Overview, design and feel

We all know that Samsung isn't exactly a shrinking violet when it comes to smartphones. It has a wide range of handsets, spanning all price points and covering Android, Windows Phone and even its own Bada operating system.

Samsung has been in the rugged mobile phone arena before, although only with 'dumb' phones such as the Solid Extreme B2100. Now, though, Samsung seems to have finally noticed the success Motorola has had with its Defy and Defy+, and has decided to jump onto the bandwagon with a rugged handset of its own.

The result is the rather heavily named Samsung Galaxy S5690 Xcover Extreme, which you'll probably see referred to as either the Samsung Galaxy Xcover or the Samsung Galaxy Extreme. We're opting for the Samsung Galaxy Xcover for this review.

The Samsung Galaxy Xcover is IP67 certified, meaning it's able to survive under a meter of water for up to 30 minutes, and can withstand dust too. Clearly it needs to be well sealed to perform these feats. The sealing looks relatively subtle, but we'll test it later.

Both the headset slot on the top and the USB slot along the bottom are protected by hinged covers. The USB slot is also quite recessed, and we had trouble getting our usual 'one size fits all' connector to fit into the hole.

The power button on the right and the volume rocker on the left are fairly flush with the chassis, and presumably well protected underneath.

The backplate is held firm with a screw-type lock, and even when you release this you need to prise it away. There's a secondary seal around the battery for double protection. The Samsung Galaxy Xcover's screen, of course, is made from Gorilla Glass.

The handset is a somewhat chunky beast, measuring 121.5 x 65.9 x 11.95mm and weighing 135g. There is a lot of unused space above and below the screen that makes it seem a bit over-engineered, and the 3.65-inch screen looks a little lost.

Beneath the screen are three fairly large buttons for Home, Back and Menu. Yes, they're well sealed against water and dust, but this doesn't in any way affect their comfy feel under the fingers.

Look closely at the volume rocker, incidentally, and you'll see a torch icon. Hold this end of the rocker down and you can toggle the camera LED for use as a, well, as a torch.

Specs-wise, Samsung hasn't really pushed the boat out with the Galaxy Xcover. Android is version 2.3 Gingerbread. The 800MHz processor isn't what we'd call state of the art, and with just 150MB of free storage you'll need a microSD card almost immediately.

The camera is another letdown, offering just 3.1MP of shooting power.

Considering that Clove, who supplied our review sample, is selling the Samsung Galaxy Xcover for £226.80 SIM-free in the UK, then maybe these specs are to be expected. In the US, we found it priced at $385 SIM-free on Amazon.

There's also the usual GPS, Wi-Fi and HSDPA on the Samsung Galaxy Xcover.

Interface

There's nothing very unusual about the way the Samsung Galaxy Xcover works. The user interface is very familiar indeed, with TouchWiz sitting on top of Android 2.3 Gingerbread.

That means that all the home screens have four shortcut icons at the bottom, taking you to Dialler, Contacts, Messaging and Apps. When you switch into the apps menu, for example, the four shortcuts remain, but the Apps shortcut is now replaced by one for the main Home screen.

You start out with three home screens, but if you hit the Home button then choose Edit you can add more, up to a total of seven. This Android 2.3 feature means you can customise the number of home screens to your own taste.

Meanwhile Samsung provides a reasonable range of apps, including Active Applications, which shows you when system resources are getting low and gives a quick link into the Task Manager to close any you don't need.

It also includes a neat weather app that links into AccuWeather for five-day forecasting.

Meanwhile, if you pull down the notification bar on the Samsung Galaxy Xcover, you can access connection settings and even switch the sound to vibration mode and disable automatic screen rotation. It's nothing we haven't seen before, but it is all good stuff.

One user interface aspect we really like is the message notification on the Samsung Galaxy Xcover's lock screen. Just slide it to the left and the handset opens right up into the messaging area.

Contacts and calling

The Samsung Galaxy Xcover supports Samsung's SNS services, which means it can bring in your social network contacts to one place.

Setting up accounts is easy, and you can tell the Android smartphone how often to check for updates.

And you can instruct the handset precisely what updates to check for.

Once you've set up Facebook and Twitter, the contacts area is populated and you can see everyone's little photo by their name, and whether they're a Facebook or Twitter contact.

You can easily search this list using the search box, and if you click through you can see people's contact details and history.

The other way of reaching out to your contacts, of course, is via the Samsung Galaxy Xcover's smart dialler. Call this up and start tapping out a name or number and matches are displayed. There isn't much space for the display, but a little number to the right of the only match that shows tells you how many there are, and tapping it gives you the full list.

In-call services are well thought out, with easy links to hold, the speaker and mute button and to go back to the dial pad.

Call volume on the Samsung Galaxy Xcover was good, although we'd have liked a bit more volume from the speaker, which seems under-powered.

As with TouchWiz, there's nothing here that we haven't seen before, but Samsung lays all the elements out well, and the feature that any phone must get right - calling - is well handled.

Messaging

The Samsung Galaxy Xcover handles your Facebook and Twitter contacts via its Social Hub, which is where it also handles SMS messages.

Initially this looks inviting, but in fact it doesn't mean there are integrated Twitter and Facebook apps on board. Tap either option and you're taken to the mobile web versions of each social network.

Worse than that, while we were automatically logged into our Facebook, the Samsung Galaxy Xcover had the cheek to ask us to log into our Twitter again. It's hardly a fully-integrated solution.

Moreover, there are no dedicated apps for Facebook or Twitter pre-installed. You can get both from the Android Market, of course, but their absence makes the Samsung Galaxy Xcover a fairly socially unaware handset out of the box.

To add a little insult to injury, we had a bit of a problem with sessions expiring and found we had to log in again quite frequently. If this were an ongoing problem with the Samsung Galaxy Xcover we'd be pretty annoyed, since the whole point of seamless social network integration is that it is seamless.

Moving on to SMS text messaging - the other thing the Social Hub handles - this is a rather more pleasant experience. Missed calls are listed here, as well as text messages. Click through to create a new SMS, and the screen offers smart dialling in its search box.

When it comes to typing messages, the keyboard lets things down a bit. You have to pop onto a second screen for punctuation and numbers.

It slows down the rush of fingers across the screen a little.

On the other hand, the threaded message view works well and gives you a reasonably lengthy view of an SMS chat.

The Samsung Galaxy Xcover offers Swype, but you can't turn it on and off from within the keyboard settings. It's in the general settings area under Locale and Text.

This is also where you can turn on and off predictive text and different keyboard types, including old fashioned numerical style keypads and handwriting recognition in portrait mode.

Of course there's email support too, and you can set up accounts very easily by adding in the standard information. It's nice that the keyboard offers '@' and '.com' shortcuts here for quick information entry.

Internet

The Samsung Galaxy Xcover has both Wi-Fi and 7.2Mbps HSDPA, so it ought to be able to cope well with web browsing in simple terms of downloading pages.

And it did, too. It took about 12 seconds to pull down and resolve the TechRadar home page over the network, which is nice going.

The 3.65-inch screen is just about big enough for comfortable web browsing, although its resolution, at 320 x 480 pixels, is some way behind what we'd expect from a higher-end smartphone these days. Still, when we did a double-tap to zoom in, web text was readable and not blocky at all.

Text reflowing isn't what it should be, though. A double-tap to zoom into a TechRadar story we wanted to read didn't result in good news.

We only really got to read without a lot of scrolling when we flipped into landscape mode. What you experience in everyday life may vary depending on the websites you read and how they're originally formatted, but we weren't too happy with what we found.

Moving on to take a look at how the Samsung Galaxy Xcover handled Flash, there was more disappointment. Its 800Mhz processor isn't up to the job, so embedded video was a bit of a no-go area.

On the other hand, there's a nice bookmarks area, which also offers your most visited sites and browsing history, enabling you to get around fairly quickly. To add a bookmark, you just tap a little icon to the right of the search box.

Camera

The camera on the Samsung Galaxy Xcover is something of a disappointment on paper. It shoots stills at just 3.1 megapixels, making it pretty much entry-level as far as today's smartphones are concerned.

The lens is slightly recessed, so it should be able to avoid getting scratched and buffeted by all the rough and tumble the phone is designed to take, and there's a flash.

The flash doesn't work well more than a few feet from your subject, however, and even then it's not great.

Shooting modes are fairly limited, but there is a panorama mode and alongside the usual sports, indoor and night modes there's a mode for photographing text.

Camera controls sit on the edges of the Samsung Galaxy Xcover's screen, where they are easy to find by touch. Because there's no shutter button, you can assign the menu key as a camera shutter, or use the on-screen button, which is just as easy.

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WHITE SKY: You can see at a glance that the camera delivers only average quality photos. It can't cope with the sky in this photo, though the water and the bridge are OK, as is the greenery. Zoom in even a little bit and you notice the pixelation.

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PANORAMA: Panorama mode stitches together eight photos, which are taken in sequence automatically as you pan. The result is a photo 2640 pixels wide x 400 pixels high. The stitch quality isn't too bad, and the process is fairly fast.

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MODES: Moving through the standard Normal, Black and White, Sepia and Negative filters, you see again how badly the camera handles variance in light. The sky wasn't especially bright on our shooting days, either.

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INDOORS: Indoors, the camera copes fairly well with average household lighting conditions. But don't try to take pictures as it gets darker.

Video

The major problem with the Samsung Galaxy Xcover's video camera is that it is limited to shooting at a maximum resolution of 640 x 480. It captures 25.7 frames a second at this resolution.

That's really not good enough for video you want to share, although videos do display well enough on the 640 x 480 screen of the handset itself.

Media

The Music Hub icon on the Samsung Galaxy Xcover's apps list might look appealing and interesting, but in fact it's fairly bland.

The app isn't even pre-installed. It has to be downloaded from the Samsung App store via a link, and as you start the download process the Samsung Galaxy Xcover tells you that you have to change a setting first.

Now, call us churlish, but that might put the odd newbie off.

Still, if you do go ahead you get the Music Hub, which is basically an online store.

If you'd rather play music you already own then you'll need a microSD card, since there's only 150MB of internal storage for any data you might have.

The microSD card slot is under the battery, which under normal circumstances we'd grumble about because it makes hot swapping impossible. But because the Samsung Galaxy Xcover is rugged, the slot needs as much protection as possible, so we'll forgive its location in this case.

The music player is a basic rendition that does its job well enough, but without frills. It has so few frills, in fact, that it could only be bothered to find album art on our microSD card some of the time.

When tunes are playing, there's a playback controller in the notifications area. Just pull that down and whatever app you're in you can move around within a playlist.

The built-in speaker delivers quite a good volume, but there's a bit of distortion to the output at top volumes. Plug in a headset and you get the benefit of Dolby 5.1 sound, which does make a bit of difference, but there's still noticeable distortion even with quite good headphones.

An FM radio adds another facet to audio-based entertainment, and the auto scan kicks in the first time you run the app without you having to ask. That's a nice little feature, and scanning only takes a couple of seconds.

The radio has a round dialler button you can sweep to move through frequencies, or you can simply choose a channel from the presets. There is room to store four favourite stations at the bottom of the screen.

When it comes to video playback, the Samsung Galaxy Xcover isn't hugely capable. It can cope with MP4, H.264 and H.263. It played our samples without jerking, though, and colour rendition was good.

Battery life and connectivity

The Samsung Galaxy Xcover has a 1500mAh battery, which is pretty generous and should, on paper, provide a relatively long life. We've not seen an official battery life quote from Samsung, but elsewhere we've seen it quoted as good for 11 hours talktime on 3G and up to 640 hours of 3G standby.

We found the battery to live up to the usual smartphone expectation of delivering about a day's worth of life between charges, but what you get will of course very much depend on how you use the Samsung Galaxy Xcover.

When we left it on overnight just with Wi-Fi on, it lost about a tenth of its charge just ticking over. Playing music for an hour lost it about 20 per cent.

And over a two-and-a-half hour period when we used the video camera, played music continuously and sent and received emails over Wi-Fi indoors and 3G outdoors, the battery drained down to close to half of its power.

So, we reckon if you use the Samsung Galaxy Xcover on a daily commute, you ought to budget for an afternoon power boost, and another in the evening.

Connectivity options don't run to the likes of DLNA and HDMI - this isn't an expensive enough smartphone to warrant those.

But Wi-Fi and Bluetooth are of course here, HSDPA supports 7.2Mbps downloads and 5.76Mbps uploads, and those who like their location-aware services will be pleased to see A-GPS is here too.

In addition, you can use the Samsung Galaxy Xcover as a portable Wi-Fi hotspot.

Maps and apps

With GPS and Google Maps on the Samsung Galaxy Xcover, mapping and navigation is nicely taken care of. There are plenty of information layers available these days, such as satellite and traffic data, and Google Maps often proves itself really useful when we are out and about.

Samsung has added a few apps to the Android standard set. It's a pity the nice Notes app from the Samsung Galaxy Y isn't here, but then you can very easily find oodles of notes apps in the Android Market.

Polaris Office looks like it's installed because there's an icon present, but like the Music Hub we mentioned earlier, you have to download it from the Samsung App store.

It is free, and we suppose this ensures you have the latest version, but the download process is a bit of a pain.

Once you have it, Polaris Office enables you to create documents that are compatible with Word, Excel and PowerPoint, as well as edit existing documents.

There's also a books app, which gives you access to ebooks including a good few for free, although the idea is really that you buy ebooks. When we looked, there were plenty of new titles on offer.

There's also a little workout helper called Cardio Trainer, but if you are into using your phone for fitness you can find better apps in the Android Market.

