Friday, February 20, 2009

Quantum Computers

Today's powerful computers that run on microscopic transistor chips won't begin to match the speed of a totally different kind of computer which may be available 50 years from now, thanks to researchers at The University of Arizona in Tucson. We all know that information technology has been driving our economic engine over the past decade or two. But for that to continue, a new paradigm for information processing will be needed by the middle of the next century. It looks like quantum information may be a candidate, there are no undamental barriers in the way. There is no basic fundamental law that says this cannot be done. Still, it's going to be very hard.



Quantum computing has potential to shatter the entire concept of binary computing, the use of zero's and one's, "on" and "off," to represent information digitally. Researchers at the University of New Mexico propose a new concept for how individual atoms might be controlled at the very quantum level for computers for the future. The researchers at the Optical Sciences Center are now about to begin experiments to test their theory that neutral or chargeless atoms, trapped like individual eggs in an egg carton by a lattice created by interfering laser beams and super cooled to the point of zero motion, will work for quantum computing.



Researchers have succeeded in cooling light trapped atoms to the zero point of motion, a pure vibrational state that is the crucial initialisation step to using atoms as quantum information bits. The pure quantum state would be the logical zero for a quantum mechanical computer. The scientists' success at cooling atoms was no small achievement. Atoms in this super cooled state are colder than liquid helium by roughly the same factor that liquid helium is colder than the center of the sun.



The researchers have reported that their scheme for stacking atom filled optical lattices so the neutral atoms will sufficiently interact to make quantum logic operations possible. If the scheme works, the big advantage is that atoms can be easily accessible for laser manipulation but remain isolated from the surrounding environment. Random forces from the outside world that act on the tiny quantum bits is perhaps the greatest problem confronting researchers trying to build a real quantum computer.

Nano Computers

Here's a date for your diary November 1st, 2011. According to a group of researchers calling themselves the Nanocomputer Dream Team, that's the day they'll unveil a revolutionary kind of computer, the most powerful ever seen. Their nanocomputer will be made out of atoms. First suggested by Richard Feynman in 1959, the idea of nanotechnology, constructing at the atomic level, is now a major research topic worldwide. Theoreticians have already come up with designs for simple mechanical structures like bearings, hinges, gears and pumps, each made from a few collections of atoms. These currently exist only as computer simulations, and the race is on to fabricate the designs and prove that they can work.



Moving individual atoms around at will sounds like fantasy, but it's already been demonstrated in the lab. In 1989, scientists at IBM used an electron microscope to shuffle 35 xenon atoms into the shape of their company's logo. Since then a team at IBM's Zurich labs has achieved the incredible feat of creating a working abacus on the atomic scale.
Each bead is a single molecule of buckminsterfullerene (a buckyball), comprising 60 atoms of carbon linked into a football shape. The beads slide up and down a copper plate, nudged by the tip of an electron microscope. The Nanocomputer Dream Team wants to use these techniques to build an atomic computer. Such a computer, they say can then be used to control simple molecular construction machines, which can then build more complex molecular devices, ultimately giving complete control of the molecular world.



The driving force behind the Dream Team is Bill Spence, publisher of Nanotechnology magazine. Spence is convinced that the technology can be made to work, and has enlisted the help of over 300 enthusiasts with diverse backgrounds - engineers, physicists, chemists, programmers and artificial intelligence researchers. The whole team has never met, and probably never will. They communicate by email and pool their ideas on the Web. There's only one problem. Nobody is quite sure how to build a digital nanocomputer.



The most promising idea is rod logic, invented by nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler, now chairman of the leading nano think tank The Foresight Institute. Rod logic uses stiff rods made from short chains of carbon atoms. Around each rod sits a knob made of a ring of atoms. The rods are fitted into an interlocking lattice, where each rod can slide between two positions, and be reset by a spring made of another few atoms. Drexler has shown how to use such an arrangement to achieve the effect of a conventional electronic transistor, where the flow of current in one wire is switched on and off by current in a different wire. Once you have transistors, you can build a NAND gate. From NAND gates you can construct every other logic element a computer needs.

Optical Computer

In most modern computers, electrons travel between transistor switches on metal wires or traces to gather, process and store information. The optical computers of the future will instead use photons traveling on optical fibers or thin films to perform these functions. But entirely optical computer systems are still far into the future. Right now scientists are focusing on developing hybrids by combining electronics with photonics. Electro-optic hybrids were first made possible around 1978, when researchers realized that photons could respond to electrons through certain media such as lithium niobate (LiNbO3). To make the thin polymer films for electro-optic applications, NASA scientists dissolve a monomer (the building block of a polymer) in an organic solvent. This solution is then put into a growth cell with a quartz window. An ultraviolet lamp shining through this window creates a chemical reaction, causing a thin polymer film to deposit on the quartz.



An ultraviolet lamp causes the entire quartz surface to become coated, but shining a laser through the quartz can cause the polymer to deposit in specific patterns. Because a laser is a thin beam of focused light, it can be used to draw exact lines. A laser beam's focus can be as small as a micron-sized spot (1 micron is 1-millionth of a meter, or 1/25,000 of an inch), so scientists can deposit the organic materials on the quartz in very sophisticated patterns. By painting with light, scientists can create optical circuits that may one day replace the electronics currently used in computers.



NASA scientists are making these organic thin films on the Space Shuttle to overcome problems caused by convection. Convection is a circular motion in air or in a liquid created from uneven heating. On Earth's surface, when a gas or liquid is heated it expands, becoming lighter and less dense. This lighter material rises, mixing with cooler and denser material from above. Such turbulence occurs in the world's weather patterns or even in a pot of water boiling on the stove.



Convection creates difficulties when trying to create a uniform film. A UV lamp or laser light will raise the temperature of the film solution, causing the hotter solution to rise. Aggregates of solid polymers often form in the solution, and convective flows that develop in the solution can carry these aggregates to the surface of the quartz. Because aggregates on optical films can cause light to scatter, the goal is to make the films as smooth and uniform as possible.

Holographic storage technologies

The theory of holography was developed by Dennis Gabor, a Hungarian physicist, in the year 1947. His theory was originally intended to increase the resolving power of electron microscopes. Gabor proved his theory not with an electron beam, but with a light beam. The result was the first hologram ever made. The early holograms were legible but plagued with many imperfections because Gabor did not have the correct light to make



crisp clear holograms as we can today . Gabor needed laser Light. In the 1960s two engineers from the University of Michigan: Emmett Leith and Juris Upatnieks, developed a new device which produced a three dimensional image of an object. Building on the discoveries of Gabor, they produced the diffuse light hologram. Today, we can see holograms, or 3D images, on credit cards, magazine covers and in art galleries. Yet this unique method of capturing information with lasers has many more applications in the industrial world and is on the verge of revolutionizing data storage technology as we know it.



A project at Lucent Technologies Bell Laboratories could result in the first commercially viable holographic storage system. Leveraging advances across a number of technologies from micromirror arrays to new non linear polymer recording media, the team hopes to spin the project off into a startup. This technology not only offers very high storage densities, it could access that data at very high rates, due to the fact that holographic methods read an entire page of data in one operation. While conventional optical storage techniques read and write data by altering an optical medium on a per bit basis, holographic storage records an entire interference pattern in a single operation. This technique makes
Unique demands on both the light source and the recording medium. While a conventional optical disk system can get by with a relatively low power laser diode and a single detector, holographic techniques require high quality laser sources and detector arrays. However, these types of components have been getting cheaper. For example, CMOS pixel sensors offer the potential for the low cost detection of data arrays, while digital micromirrors can be used for data input from electronic systems. The biggest challenge has been devising a suitable optical medium for storing the interference patterns. The team turned to none



Linear polymers in its search for that key component. What is needed is a medium that can support the overlap of megabyte data pages, each with a high enough diffraction efficiency to enable high transfer rates. These two demands sound reasonably simple, but it really leads to a very long list of pretty stringent criteria for what a material has to do. The researchers have found what they believe is a suitable candidate, an acrylic polymer compound that polymerises in response to light. In addition to having the required optical performance properties, the new material, being a polymer, is easy to form into thick films. Film thickness directly relates to storage capacity and inorganic nonlinear materials, which are crystalline, are difficult to build in thick films. The researchers have built a prototype system using off the shelf components such as camera lenses and digital micromirrors from Texas Instruments.

Iqua 603 SUN – Bluetooth Wireless Headset

This solar-powered Wireless Bluetooth headset provides superb battery life, good audio quality, and a warm-and-fuzzy feeling by helping the environment. Accustomed to reaching for your Wireless Bluetooth headset only to find its battery is drained? Take a good look at the Iqua 603 Sun Wireless Bluetooth headset, which sports a solar panel that provides almost unlimited power. Combine that with strong audio quality and you’ve got a strong hands-free contender.



The 603 Sun might not be the prettiest or most compact headset compared to other stylish options from Plantronics and Jabra, but it is just the right size to keep in a bag or coat pocket. Measuring 1.9 x 1 x 0.5 inches and weighing about a half an ounce, the black unit looks chunky, but is light enough to wear all day on your head, or around your neck with the included lanyard. The charcoal face of the headset sports a solar panel, which is also a multifunction button.



A rubber earpiece on the spine of the device fits into your right or left ear, and the top of the device holds a volume control, which is also used to redial the last number and initiate voice commands. It stayed firmly in our ear, but we appreciated the included flexible loop attachment that can fit in either ear; it made the Bluetooth Stereo headset feel more secure while walking around. A mini-USB port is located on the right side of the device for charging--on rainy days, of course.



No one can match this headset’s stellar solar panel, which can charge the earpiece in any available light--indoors or outdoors--to extend the talk and standby time of the headset. Out of the box, you have to charge the 603 Sun Bluetooth Stereo headset with the AC adapter for two hours. After two weeks of being powered on and with frequent use (30 minutes of talking per day), we never had to reach for the AC charger. Exposing the headset to indoor office light and minimal daylight was enough to keep the Stereo headset on standby while intermittently taking calls. Not having to worry about turning off the Bluetooth Stereo headset at night was joyous.

