good at QVGA@12fps
* Camera has no auto focus or flash
* No DivX/Xvid video support
* No standard 3.5mm audio jack
* Facebook is the only social networking app and it lacks Push

Wi-Fi support would have gained the GW520 lots of extra points against the competition. But then, that would’ve involved so much smartphone pressure, which the GW520 is definitely not prepared to handle. In a way, the handset can be construed as a Cookie upgrade and a response to Samsung’s deployment in the touchscreen midrange. Affordability is key after all, and the LG GW520 is well-geared to run against the likes of Samsung Preston and Star.

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LG GW520 live views

The other things sacrificed to keep the price within acceptable limits are the camera autofocus and GPS. The latter isn’t such a big deal for a feature phone, but autofocus should be a must for a contemporary mobile phone in this class. It seems to us DivX/XviD support isn’t too much to ask either: it’s absolutely relevant to the target audience and LG have the technology anyway.

It may look like you pretty much know what to expect from the LG GW520 (or the QWERTY-enabled Cookie, which we’re so keen to call it). But it won’t be fair to judge the phone before we’ve seen it in action. Join us after this very small jump as we explore the looks and feel of this neat QWERTY slider.

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2 has been in the center of attention ever since its first unofficial shots leaked online. Much like most other gadgeteers, we've had our hands itching to get one and luckily our wishes just came true.

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2 is one impressive device full of industry leading features - it's the first Windows Mobile smartphone with an 8 megapixel camera and WVGA video recording and it's actually the first ever full QWERTY phone to have that sort of imaging prowess as well.

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Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2

The XPERIA X2 most other features, though not as innovative, are a nice match as well. We guess they are worth going through one more time.
Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2 at a glance:

* General: GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz, UMTS 900/1900/2100 MHz, EDGE class 10, HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps; HSUPA, 2 Mbps
* Form factor: Slide-and-tilt QWERTY touch phone
* Dimensions: 110 x 54 x 16 mm, weight 155 grams
* Display: 3.2" TFT resistive touchscreen, 800 x 480 pixels
* Platform: Qualcomm MSM 7200 528 MHz processor
* OS: Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional
* Memory: 110MB storage, 256 MB RAM, 512 MB ROM, microSD card slot
* Camera: 8-megapixels auto-focus camera, LED flash, touch focus, geotagging, face detection, image stabilizer, Smart Contrast, WVGA@30fps video recording
* Connectivity: Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, standard microUSB port, GPS receiver with A-GPS, 3.5mm audio jack, TV-out
* Misc: Optical trackpad, accelerometer for motion-based gaming, office document viewer and editor, XviD video support
* Battery: 1500 mAh Li-Po battery

We just got the XPERIA X2 and we wanted to share with you our first impressions of the device. So consider this article as a quick and dirty preview, with a more detailed one coming up in the following week. We hope to get as much as possible from our encounter with the X2 and you can bet we surely won't keep anything to ourselves.

UPDATE 8 Sept: We decided to update this article with some new stuff instead of creating a new preview as the XPERIA X2 hardly deserves any further detailing at this early stage of its development. It still has quite a few software issues that will without a doubt be fixed in the future software builds.

So today we've added a whole new page on the messaging, web browser and 3D games and we've also updated our conclusion to take the most viable market alternatives into account. We really hope to see the XPERIA X2 again for a full-blown review, once its hits the stores all nice and bug-free.

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Sony Ericsson XPERIA X2 in our office

The XPERIA X2 should be available in two colors - Elegant Black and Modern Silver. There's hardly anything missing from the broad range of connectivity options. Perhaps the only two things it seems to lack are the FM radio and the automatic screen rotation. Yes, there's an accelerometer on board alright, but the screen doesn't auto rotate to match the orientation of the handset.

While the XPERIA X2 uses the vanilla Windows Mobile 6.5 Professional, the thing that sets it apart from competing products is the X-panels interface. X panels have gone a long way since the XPERIA X1 and have turned into a full featured system for using various animated and interactive homescreens. But we'll get to that further down.

Anyways, enough talking, let's get to some walking. Jump on as explore what the XPERIA X2 is made of with even a brief rundown of the interface later on.