With both the Android Market and Samsung Apps - Samsung's own app store - on board, you've plenty of scope for beefing up the apps content of this smartphone.

Rugged features

We've noted that the Samsung Galaxy Xcover is classed as a rugged smartphone, yet it looks quite attractive.

The USB and headset slots have protective hinged covers, the backplate is held down by a screw, and inside the back there's a seal around the edge and a second seal around the battery.

SIM and microSD card slots are under the battery. To cap it off, the screen is made from Gorilla Glass.

We subjected the Samsung Galaxy Xcover to a few tests to find out how rugged it really is. We dropped it semi-accidentally a few times, including against the edges of metal filing cabinets, onto pavements and down the stairs. There wasn't a scratch on the chassis.

We tried to scrape scratches on the screen with a knife. No joy.

We took the Samsung Galaxy Xcover on a run, stowing it in the sweaty back pocket of our training bottoms, and it weathered the storm. We even sat the handset under a running tap for 15 minutes, and it survived that too, although a little water did seep under the backplate.

Hands on gallery

Official gallery

Verdict

The Samsung Galaxy Xcover is a rugged Android smartphone, and in that it has only two real competitors - the Motorola Defy and the newer Defy+, so the comparisons are inevitable.

The build doesn't feel quite as solid as that of the Defy, and the general specifications aren't as advanced either.

The Motorola Defy+ has a 3.7-inch 480 x 844 pixel screen vs a 3.65-inch 320 x 480 screen on the Samsung Galaxy Xcover.

The Defy+ camera shoots at 5MP as opposed to 3.1MP here. The Defy + processor runs at 1GHz as opposed to 800MHz on the Galaxy Xcover.

And there's no price difference to mirror that, with the Defy+ currently costing exactly the same as the Samsung Galaxy Xcover, priced at £225/$385.

We liked

The Samsung Galaxy Xcover looks neat - its bronze sides really help it stand out from the crowd.

The microSD card is under the battery, where it's best protected from water and dust.

The camera LED can be used as a torch thanks to a feature added to the volume rocker.

We disliked

The build feels a bit on the plasticy side, and there was a little water seepage under the backplate in our 'run under the tap' test.

Web browsing isn't too great, with poor text reflow and no Flash support.

The handset feels a bit big in the hand considering its screen size, and it is in particular a bit on the tall side.

Screen resolution is on the low side for a modern smartphone.

Camera resolution is quite low, at 3.1MP, and video resolution is woeful, at 640 x 480.

Final verdict

Samsung has made rugged handsets before, and not done too bad, but this is the first time the company has brought rugged features to an Android smartphone, and we aren't all that excited, because the general specifications are average rather than great.

If we were choosing a rugged smartphone right now, we'd choose the Motorola Defy+ rather than the Samsung Galaxy Xcover. Sorry, Samsung.

Overview, design and feel

Flying the Samsung-branded flag for the mid-range smartphone market is the Samsung Galaxy W, a handset also known as the Samsung GT-I8150.

Having taken the high-end smartphone market by storm with the Samsung Galaxy S and subsequent Samsung Galaxy S2, Korean tech giant Samsung is now intent on dominating the full mobile phone scene with a flurry of boundary-pushing handsets.

With a 3.7-inch form factor and Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system, the Samsung Galaxy W pushes the boundaries of its lower mid-range smartphone price point.

The phone features a strong 1.4GHz single-core processor, offering the grunt to power a handset that also packs a 5MP rear-mounted camera, 720p HD video recording capabilities, 512MB of RAM and a flurry of connectivity options.

Touting an array of specs comparable to former top high-end Android smartphone the HTC Desire, the Samsung Galaxy W perfectly demonstrates exactly how quickly the smartphone scene is evolving.

The Samsung Galaxy W is set to duke it out with other 3.7-inch Android smartphones such as the Motorola Defy+, while its 1.4GHz Qualcomm processor is the same speed as that of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc S, and faster than the 1.2GHz offering on the BlackBerry Torch 9860, both of which cost around £100 more than the Samsung Galaxy W, priced at around £249.99 on Pay As You Go.

A relatively compact handset, the Samsung Galaxy W - in which the 'W' stands for 'Wonder' - features an aesthetically pleasing form factor, with the handset's 3.7-inch WVGA LCD capacitive touchscreen boasting a 480 x 800p resolution.

The smartphone's interface enables you to seamlessly access desired content and use the extensive array of app-based content on the pre-loaded Android Market.

Offering a lot of bang for your buck, the Wi-Fi, 3G, Bluetooth 3.0 and GPS-enabled Samsung Galaxy W lands with a spec far superior to that of a number of its similarly priced competitors.

Lining up at a respectable 11.5mm thick, just 0.2mm thicker than the HTC Sensation, the Samsung Galaxy W's round edged design might not be first in line for any beauty awards, but it is a form that in no way offends on an aesthetic front.

With the handset's rigid and compact design resulting in a 114.7g weight, the Samsung Galaxy W is just over a gram lighter than the 116g heft of its 4.3-inch Super AMOLED-touting high-end sibling, the Samsung Galaxy S2.

Relatively well crafted with little flex or distortion when put under extreme pressure, the two-toned body of the Samsung Galaxy W is let down considerably by the over-apparent join between the main shell and the removable back plate, which runs like a parting seam around eight tenths of the handset's edging.

In typical Samsung Galaxy fashion, the W's removable back panel is scarily thin and unnervingly delicate. When removing it, it seems so fragile that you fear a snap any time you take it off to replace the SIM, battery or well-hidden microSD storage card.

Comfortable and unobtrusive in the hand, the Samsung Galaxy W features a design that fails to accentuate its key features. Although not noticeably overpowering at first glance, the phone's bezel can at times make the device's screen feel quite narrow, detracting from the otherwise pleasant visual offering.

Although not offering an on-screen experience with as much pop or attention-grabbing vibrancy as its high-end rivals, the Samsung Galaxy W features a more than acceptable screen. The capacitive touchscreen display sports the same dimensions and 480 x 800p resolution as the ClearBlack AMOLED offering on the Windows Phone-powered Nokia Lumia 710.

Accentuating the handset's smooth design traits, the USB connector-come-charging port is hidden beneath a sliding tab, a move that aids the appealing aesthetic but can make it fiddly to open and access.

Weighing down heavily on the side of the touchscreen revolution, the Samsung Galaxy W features just three physical buttons, with a raised home button landing alongside well-placed volume controls and a power switch.

Everything else is touch-based, including the Android standard back button and option key, something that might not appease traditionalists but certainly bolsters the smartphone's physical appeal.

Interface

As with virtually all Android 2.3 Gingerbread-powered handsets, the Samsung Galaxy W interface is intuitive and easy to follow, with the standard array of Google apps and widgets residing on the seven available home screens.

As with all Samsung Galaxy devices, the handset comes packing the company's TouchWiz user interface for a further enhanced, joyfully simple user experience at all times.

Thanks largely to the 1.4GHz Qualcomm processor and 512MB of RAM, there is little judder or stilted transition when switching between this collection of home screens, or indeed when jumping back and forth between menus.

With easy, highly responsive scrolling controls, the Samsung Galaxy W is extremely user-friendly. Its simplistic layout and positive use of Android ensure that both complete novices and relative veterans of the Google operating system are able to quickly navigate their way through the grid-based app menu or home screens.

Requiring little initial setting up or unnecessary faff, the Samsung Galaxy W offers you the most likely desired content in prime positions direct from the box, with access to the Android Market clearly labelled, enabling you to further fill the handset with other content.

Contacts and calling

Arguably still the most important aspect of any smartphone, no matter how many fancy bells and whistles it plays host to, is its ability to make calls with a strong, clear, interruption-free connection.

As impressive and high achieving as some of the Samsung Galaxy W's more superfluous features might be, as a standard pocket blower, the phone falls a little short of expectations.

While it might be easy to navigate through the calling process, once connected, calls often sound quite airy and distant, with a little background distortion and muffling causing those on the other end of the line to sound quiet and isolated compared to other handsets.

Despite these audio quality issues, during our period testing the phone we experienced no unexpected dropped calls or complete loss of signal.

On the contacts front, thanks to its Android innards, the Samsung Galaxy W offers a simple and seamless user experience, with an intuitive process requiring no explanation to access, modify, search and add contacts and personal details as desired.

With communication histories for individual contacts easily accessed via a run of shortcut menu options within the contacts book, communications between those in your address book is further bolstered by the ability to sync with connected social media accounts and assign contact images based on Facebook profile pictures.

Further enhancing the user experience and making it easy to find desired contacts in what could potentially be an otherwise highly cluttered mass of names and numbers, all contacts can be organised easily into groups. The standard group names of 'Co-workers', 'Family' and 'Friends' can be further enhanced by the creation and self titling of further groups, a process that is neither arduous nor time consuming.

Messaging

A core pillar of any modern smartphone is it messaging capabilities. Here the Samsung Galaxy W once again covers all the basics and most common extras but fails to push the boundaries to set itself apart from the crowd of similarly priced devices, such as the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray and some full QWERTY-touting BlackBerry handsets.

In typical Android fashion, messages are simple and easy to read, with a well sized and spaced font enabling quick absorption of incoming content, be it via SMS or email.

One of the Samsung Galaxy W's stumbling blocks while constructing messages - an issue that rolls across to its search and browser functions - is its slightly cramped and narrow-lettered keyboard in portrait mode.

Thanks to its full touchscreen interface, the Samsung Galaxy W's QWERTY keyboard offering is that of the Android software and TouchWiz UI. While not offensive or cumbersome to use, the touch QWERTY input will result in many users with average to larger-sized digits repeatedly finding themselves correcting errors and accidentally pressing multiple keys.

Although this issue is less apparent when holding the phone in landscape orientation, Samsung has largely corrected the issue itself with the inclusion of the Swype input system. This enables you to simply drag your finger between letters with the software then filling in the likely desired words - a system that, more often that not, works.

Continuing its run of user-friendly features, both email and SMS messaging services feature prominently on the handset's main home screen direct from the box, with MMS messages able to be sent via a simple tap on the attachments option while in the messaging menus.

Internet

Quick and simple to connect to a wireless internet network, the Samsung Galaxy W is a joy to use as a source for internet browsing and online content perusal.

With strong connectivity and fast load times over both Wi-Fi and 3G connections, the Samsung Galaxy W hosts a well-sized URL input box and a handy bookmarks tab.

Enhancing the user experience and cutting down on irritating lag, the Samsung Galaxy W's browser features extremely quick image and text rendering, enabling you to pinch to zoom in on desired content and have it available in an easy to absorb manner in a fraction of a second, for an uninterrupted browsing experience.

Requiring no unnecessary user input, the full web experience is open to you, with the phone's integrated browser capable of handling both HTML 5 and Adobe Flash content, including Flash videos, direct from the box. This further bolsters the handset's already impressive web credentials.

Easily navigated via the standard touchscreen controls, the handset's Android-necessitated back button acts as further navigation through previously viewed web pages.

Unlike most computer-based browsers, however, the Samsung Galaxy W offers no means for scrolling forward through pages if users have already skipped back. Although not a catastrophic omission, this feature is sorely missed when required.

Camera

Sporting a 5-megapixel camera on the rear, the Samsung Galaxy W's photographic capabilities are rather impressive, with sharp detail and strong colour management across a range of lighting conditions and subject matters.

Although 8MP snappers will no doubt soon be filtering down into the mid-range smartphones, the Samsung Galaxy W's current 5MP camera will fulfil the needs of most users.

Quick to focus in good lighting conditions, the handset's camera is somewhat let down by its low light abilities, with heavily grainy and noisy images the result when shooting without the flash.

Use the LED flash and the results are pleasantly surprising. Unlike many handsets that offer over-exposed, whited out images when shooting with flash, the Samsung Galaxy W provides images of impeccable colour and contrast management with the additional light source well distributed to accent fine details and highlight desired areas of interest.

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The one downfall of using the Samsung Galaxy W's camera with the flash on, however, is the heavily increased focusing times, with the camera's incorporated autofocus feature repeatedly second guessing itself before finally agreeing on a point of focus.

Adding to the handset's rear-mounted snapper abilities is a second - VGA - camera on the front. As with most forward-facing phone cameras, the Samsung Galaxy W's VGA offering provides heavily grainy end results, offering little inspiration and creating little desire to use the handset's possible video calling abilities.

Video

As well as shooting strong 5MP still images, the Samsung Galaxy W's rear-mounted camera captures impressive 720p HD video content at up to 30fps. Impressive stats on paper, the handset's recording capabilities are rather hit and miss, with performances slightly less than the quality expected when taking into account only the cover notes.

On the positive side, the Samsung Galaxy W possesses strong light management with its video content, like it does for still shots, making good use of natural light when available and quickly adjusting to varying conditions of light and shade when recording.

On a more negative, note the handset's audio recording abilities let the visuals down, with the accompanying sound often tinny with a static air that lacks clarity and the crisp, clear sounds that are expected.

On the design front, the high, central positioning of the lens makes shooting content a tricky task when trying to avoid unwieldy fingertips sneaking into shots.

Media

Featuring less than 2GB of available internal storage, the Samsung Galaxy W hasn't been created with high-performance, storage-heavy media in mind. Although these storage limitations can be easily overcome with an additional microSD card, up to 32GB in size, some of the handset's other media pitfalls are harder to overlook.

The biggest offender on the media front is the Samsung Galaxy W's audio abilities. An inbuilt speaker drastically lacks depth, producing audio and video playback that misses deep, bass-heavy tones. Instead it replaces rich, premium audio output with tinny notes and voices that are almost warped when watching video content with any amount of dialogue.