Solid State Storage Technologies

OmniDimensional Systems plans to create a 2 Gigabyte solid state memory by integrating thin film transistors and diodes onto a substrate that is formed from the flexible foil used to store information optically on CD-ROM. The intent is to substitute thin film electronics for the slow and unreliable mechanical parts used in optical drives, enabling subsystems that promise virtually instantaneous access to very large databases. The company is combining the solid state memory with a special encoding technique that it says can pack three times the normal amount of information into a given space.



The company uses the basic data encoding and compression scheme, called autosophy, in its data communications products. What they've done is marry two mature technologies to fill a need for cheap, large associative memories. Autosophy can do the same thing for rewritable optical memories, by using a secondary grid. CD-ROM and similar rewritable optical media modify the surface of a thin sheet of foil with various aberrations, which are normally sensed by a photodiode's picking up light from a laser diode on the read head.



In the OmniDimensional approach, the read head is replaced with an array of integrated thin film transistors and diodes of the kind used in active matrix liquid crystal displays (LCD). Autosophy encodings simplify the reading electronics by ensuring that only one output row activates at a time. The company believes the associative operation of the memory will enable autosophy theory to expand from the RAM based telecommunications code it is today to become a mainstream solid state memory technology.



Autosophy theory enables graphical data to be compressed but requires the use of associative memories to do real time lookups of dictionary entries. The process is simpler for serial telecommunications, because the bit stream is artificially divided into 8 bit characters (plus start and stop bits), which can be kept in a dynamically maintained library in RAM.



For instance, autosophy as used in telecommunications only transmits a full set of information once. The second time, only the address of the information is transmitted. But with graphical data which is two dimensional and not neatly divided into characters, autosophy needs associative memories to perform real time lookup in a dictionary of pieces of the image.

Is Bluetooth devices are safe

According to the latest research it is safer to talk on Bluetooth Headset devices rather than holding your mobile phone to your ear. This is due to the fact that, as the range of the Bluetooth devices is only about 10 metres, the Bluetooth radio wave frequencies are much lower than the current standards. Wireless technologies are developing and diversifying rapidly. For example, WLAN, UWB, ZigBee and Wibree, are now entering several different market-areas, however, it is important to keep in mind that it usually takes time for new technologies to become an industry standard in their respective markets.



For instance, WLAN (a service that is already becoming more and more common in the mobile phone industry) is still not going to replace Bluetooth technology for quite a long time. As a result, though, new technology-based products are quickly being developed and will be offered to customers as soon as possible. It is highly unlikely that somebody could break into a given mobile phone by using a Bluetooth accessories.



The transferring of “mischief programs” from one mobile phone to another, have recently awaken some discussion regarding general security. According to the mobile phone manufacturers, these programs very rare and are not commonly used. Some people also feel that there is the chance that a “mischief program” could forward itself to another mobile phone by using multimedia or Bluetooth messages.



However, these attaches are easy to avoid by using simple common sense as this form of program-transferring usually requires the recipient to first “accept” the contact request from the “infected” Bluetooth Accessories, open the received message and install the program that is in the message—despite the mobile phone’s numerous security warnings. Mobile phone development is heading towards the direction where phones will soon be better prepared for these types of threats.

Wireless Bluetooth Headsets

Bluetooth® wireless technology is an open, accepted standard for wireless communication. As long as Bluetooth electronic equipment is within approximately 10 meters of each other, they can communicate and transfer data, speech, music, or images without a physical connection. Bluetooth is the key enabling technology for IQUA in 2004-2005, and will continue to be one of the essential technologies from 2005 onwards.



Bluetooth technology is an essential, everyday tool found in a various types of electronic equipment. This technology makes it easy to transfer speech between a mobile phone and a headset, a mobile phone and a pocket computer, or images from a digital video camera to a PC. And even though two Bluetooth units comply with the standard and should be connected, it may not necessarily make sense for them to speak to each other. For instance, a Bluetooth mouse would not profit much from a connection with a digital camera, or a headset with a keyboard.



The basic requirement for Wireless Bluetooth Headset units to be able to communicate is that they are located within 10 meters of each other. This is the range of the Bluetooth radio waves under the current standard. In order for Bluetooth units to communicate without others listening in, Bluetooth electronic equipment must be paired. To accomplish this, the equipment must recognize each other and be accessed with the same number/pin code. This is a simple, onetime process that safeguards against others with Wireless Bluetooth Headset being able to hear your phone conversations or receive your data on another pocket PC.



For extra security, Bluetooth electronic equipment can hop randomly between 79 frequencies 1,600 times per second, which makes it virtually impossible for anyone to listen in. Additionally, it is possible to encrypt the information sent between equipment units with a code that only those two units recognize.
Bluetooth wireless technology works in an open frequency spectrum at 2.4 gigahertz, the same as wireless networks, telephones and other electronic equipment. It is possible for all types of equipment to operate within the same spectrum without disrupting each other because a frequency consists of several channels thet the equipment can hop between to find quiet channels.



With the Bluetooth 1.2 standard, electronic equipment can find quiet channels beforehand, communicate between them and resend data if anything is lost due to noise. Today's Bluetooth Headset signals have a maximum strength of 2.5 milliwatts and a range of about 10 meters, (Class 2 equipment). Because of this weak signal, there cannot be either numerous or large physical obstacles between two communicating Bluetooth Headset devices. An important advantage of the weak signal used by Bluetooth is that the electromagnetic radiation emitted by all electronic equipment is also very weak. In fact, the strength is about 1/800 of that emitted by a mobile phone.

Xml, Sgml, Html Conversion Services

Rely Services provides XML, SGML and HTML conversion of your documents for content delivery via the Internet. Rely Services, is an XML services company offering XML training, conversion of data to XML, and general XML consulting. The company specializes in helping businesses in any industry assess their XML opportunities and needs, implement appropriate XML applications, and maintain and update XML content.
SGML conversion is slightly different from HTML conversion or XML conversion in that the language uses some tags like DATATAG, OMITTAG, SUBDOC tags. Rely Services provides services like HTML / XML / SGML conversions - from simple hard copy paper documents to web based information articles, manuals, legal documents etc - across a wide variety of browsers and platforms. And we do these conversions with assured quality - the hallmark of Rely Services



The data conversion to XML includes journals, books, and pamphlets that are now in print form as well as information that currently reside on CDs. Once the XML conversion is complete, apply HTML (Hypertext Mark-up Language) styling to the content for display on the web. We convert contents from various proprietary formats-such as word processing and graphics software-into the XML format, which consists of content- descriptive tags. Foresighted companies are doing the conversion to XML now. Once the conversion of existing content is completed, maintaining and updating the original source is relatively simple.



No question, getting your company's data into SGML/XML is a smart thing to do. However, before you dive right in, stop and consider the benefits that differentiate SGML/XML from older formats. It is important to get a handle on these issues before embarking on a conversion project, because otherwise you are apt to miss XML's most valuable benefits. SGML/XML focuses on categorizing content saving time and money. A well thought out and meticulously applied tag set will let you enjoy the full benefits of XML. A hastily conceived or sloppily applied tag set will yield a result that may technically qualify as XML but wont let you benefit from XML's strengths.



When converting to SGML/XML, however, the emphasis is on text and structure, not text and appearance. In addition, unlike appearance information, structure information is often not present in the original document. Off-the-shelf software tools are incapable of accurately inferring, in an arbitrary context, how a specific paragraph is supposed to be tagged. Companies that specialize in SGML/XML conversions usually develop a suite of proprietary software conversion tools, and then customize them for each client's needs.

Data Entry Services

Data entry outsourcing is becoming common place. This can be competitive advantage for a company. It can outsource data entry to someone reliable that specializes in the field of data entry. This is especially true of companies that require intensive Data conversion, Data Processing , HCFA-1500, UB92 & ADA-94, insurance claims processing, Xml, Sgml, Html & more data entry services – like data entry of insurance documents, data entry for medical claims processing (HFCA 1500, UB 92, ADA), data entry for employees benefit forms and any business that needs data to be extracted from any documents. Many companies today prefer to outsource data entry to offshore locations, as it proves to be a cost effective solution.



Rely, has implemented a large number of electronic data and document conversion projects for its customers from different industry verticals, around the world. Our Specially trained operators are experts in handwriting analysis and can retrieve difficult handwriting for customers. At Rely, we offer most comprehensive range of high quality turnkey outsourcing solution to any and every business segment that partially and completely uses manual data entry.



We offer the following services Volume Data Entry (Handwritten / Printed), PDF Conversion, Open-Ended Research Coding, Scanning, OCR Cleanup, Bulk Bill/Order Processing, Abstracting and Indexing, Medical/Insurance Claims - compliant with HIPAA (HCFA, UB 92, ADA-94), E-books publishing, Catalog Conversion and Digitization, Data Extraction, Tabulation and Analysis, Online Data Entry and Remote Verification, Internet Research, Email Mining and Customized List Making, HTML/XML/SGML Coding with DTD Design,
The data input can come from paper documents, image files, old databases, microfilms, and output could be in ASCII format, COBOL, PDF, MS Word, MS Excel, SGML, HTML, XML, or any proprietary software format.



We offer data conversion, data entry, data processing, form processing, image processing, html markup services in English, and in languages based on the English alphabet. These include French, Italian, Spanish, German, Portuguese. Our highly trained staff is willing to add many more services to our credit. Therefore, do not hesitate to contact us if you do not find the service you are seeking among those listed above. Rely, has implemented various data entry services projects for its customers from different industry verticals, around the globe. Feel free to ask about services that you do not see.

the Nokia E50

The E50 is quad-band phone that attempts to provide PDA-style functionality with the small form factor and weight of a standard cell phone. Nokia has succeeded in doing this nicely, but they’ve had to make a few compromises along the way that I’ll discuss in greater detail in the review. The display is another of the big compromises that Nokia had to make. While the screen has an excellent resolution of 240 x 320, that resolution is crammed into a fairly small space. This has both positive and negative consequences. On the plus side the pixels are so small that they aren’t really discernable, thus making the things you see on the screen seem very smoothly rendered.