Furthermore, despite a number of handsets, such as the HTC Sensation XE, now coming boxed with a pair of impressive in-ear audio buds to further enhance your sound experience, the Samsung Galaxy W lands packaged with a pair of poorly constructed, tacky plastic buds. These offer no reassurance of quality at first glance, and their performance matches their unappealing physical appearance.

Aside from these audio issues, the Samsung Galaxy W's 3.7-inch screen offers a pleasant base on which to enjoy video content, with the Google-brimmed handset coming pre-loaded with the YouTube app, enabling quick access to hours of video content on the move.

Other media offerings on the Samsung Galaxy W include the incorporated FM radio and the ability to perform minor edits, such as cropping and simple contrast alterations to images shot with the device.

Battery life and connectivity

One of the often maligned features of modern smartphones, the Samsung Galaxy W's battery is highly impressive, with the handset breezing past the hump of a single day's heavy use and easily getting through a second day without the need for further charging.

Thanks to its 1500 mAh Li-Ion battery, the Samsung Galaxy W touts a claimed eight hour 20 minute talktime life, with 3G enabled, and up to 420 hours standby time. Both figures ring true, with a day's regular use across calls, web-based activity and media features leaving the phone with around half of its juice still to spare.

Despite landing at roughly half the price of some of its top-end competitors such as the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich-packing Samsung Galaxy Nexus and the Apple iPhone 4S, the Samsung Galaxy W features a far superior battery life, thanks to its more conservative feature offerings.

On a connectivity front, the Samsung Galaxy W boasts a vast array of options, with the standard Wi-Fi and GPS offerings further bolstered by the integrated USB connector and Bluetooth 3.0 options.

While the handset is fast to access wireless networks and boasts strong connectivity once signed up, the phone can also be used as a Wi-Fi hotspot, to offer wireless internet connectivity to a number of further Wi-Fi-hunting gadgets. Simple to set up, the personal Wi-Fi hotspot feature is intuitive to manage, with resulting connectivity providing strong, speedy coverage.

Maps and apps

Thanks to its Google-branded Android innards, the Samsung Galaxy W comes pre-installed with Google Maps and the service's standard array of location and navigation-based features. Although a handy service to have lined up on your handset's home screen, the inclusion of Google Maps is no great surprise, with the software typical of virtually all other Android devices.

In terms of apps, the Samsung Galaxy W boasts two main outlets for users to fill their devices with post-production content and handy tools, games and the usual utilities, with the standard Android Market followed up by the Samsung Apps offering.

Replicating much of the app selection from the official Google store, the Samsung Apps outlet sees a number of apps land with considerably higher price tags than when bought via the Android Market. A prime example of this is Bejewled 2. Available from the Android Market for just £1.99, the same game from Samsung Apps costs £3.00.

While many will turn to the Android Market and Samsung Apps outlet for additional content, the Samsung Galaxy W comes pre-loaded with a hearty selection of app-based features that enhance the user experience and entertain.

Covering all bases with a selection of games, utilities and business-assisting apps, the pre-loaded offering, which features the likes of The Sims 3, Hangman, Polaris Office, YouTube and the standard Samsung Social, Music and Game hubs, often presents you with a tester of what can be further expanded and fully used for an additional price.

Hands on gallery

Official gallery

Verdict

Overall a very strong mid-range smartphone, the Samsung Galaxy W is not without faults. Combining strong hardware with strong software, a few cracks appear where the two join.

While the handset isn't the pristine, perfect product that some would hope, it is, however, one that pushes the boundaries of its sub-market expectations.

With a £249.99 PAYG price tag, or available for free on contracts as low as £25 per month, the Samsung Galaxy W proves great value for money, repeatedly exceeding expectations where it counts - in overall base performance.

We liked

Largely well designed, well constructed and well finished with Android 2.3 and the Samsung TouchWiz user interface, the Samsung Galaxy W surpasses the core abilities of a number of its closest competitors. It even rivals the performance capabilities of some handsets around£100 more expensive.

The handset's 1.4GHz Qualcomm processor makes the Samsung Galaxy W a joy to use for standard tasks, with smooth, quick transitions between applications enhancing the user experience and bringing some fluidity to the phone.

Elsewhere, the Samsung Galaxy W's browser is fast and simple to use, bolstering the online experience, while the 5MP rear-mounted camera offers up a surprise with its strong light management while shooting both stills and video content.

We disliked

Let down by the inbuilt speaker, the Samsung Galaxy W isn't a device targeted at the hardcore media-absorbing market. Nor is the smartphone particularly strong on the calling front, with distorted connections a considerable bugbear when using the handset on a long-term basis.

Final verdict

Strong in some areas, weak in others, the Samsung Galaxy W is a mash-up of the best and slightly below par offerings on the mid-range smartphone market for those users not yet ready to make the jump to the high-end and costly Samsung Galaxy S2.

A very impressive battery life far exceeds those of its higher-end, higher-priced rivals, while the intuitive interface and speedy processor offer a strong introduction to the smartphone scene for those who are adopting the well-priced Samsung Galaxy W as their first trip away from feature phones.

With the numerous benefits outweighing the negatives, the Samsung Galaxy W is an impressive offering for its price point, with premium components creating a strong all-round user experience.

Overview, design and feel

Differentiating yourself from the pack means making something spectacular…or just different. With the LG DoublePlay, a few radical hardware changes translate to an unusual, and sometimes more productive, experience.

The phone is perhaps most similar to the Kyocera Echo (or maybe even the Nintendo 3DS) but falls short of the amazing Samsung Google Nexus and Apple iPhone 4S which function as more traditional phones. At the very least, the DoublePlay tries something new.

The most unusual feature is the phone's two screens, one main 3.5-inch touchscreen running at 320 x 480p resolution and a second 2-inch, 240 x 320p screen.

The two-screen approach, like the 3DS or the Echo, lets you run an app in one screen and see app icons in another. Or, you can see your main Facebook page and chat with someone on the second screen.

As you can imagine, having two screens means putting up with some bulk. The phone weighs 192 grams, or about 50 grams heavier than the Galaxy Nexus. At 64mm thick, the DoublePlay feels like it could double as a hockey puck or maybe a doorstop. If thin is in, then LG didn't get the memo.

With its 1GHz processor, the DoublePlay is a bit behind the curve compared to the new crop of 1.2GHz and 1.5GHz phones that have added zip for games and browsing the Web. The phone is loaded with Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread and we kept missing the superior performance and usability of Android 4.0.

The 5-megapixel camera is also a bit behind the pack. At CES, we saw a bevy of phones with extremely high-res cameras, up to 16MP in some cases. The DoublePlay supports 720p video recording, but it is equally inadequate. The phone includes 2GB of internal memory, but if you need more space for your photos and videos, it supports up to 32GM microSD cards.

As for wireless connections, this is an HSPA+ phone running on T-Mobile in the US with a rated download speed of about 14.4Mbps. Real-world speeds were much lower, hovering around 3-4Mbps.

The phone supports Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 3.0. Unlike an Android 4.0 phone, the DoublePlay does not work with the new Bluetooth Health Device Protocol (HDP) standard and does not have an NFC chip.

Further lessening its appeal, the DoublePlay comes equipped with a 1500 mAh battery is not quite capable of all-day functionality. The two screens definitely hamper the experience if all you care about is talking and texting. The phone is rated for just three hours of talk time.

In our own tests, the DoublePlay lasted for about six hours of normal use during the day. As with many recent Android phones, we installed the Juice Defender and were able to use the phone an entire day.

Alas, none of that is likely to matter if you're interested in the DoublePlay solely for its dual-screen functionality. We think only the most hardcore dual-screen users will appreciate the hardware design; other will miss a slimmer phone.

Interface

One of the main reasons to consider the LG DoublePlay is its appealing and unusual interface. Pull up the browser and you'll see thumbnail bookmarks for sites you've visited on the second screen. Use the Richnote app and you can create a new memo.

There are nine apps included like the Bobsled group messaging app, music and calendar apps, browser and social apps, and a photo app which all work with the DoublePlay's unique screens. Typically, the top screen displays a typical portion of the interface and extra controls are displayed in the lower screen.

The dual-screen setup is most effective for keeping tabs on things or multitasking. For example, LG includes the Sim City Deluxe game, so you can get engrossed in building a city on your phone but also run the messaging app on the secondary screen to reply to that message your boss sent you.

Unfortunately, this novelty wears thin quickly. The main problem is that there are only nine apps that work with the secondary screen, and there doesn't seem to be a plan to add more.

When you download the Evernote app or Skype, you won't be able to run part of these apps on the second screen and there's no way to find out which apps are supported shy of running each and seeing if the secondary screen does anything.

The confusion is exacerbated by having this blend of widgets and apps placed on the secondary screen. Many of the widgets, including one for social networks and for messaging, plus several others, do not work with the secondary screen once opened.

So, you might run the Friends social network widget and the social network app for the secondary screen, but they do not work in tandem. Oddly, the widget and secondary-screen apps often look alike, even if they do not work in concert.

Contacts and calling

Calling

Since the DoublePlay uses the older Android 2.3 Gingerbread operating system, you won't find any of the new and improved contact management tricks of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich. For example, when a call comes in, there isn't a slider that lets you send the caller a text message instead.

Despite an antiquated interface, the phone was loud and clear for most test calls, and the speakerphone was plenty loud.

The DoublePlay has the dreaded "taco phone" look when you make calls, due to the larger size and thickness. Imagine talking on the Nintendo DS as a phone and you will get the idea.

Contacts

We did like the quick responsiveness for searching contacts. You can press the search button to type a name, and once you do, a list of contacts and saved e-mail addresses appears almost instantaneously.

With a few other phones we've tested, including the Galaxy Nexus, there is sometimes a slight pause when searching. The Contacts app tended to load a bit slow, probably due to having 3000 Gmail contacts.

For each contact, you can view the history of your interactions. The phone also lets you add Twitter, Facebook, and other contacts for social networks and search for those as well.

Messaging

Messaging on the DoublePlay depends almost entirely on whether you prefer a split keyboard. Some computer users swear by them and can type faster when they have one section of the keyboard for each hand.

The DoublePlay is split in such a way that the 2-inch screen is located between the QWERTY keys. It feels a little weird, and initially our typing speed seemed to suffer a bit from the strange finger spacing. As with many physical keyboards, there's a learning curve, but eventually our typing speed actually improved.

If physical keyboards aren't your thing (and you somehow still end up with this phone) you can slip the keyboard closed and type using software keyboard, which we found were preferable to several higher quality phones (we're looking at you, Motorola Atrix 2).

The phone does use haptics for the soft keyboard, which is a plus for those who find the slight buzz sensation to be helpful. (On phones like the Atrix 2, the buzzing is a bit too pronounced.) We found typing on the DoublePlay software keyboard to be fluid and fast for most texting and e-mail chores.

LG includes the Bobsled group texting app which is works exactly like GroupMe. You can add contacts to a group, and then send group texts and store them in the cloud. Like GroupMe, you can load the Bobsled app on your tablet or even on a different phone to see your group texts elsewhere.

Messaging on the dual-screen DoublePlay does provide a good paradigm shift, though. You can load up the messaging app, type a Facebook status update, or even browse photos and music lists on the second screen while you browse the Web on the primary screen.

This helps in a rather select group of instances, but when it does, it almost validates the phone entirely.

Say you want to let someone know about an upcoming event or schedule change. You can look up what you need to know on the main screen with the browser, and then type in the message on the second screen, all without switching between apps.

Internet

Internet browsing on the LG DoublePlay is a bit of a saving grace. Besides the useful dual-tasking mentioned earlier, the phone's dual-screen setup just makes sense for web browsing.

It shows webpages on the main 3.5-inch screen, and a thumbnail of previously-visited sites on the secondary screen. You can flip through these thumbnails in a rotating preview that looks like a rolodex.

Sites like TechRadar.com and Google.com loaded quickly and formatted correctly.

We had occasional (and expected) Adobe Flash problems, but some sites, like TechRadar, worked without hitch.

The phone supports text re-flow for most sites and worked well on those sites we visited. Page zoom in and out worked fast and handled most sites for text and images well.

Camera

The DoublePlay offers just a 5MP camera, and the image quality isn't great. Snap a photo, and the DoublePlay produces a slightly blurred image lacking in color and detail. Pictures taken in outdoor sunlight look quite a deal better than inside, but neither were worth writing home about.

Bring the camera inside and the colors tend to look washed out and a bit dim. That's a problem when there are so many adequate cameras on smart phones - and the rift will just deepen now that phones like the HTC Titan II on the horizon.

Sunlight

Bright outdoor scenes looked better than indoor photos, but they still weren't fantastic.

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Gameboard

Indoor shots, even with background lighting, looked dim and grey.

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People

Some outdoor shots produced heavy noise - though at least part of this could be racked up to temperamental ultra-bright shooting conditions.

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The LG DoublePlay has surprisingly few camera options on the software side. The scenes modes are paltry – basically, a few indoor and outdoor settings but nothing that made a huge difference.

Scenes mode provide a negligible value beyond the basic auto setting. There wasn't a huge difference between the auto mode and the sunlight mode for outdoor shots.

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Fortunately, the shutter speed is reasonable. On the DoublePlay, the shutter is responsive and clicks almost instantly. Switching between modes is also faster than expected, which is helpful when you want to quickly switch over to video mode.

You can't tap the screen to focus on a subject, but you can enable a face tracking mode. There is also a Macro Focus mode (but not a Macro Scene mode which adjusts the focus and other settings).

Video

Video quality was also not up to snuff. The optics in the phone are also not exactly competitive with other phones, and videos in 1280x720 HD mode tended to look choppy, slightly pixelated, and often with dropped frames.

Light changes

The DoublePlay did switch reasonably well between an indoor lamp, outside scene, and then back to indoor lighting without too much fading and color changes.

This typical outdoor scene, one of many we shot, is too choppy, as though the video was losing frames. The colors were accurate, though, and looked well lit.

Indoor video

Indoor videos did not exactly pop in terms of color vibrancy, but at least they looked better than the more choppy videos in an outdoor scene. Note the focus problem at a midpoint on the video.

Like the still photo mode, there are few Scene Modes – only a handful for outdoor, sunlight, and night. That means you can't specifically set the video mode for things like a macro scene or candles at a birthday party like you can with a full pocket digital camera.

Media

With two screens, there is a great opportunity for innovative games ala the Nintendo DS, or watching a movie on one screen while keeping tabs on your e-mail in another, or just running a slideshow on one screen and music on another.

Unfortunately, none of those activities are possible. The DoublePlay only works with nine apps in dual-screen mode, and none of them are directly related to media consumption.

Another surprise is that there is no front-facing camera on the DoublePlay, which seems like a necessity in today's day and age.

Like we mentioned, the phone supports up to 32GB microSD cards, which is helpful since the phone only has 2GB of internal memory. The slot for the flash cards is easily accessible inside the back cover.

Oddly, LG does not provide a music widget you can drop onto the 3.5-inch main screen, though there is an app for the secondary screen that allows you to control your music. Sound quality is average – not distorted, but not loud enough. The phone supports most common music formats like MP3, AAC, WAV, and WMA and all formats worked properly.

The display is small enough to make watching videos feel a bit lackluster. The DoublePlay supports MPEG4 and H.264/H.263 for video and played both smoothly. LG includes the DoubleTwist app for syncing media.

There's no built-in app for renting movies or TV shows, but you can play videos using the YouTube app or load them as MPEG4 files onto the device. The phone is DLNA-compatible for streaming media to set-top boxes and video game consoles and supports FM radio.

Battery life and connectivity

Battery Life

Due to a relatively small 1500 mAh battery and the need to light up two displays, battery life wasn't great. The talk time rating of three hours is fairly typical, but using the phone for everyday use (browsing the Web occasionally, checking e-mail, and sending text messages) only netted around six hours of usage.

You can extend the battery life using an app like Juice Defender, which disables the 4G connection for background usage. (To enable the connection, you just tap an option for short-term usage.)

Connectivity

While plenty of phones are still rocking Gingerbread, we couldn't help but think of all the ways the DoublePlay could have benefited from it. Being stuck on Gingerbread means Android Beam is not available - a tool that lets you send YouTube video links, Web site bookmarks, and your contacts by tapping phones together.

The DoublePlay does support Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 3.0, but doesn't support Bluetooth 4.0, the new standard that uses lower power transmissions. The DoublePlay also does not support Bluetooth HDP, the new standard included with ICS that lets you connect to heart rate monitors, step counters, and workout machines at the gym.

The phone works with the T-Mobile 4G network in the US for theoretical speeds of about 14.4Mbps, but a real-world throughput of more like 3-4Mbps. (The speed of your connection depends greatly on where you are, other users who are connected, et al.)

Maps and Apps

Maps

LG comes packed with the usual Gingerbread Google Maps, which functions similar to how it has in the past. Google Maps comes complete with voice guided turn-by-turn directions.

The DoublePlay also comes loaded with the TeleNav GPS app for mapping. Though it'll eventually cost you an additional $2.99 a month, and we can't think of any compelling reasons to use it isntead of Google Maps. We'd rack this one up as bloatware.

Apps

It's not the only bloatware on the phone, either. For the most part, the included apps aren't meaningless - they just provide services that other, free-er apps provide better. For instance, if you already use the The Kindle app or Google books for reading, you might not need the Blio app.

But it's not all junk - the phone includes the Lookout security app for finding a stolen phone, scanning for malware, and backing up data. There's a Wi-Fi Calling app you can use that does not use up your minutes for voice calls.

Other included apps of use include the world famous Sim City Deluxe and Tetris, as well as the Slacker radio app, the DoubelTwist music app, Zinio, Polaris Office, and the Bobsled group-texting app. Polaris Office is a good option for viewing Microsoft Office apps, which might mean you won't need to purchase Quickoffice for your mobile Office related needs.

Verdict

The LG DoublePlay is a unique phone that, if nothing else, tries to do something different. When it works, the dual-screens let you multitask at an unprecedented and entirely awesome pace.

Unfortunately, its uses are so sparse, that the novelty of the DoublePlay starts to wear thin, quickly. The phone is quite a bit too big and bulky, so everyday tasks like making calls and browsing the Web become too cumbersome.

We liked

The dual-screen does afford some extra functionality – namely, texting or taking notes on the small screen while you perform other tasks on the main screen. And when you're done using the physical keyboard, it's handy being able to slide up the phone keyboard and use the virtual keyboard.

Apps generally ran fast, and we had no problems visiting sites (except a few that buckled under their own large Flash animations).

We disliked

The LG DoublePlay felt bulky and heavy by the end of the day. The battery can't match the longevity of comparable models.

The camera did not provide enough clarity for photos or video, and did not include enough settings to fake good picture-taking.

Typing on the split-screen was a bit cumbersome and, perhaps most unforgivable of all, the small display frequently had no functionality in conjunction with apps. There was no way to know what was supported, aside from opening each app.

Verdict

The LG DoublePlay gets extra points for doing something almost entirely different. For some, the second screen will be a productive aid.

However, at the end of the day the second screen feels more like a mistake than a revolution, and as an everyday phone, the DoublePlay just doesn't cut it.

It's too bulky, too unintuitive, and too low-tech to be anything besides a gimmick.

Overview, design and feel

The Nokia Lumia 710 is the second offering into the Windows Phone arena from Nokia, following the release of the Nokia Lumia 800 late last year.

The first thing you notice when comparing the Nokia Lumia 710 with its older mobile phone sibling is that the Nokia Lumia 710 looks and feels cheaper. And it is. Where the Nokia Lumia 800 SIM-free price is around £430, the Nokia Lumia 710 is expected to cost a somewhat more economical £300.

The reason the Nokia Lumia 710 feels like a cheaper handset is partly down to the weight, coming in at a sprightly 125.5g against the Nokia Lumia 800's 142g. On paper this seems like a good thing, but the smartphone is too light somehow, making it feel unsubstantial compared to its bigger brother.

In addition to this, the Nokia Lumia 710 screen is recessed slightly, and the transition from the front face of the phone to the sides feels quite angular. The result of this styling is that the phone design doesn't look or feel as coherent as the Nokia Lumia 800.

Also we found the separate physical buttons for Back, Home and Search on the Nokia Lumia 710 look and feel cheaper than the integral styling on the Nokia Lumia 800, and we caught the bottom left of the screen when going to press the Back button a number of times.

One major advantage over the Nokia Lumia 800 is that the rear cover is removable, since the Nokia Lumia 710 comes with a replaceable battery. Based on the battery life of the Nokia Lumia 800, the ability to carry a spare battery and swap out may well prove extremely useful.

With the Nokia Lumia 710, Nokia has returned to the days of the changeable covers - rear at least - to further personalise your mobile phone. Although we're all for changeable covers and phone personalisation, removing the cover feels like something we should be doing as little as possible when we saw the exposed pads onto which the side buttons press.

Although phones with changeable covers are more commonly marketed at younger users, the only available payment method for Vodafone and T-Mobile customers is by credit card, which many won't have. This seems odd since Microsoft enabled PayPal as a payment method on the Xbox 360 late last year, and those transitioning from Symbian handsets are used to having the option to pay via their phone bill.

It seems that at present, if you are interested in buying a Windows Phone, then you're best off with Orange, which is supporting pay via phone bill with Microsoft.

When we compared the size of the Nokia Lumia 710 (119 x 62.4 x 12.48mm) with the Nokia Lumia 800 (116.5 x 61.2 x 12.1mm), we were surprised to find it was the larger of the two. The only reason we could find for this was the extra mechanics required for a removable cover and replaceable battery in the Nokia Lumia 710.

The Nokia Lumia 710 and Nokia Lumia 800 share the same screen size (3.7 inches) and resolution (480 x 800p), although the Nokia Lumia 710 is limited to a ClearBlack TFT compared to the ClearBlack AMOLED on the Nokia Lumia 800.

They also both use Gorilla Glass, making them somewhat bomb-proof. The similarities continue to the processor, with both phones using the 1.4GHz single-core Qualcomm MSM8255T Scorpion/Snapdragon chip.

Outside of the Nokia stable of handsets, the Lumia 710 is similar to the HTC Radar, which is 11.5g heavier, at 137g, although similarly sized, measuring 120.5 x 61.5 x 10.9mm.

Both phones have a 5MP camera and 8GB of internal memory. But the HTC Radar has a slightly larger 3.8-inch screen and a substantially lower powered processor - a 1GHz single-core Qualcomm MSM8255 Scorpion/Snapdragon.

Interface

The Nokia Lumia 710's user interface follows the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango standard, which means there's no difference in the usability between the Nokia Lumia 710 and the Nokia Lumia 800.

There are some slight differences when compared with the HTC Radar, in that Nokia adds an additional tile colour option (Nokia Blue), 20 additional ringtones and three additional alarm sounds (Nokia calendar, Nokia email and Nokia message). This all means that your new Nokia Windows Phone can still sound like your old Nokia Symbian phone, if you want.

The Windows Phone interface is, at first glance, very different to other smartphone operating systems. As Symbian^3 devices have developed through Symbian Anna to Belle, the home screen has become more Android in appearance, with the menu structure using an app grid with the ability to have folders or sub-menus within menus.

Although there are some similarities to Android, iOS and Symbian in Windows Phone 7.5, the emphasis has changed from having many apps accessible on the home screen to having a few easily accessible apps on the start screen, in a scrollable 2x4 grid, with useful information displayed on their tiles.

This interface with four to eight live tiles on the screen at any time is more intuitive and faster to navigate.

The main negative of the Nokia Lumia 710's interface is the lack of folders, which will hopefully be partially rectified by the release of Windows Phone Tango.

An alphabetically listed app menu is searchable, jumping to first letter functionality when you have 45 or more apps (games don't count) installed. This dearly needs the sub-folder functionality too.

Contacts and calling

Setting up your contacts - or People, as Windows Phone calls them - is a breeze. When we powered on the Nokia Lumia 710 for the first time, we were asked to log in to or register for a Windows Live account, which, although non-compulsory, forms an integral part of how Windows Phone works.

This account was then synced to the People, Calendar and Email (Hotmail) apps and enabled IM via Windows Live Messenger, while becoming the default cloud backup solution for all contact information.

Next we were asked to log in or register for a Nokia account, which gives an idea of how Nokia plans to expand on its initially limited Windows Phone apps offering.

As well as the ability to sync people's contact information from Windows Live Hotmail, Facebook, Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Nokia/OVI Mail and Yahoo, Nokia has created a Contacts Transfer app, which enables direct Bluetooth transfer of all contact information from one phone to another, in case you're not currently a social or cloud surfer.

As the People app populates from the different cloud and physical locations it automatically merges contacts where the name is the same across the sources, reducing the number of contact names to search through.

Even so, we found we needed to run through the contacts in the People app to do the last few contact merges manually where they had different names/nicknames in the different sources.

One major issue with the multiple sourced contact information is that it's somewhat an all or nothing functionality, displaying either all contacts from a source or none of them. Hopefully Nokia/Microsoft will provide a happy middle ground for customisation in a future update.

Once this is all complete, calling with the Nokia Lumia 710 is as easy as tapping the phone icon, which opens a call history screen with touchscreen buttons at the bottom for voicemail, a simple dial pad, access to your phone book and a call history search.

The People app defaults to the top-right live tile on new and reset Windows Phones, and can be found in the apps list if removed from the start screen.

The dial pad enables you to make a call and nothing much else, which feels a little limited when compared with the smart dialling provided on competing smartphones. However, contacts can be searched though separately in the People app, so the functionality is still accessible.

While making and receiving calls on the Nokia Lumia 710 with our Orange SIM, we found that the signal was maintained well, with the 3G signal switching quickly between Orange and T-Mobile.

Messaging

Messaging and social networking is where Windows Phone and the Nokia Lumia 710 really come into their own. Once we had set up accounts for Windows Live, Twitter and Facebook, we were able to choose which contacts to display in the People app.

Setting up Windows Live, Twitter and Facebook accounts meant that we could select contacts from the People app to IM or email via Windows Live Hotmail, write on their wall or chat with them on Facebook or send them a message on Twitter, along with the standard option to send them an SMS or MMS.

While on a contact's profile screen, we were able to swipe to the left to see what's new, which displays their recent posts on Facebook and Twitter. Swipe again to see their Facebook photo albums and swipe a third time to see a history of messages from them.

From the People app, a quick tap on a profile picture opened up the Me app, which can also be opened by selecting it from the app list - or start screen, if pinned. From here we were able to post a status update or check in on Windows Live, Twitter LinkedIn or Facebook.

Based on the ability to check in, seemed a pity that this feature wasn't linked to Foursquare as well, but we suppose we can't have everything, and this is a great start.

If we fancied a live chat, we could choose to 'Set chat status'. Although this didn't result in a visual change in the Me app, opening the Messaging app now showed an Online screen, which displayed contacts who were available on Windows Live Messenger and/or Facebook Chat.