On the minus side the screen is difficult to see unless you have the eyes of an eagle, or you have to wear glasses to correct myopia. Those of you who wear glasses to see far away know that when they take their glasses off they can focus very close to objects and can see levels of detail that require a magnifying glass for others. The screen on the E50 uses fonts that are so tiny that being able to focus closely to the screen is needed to comfortably read them. This can seriously impact upon the usefulness of the device and I strongly recommend that you check this out to make sure you won’t have trouble reading the screen.



The 1.3 megapixel camera on the E50 is about mid-pack when it comes to quality. It fairs well against the 1.3 megapixel camera in my Motorola i580, but there are a few issues that make this camera less useful than the one on the Motorola phone. The first is a common fault with Nokia cameras, which is a high level of digital noise in low light conditions. More importantly however, this also applies to the darker regions of brightly-lit subjects, which makes it impossible to adjust the shadows and highlights using software such as Photoshop. Bringing up the shadows in an E50 photo only enhances the noise that’s already there and the results are disappointing to say the least.



You can expand the memory in the E50 by means of a MicroSD card. My only complaint about the placement of the card slot was that you had to take off the battery door to get at it. Fortunately you don’t really to need get at all that much at all, as the phone acts as a Mass Storage Device via USB. This means that if you plug it into a Windows XP computer the operating system will automatically see the phone as a hard drive without the need to install any drivers. However, the phone must go “offline” while such a connection is made.

Sony Ericsson W300i

The Sony Ericsson W300i is a low-end quad-band GSM phone. It sports lots of features that make it seem higher-end than it really is, such as a camera, MP3 player, Bluetooth, removable memory stick, voice activation, and speakerphone. This has to be one of the quietest-ringing phones I’ve ever tested. While it’s great that you can assign pretty much anything you want as a ringtone, including voice notes you record yourself, the overall volume of the ringers (even with the ringer volume turned up to maximum) is laughably faint. Don’t count on hearing this phone ring in a crowded shopping mall.



Keypad Design: After experiencing the featureless flat keypad of the Motorola PEBL/RAZR it was hard to imagine that anyone could conceive of a worse keypad, but kudos to Sony Ericsson for pulling off the impossible. Clearly the keypad on the W300i was designed for looks and not for functionality.
While the keys press with good tactile feel, the problem is the ridiculous overlapped design. I don’t exactly have monster thumbs, but mine are too big to accurately use the keypad on the W300i without accidentally actuating the key above. I can only image how much a pest this thing is going to be for men with even larger thumbs. Perhaps woman (or men) with small thumbs won’t have a problem with this.



The 4-way cursor key is actually not bad, except the itty-bitty recessed excuse for a center button. Thankfully the function of that button is almost always duplicated on the left softkey, which in itself suggests that the engineers at Sony Ericsson knew full well that the key was too small.
Like the Motorola PEBL, I must admit that the W300i does many of the aspects I rate highly in a phone quite well. It has pretty decent audio quality and pretty decent RF performance, and it has a useable speakerphone and a good display. Sadly it does so many things wrong too, including a horrific keypad, faint ringtones, and a camera that’s so bad it barely matters whether the phone has one or not.



The price is ridiculous if bought outright or on a prepaid plan, but it drops to $25 if you are willing to go with a 3-year contract. At only $25 the phone’s overall lack of refinement is quite excusable and it’s good qualities (namely audio and RF) may well be worth the other annoyances at this price point.

The Nokia 6126

This a new Nokia clamshell phone offered to Canadians through Fido. Nokia hasn’t really started to make clamshell phones until just recently, but the 6126 proves that they got the right idea right away. The model I tested was provided courtesy of TelecomZombie (that’s his HowardForums name). Once again, Nokia have gone out of their way to use up the real estate in as effective a way as possible. The 6126 has a positively huge 240 x 320 pixel color display with 24-bit color depth (16.7 million colors) that looks gorgeous. It could do with being a bit brighter, but aside from that it’s one of the nicest clamshell displays I’ve tested in quite some time.



The phone also has a color external display with a resolution of 128 x 160 pixels. There are phones that can’t even boast that kind of resolution on the main displays. The quality of that outer display is low compared to that of the inside display, but it serves it purpose very well. It even displays what the camera sees for doing self-portraits. The phone uses MicroSD cards to provide addition memory for photos and MP3 files. Presently MicroSD cards are available up to 1 GB, but there is a SanDisk 2 GB card presently available exclusively through a US provider. Once they become readily available they might work on the 6126, depending upon whether Nokia correctly implemented the interface. Apparently a number of other phones that use MicroSD cards can only “see” up to 1 GB.



Battery Life: I don't normally get a chance to test battery life, and even though I didn't have the 6126 in my possession for long, it aptly demonstrated how generally poor the charge life is. After I'd first received the phone I full charged it overnight, but within about 3 days the battery had dropped to only 1 bar and the total amount of usage hadn't been all that great. For those of us who charge their phones each night, this isn't really an issue, but users who require that their phones can operated solely upon batteries for prolonged periods of time, or with heavy use, may find the standard batter in the 6126 a bit weak.



While this might not be the perfect GSM phone, I can find very little to complain about, with the exception of the outgoing sound quality in noisy environments and lackluster battery life. If I were looking to switch back to GSM I’d certainly put this phone at the top of my candidate list. I even like the overall styling, both inside and out, especially the way the top of the clamshell is actually shorter than the bottom. They blend the two halves together in a very elegant manner. The phone is a tad expensive if bought without a contract, but you get a really top-notch phone that includes all sorts of goodies, such as Bluetooth, an MP3 player (that will play MP3, MP4, eAAC+, & WMA formats), a 1.3-megapixel camera, a huge display, and Class-10 EDGE connectivity.

The LG 8100

The LG 8100 is multi-media phone that supports a 1.3 megapixel camera, an MP3 player, streaming audio and video, and it has a price tag to match. However, as you'll read in this review, it fails in far too many core aspects to worth what they're charging for it. The worst aspect of the sound is that it seems to go up and down in volume (quite noticeably) for no particular reason. I thought the phone I’d tested was a lemon, but I checked around on the Internet and I found message after message from people complaining of exactly the same thing. Typically the volume can drop so low that you’ll barely be able to heard your caller. It might spring back to normal on its own, but you typically have to end the call and start another one.



On the other hand, outgoing sound quality is actually quite good. In fact, this is one of the better CDMA phones for outgoing audio. It copes exceptionally well with loud background noises, such as an opened window while driving down the highway. Oddly it seems that each time I find a CDMA phone on which the outgoing audio is great, the incoming is horrible. I guess the LG 8100 didn’t want to buck the trend.
The speakers on the LG 8100 are quite good. They’re mounted at either end of the hinge and they produce relatively good reasonably good sound reproduction.



Unfortunately they aren’t very loud in speakerphone mode, and so the feature is really only useable in a very quiet environment. A weird aspect of the speakerphone feature is that in order to switch between normal mode and speakerphone mode you must press AND HOLD the speaker button for about a second. This is annoying and not very intuitive. Another weird thing is that the phone doesn’t switch back to normal mode after a call, and so if you were using speakerphone on your last call, you’ll be using on your next call, whether you expect it or not. This is also annoying.
The quality of this 1.3 megapixel camera is definitely sub-par. Shots are generally dark and there is a lot of noise in those dark areas (even in well-lit shots). Attempting to correct the darkness of a shot using software such as Photoshop simply brings up the noise and the pictures look awful. Compared to the Nokia E50 and Motorola i580 that I had along with me for comparison, the pictures from the LG 8100 were rather disappointing.



MP3 Player and Streaming Music: Luckily I got to try out an LG 8100 that was hooked up with a Spark plan that included the XM satellite radio feature. It works exceptionally well on the 8100 and the audio quality is at least as good as you get from a dedicated XM receiver. The MP3 player software was fine, though certainly not among the best out there, and well behind a typical iPod.

The Nokia 6126

This a new Nokia clamshell phone offered to Canadians through Fido. Nokia hasn’t really started to make clamshell phones until just recently, but the 6126 proves that they got the right idea right away. The model I tested was provided courtesy of TelecomZombie (that’s his HowardForums name). Once again, Nokia have gone out of their way to use up the real estate in as effective a way as possible. The 6126 has a positively huge 240 x 320 pixel color display with 24-bit color depth (16.7 million colors) that looks gorgeous. It could do with being a bit brighter, but aside from that it’s one of the nicest clamshell displays I’ve tested in quite some time.



The phone also has a color external display with a resolution of 128 x 160 pixels. There are phones that can’t even boast that kind of resolution on the main displays. The quality of that outer display is low compared to that of the inside display, but it serves it purpose very well. It even displays what the camera sees for doing self-portraits. The phone uses MicroSD cards to provide addition memory for photos and MP3 files. Presently MicroSD cards are available up to 1 GB, but there is a SanDisk 2 GB card presently available exclusively through a US provider. Once they become readily available they might work on the 6126, depending upon whether Nokia correctly implemented the interface. Apparently a number of other phones that use MicroSD cards can only “see” up to 1 GB.



Battery Life: I don't normally get a chance to test battery life, and even though I didn't have the 6126 in my possession for long, it aptly demonstrated how generally poor the charge life is. After I'd first received the phone I full charged it overnight, but within about 3 days the battery had dropped to only 1 bar and the total amount of usage hadn't been all that great. For those of us who charge their phones each night, this isn't really an issue, but users who require that their phones can operated solely upon batteries for prolonged periods of time, or with heavy use, may find the standard batter in the 6126 a bit weak.