From the Messaging app, we were able to select a contact and choose from messaging them via SMS or IM, creating a virtual conversation with them. All of these methods of communication made us feel well connected from the Nokia Lumia 710's general interface, without having to install third party apps.

However, Microsoft has released a Facebook app and Twitter and Foursquare have released their own, with Skype rumoured to be integrated into a future update to Windows Phone handsets.

Internet

Internet -via Wi-Fi or 3G - is fast and responsive on the Nokia Lumia 710, sharing the pre-installed Internet Explorer browser with the rest of the Windows Phone stable.

Connection times are substantially faster than Symbian devices, taking around four seconds to open the full (non-mobile) TechRadar site. These speeds are more akin to the top-end Android and iOS smartphones, as we found in our Nokia Lumia 800 review. Both Nokia phones share the same hardware and software that affect this performance.

As with the WiFi internet speed the Nokia Lumia 710 and Lumia 800 are on a par when using 3G for internet surfing taking around three seconds to initial load the Techradar website with text and fixed images and a further five seconds to load the rest.

This two part method means that you can be reading the articles whilst the animated areas of the site are still loading. With Internet Explorer directed to the mobile internet version of the site the load time was cut to nearly two seconds for all info.

Although Internet Explorer is pinned to the start screen out of the box, the space can be saved since most people, once used to Windows Phone, prefer to use the bottom left search button to open Bing and navigate from there.

This holds the same for the Local Scout app, since once Bing has been opened, four touchscreen buttons appear at the bottom of the screen, providing access to Local Scout, Music Scrobbler, Text/Barcode Scanner and Voice Recognition Internet Search.

Local Scout provides location-based information on shops, bars, restaurants and attractions.

The Music Scrobbler app listens to background music and searches for it in the Marketplace.

Text/Barcode Scanner scans barcodes, QR Codes, Microsoft Tags, books, CDs and DVDs, plus can translate scanned text - with mixed results, so we're undecided on this function despite it being a really cool feature.

Voice Recognition Internet Search starts a web search based on spoken words.

One major limitation that remains from the Nokia Lumia 800 is that Flash Player still hasn't arrived. According to the Flash Runtime Team at Adobe, although they are working with Microsoft to provide a Windows Phone Flash Player solution, "Windows Phone 7.5 Mango will not support Flash Player". Hopefully it will appear in Windows Phone 8 later this year.

Camera

As with the Nokia Lumia 800, the Nokia Lumia 710 doesn't feature a front-facing camera. The first Nokia Windows Phone expected to provide this functionality is the Nokia Lumia 900 or one of the Nokia Lumia 9xx variants.

This remains a frustration, especially following Microsoft's takeover of Skype. This is a feature that featured on Nokia Symbian phones as well as numerous Android handsets and iPhones.

The 5MP Nokia Lumia 710 camera is the first major cost saving compared with the 8MP Nokia Lumia 800 camera, although this is on par with the HTC Radar, just as the Nokia Lumia 800 is with the HTC Titan.

The camera software interface is the same across all of the Windows Phones, but the difference in resolution between hardware specs will see a difference in the file output.

This being said, although the Nokia Lumia 710 has a lower resolution camera than the Nokia Lumia 800, it does have a greater zoom capability, with a 4x digital zoom instead of a 3x one.

With Windows Phone 7.5 comes touchscreen-based tap to focus and shoot, which is very nice to have.

With this default Windows Phone functionality comes the beautiful integration between the Camera and Pictures apps. Take a photograph, tap on the arrow in the top-left corner of the camera screen and you enter the Pictures app in the Camera Roll, where you can auto-fix, face tag and upload the image to your selected quick share account (Facebook, Twitter or SkyDrive) or share it via email or any other social apps you may have installed.

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SHARED: Image quality is reduced along with file size when it's shared.

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MAXIMUM ZOOM: Images are noisy at full zoom settings.

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MINIMUM ZOOM: Zoomed out, images are much clearer.

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Although all images were taken in auto mode as this is where most owners will reside, the Nokia Lumia 710 provides a wide range of scene options with the standard Backlight, Macro, Landscape, Night, Portrait and Sports being bolster with Beach, Candlelight, Snow, and Sunset.

In addition to this we were able to change White Balance, Exposure, ISO, Metering Mode, Contrast, Saturation, Focus Mode, Resolution and Flickr Reduction. Sadly however, with all these options there is no option to use red-eye reduction flash.

After a lot of searching around, we found a number of third-party red-eye removal apps, but none have overly impressed, using very low-tech cover up methods.

Video

When it comes to video recording on the Nokia Lumia 710, we found the response to changes in light levels was good and there was minimal lag when panning around.

The major disappointment we had was that, as with the Nokia Lumia 800, the Nokia Lumia 710 doesn't permit changing the zoom level during recording, meaning that to zoom in or out we had to stop recording, change zoom level between the six preset levels and start recording a new section of video.

Although the Nokia Lumia 710 struggled in low light conditions without the single LED light, turning it on provided a reasonable colour depth and panning lag, as long as the subject was less than a couple of metres away.

Media

Pictures

One of the most important things when it comes to media is storage, and this is another area where money has been saved on the Nokia Lumia 710, providing 8GB of capacity compared with the Nokia Lumia 800's more generous 16GB. Yet again this mimics the HTC Radar specification, just as the Nokia Lumia 800 mimics the HTC Titan.

As long as this doesn't limit you too much, the Pictures app is a breeze to use, with a customisable in-app background based on the images on your phone.

We did, however, find that it's not possible to delete images in bulk from the Nokia Lumia 710 without using the Zune PC software. This isn't a limitation of the Nokia Lumia 710 specifically, but one of the Windows Phone 7.5 operating system.

Music

When it comes to listening to music on the Nokia Lumia 710, you're presented with two options out of the box, with the default Zune Player from Microsoft and the Nokia Music app.

The main advantages of Nokia Music over the Zune Music+Video app is that it includes Mix Radio, providing a selection of different genre-based Music Mixes to listen to over the air, or download to listen to later, which are updated weekly. Plus if you permit the app to use your location, it provides live local gig information.

That being said, the My Music section of Nokia Music is heavily reliant on the Zune Music+Video back end.

The only way to tell if you're using Nokia Music when scrolling through your music is that Nokia Music has 'My Music' rather than 'Music' written at the top of the screen, and provides selection via Genre, which isn't offered by Zune Music+Video.

Nokia Music, as its name implies, is limited to music media, whereas the Zune Music+Video app provides access to Music, Video, Podcasts stored on device, a standard FM Radio (with headphones) and direct access to the Music Marketplace.

If you're prepared to fork out £8.99 per month or £89.90 per year you can get your hands on a Zune Pass, which enables you to download and listen to as much music as you like from the Marketplace on your Phone, PC and Xbox 360. Although this is a nice idea, it seems a little expensive in the current market.

A frustration with the Zune service is that although there is a method of playing audiobooks on Microsoft Zune Media Players, this hasn't transitioned into the Windows Phone operating system. This means that a number of clever people have had to devise a work-around where you can upload audiobooks to the Zune software as local podcasts, enabling bookmarked audio, so you can pick up your audiobook where you put it down.

Doing a speaker comparison between the Nokia Lumia 710 and Nokia Lumia 800 - using Shelter by The XX - we found that although the sound from the Nokia Lumia 710 is fractionally more open, the Nokia Lumia 800 sounded slightly better.

We put the difference down to the construction of the phones, since through headphones they sounded the same. Nokia has already accepted that the sound quality could be improved in the Nokia Lumia 800 and promised an update later in the year. Hopefully this will be applied to the Nokia Lumia 710 too.

Games

Gaming is another area where the Nokia Lumia 710 excels, since it works as an extension of the Xbox 360 gaming experience. Many Xbox 360 Arcade games have been expanded to have variants playable on Windows Phone handsets.

Some over the counter games such as Kinectimals enable the user to take a snapshot of the television when playing the game on the games console, and transfer progress to the phone. They also use the Xbox 360 Kinect to take a photo of the Nokia Lumia 710 screen to transfer progress back to the console.

Not only are you able to download games to play, but you can also download an app to modify your Xbox 360 avatar if that takes your fancy. Or download an app to control your console, an app to act as a ruler, a spirit level, a torch and more.

The gaming experience on the Nokia Lumia 710 is very impressive, with the only disappointment being that games are somewhat more expensive than in other mobile app stores, including the Nokia Store.

Battery and connectivity

Battery

The battery life on the Nokia Lumia 710 suffers in the same way as the Nokia Lumia 800, providing a day's usage between changes. Long gone are the days of the endless battery life.

This isn't surprising, since the Nokia Lumia 710 has a measly - albeit removable - 1300mAh BP-3L battery, compared with the Nokia Lumia 800's (non-removable) 1450mAh BV-5JW.

Nokia states the Lumia 710 as being capable of up to 7.6 hours 3G talk time and up to 400 hours GSM or 3G standby time, compared with up to 9.5 hours 3G talk time and up to 265 hours GSM standby and 335 hours 3G standby on the Lumia 800.

When we now compare this with the specs for the HTC Radar, with its 1520mAh battery and up to 600/485 hours GSM/3G talk time and up to 480/535 hours GSM/3G standby, we note the improvements needed from Nokia.

The only advantage for the Nokia Lumia 710 is that, as the battery is removable, maybe someone like Mugen will develop a higher-capacity battery replacement.

Charging up the Nokia Lumia 710 is no different to the rest of the latest breed of phones out of the Nokia stable, using a micro USB connection on the top of the phone. One difference to the Nokia Lumia 800 is that there's no connector cover this time, with the micro USB socket exposed at all times.

As with other Windows Phone handsets, there is an option within phone settings to enable automatic switching to battery saver mode when the battery level drops below a preset figure. Once enabled, certain services such as automatic synchronisation of emails and app background tasks are switched off.

Connectivity

Connectivity on the Nokia Lumia 710 is no different to that on the Nokia Lumia 800, with a USB to micro USB cable included in the box for physical PC connectivity for synchronisation, data transfer and USB charging.

As with the Nokia Lumia 800, the Nokia Lumia 710 also supports Bluetooth 2.1 +EDR, and Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n with the usual WEP, WPA, WPA2 (Enterprise & Personal) enabling both wireless accessory usage and Wi-Fi synchronisation with the Zune PC software, if you're prepared to take the battery hit.

The first time we connected the Nokia Lumia 710 to the PC driver, installation went smoothly and we were asked to install Zune software onto the PC, even though it was already installed. A bit of polish is needed by the software developer here, maybe.

Once the PC Zune software was opened with the phone connected, it checked for updates and found one, which it installed. Then the phone was ready for use.

The PC Zune software operates similarly to iTunes with iOS devices, requiring that you set up your music and videos in a folder structure and set the software to monitor it. There's an option for it to automatically re-structure and rename the files and folders based on changes to track details within the Zune software.

Once set up, transferring music, podcasts, videos and pictures on and off the Nokia Lumia 710 is as simple as you like, with the option to automatically sync all, by playlists or manually. To make things even easier, the Nokia Lumia 710 can be set to automatically synchronise with the Zune software via WiFi when non charge and in range of your home WiFi network.

As with the Nokia Lumia 800, the Nokia Lumia 710 isn't automatically recognised as a USB storage device, but this can be rectified by running a little third-party app that makes a small change to the registry on your PC to enable this.

In addition to the media transfer that uses the Zune software, contacts, email and calendar events can be synchronised with your PC's Outlook data via Windows Live and the Windows Live Outlook Connector add-on.

Finally, an additional advantage of the Windows Live service is that the Nokia Lumia 710 can access, modify, and save OneNote, Word, Excel and PowerPoint files on a 25GB provisioned space on SkyDrive, Microsoft's cloud service.

Maps and apps

Maps

Although Windows Phone 7.5 comes with Bing Maps fully integrated, the Nokia Lumia 710 comes with Nokia Maps, albeit a Marketplace link and Nokia Drive (full app), pre-installed.

This may cause confusion or seem a waste of time for some, but Nokia has a long history of excellent mobile maps and sat nav. The frustration in this case comes in the fact that the current offering from Nokia for Windows Phone feels disjointed at best.

The Nokia Maps app relies on Over-The-Air (OTA) map data when the Nokia Drive app downloads the map data onto the phone. This makes us wonder whether the two apps are being developed by completely separate teams in different parts of the world.

Tapping on an address in the People app or other areas of the operating system brings up the Bing Maps app, whereas to use Nokia Maps you have to open the app, which has text-based search and display places options, sourcing all information OTA even though Nokia Drive has map data stored on the smartphone.

Once you've selected a location, you have the choice to walk or drive. This is where things get even more disconnected, because choosing to drive doesn't open the Nokia Drive app, but provides less capable OTA navigation functionality with Nokia Maps.

To use the sat nav functionality provided in Nokia Drive, you need to open this app instead and use the text entry search to find your location, since Nokia Drive doesn't support map-based location selection or local places display.

Nokia Drive then provides sat nav using the on-device maps, although the search functionality is still performed OTA.

Nokia apps

Along with Nokia Maps and Nokia Drive, Nokia has a number of other apps for Windows Phone including Contacts Transfer, Apps Highlight and Nokia Music, which all come pre-installed on the Nokia Lumia 710.

In addition to these is TuneIn Radio and a useful Network Setup app to help automate setting up internet and MMS services when switching SIM cards.

An interesting Nokia app, which is a little harder to find, since it's still in public beta, is Nokia Pulse, which is a group-based social app with push notifications of updates.

Microsoft apps

Microsoft has also been busy developing apps and games to populate the Windows Phone Marketplace. The good news is that many of these are free and include, Facebook, YouTube, Last.fm and a number of utility apps like Weather and Unit Converter.

One little app that appeared a few weeks ago is the Suggestion Box which is for users to suggest, and vote on other peoples, improvements or changes to the current Windows Phone OS.

Pre-installed apps

Now we get to the pre-installed apps, of which there are 27 in all, many of which we have already covered, such as AppHighlights, Calendar, Camera, Contacts Transfer, Internet Explorer, Maps, Marketplace, Messaging, Music+Video (Zune), Nokia Maps, Drive and Music, Office, People, Phone and Pictures.

Of the remaining apps, Alarm, Calculator and Settings are quite self-explanatory.

This leaves eBay, ESPN, Groupon, Help+How-To, Sky News, Trip Advisor and We Care. The eBay app is nicely done, with the ability to perform guided searches as well as general searches, and the option to enable notifications to keep an eye on that must-have item you've bid on.

ESPN and Sky News are simple but nicely presented news apps, and Trip Advisor provides the ability to read and write reviews of hotels, restaurants, attractions and flights.

Groupon is a mobile extension of the Groupon website, providing localised discount vouchers for shops, restaurants and so on. Finally, Help+How-To is an online user guide for Windows Phone, and We Care is a little app from Nokia to let you know that the company cares about your privacy, which is nice.

All of these apps are easy to use, and can be uninstalled from the Nokia Lumia 710 if needed, by long-pressing on the app name in the app list and selecting Uninstall.

We accept that the Windows Phone Marketplace isn't as big as the App Store or Android Market, but there are some excellent gems in there, and more are appearing every day.

Hands-on gallery

Official gallery

Verdict

The Nokia Lumia 710 is by no means an ugly phone, but when compared with the beautiful curves of the Nokia Lumia 800 it starts to feel cheaper than maybe it should. The smartphone is directly aimed at younger users with its changeable rear cover, but we're not sure its hardware needed to be downgraded as much as it has been.

We liked

The removable battery is what we have always loved about Nokia handsets, enabling us to carry a spare just in case.

The user interface continues to impress in many ways with its speed of response and the intuitiveness of its icon.

Nokia apps such as Nokia Maps, Nokia Drive, Nokia Music (with Mix radio and gig info) and Nokia Pulse are great. We can only hope that the Nokia Drive and Maps integration will be sorted out.

The integration with Xbox Live is a dream for those of us that have grown up with console and handheld gaming.

The use of cloud based services to back up information and the ability to merge contact information from more than one cloud based service making communication and sharing with friends across the world so much faster and easier.

We disliked

The small capacity of the battery leads us to be disappointed again with the juice-retention of Nokia's Windows Phone offerings.

The cheaper look and feel of the Nokia Lumia 710 when compared with the Nokia Lumia 800 is disappointing, as is the downgrading of the screen (TFT instead of AMOLED), camera (5MP instead of 8MP) and internal storage (8GB instead of 16GB).

The repeated lack of a front-facing camera, with Skype around the corner and the Tango Video app already existing, is frustrating.

The visually fragile volume and camera buttons that are exposed when the rear cover is removed look like they are going to get damaged by battery switchers or cover changers, and that it's just a question of how long it will take.

Final verdict

Although we would buy the Nokia Lumia 710 over the HTC Radar, it's overshadowed by the Nokia Lumia 800, which impressed us a lot more and makes the Nokia Lumia 710 feel more like its cheaper relative than we would have liked. We know that the phone costs less, but the cost savings feel too apparent.

For the small drop in price and the expectation that both phones are to drop in price, we're left feeling that, unless you really want the changeable cover and removable battery, you're better off saving up a little more money and buying the Nokia Lumia 800 instead. The older phone gives a lot more bang for your buck.

Based on the recent announcements from Nokia and rumours flying around the internet, it's likely this will remain the budget option for the foreseeable future - a little bit more of a price drop and we'll be a lot more impressed with this otherwise decent handset.

The gap between smartphones and MP3 players began to narrow with the advent of the iPhone, and it is now practically non-existent thanks to smartphone storage capacities of often 8 or 16GB holding a lot of our music.

There is nothing on this world or any other that's more annoying than listening to tinny music through the small speakers on a smartphone (especially if the music isn't yours).

The Logitech Mini Boombox utilises the smartphone's Bluetooth connection to become a rechargeable wireless speaker. The Logitech Mini Boombox charges via a USB cable and is small, with a simple - yet quite good looking - design.

When turned on six red icons appear on the top of the device, highlighting where to push to start, pause and skip between tracks, as well as changing the volume and connecting to a Bluetooth device.

Connecting the Logitech Mini Boombox via Bluetooth was incredibly easy - we just turned on Bluetooth detection on the phone, then pressed and held the Bluetooth button on the Mini Boombox, then clicked 'Mini Boombox' on our smartphone and they connected straight away.

A nice feature was that we could control playback on our smartphone from the Mini Boombox, making it a sort of remote control for our phone as well. It can also be used as a hands-free kit for your phone, with a small built-in microphone picking up your speech.

Even for such a small speaker sound quality is very good, and there's hardly any noticeable audio as you increase the volume. It manages volumes loud enough to fill rooms, and is pretty good for outdoor parties.

Tascam's built its reputation on providing high-quality recording equipment for musicians and videophiles, and now you can get a piece of the action with the compact, lightweight iM2.

It's a digital recorder for iOS devices that plugs into the dock connector on the bottom of your iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, fourth-generation iPod touch, iPad or iPad 2.

On its own, it comprises a pair of high-quality stereo condenser mics with a built-in volume input dial and a limiter switch to reduce distortion.

But it really comes into its own when you team it with its accompanying PCM Recorder app. This apes the controls on Tascam's range of pro-class audio recorders like the DR-08, giving you precise control over recordings, the ability to transfer recordings to iTunes or share them on SoundCloud.

Thanks to the high spec of its stereo mics and ability to record in CD quality (44.1kHz PCM), the sound recordings the iM2 makes are excellent no matter what you're trying to record. And you can angle the microphones backwards and forwards by 180-degrees to ensure they're always pointing at your subject.

The Tascam iM2 inevitably picks up any sounds your hands make while you're holding it; and you'll need to be careful when setting recording levels to avoid clipping/distortion, although the limiter can help. There's also a lack of a line input, which ultimately stops the iM2 from being a great all-round recording machine.

The Bayan Audio Bayan 7 is a curious-looking speaker dock which looks more like an oven that slots into a wall than a high-end iOS speaker dock (a black version is also available). But on closer inspection, it soon reveals its true purpose.

Set into its clear acrylic facia is a hefty bass subwoofer that also acts as its stand. The rest of the sound is supplied by twin 5cm full-range speakers and two 2.5cm tweeters.

The Bayan 7 has two amplifiers, one for the bass and one for the middle and high-end sounds. Altogether, the five speakers deliver 120W of power, so it won't leave you short of volume. Its comprehensive collection of drivers also gives it a very wide frequency response.

Around the front there's two 30-pin dock connectors, which fit every compatible device except the iPad. You can charge an Apple tablet using the USB port on the back of the Bayan 7, and play its sounds by connecting the supplied 3.5mm AUX cable (which can also connect to your Mac or any audio device with a headphone socket). But you can't use the rather fussy remote's iPod controls when listening to an iPad.

The hand controller also lets you set the volume, adjust bass and treble independently and switch between Music Mode and Vocal Mode, which is well tuned for spoken word media such as audio books.

Bayan 7 is suited for most genres of music, but if you like intense, room-shaking bass, it might not be for you. Although deep, rich and natural, its bottom end won't drown the mix even when turned up to maximum.

Its excellent stereo separation belies the proximity of its speakers, though the sound isn't as three-dimensional as it might be. But where Bayan's high-end speaker dock really scores is in its crystal-clear reproduction.

The Bayan 7 is not a speaker dock that looks good in any room, but you can't fault the sound. Whether its rather idiosyncratic appearance is a good thing or a bad thing is very much a matter of taste.

Overview, design and feel

BlackBerry may quietly (or perhaps not so quietly) be finessing its plans for world domination with its upcoming BBX handsets, but it's not letting the other operating system go to waste, with a stream of BB7 devices being churned out right now, among them the BlackBerry Bold 9790.

No longer are there just a few mobile phones to pick from, with RIM really saturating the market as it attempts to put the woes of last year's BBM outage firmly in the past.

Up until now, the cock of the school has been the BlackBerry Bold 9900, the premium BB offering that showcased the then new BB7 OS and replacing the tired Bold 9700 and 9780 lines.

And we thought that was it. Until the BlackBerry Bold 9790 landed on our doormat, promising what appears to be the best bits of the 9900 in a shell that's like the lovechild of a Bold 9700 and a Curve 9360.

We're slightly unsure why it exists, since it's very similar in all but size to the Bold 9900 and makes it feel like RIM is over-saturating its own market here. However, this could be a ploy to 'sex up' the Bold line and make it attractive to the younger, non-business focused market - plus some people always prefer smaller designs.

At the time of writing, the BlackBerry Bold 9790 is yet to be released, but it's expected to cost around £360 in the UK or $450 SIM-free in the US on pre-order, which makes it a good £100 cheaper than the larger Bold 9900.

And yet, with a 2.45-inch touchscreen, 8GB of onboard memory, 5MP snapper (with flash), GPS, Wi-Fi, NFC, HSPA and 1GHz processor (smaller than the 9900's 1.2GHz), it's certainly not short of bells or whistles, and can competently compete with the likes of the credible Nokia E6.

And of course, it'll be up against the Bold 9900. Which you go for may quite simply depend on whether you prefer a big smartphone or a small one (plus a few extra pennies in your pocket.)

As for the BlackBerry Bold 9790's design, this baby is small. If you've held a 9700 or 9780, then we're talking that small, although the handset also feels ever so slightly thinner. That's partly due to the tapered design we first encountered with the BlackBerry Curve 9360. The actual dimensions are 110mm x 60mm x 11.4mm.

Like the Curve 9360, we have four buttons below the screen, which are completely separate and surround a touch-sensitive trackpad. This distinguishes the BlackBerry Bold 9790 from the Bold 9900, which had four touchpads beneath its screen instead.

Indeed, the BlackBerry Bold 9790 looks almost identical to the Curve 9360, and the only thing that really sets them apart to look at is the keyboard. While the Curve 9360 uses the Curve's separate keys, the Bold 9790 employs the Bold's signature keyboard where the buttons are all crammed in together.

There's little of interest on the sides other than a volume rocker and convenience key on the right and a headphone jack on the left. The lock button is up top, while the micro USB charging and syncing port is down below.

There's a flash of silver around the sides and the back and a rear cover made of a matt rubber, which quite frankly requires a degree from Oxford, fingernails from Jurassic Park and the brute strength of Samson to pull off. Until you figure that it slides down. Oops.

At 107g it's light, so you won't be worrying about putting your back out carrying the BlackBerry Bold 9790 around.

Interface

The BlackBerry Bold 9790 gives you the latest BlackBerry operating system, BB7. It's a stretch to call it the 'new' OS, since it's been out for a few months. And even when it was first released, we didn't particularly feel that it was fresh or new compared to OS6.

Nevertheless, moaning aside, it does the job and bridges the gap before we get our hands on the all-new BBX later this year.

The icons in BB7 are a bit of an acquired taste. Like the BlackBerry PlayBook, they look a little bit hotch potch and cobbled together, although they do have the benefit of being incredibly detailed and looking like they could jump of the screen at any time, albeit at the risk of looking rather busy.

As introduced in BB6, RIM gives you several drawers to swipe between on the BlackBerry Bold 9790. The idea is that you can view all apps, just favourites or just, say, media apps. It's well-intentioned but not something we ever used, and nor did anyone else we asked.

Searching through the phone is a cinch, and you can access apps, contacts, music and more by just beginning to type on that home screen, like a number of the other big operating systems.

Ring profiles are as comprehensive as ever, with several available, although there are so many options to customise that even for an advanced user, it can get a bit confusing.

The big difference between the BlackBerry Bold 9790 and BB6-rocking devices is that the BlackBerry Bold 9790 has that touchscreen as well as a physical keyboard - just like the Bold 9900. It's useful to have but not essential by any means, and we found ourselves instinctively using the trackpad more often than not.

The 1GHz processor whizzes along so much faster than the older 9700 and 9780 handsets, and we must say that we were impressed with the speed, despite the reduction in grunt compared to the Bold 9900.

Sadly that's about it, because BB7 hardly pushes the boundaries, and if you're a previous BlackBerry owner, you won't find this to be that different to handsets you've used before.

Contacts and calling

RIM has always excelled with its contact management which - aside from email - could probably explain its traditional popularity among the corporates. And as the old mantra goes, "If it 'aint broke, don't fix it." Which is exactly what RIM has done for the BlackBerry Bold 9790. Nothing.

The contacts section is exactly the same as it was on BB6. Exactly the same. Which isn't a bad thing. Though we had hoped for a little more colour, since the one thing RIM has never given us in this section is aesthetics, preferring form way over function.

Adding contacts is easy as pie, with various options from BES to Google Sync to using a cable to connect and sync with your PC or Mac. We did it in seconds using a cable, and found them to all be there. Considering there are over 2000 entries in our address book, the fact it took less than a minute was definitely a plus.

Your loved ones (and the numbers of people you've acquired yet don't remember who they are) come complete with thumbnails.

Nice if you have photos of said people and have invested time in putting them where they should be. Not so nice if you haven't, because then you have a mixture of photos and BB icons, which looks a little untidy. But as we say, aesthetics don't appear to be RIM's priority.