While this might not be the perfect GSM phone, I can find very little to complain about, with the exception of the outgoing sound quality in noisy environments and lackluster battery life. If I were looking to switch back to GSM I’d certainly put this phone at the top of my candidate list. I even like the overall styling, both inside and out, especially the way the top of the clamshell is actually shorter than the bottom. They blend the two halves together in a very elegant manner. The phone is a tad expensive if bought without a contract, but you get a really top-notch phone that includes all sorts of goodies, such as Bluetooth, an MP3 player (that will play MP3, MP4, eAAC+, & WMA formats), a 1.3-megapixel camera, a huge display, and Class-10 EDGE connectivity.

The Pantech 3200

Pantech is a name unfamiliar with most North Americans, but they’ve been around making cell phones for quite some time (usually for other name brands). The PN-3200 is the first model to be marketed under their own name here in Canada and it gets them off to a fairly good start. Except for slightly harsh tonal quality, low-volume ringers, a poor speakerphone, a few other minor quibbles, the Pantech 3200 is actually quite a good phone. It has exceptional outgoing sound with incredible resistance to background noise, excellent RF performance, plenty of earpiece volume, and reasonable over-the-road performance. You could hardly ask for more, except perhaps a lower price.



Price is sadly the major problem with the 3200. As it stands the phone is an excellent entry-to-mid-level model, but it’s priced much closer to the upper end than anything in the range in which it falls. It is unavoidable to compare the 3200 with the Nokia 6265i because Telus prices that phone only $50 higher when the phone is bought outright and only $30 more on a 3-year contract. What does that extra $50 buy you? The list is rather extensive and reads like a laundry list of must-have features in modern cell phones.



The 6265i offers a higher-resolution screen (320 x 240 vs 220 x 176), a higher-resolution camera (2.0 mega-pixels vs 0.3 mega-pixels), external memory cards (up to 2 GB), an MP3 player, full-featured Bluetooth including OBEX, and the ability to put your own material on the phone without going through Telus and paying big time for the privilege. Add to that much smoother tonal balance, and slightly better over-the-road performance, and it’s hard to think of any reason not to spring for the extra $50 and go for the Nokia. To be fair, the 6265i has slightly lower earpiece volume and poorer ability to cope with background noise on outgoing calls, but that’s hardly a damning list.



I normally don’t compare two phones on the basis of price in my conclusions section, but the vast gap between the features and capabilities of the Nokia 6265i and the Pantech 3200, combined with a minimal price difference, makes this comparison inevitable. It’s really too bad for the 3200, because it is a phone worthy of your consideration. However, like the personnel officer who must choose between 2 almost equally-talented applicants, they’re going to choose the one with the better degree, or the greater work experience, or something else that distinguishes one from other. To complete analogy therefore, the Pantech 3200 is the applicant with a high school diploma going up against an equally-talented contender with a university degree. We all know who ends up with the job.

The Nokia N80

The N80 is one of a series of slider phones from Nokia that incorporates the Symbian operating system and provides a host of PDA-style functions in a device with a phone-like form factor. The N80 is not presently offered by any of the Canada providers, but it can, like any GSM phone that supports the frequencies using in North America (850 and 1900 MHz), be bought through a retailer and used on any of the GSM providers in North America.



The N80 also includes 802.11g WiFi, which allows you to hook up to standard WiFi networks and hotspots to avoid using GSM-based data connections. For some reason however, the N80 seems incapable of authenticating on a the WPA/WPA2 encrypted connection (with or without TKIP), which covers most of the standard security setting for home wireless routers. Both Howard Chu & I went through the various settings in a vain attempt to get it to work, but each time we tried we were told that the phone had been unable to authenticate. It does however work well with an open (unencrypted) WiFi network.



The Symbian Operating System: I’ve never had a problem with Symbian operating system, but its implementation in the N80 is very slow. You’d be surprised how long it takes to do just about anything, and to make matter worse there appears to be no key buffering. If you press a key too quickly, you’ll have to press it again once the operation you started with the previous key has completed.
There were all sorts of annoyances that one wouldn’t expect to find on a cell phone. For example, when a new voicemail message, MMS message, or text message arrives, you can’t actually make a call until you get rid of the warnings from the screen.



Perhaps the biggest annoyance isn’t the fault of the Symbian operating system, but the physical lack of separate volume keys. As on a number of other Nokia models, volume is adjusted using the left and right cursor keys, which is fine under most circumstances. However, if you press any numeric keys during your call (such as when access your voicemail) you cannot adjust the volume until you have cleared all of they keystrokes from the display. If you’ve already pressed left or right before realizing you need to clear the display first, you must ALSO move the cursor back to the beginning of the line before it is even possible to clear ALL of the characters. What idiot thought up this idea? Why doesn’t the phone have separate volume keys?
The N80 includes a MiniSD card slot, which unlike other Nokia models is actually accessible WITHOUT having to remove the battery door. Currently MiniSD cards are available in sizes up to 2 GB, which gives you plenty of storage space for the relatively large photographs the camera takes (up to 1 MB per image) and for lots of MP3 files.



I really ended up with mixed feelings about this phone. It has excellent RF performance and audio, as well as some exceptional features, including a terrific camera. However, it is a slug when it comes to normal phone operation and it has annoyances galore that make the day-to-day use of the phone a royal pain-in-the-ass. I also found the earpiece to be uncomfortable after prolonged use, and getting the best volume from it requires finding a rather small sweet spot.

The Nokia 6061

The Nokia 6061 is a no-nonsense entry-level phone offered by both Fido and 7-11. While it doesn’t have the great audio quality of higher-end Nokias, or glitzy features like a camera, or an MP3 player, it still offers solid performance and plenty of power for a reasonable price. For the most part I this keypad. For once we have a 4-way cursor key that’s easy to use, even for those with large thumbs. The keys surrounding the 4-way cursor pad are also huge and easy-to-press.



The numeric keys are a little small and it’s difficult to tell one key from the one next to it, though it is easy to tell one row from the next by feel. So, while I would personally make the numeric keys a bit bigger (and a bit more distinct) if I was designing the phone, the overall keypad execution is very good. The display is 128 x 160 pixels with a color depth of 16 bits (32,000 colors). While that is rather low-res by today’s standards, it’s more than adequate for an entry-level phone.
It’s also easy to see in bright sunlight and produces fairly nice color. One could hardly ask for more in a phone in this class. The 6061 does not have an external display however, which is very odd on a clamshell models these days. It means you’ll have to open the phone to see whose calling you, but at the same time its one less thing to scratch up.



As an entry-level model the Nokia 6061 is almost the perfect phone. The audio is a bit tinny, but aside from that it provides it users with core functionality that’s almost as good as a high-end phone. There are lots of other surprising features, such as a useable speakerphone, alarm clock, calendar & to-do lists, and MMS messaging. I wouldn’t have any problem recommending this phone to those looking for a no-nonsense model.



Yes the 6061 comes off wanting in the audio department compared to the Motorola PEBL, but the 6061 is also a much less expensive phone, especially when purchased on contract. However, its $115 price tag when purchased outright is a tad high for the features offered by this phone, but it’s a solid performer that’s hard to beat with anything selling for less.

Review of the Motorola PEBL

The Motorola PEBL is a stylish, if a tad impractical, phone offered by Fido. It is the first phone from Motorola that I’ve tested since the days of the P280/V60 that possesses Motorola’s excellent audio and RF qualities.
The little speaker used for the speakerphone is also used for the ringer, which like virtually all phones on the market these days can play MP3 files. There aren’t a lot of loud ringtones available on the phone, but some are at least loud enough to suffice. Fortunately the vibrator is quite strong and if you set the phone to ring and vibrate simultaneously, you can at least feel the phone, even if you can’t hear it.



Ugh! The keypad on the PEBL (like the similar one found on the RAZR) is an excellent example of functionality taking a backseat to looks. The design is arguable no worse than a standard flush design, and so long as you are careful where you place your fingers you shouldn’t have too much trouble. However, like flush keypad designs it suffers from being nearly impossible to use without paying careful attention to it. In addition, because the digits aren’t horizontally aligned, shifting your thumb over from any of the middle keys (2, 5, or 8) will put it right in the middle of two of the outer keys.



The 4-way cursor pad is a more traditional design, but it’s really tiny and it’s difficult to feel where your thumb is at any given time. While it isn’t the worst 4-way pad I’ve ever tried, it certainly comes close.
I’ve often said that if a phone had solid core functionality that I’d love it no matter how poorly it did everything else. The PEBL is just such a phone. It has excellent RF and audio qualities while offering very little extra and a horrific keypad. The PEBL is clearly designed to be a fashion phone, but with good core functionality in there too, it’s certainly a great fashion phone.



The problem is how Fido prices this model. If bought outright the price of $350 is just way too much for what you get. On the other hand, Fido really discounts the price if you are willing to sign with a 2 or 3 year contract. On a 2 year contract the price drops dramatically to only $100, which actually makes it only $35 more than a bottom-end Nokia 6061. On a 3 year contract the price drops to $50. So, if you are willing to sign a contract, the price is not bad, but if you prefer month-to-month or pre-paid, the PEBL is a bit pricy.

Nokia 6233

The Nokia 6233 isn’t presently available through any of the Canadian providers, so if you want one you’ll have to order it online or buy it at a retailer that carries one. The camera in the 6233 is 2-megapixel type and of approximately equal quality to the one provided in the 6265i. It takes good photographs, but like all Nokia cameras, it suffers from too much noise in the shadows (even in well-lit pictures). As I’ve often noted, this makes it difficult to use software such as Photoshop to fix the shadows & highlights to compensate for a poor exposure. Bringing up the shadows just makes the noise more obvious.