In a contact field, you can put in any bit of information you require, ranging from date of birth to anniversaries, address, phone, email details plus custom information if you want to keep a note of their dog's name.

Adding them is as easy as doing it via the phone book options or just typing the number in on the home screen and hitting 'Save'.

Calling a person is easy - just type their name in from the home screen and smart dialling kicks in, or do it via the contacts app. You can also add shortcuts to people to dial on your home screen, a feature that our iOS-loving friends still miss out on, unless they want to go around the houses using third-party apps.

When in a call, you get the usual options, such as hold, add participant and so on. There's nothing new here. And the call quality is, as you'd expect from BlackBerry, pretty good.

Signal was excellent on the BlackBerry Bold 9790 as it always is on BlackBerry handsets, and we managed to hold onto calls well even in a moving car. Both the in-built earpiece and the speakerphone held their own, and we like the ability to write notes as you're engaged in a call.

It's very handy when somebody is giving you useful info, and negates the need to mutter "hang on while I grab a pen." Noise reduction seems to kick in automatically, and we were told we sounded very clear

.

There's no video calling capability, which is a shame since RIM doesn't seem too interested in keeping up with the other mobile phone manufacturers here. And as for social networking, you won't find it too deeply integrated, with Facebook and Twitter being independent apps.

While they may jump in a bit with the messaging aspect, contacts-wise there's no HTC Sense-style approach - other than a bit of contact profile image swapping between apps - and that's a real shame. We rued it on the 9900 and we rue it again.

Messaging

BlackBerry may have lost its way over the years in certain aspects, but aside from when BBM went down, messaging has consistently been a strong point for RIM phones. No surprise then that it's excellent as always on the BlackBerry Bold 9790.

Email is the natural place to start, and it ticks all the boxes, with various account options open to the user from BES (business setup) to BIS (consumer-focused). It's very intuitive to set up if you're doing it yourself, and just as easy to customise.

We're big fans of the unified inbox, since you're able to throw everything in there. We're not talking just multiple email accounts but SMS/MMS, BBM, WhatsApp, Twitter and Facebook. To coin the Apple philosophy, 'it just works.'

BBM is present and accounted for. RIM's proprietary messaging service, which offers encryption, is free to use (barring data costs) and extremely popular with younger people who swap BlackBerry PINs like adults used to swap cigarette cards. Group chats, file transfers and even BlackBerry Music are onboard, which enables you to share your audio tastes.

Twitter and Facebook are both accounted for, and represent their clients well. Of course, you can also use the fantastic alternatives such as UberSocial if you prefer - they all do the basics well. The Facebook app has been updated in the last six months or so to make it more visually appealing and user-friendly, although it's still not on a par with the iPhone or Android variants.

As well as full integration with the inbox for Twitter and Facebook, the beauty of BB7 is that it enables an inroads to the inbox for other messaging solutions, too. The likes of Windows Live Messenger, ICQ, LinkedIn and so on. All of them will show up with notifications in the inbox if you choose, and it looks and feels very professional.

We were really impressed with the keyboard on the BlackBerry Bold 9790. It's the same as that found on the 9700 and 9780, which we always thought was one of - if not the - best out there.

The Bold 9900 upped the ante a little by giving more real estate, but we still feel that the keyboard on the BlackBerry Bold 9790 is pretty unbeatable, and you'll be typing out messages like an eager Justin Bieber fan club member in no time at all.

Internet

We're glad to say that the internet experience on the BlackBerry Bold 9790 is top notch as far as BlackBerry devices go. This is a fairly significant statement, because up until just over a year ago when BB6 hit the streets, the web browsing on a BlackBerry device was poor to say the least.

Luckily once RIM started pursuing its own WebKit solution, things got a bit better and here we are now.

We'll get the negatives out of the way first. There's no Flash. We always go on about this so we won't bother now - especially because Flash has become less and less important and significant. Indeed, Adobe has said it plans to drop Flash support for mobiles and concentrate on PCs and dedicated apps instead.

We need to compare performance slightly to the Bold 9900, because that has a marginally bigger processor at 1.2GHz (compared to the BlackBerry Bold 9790's 1GHz). When we used the 9900 to browse it was good, but we noticed some glitches. Pages took a while to render, for example.

We'd have expected this problem to surface on the BlackBerry Bold 9790 because of the inferior processor, but we had no such issues, which is a big win as far as we're concerned.

Pages don't load as fast as they do on comparable smartphones from other manufacturers, though. You'll not get the blistering speeds of the Samsung Galaxy S2, the iPhone 4S or even HTC Titan here. But the bizarre thing is, because BlackBerry's browsers have always been so pants until recently, you just feel it's par for the course and something to be tolerated.

The touchscreen enables you to navigate that way, but the screen is so small compared to the 9900 that clicking on links can be a bit cumbersome. Indeed, the screen size is the BlackBerry Bold 9790's Achilles' heel for browsing, because it doesn't fit much on.

When you consider we thought the 9900's screen was a little too small for web browsing, you can see why we were frustrated on this handset. Double-tapping enables tap to zoom, and text reflow works well though.

On top of that, you get nice little thumbnails for your browser bookmarks and open windows. Classy, huh?

Camera

The BlackBerry Bold 9790 comes with a 5MP camera. Clearly this isn't a snapper aimed at budding paps. Although some readers will point out that there's more to a camera than the pixel count (such as aperture, lens quality, processing software and so on), we still maintain that 5MP isn't the best out there.

The current standard is 8MP, with 12MP the next logical step. HTC is about to launch a 16MP version of its Titan in the US. With all that in mind, 5MP seems so 2009.

Luckily, one glaring omission from the BlackBerry Bold 9900 has been fixed here - autofocus. We were staggered to see it left out, but the camera gods obviously heard our wails, for here on the BlackBerry Bold 9790, it works as well as you'd expect and hope.

Sadly there's still no tap-to-focus, which is a crying shame since you may want to take care of this yourself (and why shouldn't you with a touchscreen?) but maybe one day RIM will see sense.

Photos taken in good light reproduced well, and colours were fairly representative. But those taken close up in normal light with the LED on auto mode seemed to be bathed in something that made everything look more yellow than in real life.

In pitch black, the LED light does its job well, picking out images from complete darkness. Whack it into a low light setting or just turn the light off completely and you'll see that objects are almost impossible to see.

The camera app on the BlackBerry Bold 9790 is pretty much the exact same as that offered in the Bold 9900. And that was pretty much the same as that offered in the Bold 9780. Yes, you get a few customisation options - such as a plethora of scene modes ranging from face recognition to all of the other usual suspects - but we found these to be more style than substance.

The shutter speed is still miles off that of a dedicated point-and-shoot camera, which makes something like an iPhone 4S or other excellent camera phones a far better alternative if you're looking for a phone that will also replace your bog standard camera.

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ARTIFICIAL LIGHT: Taken with ceiling light on, the camera focuses well.

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FLASH: With the same photo in pitch black conditions, both the flash and autofocus manage a stellar job.

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MACRO: Macro mode is good at picking out text and focuses in a millisecond.

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STONG FLASH: The flash can illuminate a whole room that is completely in darkness.

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GRAINY: The zoom is obviously optical, not digital. And it shows.

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DAYLIGHT: Photos taken in good daylight come out clearly.

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SCENE MODES: The various scene modes make a little difference, but not that much.

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MOVING BLUR: The shutter speed is slow. You won't be taking many snaps of kids or pets.

Video

So if you're wondering which of the two Bolds is the Daddy, here's where the distinction is made. And it's not good news for the BlackBerry Bold 9790. We say this because the newer handset has a much poorer video shooter than the Bold 9900.

Ladies and Gentlemen, we give you 640 x 480. Yes, it's 2012 and BlackBerry's supposed 'flagship' smartphone doesn't do HD video recording. This is a crying shame, because the Bold 9900 did come with that out of the box, but it's been deliberately omitted here.

Watch our BlackBerry Bold 9790 review video sample

The BlackBerry Bold 9790 comes with a 1GHz processor, so it's clearly more than capable. The software is capable because it runs on the Bold 9900, so we remain completely stumped as to why RIM has crippled the BlackBerry Bold 9790 in such a way by providing us with the same resolution we'd expect from the more affordable Curve range.

Luckily, if you're a part time Spielberg you won't be too disappointed, since videos do look quite nice on the screen. The colours are reproduced well, the frame rate is top notch and the sound is recorded perfectly, so for watching back on your phone, you'll be quite happy with the BlackBerry Bold 9790.

Even watching videos back on a computer is OK. It's just not amazing. Movies are shot in the older .3GP format.

There is a video light, but annoyingly, you have to decide if you want to have it on or off before you start shooting your video, which is irritating - especially if you're moving around between light and dark or maybe shooting in twilight.

You have to stop recording to toggle it on and off, which can ruin videos, and there's what looks like an icon at the bottom of the screen for you to click on to turn the light on and off. Unfortunately this is just a notifier, signalling if your light is on or off (like you wouldn't be able to tell by looking at the back of the phone), and is a waste of screen real estate.

It's annoying and shows that RIM hasn't really thought this whole bit of the OS through. Most people won't notice or mind, but we did, and it irked us.

Media

So you want to buy a smartphone that handles media well? Buy an iPhone.

That's the conclusion many people come to if they don't do their research to explore the just-as-capable handsets provided by Microsoft and Google in particular. Then there's BlackBerry. It's a business phone brand, but the BlackBerry Bold 9790 does cope with media better than many would probably first think.

RIM's been honing this aspect for a while as it goes after the youth market, and what we have here is actually a cracking little PMP. There's even a credible alternative to the iTunes music store preloaded in the form of the Amazon MP3 store, which we've used extensively and found to be just as good (and cheaper in many cases.)

Getting your non-DRM-protected music on board is as simple as plugging the cable in and using the RIM software. Both PCs and Mac are supported, so unless you're rocking Linux or Chrome, you'll probably be OK.

We were particularly impressed that the Mac version syncs playlists from iTunes, and does so with all the relevant info that one would expect. You're also able to sync your iTunes music from your computer to the BlackBerry Bold 9790 via Wi-Fi.

Syncing video is also fairly easy, although we'd recommend doing it the old-fashioned way. If you use the official software, it seems to go through some kind of optimisation process that takes forever.

However, if you go into drag and drop mode, as long as it's one of the supported file types, it'll still play but just take less time to get on.

At least RIM has been generous here and put 8GB of space on the BlackBerry Bold 9790, which means you have something to play with out of the box. And with support for up to another 32GB on top, there'll be enough storage for even the most vociferous of hoarders.

When you do get videos onboard, they look great. Colours are, again, represented extremely honestly, and you're left with a really good medium to watch your movies on. Indeed, the only downside is the screen size, but that's to be expected.

Best stick to shorter YouTube clips then. But there's no YouTube app - in fact, the YouTube icon is merely a link to the mobile site. We would say we feel cheated by this, but we saw the same thing on both the Curve 9360 and Bold 9900, so it's not a massive surprise.

Sound quality is amazing over the headphones, picking out the mildest of details that other phones (even a certain fruit-flavoured one) didn't. And a big plus for BlackBerry is that it has obviously put some thought in by enabling you to create playlists directly on the BlackBerry Bold 9790. Small things like this go a long, long way when you're using the phone every day.

Unfortunately, RIM has left one small thing off that annoyed us - an FM radio. Yes, we know that there hasn't yet been a BlackBerry phone featuring an FM radio released, so we hardly expected there to be one on the BlackBerry Bold 9790. But RIM is trying to position BlackBerry smartphones as fully-fledged media devices as well as communicators, and a radio would really have been the icing on the cake. At least that support is coming in BB7.1!

Battery life and connectivity

RIM hasn't gone to town on the battery for the BlackBerry Bold 9790. We won't beat around the bush. Under the hood, you'll find nothing more adventurous than a 1,230mAh pack. It's the same as that found in the larger-screened Bold 9900.

Not that it made much difference, since we managed to get comfortably through a day of heavy use and still have about a third of the juice left for nighttime shenanigans. This is the advantage of having a smaller screen and (marginally) smaller processor.

Plus, although we don't know the inner mechanics of it, we'd attest to BB7 being optimised to save power where it can. We're not talking Curve 8310 standards of yesterday, but it does put in an above-average performance.

Connectivity-wise, we have the usual suspects: HSDPA 3G and HSUPA, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and GPS. Bluetooth isn't just reserved for calls but also for streaming music wirelessly to our stereo via A2DP, which we were very happy with. The Wi-Fi signal was strong and we had no problems with the speeds of our Vodafone 3G signal.

Near-field communications (NFC) is the big plus on the BlackBerry Bold 9790. NFC is to phone operators now what integrated GPS was back in 2007.

All of the manufacturers are talking about it and telling us it's the future, yet BlackBerry is one of the first to bring it to market, which you have to commend it for. In theory, the technology will enable you to use your phone to pay for goods by touching them against a sensor.

NFC is taking a while to catch on and it's still only being used in a handful of places as an experiment. But having said that, Orange said it expects a huge increase in NFC handsets brought to market this year, so be assured, it's the future (and it would know, because it also told us it's bright).

Maps and apps

There are a couple of new toys to play with on the BlackBerry Bold 9790, app-wise. For example, Wikitude comes preloaded. Augmented reality browsers have been around for a while, and appear to be the kind of thing users either love or hate. But the cool thing about this version is that it integrates with BBM so you can also see if your Messenger friends are in the vicinity by just waving your phone in various directions like a lunatic.

Unfortunately, we have few friends, and even fewer with compatible handsets in the area, so we couldn't test it out to the full.