On the other hand, the videos that the 6233 can capture are light years better than any other phone I've tested. While the results wouldn't hold a candle to those from a digital camcorder, they are shocking good nonetheless. Instead of some ridiculously low resolution (typically 176 x 144) the 6233 can render video at an amazing 640 x 480 (virtually at NTSC resolution of 720 x 480). The frame rate is a little slower than standard TV and when lots of things change from frame to frame (such as during a pan) the quality seems less than great, but for normal levels of motion it's really excellent.
Data compression in the video recordings is also kept to a minimum, thus ridding the video of those super-annoying compression blocks that mess up the results from most other phones. However, it means that videos recorded at this rate are quite large. A 27-second sample video Howard & I made turned out to be almost 6.5 MB in size. While approximately 14 MB per minute is a far cry from the almost 220 MB per minute consumed by DV tapes, it's a big step forward for cell phones.
Note that the phone supports various lower-resolution settings (including 176 x 144, and even a super-low-res video mode of 128 x 56) and various higher compression settings. To get the results noted above you have to set all of the video settings to their highest levels.



Bluetooth: While support of Bluetooth isn't anything unusual these days, the support of the A2DP profile is. Only the most recent version of the firmware adds support for this profile, but it shouldn't be difficult to get your copy of the phone updated if you have an older version that doesn't offer A2DP.
So what's this A2DP profile all about? It's essentially a high-fidelity stereo standard that allows you to listen to full-fidelity music through headsets that connect to the phone via Bluetooth. I was quite impressed with the implementation for 2 reasons, the most obvious being the ability to listen to MP3 files in full-fidelity. However, the profile was much more tolerant of bit errors than the standard headset profile when used to take calls. This means that you rarely get any of that robotic quality that occurs with standard Bluetooth headsets when there is interference to the signal.



This is a very impressive Nokia phone, and with its excellent over-the-road showing during my tests it might well be the best-behaved model to come from them in ages. Its lack of 850 MHz support however, will put some people off, especially those who travel extensively in rural parts of the country. Those who use their phones almost exclusively in urban settings won’t find that missing 850 MHz is a huge problem, but I’ll leave that argument to the 850-is-next-to-godliness debaters on HowardForums.

Palm Treo 700wx

The Treo 700wx is the CDMA Windows Smartphone edition of the Treo 700. As usual, this review is not to critique the non-phone aspects of the device, which means I won’t pass judgment on the Windows operating system or on any of the data-centric things that you can do with this model. My focus, as always, is on the phone portion of the device.



The Treo 700 offers optional WiFi, but only as an add-on. In order to use WiFi you must plug the provided WiFi adapter into the SD card slot. This means you cannot have any expanded memory available while connected to the Internet via WiFi, though I'm told you can get a WiFi card with memory built into it. Nonetheless, the arrangement smacks of afterthought, which is exactly the impression I got from the phone functionality. Plenty of other Smartphone and PDA models have WiFi built directly into the device and do not subject you to such limitations.



The camera in the Treo 700 is a 1.3 megapixel unit, but the quality of the photographs is very disappointing. All of the pictures I took using the Treo and my Motorola i580 (which also has a 1.3 megapixel camera) revealed that the one in the Treo is fuzzy-looking. It’s almost as though the image sensor has lower-than-1.3-meaapixels resolution and then the image is sampled up to 1280 x 1024. I ensured that the lens was spotless before taking the shots, but they still came out fuzzy. Here are links to a few of the samples and their associated shots taken with the i580.



Any other uses notwithstanding, the Treo 700wx is possessed of one of the worst CDMA phones I’ve tested in ages. It’s horrible sound quality, atrocious over-the-road performance, frustrating little keypad, and inability to cope well with background noise during conversations makes it a terrible choice for those looking for a quality phone to go along with their data-centric device. While it seems endemic throughout the industry to provide second-rate phones on PDA devices, the Treo takes this to a new low. Unless you absolutely want a Palm running Windows, you’d do yourself a big favor to look elsewhere.

Review of the LG TG800F

The LG TG800F is the GSM version of the Chocolate. While Fido doesn’t seem to use the name Chocolate on their web page, the box and user guide for the phone do refer to it as such. The big selling point of the chocolate line is its use of touch-sensitive keys for many of the buttons on the phone (though the numeric keypad is still a standard mechanical type). Earpiece Volume: On this score the phone does very well, with my only complaint being that there are too few volume gradients. One setting may be a bit too loud, while the next lowest may be not loud enough. Aside from that however, the native earpiece can generate clean sound at volumes most phones only dream of. It therefore works very well in loud environments, except that the sound gets harsher as the volume increases.



Outgoing Audio: Sadly, this is one aspect of the audio that’s noticeably sub-par. My own recordings to voicemail, as well as comments from various people I spoke to using the phone, demonstrated that the TG800F has rather fuzzy-sounding audio quality that’s also a little faint. One caller described it as sounding like I wasn’t talking directly into the microphone. Everyone agreed it wasn’t loud enough.
Keypad Design: Technically there two different keypads on this phone and each warrants its own critique. The number keys are standard mechanical types that are exposed when the phone is slid open. They are well-spaced, but for the most part they are flush and it is difficult to discern one from the other strictly by feel. All of these keys pressed well and did their jobs in an accurate fashion, but they are a little mushy and are a bit short on solid tactile feel.



One of my biggest complaints about the numeric keypad had nothing to do with its physical construction, but rather the phone’s slow response to them during a call. When you must type digits during a call (such as those times when you have to key-in information) the lag time between pressing a key and hearing the touchtone is longer than on any phone I’ve ever tested. I could find no way to turn off the tones (even if you turn off key sounds completely), and so there is no way to bypass this issue.



The second keypad is really the selling point of the Chocolate line. On the face of the phone, immediately below the screen, are a series of touch-sensitive keys that really have no physical existence except for light-up symbols. Whenever the keys are active, the lights behind them are on. If the lights are off, there are effectively no keys there. They aren’t really touch-sensitive, in that they don’t use pressure to actuate. They appear to be proximity sensors, and because of that they do not work if you are wearing even thin driving gloves.
If everything about the TG800F was merely average, I’d still recommend it, but it fails so uttering when it comes to outgoing audio that I have trouble endorsing this model. You’ll constantly punish your callers with mediocre sound quality at the best of times, and horrible problems when background noise is present.



Most of the desirability of this phone is derived from the touch-sensitive keypad, but if you are the type that reads my review of phones to find out how well they work as phones, then you won’t be likely to choose a glitzy feature over mediocre performance.

the Sony-Ericsson z710i

The Sony-Ericsson z701i is a quad-band GSM clamshell phone that’s loaded with lots of features like a good-quality 2 megapixel camera, built-in MP3 player (with external buttons), GPRS/EDGE, and as you’ll soon see, excellent audio and RF characteristics.
I really don’t know where Sony-Ericsson’s thinking is in this regard. They give you only one ringtone that even remotely approaches a standard ringer. The rest are relatively faint (though nice-sounding) MIDI files. The volume of the one ringtone that actually has a bit of volume isn’t that great, and so you’ll probably want to load something loud yourself. Sadly, Fido’s version of this phone disallows the use of MP3 files as ringtones. This seems to be one area where all the Sony-Ericsson phones I’ve tested recently fall flat.


The internal display is 176 x 220 pixels with 18-bit (262,000) color. The backlight is bright and the overall use of the screen by the phone’s UI is generally quite handsome. The outer display is 128 x 128 pixel monochrome screen with 4-level grayscale. The outer display uses reverse (white on dark blue) and it’s rather difficult to see in bright sunlight. The inner display works well in bright sunlight however and the graphics engine in the phone seems more than up to the task of providing smooth animated effects.


To test the provided MP3 player I had only the provided stereo earbuds, as the phone used a proprietary connector and it did not come with an adapter for standard 3.5 mm headsets. The quality of those provided stereo earbuds was sub-standard to say the least. They could generate a fairly decent amount of bass, but their overall reproduction was poor. I therefore couldn’t judge if the MP3 player was all that great. I certainly wouldn’t use those earbuds for phone calls, as the overall quality was well below that of the native earpiece.


I really like this phone. Not only does it have exceptional RF and audio capabilities, it also provides a lot of great features, a half-decent phonebook, a good camera, and nice ergonomics. It now stands as my choice as the phone I WOULD USE if I had to abandon Telus Mike and switch to Rogers/Fido. Yes, the phone is locked to Fido, but I’m sure it can easily be unlocked to work on Rogers or 7-11 (same network, different price plans).
The price is a bit steep for pre-paid and month-to-month users (at $325), but if you don’t mind signing up for a 3-year contract with Fido the price falls to a very reasonable $75.

The Motorola i880

The i880 is essentially a mini version of the i580, but with a few minor improvements (such as a 2.0 megapixel camera vs 1.3 megapixels, color external display, external MP3 player buttons, and the ability to access the MicroSD while it is in the phone). It’s very similar in many ways, but just different enough to be worthy of your consideration. To be quite honest, I haven't found any detectable difference in the RF sensitivity in any of the iDEN phones I’ve tested in the last 3 years, and the i880 is no exception. Motorola has provided the same stellar ability to pull in weak signals on every single iDEN phone they’ve built during that time. You’ll see the occasional message threads out there in which the posters claim one model is better than other, but in my testing I’ve never been able to find evidence of that.


Over-the-road Performance: This is another aspect of all iDEN phones that has remained consistently good over the last 3 years, though with the release of the i580 there was a slight increase in the tolerance of the phones to network issues. The i880 continues that improvement, but doesn’t cope any better (or any worse) than the excellent i580. Speakerphone: The i880 forward-facing stereo speakers just like the i580 and the initial assumption was that the i880’s smaller size would result in either lower volume or poorer tonal quality. While it did seem as though the i880 was a little less rich-sounding that the larger i580, there really wasn’t much difference in the two. I switched between each by simultaneous pressing the speaker button atop the phones to switch one from earpiece to speaker and the other from speaker to earpiece. There was certainly no difference in volume, and any tonal differences were slight at best.


The i880 is an excellent substitute for the i580 if you want a phone that’s smaller, lighter, and less industrial-looking. However, the i880 doesn’t offer much that the i580 does, with the exceptions of a better quality camera, a physically larger display, external MP3 buttons, and a color outer display. I hadn’t originally planned to replace my i580 with an i880, but the allure of less hiss and a better camera finally won me over.


The bottom line is: buy the i580 if you want a rugged phone that will survive shock, dust, vibration, and water. Buy an i880 if you don’t need that sort of ruggedness, or you would prefer a more cellphone-like model with a better quality camera.

The Nokia E65

The E65 is yet another slider-style Smart Phone from Nokia, once again sporting the Symbian operating system. It also includes a 2-megapixel camera, MicroSD expansion slot, and support for WCDMA at 2100 MHz (though this band isn't used in North America). The phone was tested only on the standard GSM voice network presently offered by Rogers (and by extension, Fido, 7-11, and other virtual network providers who use the Rogers network).


The E65 has approximately the same over-the-road performance as most other Nokia models I’ve tested, which is to say okay, but hardly stellar. Handoffs are generally tamer than in earlier Nokia models, but the number of handoffs and the overall network experience while on the move is decidedly sub-par compared the recently-tested Sony-Ericsson z710i. If it weren’t for the z710i I might be more impressed with the E65, but alas technology marches on and the z710i raises the bar. That leaves the E65 looking like old-tech.


Outgoing sound quality was nice, but the phone had a nasty habit of picking every little scrap of background noise and sending it along to your caller. For example, MOST phones suppress background noise well enough that using them in a reasonably quiet car at 60 km/h wouldn’t give your callers any clue that you were driving. Under the same conditions with the E65 however, your callers will be quite aware that you are driving.


I tried the driving-past-a-tractor-trailer-with-the-window down test and the E65 failed miserably. While such noisy conditions are unusual, they do demonstrate just how well a phone can cope with background noise. While some phones I’ve tested can continue to transmit quite understandable audio under such severe conditions, the E65 is totally impossible to make out.


So while the E65 possesses excellent fit & finish, decent RF sensitivity, and good earpiece volume, not much else really got my attention. Virtually every other aspect of the phone was in some way inferior to what one could expect from other phones on the market, including other Nokia models. It’s not a terrible phone by any stretch of the imagination, but despite some of its gee-whiz features, it fails to rise above mediocre.

Nokia 1600

The Nokia 1600 is a basic no-nonsense low-end phone offered by 7-11 on their Speakout Wireless service. There’s no camera, no MP3 player, and no expansion memory slot, but there’s plenty of features for those looking for just-a-phone. This is one area where the Nokia 1600 really shines. I compared it against the Siemens A56, which is a phone with an excellent reputation for good RF sensitivity. Most phones that I rate highly usually match the performance of the A56, or beat it ever so slightly.


The 1600 however, actually beat the A56 by enough to be quite noticeable.
I ran the tests in a couple of known weak spots for Rogers inside of Square One shopping mall in Mississauga. The first was in the lower level of Sears, which is a great place to test the performance of phones at 850 MHz. I was able to take the 1600 into places on the lower level of Sears and maintain reasonable call quality where the A56 broke up or even dropped the call.


Like tonal balance, the ability of the phone to reproduce the nuances of speech is quite good, but not quite stellar. Part of the problem is a detectable background hiss that seems to change somewhat with the overall sound. In other words, it isn’t just hiss, but a distortion in the sound that takes away from overall clarity. Still, it outranks quite a few more expensive phones on the market, and so given the low-end roll in life, it’s hard to find fault here.



Earpiece Volume: Sadly the earpiece volume is only adequate in many circumstances, and rather faint in others. Not only is the maximum volume of this phone mediocre, but the volume boost feature seems reluctant to kick in when you need it. At first I wasn’t even sure there was a volume boost feature, but I finally found conditions that would trigger it. I personally wish Nokia would just provide more overhead in their volume settings rather than relying on this method of compensating for loud conditions. It can get annoying when the phone constantly raises and lowers the volume.


While this is hardly one of the best Nokias I’ve ever tested, it has very little wrong with it and as a low-end starter phone its tough to beat. It has excellent RF characteristics, reasonable audio quality, a great speakerphone, and reasonably loud ringtones. It’s certainly one of the best phones presently sold by 7-11, and given its mission in life you would be hard pressed to find a better phone for the same money.

What is UMTS?

If UMTS is part of GSM, then what exactly is the difference between it and what we presently know as GSM? There is a tendency to refer to the old service as strictly GSM, but I need to clarify that calling it that is a bit of a misnomer. GSM is actually the name given to the entire system upon which a cell phone and its service are part. The term GSM encompasses everything from the air interface to the way in which the switches interact with one another, as well as to the landlines to which they connect. However, in this context we are using GSM to refer to the old 2.5G service that most North American’s know as GSM. UMTS is the new iteration of the GSM air interface.



Okay, so now that we have the nitpicks out of way, let’s delve into the differences between the old and the new air interfaces. The original GSM service was based on a TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) scheme. This approach broke up a single channel into various “slots”, which phones took turns transmitting on in order to share the channel. The new UMTS service uses a CDMA (Code Division Multiple Access) scheme.



That immediate begs comparison to the existing networks that most North Americans refer to generically as CDMA (which, like GSM, is a bit of a misnomer). Currently the big CDMA providers include Bell Mobility, Telus, Sprint PCS, and Verizon. The comparison is certainly a valid one, but rest assured that both of these systems are quite different, though they are based on a similar air interface technology.



But getting back to GSM, a big difference between a TDMA-based system and a CDMA-based system is how the phone deals with handing off from one cell site to another. In TDMA-based systems the phone must wholeheartedly switch from one channel to another in order to switch towers. There are no halfway measures here, it’s all or nothing. As a result, all TDMA-based GSM phones suffer from slight (but rather annoying) interruptions in the audio stream whenever a handoff occurs, and if one doesn’t occur in a timely fashion, the user can experience rather devastating degradation of the call quality.

HTC P4000

The HTC P4000 is a Windows Mobile device (though sadly only Windows Mobile 5, and not the most recent version 6). As usual, my reason for testing the device is NOT to look at its suitability as a mobile computing platform, but rather at the quality of the built-in cellular phone.


Ring volume is okay, but it could do with being much louder if you expect to hear it in a noisy environment. Under noisy conditions you will probably have to rely on the vibrator to alert you to incoming calls. Fortunately the vibrator is quite powerful, and so this might be enough to compensate for the ringer volume, so long as you carry the device in close enough proximity to your body to feel it.



I transferred a copy of the super-load ringtone I use in my i880 and it wasn’t too shabby, though it was still magnitudes quieter than the same ringtone coming out of my Motorola iDEN phone. I guess the lesson here is, to get the most out of a rather limited resource, it’s best to choose your ringtones wisely. As with most PDA-phones, the display looks great indoors, but it’s difficult to read in direct sunlight. When lighting isn’t an issue, the screen has excellent color clarity and it provides sharp images and very readable text.



The 2-megapixel camera is not bad, but hardly better than most other 2-megapixel camera-phones. On the plus side it has good lens linearity, surprisingly little digital noise in low lighting conditions, and a positively huge viewfinder. On the downside however, it has trouble keeping the colors true when there are varying light conditions in the shot, and it produces very odd ramping effects on sharp edges. Overall however, you’ll be reasonably pleased with the results once you get used to using it.



I’ve rarely been impressed with the quality of the phones that usually get grafted onto PDAs, and while I’m not exactly impressed now, the P4000 is at least a move in the right direction. If they could fix the three primary problems (soft earpiece, shallow tonal balance, and problems with background noise degrading outgoing audio) they’d actually have a fairly decent phone. Taken as a whole therefore, the P4000 is only average when it comes to the phone function, but that’s MUCH BETTER than most other PDA I’ve tested (especially from Telus).

Nokia 6120 Classic

Despite its somewhat familiar numeric designation, the 6120 Classic has nothing in common with the old TDMA model with which it shares this number. The 6120 classis is a GSM Smartphone using the Symbian operating system. Here’s one aspect of the phone that’s simple way below part. The keys are so tiny and fiddly that it’s nearly impossible to use them. Even Howard Chu, who lent me the phone, said that his smaller fingers still had enormous problems with the keys.


I was forever pressing incorrect keys during my testing and I found it really annoying. Especially poor are the keys clustered around the tiny 4-way pad below the screen.
Like all Nokia Smartphones that I’ve tested, the 6120 comes with a gorgeous-looking 320 x 240 screen. The only problem is its overall tiny size, which makes seeing many things on the screen a real squinter for many people (especially those who wear contact lenses for distance viewing).


The backlighting is bright, and the screen is visible in bright daylight (though direct sunlight is a bit of an issue). The 2-megapixel camera is about par for Nokia, which means it suffers from a lot of digital noise. If that noise was just noise, it wouldn’t be so bad, but the noise gives shadows a distinct green cast that impossible to remove easily with photo-editing software such as Photoshop. I reported exactly the same problem with the E65’s camera, and so most likely they both use the same device.


With the exception of the really fiddly keypad and the slightly harsh incoming audio quality, there’s very little to complain about in the 6120 Classic. It has excellent RF performance, generally good audio performance (the harshness notwithstanding), and a terrific speakerphone. It’s also quite small, which is a good thing in many ways, but a bit of issue when it comes to the screen.

Sony-Ericsson K850i

Before I begin this review, I wish to confess that I went into it with extremely high expectations. After being so impressed with the sound quality of the z710i I thought that a top-end Sony-Ericsson would at least be the equal of its lesser brother. I’d also read some rather amazing things about the 5-megapixel camera on this model. My comments might therefore be a bit negative-sounding when they probably shouldn’t be, but I’ll try and keep my personal disappoint out of the review.


The K850i uses the Sony moniker of Cyber-shot, which alludes to it being in the same class as the line of similarly-named Sony digital cameras. Does it live up to the hype? Yes and no. At 5 megapixels it is one of the highest-resolution cameras you can get in a phone (matching the Nokia N95). The lens quality appears to be excellent, with good overall focus consistency across the entire image. The auto-focus and macro capabilities allow it to photograph things other phones can’t, and a xenon flash allows you to take indoor nighttime shots like nothing you can get from LED lights found on most phones.


But all that aside, what’s the image quality like? Well, if the shots are taken outdoors on a sunny day they come damned close to matching that of a dedicated digital camera. Color purity is excellent and the overall lack of fish-eye effect makes for very natural-looking pictures. When lighting is not so good however, the quality of the photographs deteriorates. Fortunately the sheer size of the images (2592 x 1944 pixels) mean you don’t really see the imperfections at the typical resolution that the images are displayed. However, if you print them it’s a different story, and the difference between the K850i and a mid-range digital camera is strikingly obvious.


The phone also sports a half-decent video recorder, but don’t expect anything close to a standard digital camcorder. Just the same, recordings are made at 320 x 240 and 30 frames-per-second. So long as there isn’t too much going on in the shot, the videos look smooth and are mostly free of compression blocks. They do get a bit blocky when there is a lot of motion (such as during a fast pan), but overall the videos are pretty good.


When I first got the K850i, I imagined that it was going to be the one that would finally convince me to give up using Telus Mike and switch to a GSM phone. Certainly the performance of UMTS has shown me that CDMA on a GSM phone isn’t the mess it is on current CDMA-2000 networks (like Telus PCS, Bell Mobility, Verizon, and Sprint PCS). However, the sound quality wasn’t quite up to the standards I was expecting, and keypad/touch keys are a nightmare. I really wanted to love the K850i, but I just couldn’t seem to get past the various U/I issues. My current Motorola i880, despite all its failings (especially the Motorola U/I), is still a better PHONE when it comes to the utility aspect.


While I might not want to switch, I do believe the K850i is good enough to be well worth recommending to others. It has pretty good sound quality (if not perfect), it has one of the best cameras found on any phone on the market, and it has a wonderful screen. If you can live with the keypad design and you aren’t driven to suicide by having to unlock the keypad every few seconds, then you might find the K850i an excellent choice.

Nokia 2760

The Nokia 2760 redefines the sort of features one can expect in a low-end phone, by offering a camera, Bluetooth, FM radio, and MP3 playback in a phone that sells for only $125. However, just how good a PHONE do you get for that money? Sadly, not that great. There really isn’t much I can say about the camera, as it provides a rather prehistoric 640 x 480 resolution. The shots look okay for a VGA camera, and the level of noise at low light levels doesn’t seem as bad as on high-resolution Nokia cameras.


The primary job of the camera is to take picture-ID photos and quick shots to MMS to your friends. Beyond that, it isn’t something you’d use to take ACTUAL photographs. As for MP3 playback, this aspect is very limited, since the phone has minimal internal memory and NO external memory card. Subsequently it has no MP3 player installed on it and is only capable of playing single MP3 files at a time directly from the Music subdirectory in the file browser.


In no way, shape, or form is this phone a substitute for an MP3 player. In quiet environments the outgoing sound quality is decent, with good clarity. However, when compared to better-sounding phones the 2760 is only a mediocre player when it comes to outgoing sound quality. It also doesn’t cope particularly well with background noise. I tried the phone out on a noisy street and the results were disappointing. While the phone seems to do a credible job of reducing the impact of the traffic noise, it also mangles the voice of the user quite noticeably.


Under such conditions your callers might ask you to repeat a number of things.
Except for the RF sensitivity and excellent keypad, this phone really doesn’t have a lot going for it. However, it performs adequately in most regards and it isn’t that expensive. Considering the other options available through 7-11 however, the 2760 isn’t too bad. It just pails in comparison to the rest of the cell phone world (including other Nokia models).

Nokia E51

The E51 is a slender and thin Smartphone from Nokia the sports many of the features found in some of their larger PDA models (but without the full QWERTY keyboard). The E51 therefore looks more like a standard candy bar cell phone, but it processes many of the features expected from higher-end models.


Provided is Nokia’s excellent 320 x 240 TFT color display. It has vibrant colors and it is surprisingly easy to see in direct sunlight. It doesn’t provide the amazingly-reflective background found on the Nokia 5200, but it does something that very few TFT display can: it actually reflects sunlight internally. This is important because the brighter the sun gets, the better you can see the display. Sure, the colors aren’t so great in direct sunshine, but you can at least READ the display and easily see important information. This makes the E51 display one of the best compromises between indoor and outdoor performance that I’ve seen. Hopefully this means that future Nokia models will be endowed with the same great display.


The E51 suffers from a real estate crunch that is common to many modern candy bar designs. Screens have become physically large and this inevitably crowds out the keypad. To its credit the E51 had good key feel and the spacing of the 12 number keys is fine. The problem with the design (as is the case with many Nokia candy bar and slider designs) is the softkeys and the 4-way cursor pad. These keys are either way too skinny (the softkeys) or way too difficult to discern from one other (the 4-way pad). I won’t say that this is the worst keypad I’ve tested on a Nokia phone, because it’s far from it. However, it is also far from being a great keypad design. I guess the fairest assessment is to call it an adequate keypad design.


The E51 has the potential to be really great phone, but as it stands the sympathetic vibrations in the earpiece and the inadequate earpiece volume steal any chance of this phone has of ever getting on my must-have list. If the earpiece issue is consistent, then all E51s will be like the one I tested. However, if the earpiece issue is inconsistent, then it is possible that you can get a good-sounding example. Just make sure you try it before you buy, which means think carefully about buying one online.

Apple iPhone 3G

The iPhone it seems has risen to a status above its true station in life. The iPhone is perceived by many as gift from god (which may be why it garnered the nickname The Jesus Phone). However, it’s still just a phone, and so in this mini-review (which was performed over a period of 2 hours at Square One in Mississauga) I attempt to look solely at this model’s suitability as a phone. I will however comment on auxiliary aspects of the phone where applicable.


One would normally expect a 3G mobile device to have the ability to tether a computer to the phone so that it can use the 3G connection to access the internet. This is yet another feature that the phone is apparently capable of (with a bit of effort, this can be done on a jailbroken iPhone), but Apple has decided that regular folk don’t need or want this.


For me at least, the Apple iPhone is both a desirable product and a letdown at the same time. However, I’m rather picky, and thus the negative aspects of the phone (such as low earpiece volume, mediocre camera, no video recording, closed application development environment, so-so speakerphone phone, lack of tethering, and poor Bluetooth support) just don’t seem to outweigh the positives in my mind.


Perhaps part of the problem for me was the Nokia N95 I was testing at the same time. While certain aspects of the iPhone leave the N95 in the dust, such as its gorgeous user interface and big & bright high-resolution screen, the now-equally-priced N95 is a geek nirvana by comparison. So before you run out and buy an iPhone 3G, make sure that you can live with the restrictions placed upon you. If you can, then the iPhone will certainly please you, because the positive aspects of the phone are quite amazing.

Nokia N95 8GB

The Nokia N95 8GB is the most recent iteration of the much-hyped Nokia Smartphone. This model is now being carried officially in Canada by Rogers and they’ve recently dropped the price to $199 for a 3-year contract to match the Apple iPhone 3G. Nokia bills the N95 as “Canada’s Smartest Smartphone”. I don’t know about that, but it’s still a pretty good phone as you’ll see. This is a service that allows uPnP devices hooked up to a WiFi network to be used to play various types of media.


When you are connected to a WiFi network you can stream audio and video from the N95 directly to one of these Home Media devices. The N95 comes with native support for iMAP/POP3/SMTP mail clients (3rd party software is available for Microsoft Exchange support). The email system is integrated into the operating system, and so many applications have direct access to sending their content as email attachments if you so choose.


The provided Nokia web browser is actually pretty decent, though it certainly doesn't look as good as Safari provided in the iPhone. Like many phone-based browsers you have the option of displaying pages in their true representation, or reformatted to be friendlier to the small screens. I personally prefer the reformatted mode for most pages, though some work best when displayed in their native format.


It took me a while to warm up to it, but I got to like the N95 so much during the trial that I decided to buy one for myself. I got mine through Treatz, who many people know well from Howard Forums. I've long been a fan of Nokia phones, but over the last few years they've managed to produce far too many phones that just didn't click with me. Not so with the N95.


I would have preferred a slightly more comfortable earpiece, slightly richer sound, a better keypad, and maybe a kick-ass user interface like on the iPhone, but overall I can’t think of much else I don’t like. Just the excellent camera and video recording functionality of the device alone are almost enough to be worth the price of admission, especially at just $200.

Nokia 1208

The Nokia 1208 is a small candy-bar style phone offered in Canada by 7-11 Speakout Wireless. Despite its small size and lack of high-end features, the 1208 is actually a very competent phone that I would not hesitate to recommend to anyone interested in a no-nonsense model. The most obvious phone to compare the Nokia 1208 to is the Nokia 1600 (also sold at 7-11). Unfortunately I did not have access to a 1600 during the review process, and so I couldn’t compare them side-by-side.


Based on my review of the 1600 however, it seems that it and 1208 are very similar in many important respects. What I did have on hand to compare with was my Nokia N95, which may at first seem a bit unfair. However, the 1208 actually compares very favorably to the N95 in important aspects that they both share (like RF and audio qualities). There's not a lot of icing on this particular cake, and I'm really making a stretch here. The phone has no MP3 player, no camera, no multimedia aspects what-so-ever.


What the phone does provide is an LED flashlight, which of course is absolutely nothing new. The light can be turned on momentarily using a sequence of keys, or you can turn it on using a menu command. In virtually all of the categories that matter most to people who need just a phone, the Nokia 1208 is a clear winner. It has pretty decent audio, more than enough earpiece volume, and great outgoing audio. It falls down a little on ringer volume and speakerphone performance, but neither of these is a deal-breaker.


Is it better than the 1600? In some ways it most certainly is. If I had to choose between the 1600 and 1208, I’d definitely go for the 1208. I like its keypad better, I like its speakerphone better, and I like the louder earpiece volume. If someone asked me what they should buy for a using ONLY as a phone, I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend the Nokia 1208.

Review of the Nokia 1680

The Nokia 1680 is the newest low-end phone from 7-11 Speakout Wireless. It sells for more than the previously-reviewed Nokia 1208, but in my opinion (as you will soon discover) I don’t think it is worthy of this position in the lineup. I had no problem with this aspect of the phone. It seems that Nokia has finally figured out how to squeeze excellent RF sensitivity out of all of their recent models, regardless of its position in the hierarchy.


It’s almost got to the point where doing this test on a Nokia phone has become redundant, but that’s the direction we should be headed with cell phones by now. Even though RF performance has become a non-issue with phones of late, audio certainly hasn’t. No matter how much experience the company has making phones, many with excellent audio performance, Nokia still seems capable of producing ones that sound like they were tested by tone-deaf technicians.


The 1680 sounds like a cheap plastic toy that is totally put to shame by the audio quality of the less-expensive 1208. However, the poor tonal balance is only the fault of the native earpiece. The phone actually sounds half-decent through a good-quality earbud or headset. Despite that, its failing mark in this category stands, since many people will use it as-is (without an earbud).


The 1680 is a big disappointment all around, with the exception of its RF performance, which it shares with all of the recent Nokias I’ve tested. Beyond that it’s an entry level phone that can’t even compete with its supposedly-lesser kin the Nokia 1208. If I had to choose between the 1680 and the 1208, EVEN IF they gave me the 1680 for free, I’d choose the 1208 every time. With the possible exception of its size and styling, I can’t see why 7-11 even bothers to sell this model.

Nokia 5200

The Nokia 5200 is a tri-band (850, 1900, and 1800 MHz) slider phone and is presently offered on both Fido and 7-11. It’s a bit cheaper at 7-11, selling for just $150, but you can get it at Fido (with no contract) for $200. It offers an MP3 player with an included 1 GB MicroSD card (which may be replaced with up to a 2 GB card). It also supports A2DP Bluetooth stereo headsets.


Tests were made of RF performance at the usual Hall of Shame over at Square One shopping mall. I compared the ability to pull in a signal during a call against a Nokia E51 (which I was also reviewing at the time) and I found it to have excellent RF qualities. Both phones performed almost identically, and so by extension the 5520 also has excellent RF sensitivity. In other words, it’s as good as you’re presently going to get at pulling in a really weak signal.


Note that the 5200 supports only standard GSM, while the E51 also supports UMTS. The comparisons noted above were made with the E51 switched to standard GSM mode. The overall incoming tonal balance isn’t bad compared to many phones I’d tested (including a number of high-end Nokia models), but at the same time it falls short of some of the better-sounding models out there (including my still-current Motorola i880 on Telus Mike).


The tone of incoming audio is a little harsh, but not enough to make you want to yank the phone from your ear or turn down the volume until you can’t hear it. I was a little disappoint in this aspect of the phone, in that it seems to add a bit of distortion to the sound that isn’t there when I made calls to identical sources with other GSM phones (including my ancient Nokia 6310i). The distortion isn’t particularly noticeable under day-to-day use however, but Nokia could have done better.

Sony Ericsson Xperia X1

The XPERIA X1 is a luxury smartphone from Sony Ericsson, manufactured by High Tech Computer Corporation, and is the first in the manufacturer's Xperia series. The X1 was first presented at the 2008 Mobile World Congress. The X1 is an arc-slider phone with the Windows Mobile 6.1 Operating System. It is Sony Ericsson's first mobile phone to feature Windows Mobile. Device also has Java virtual machine (JBed) and supports JavaME that is claimed to have richer set of features than typically available.


The phone features a three-inch touchscreen overlaying a keypad which emerges when the user slides the touchscreen face upward, much as in the HTC TyTN II, although the X1's touchscreen slides out in an arc. Its touchscreen is a 65,536-color TFT WVGA display. It has a 3.2 megapixel digital camera which records video at thirty frames per second in VGA (640x480) quality. There is also a secondary front facing camera for videoconferencing that is of QCIF format. Connectivity options for the phone include: mini-USB; wireless LAN 802.11b/g; Bluetooth 2.1 with A2DP, FTP, and HID; EDGE; and quad-band GSM, UMTS, HSDPA, HSUPA, and HSCSD.


The X1 has 512MB of internal memory (400MB free), which is expandable to 32 gigabytes using High Capacity microSD cards, although currently only cards up to 16 gigabytes have been released by SanDisk. The phone also features A-GPS for navigation. The X1 began shipping on the 30th of September 2008, and was meant to become available in the United Kingdom, Germany, and Sweden. It became available to the UK market on October 27, 2008(only on Vodafone) but it is not clear when it will be released to the rest of the EU.


The handset is available through the Carphone Warehouse and Phones4Uin the UK. In Europe it will be sold only in Fnac stores (Belgium and France). In South Africa, it will be released to the public on December 16, 2008. The North American release date was expected to be announced on November 3rd, 2008; however, it was not. On November 13, Sony Ericsson announced that the phone would be available in North America on November 28, 2008 for $799 unlocked.

RIM BlackBerry Storm

It is part of the BlackBerry 9500 series of phones. It is RIM's first touchscreen device and first device without a physical keyboard. It features a touchscreen which reacts physically like a button via SurePress, a Research In Motion patented technology of providing haptic feedback. It will be available through Vodafone in the UK, Ireland, Australia, and India. Verizon Wireless in the United States, Telus and Bell in Canada.


The BlackBerry Storm is a world-phone, featuring CDMA with EV-DO Rev. A data, UMTS with HSDPA, and quad-band GSM with EDGE data access speed. However, the BlackBerry Storm only has European, Oceania, Asia and Brazil UMTS and HSDPA frequency bands. Therefore if the BlackBerry Storm is used with GSM wireless carriers in North America, the BlackBerry Storm will only be able to access wireless internet at EDGE data speed maximum.


This is because GSM carriers in North America, namely AT&T, T-Mobile, Rogers and Fido do not operate on the same frequency bands for 3G as the rest of the world. If BlackBerry Storm is used in Europe, Africa, Asia, Oceania or Brazil, HSDPA wireless data speed can be achieved, provided that the local GSM networks support it. The phone will use the primary network technology of its intended carrier (Verizon) when traveling domestically in the US, and rely upon the GSM/UMTS/HSDPA networks of Vodafone mainly when traveling abroad.


There are currently no unlocked and unbranded versions available for the GSM Blackberry Storm however unlocking the phone will allow it to be used with any GSM service provider. It is intended to be a direct competitor to Apple iPhone, the T-Mobile G1 by HTC and the HTC Touch family.

Mini-Review of the Blackberry Bold

The Bold is the new top-of-the-line Blackberry, offering all of the expected Blackberry features in one package with a high-resolution display. Each reviewed feature is given a grade (on a scale of E- to A+), which appears in parenthesis after the feature title. If a feature hasn't been rated, it is because I was unable to test it (which occurs most commonly in mini-reviews). These ratings are purely subject and are meant only to give you a quick reference of what I thought about that particular aspect of the phone.


This review is the first time this rating concept has been used. This is a mini-review because I was only able to look at the phone for a short period of time and I wasn’t able to take one home with me. However, I actually had the opportunity of testing 3 Bolds at once. This didn’t result in a better review, but it was a unique opportunity to find out if a flaw existed on all of the test subjects. I’ve previously noted that getting to test only one of a particular model can result in a poor review if I ended up with a lemon.


As it turned out however, there were no problems of that nature in this batch of 3 Bolds. During the tests of the Bold’s RF sensitivity it was suggested to me that this category is becoming increasingly irrelevant. The RF sensitivity of most phones I’ve tested in the last little while have been almost identical, and they all have been excellent. It seems therefore that phone designs may well have reached the pinnacle of this performance aspect and can go no further (or if they can, only marginally so).


The Bold is certainly no exception here, because it can work just as far into the depths of Square One as the Nokia N95, which was been compared with other recent models including the iPhone, and many Nokia model. I first tried the Bold I was rather taken aback by the tininess of the sound. However, it was quickly pointed out to me that the Bold included a feature that provided a crude equalizer for incoming audio, and so we changed the setting to provide more bass. That cleaned up the tininess quite nicely and the balance sounded much more natural.


By the same token, the Bold is not the ultimate phone either. It’s a great Blackberry, but it offers little that would put it clearly above its competition. Like the iPhone, it seems to be surrounded by more hype than it can truly live up to. But also like the iPhone, it’s a still a good model once you strip away the hype.

Nokia 6310i

The first thing that strikes you about the 6310i is how tall the phone looks. That’s really just an illusion, since the width and height are identical to the old 6190. In fact, the silhouette is identical as well. If you examine the position of the keys, screen and earpiece opening, you’ll find that they too are in exactly the same locations (though the screen on the 6310i is about 10 to 15 percent larger). The styling of the faceplate alone creates the illusion of tallness.


However, there is no denying that the 6310i is markedly thinner than the old 6190. This is due in part to the new Lithium-Polymer battery that ships with 6310i. Even though this battery is much thinner and lighter than the old BLS-2 battery, it packs a whopping 1100 mAh of capacity compared to 900 mAh in the older Li-Ion unit. Battery life on the 6310i is phenomenal. Even after countless hours of on-air testing and playing with the phone, the battery still wasn’t anywhere near being run down. Finally Nokia has a phone with decent battery life.


Also improved is the backlighting, which is now a light blue color, and very easy on the eyes. Even though the screen backlight is still provided by LEDs, it is so evenly distributed that you’d swear it was an electro-luminescent type. The screen could do with being a bit brighter, but I found it was otherwise very readable, and very handsome when lit. The screen is a bit bigger than the one found on the 6190, and it offers more lines of text. It also has much better contrast, and a more reflective backing than many previous Nokia models.


The keypad is great, with just the right amount of user feedback. Each key presses with the same level of force, and it is extremely predictable. The placement of the keys is also excellent, and using the keypad with your thumb while holding the phone in one hand is as easy as it gets. My only gripe with the keypad at all was that its keys weren't raised enough for my liking. I would have preferred keys that stuck up just a little more (but at least they aren't flush as they are in some phones).