There are also various other bits and bobs such as BlackBerry Protect (what it says on the tin), Documents to Go (the full version- yay!) and Smart Tags (which we still can't work out, other than knowing it has something to do with the NFC chip).

There's a compass on the BlackBerry Bold 9790, which will become crucial if you're orienteering in the middle or the Amazon and need to know which way north is. And to help you find your way out of the rainforest, BlackBerry Maps is also onboard. Thank. The. Lord.

We say that with all sarcasm of course, because Maps - as we have said before - has to be one of the blandest, most boring and underinvested bits of computer code known to man. Any serious mapper will just ignore it and download Google Maps straight away in its place. Luckily GPS gets a lock pretty quickly, so you won't be hanging around too long once you're set up.

Unfortunately for those of us with lower IQs, there isn't much on the BlackBerry Bold 9790 in terms of games. Obviously BrickBreaker is there (it probably will be until RIM crumbles), and Word Mole is also onboard, but that's it. We wouldn't have said no to a nice Solitaire or Chess to while away long commutes.

But at least BlackBerry App World is there to top the BlackBerry Bold 9790 up with some bespoke timewasting.

The App World still lags behind the Apple App Store and Android Market, though. Quality apps seem to cost a lot more than they do in their competitors' stores, and the free apps look, in the majority, like something created by Matthew Broderick in War Games (great film - what do you mean you haven't seen it?).

Although App World comes preloaded on the device, you're not in Apple's walled garden and, as such, can still download apps from a plethora or other stores online. Shop around!

Hands-on gallery

Official gallery

Verdict

It's hard to be massively excited about the BlackBerry Bold 9790. The Bold 9900 was a mobile phone to be excited about, since it was the obvious successor to the Bold 9700 and 9780 handsets, which seemed like they'd been around forever. But just when the 9900 gets its feet under the table, this little upstart comes along and insists it's the rightful heir to the title.

It doesn't feel like a massive leap forward, more an upgrade that has been released for the sake of it, and we can't quite see where it fits in in the BlackBerry scheme of things.

We liked

The BlackBerry Bold 9790 is a perfect size for those who don't want too much bulge in their pockets, so to speak. It takes that winning design from the 9700 more than two years ago and brings it bang up to date. And even though it's been on a diet, it's acquired a bigger heart and much bigger brain and muscles with that beefed up processor and newer operating system. Plus NFC inclusion makes this baby future-proof.

We disliked

But the smaller size could also be its downfall, since bigger hands will struggle to cope - especially when prodding at the screen. The camera isn't anything special, and the internet browser is good but only by BlackBerry standards. Plus BlackBerry 7 does feel like a bit of a letdown - not so much of a problem if you're coming to BB new, but a bit of a disappointment if you're upgrading.

Final verdict

If you were to take the BlackBerry Bold 9900 out of the equation and judge the BlackBerry Bold 9790 on its own merits, you could quite confidently say it's a cracking little phone. We're not massively excited by it but, geek-speak aside, just the specs alone make it worthy of a £350/$450 SIM-free price tag.

If we were torn between the BlackBerry Bold 9790 and the Bold 9900, we'd pick this, albeit at the risk of grumbling about a smaller screen.

Overview, design and feel

When we reviewed the original Orange San Francisco, little did we know that the handset that wowed us for its great capabilities at a low cost would become the benchmark for other low-cost smartphones to emulate throughout 2011.

Now we're firmly in 2012 and Orange's follow up, the San Francisco 2, has popped into our hands. Its name might sound dull, but does the handset have what it takes to be a worthy follow-up?

The Orange San Francisco 2 can be yours for as little as £10.50 a month on a 24 month contract o£99.99 on Pay As You Go. (The original San Francisco is still available at £89.99).

This puts it among recent budget smartphones such as the HTC Wildfire S, Samsung Galaxy Y, BlackBerry Curve 9300 Huawei Blaze and Motorola Atrix 2.

The extra £10 for the updated Orange San Francisco 2 model gets you some updated specs, but to be honest, the updates might not wow you, because the original was so very good.

So, replacing the original's Android 2.1 we now have Android 2.3. The Qualcomm 600 MHz processor of the Orange San Francisco has been upped to an 800MHz option, and the camera can shoot still photos at 5 megapixles, up from 3.1MP.

There's 512MB of RAM, which isn't a huge amount, and the same as that of the original, although internal storage has been bumped up from 150MB to 512MB.

The screen hasn't changed size or resolution, it's still a 3.5-inch panel and it still delivers at 480 x 800 pixels. Really, we didn't expect a higher resolution in a budget smartphone, and this is another testament to how far ahead of the game the original San Francisco was rather than how behind the times the follow up is.

Of course you've got Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth and HSDPA on board, and, as we'll see later, Orange has skinned the handset within an inch of its life.

The screen size is a clue that overall this is a fairly pocket friendly phone. It measures 117 x 58.5 x 10.6mm and weighs 120g. It is a shade lighter than the 130g original San Francisco and ever so slightly different from the original's dimensions of 116 x 56.5 x 11.8mm. The real difference is in the build materials and general look.

The chassis is all plastic and makes no bones about being so. The shiny backplate is a finger-smear danger zone, and the upper and lower curved edges have a Sony Ericsson-ish look about them.

The top edge houses a tiny on/off button and headset slot, the bottom is clear apart from a tiny notch for removing the backplate. On the left there's the microUSB connector, and on the right a teeny volume slider.

Three (non-backlit) buttons beneath the screen give you Menu, Home and Back functions, and there's a front-facing VGA camera (absent from the original). The speaker adds a flash of silver to the black chassis of our review sample. Watch out for a white version of the handset too.

One of the things we really liked about the original San Francisco was its solid, impressive build - great for a budget phone. Those values are gone on the Orange San Francisco 2, which is a pity. And it's not because Orange has changed manufacturer - the San Francisco 2 is made by ZTE just as the original San Francisco was.

The upshot of all this is that the Orange San Francisco 2 doesn't immediately grab our attention as its predecessor did.

Interface

Orange just loves putting its own skin onto Android, and as we said earlier it has skinned the Orange San Francisco 2 within an inch of its life.

Unfortunately Orange doesn't seem to understand how to do skinning well. The default wallpaper is dour, and we aren't fans of Orange's icon design either. Yes they use the orange colour, but they just look staid and old-fashioned.

On the main home page, Orange drops a clock with a handy alarm icon. Tap that and you can immediately set up an alarm. It's great for those of us who like to use our phone to wake us up in the morning - and the Quick Snooze feature enables you to configure how long you want your lie in to be.

Move around the five home screens and you come across more Orange efforts in the shape of widgets. We have to admit here that Orange has often done a nice job. Take the Orange San Francisco 2's Gallery widget, for example. It has nice large thumbnails of your shots, plus a quick share option and a link into the camera.

When it comes to personalising things, Orange has separated its own widgets from the Android ones. We like this because there's some duplication of functions, and the separation could save Android newcomers from some confusion.

Each home screen has a bar of four shortcuts running along the bottom edge. These take you to the main apps menu, messages, the dialler and contacts. Tap and hold on this bar for a screen that shows all the home screens in thumbnail view, making it easy to get around.

Contacts and calling

Unlike more sophisticated Android handsets, the Orange San Francisco 2 doesn't offer to automatically pull in your Facebook or Twitter chums into its contacts app. In fact, the accounts you can add to the system are rather a miserly bunch - corporate, Yahoo!, Work, Windows Live Hotmail and Google.

In fact, Orange hasn't bothered to install any apps for Twitter or Facebook. Getting something from the Android Market is no bother, but it is odd that Orange offers no help in this respect.

With that situation, you're left to draw contacts in from your Google account, SIM or an SD card, or add them manually.

The usual import/export option works well for SIM-based contacts - you'll find it on the menu in the Contacts app itself.

Alternatively you can really go to town and enter contacts manually. There's scope for plenty of data to be added, including multiple phone numbers and email addresses, of course.

The Orange San Francisco 2's dialler supports full smart dialling. Just start tapping in either a name or number and matches are shown on the screen. Rather nicely, the letters/numbers you type are highlighted in red.

Calls themselves we found to be fine in terms of quality. The Orange San Francisco II incorporates HD Voice, which helps to improve call quality – but only if you are placing a call to another Orange handset that also supports it, and we didn't do that too often during testing.

The usual Android in-call screen makes it easy to add additional people to a call, use the loudspeaker, mute calls and, of course, end a call.

Messaging

There are plenty of messaging options on the Orange San Francisco 2, and prime among these for some people will be mobile email. You can set up accounts using a range of different presets, or add the date for account types that aren't covered from scratch.

If SMS is more your thing, then the Orange messaging widget might appeal. It takes up half a screen, but gives you a good view of incoming text messages and a shortcut through to writing your own.

In addition, incoming text messages are shows as alerts on the Orange San Francisco 2's notifications bar, and if you pull the bar down you can read the full message. Tapping the message then takes you to the editor where you can craft your response.

To compose your own messages, whether SMS or email, you'll need to use the on-screen QWERTY keyboards in portrait and landscape mode. There's a smart dialling system that helps you enter phone numbers to send your SMS to - just start tapping away in the To box and it kicks in.

The keyboards themselves are a bit squished into the 3.5-inch screen, and you'll need especially nimble and small fingers to work efficiently in portrait mode. However, the predictive text system helps a little with achieving speedy text entry.

When you switch to landscape screen mode you've got a bigger keyboard area to type with, but you can't see as much of the text you type - or any of the message you're replying to.

We've a couple of other gripes. The Orange San Francisco 2's touchscreen isn't overly responsive to key taps - we felt we had to consciously press each key to make contact, and this slowed our typing down somewhat. Orange has implemented a Swype type text entry system too, and you may prefer this dragging system to prodding at letters.

The keyboard itself is rather rudimentary in use, with no long presses for secondary characters. Instead you have to hit the '123' key for a range of alternate characters.

Now, the Orange San Francisco 2 is a budget Android smartphone, so we can't expect the Earth. But we felt let down by the somewhat lacklustre touchscreen and rudimentary keyboard.

Internet

The Wi-Fi and HSDPA 3G internet capability in the Orange San Francisco 2 are nothing special as far as Android smartphones go, but they do mean this is a handset you can use for web browsing.

Be warned, though, that the small screen can make this a bit of a chore, and if you're a fan of watching embedded video then forget it. The Orange San Francisco 2 doesn't have Flash support, although with Adobe planning to stop support for mobile Flash, this is soon to be a standard spec.

Web pages don't download all that fast. Working over Wi-Fi it took a full 39 seconds to load the complete TechRadar home page. The Orange San Francisco 2's small screen means you'll need to start zooming in to read most web pages, too.

A double tap zooms you in to the point where reading is usually possible, and text reflows nicely so that all you need to do is vertical scrolling.

However, if you zoom in further, using a pinching action, reflow goes out the window. You have to use the zoom bar that pops up on the phone's screen to retain text reflow, which you can do to a high level.

You can have multiple windows open at once, and switching between them is a simple matter of using the Menu button. But visually, the windows layout feels stale. No thumbnails here, just a boring old list of web pages.

The browser itself isn't the fastest thing under the fingers, and zooming action is more jerky than silky smooth.

But the high resolution screen, at 480 x 800 pixels, is the saving grace of the Orange San Francisco 2 in web browsing terms. Text and images are clear, crisp and sharp.

Camera

The Orange San Francisco 2 actually has two cameras, which is quite a coup for a budget smartphone. The one on the front is up to shooting VGA pictures, which might be useful if you like taking shots of your own face.

The main camera has a dinky little flash that's not up to much of anything, and it shoots 5MP stills. Camera controls are on small touchscreen icons to the left of the main panel, so they're easy to get to and use.

The Orange San Francisco 2's range of shooting modes isn't vast, but considering the low cost of this handset, the phone's camera is a reasonably good performer.

The scene modes run to the usual black and white, sepia and negative, and there are auto white balance settings for incandescent, daylight, fluorescent and cloudy conditions, but not really many settings to twiddle with.

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AUTO FOCUS: The camera did fairly well indoors in well-lit conditions without the flash, and the auto focusing in this sample shot shows that it has a fairly good grasp of what it is doing.

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INDOOR: In less well-lit indoor conditions the camera still did its best, and this photo was taken at a level of ambient lighting that can cause problems for mobile phone cameras.

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DULL OUTSIDE: Whenever we took the camera outside, we weren't blessed with great weather conditions. And this photo, taken on a dull stormy day, really does struggle with light levels.

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LOW LIGHT: Light levels are a problem again in this outdoor shot, with the ground lacking definition and colour depth.

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BLACK AND WHITE: Moving in to black and white mode the camera again has difficulty, because the vast expanse of sky means it can't let enough light in to deal with the low level detail.

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SEPIA: When pushed into sepia mode the camera performs a little better.

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NEGATIVE MODE: When we move to negative mode, the Orange San Francisco 2's camera makes a nice job of the cloud scene, producing a rather eerie result.

Video

Just as with the stills camera, outdoor movie shooting needs good ambient light if the Orange San Francisco 2's video camera is to perform well.

Our video of a moving train is sharp and clear - this was taken on a bright day. On a dull, rainy day, though, the camera struggles to capture enough light to take a photo. And, because the lens sits flat on the backplate rather than being recessed, we found it often got splattered with rain, producing shots we couldn't use.

Media

There's an FM radio on board the Orange San Francisco 2, and this has a rather nice look and feel that's certainly an improvement over that of the radio on the original Orange San Francisco.

There are 10 presets you can save on the main screen, and then you just jump between them with simple screen taps.

However, there's no auto tuning, no RDS and no way to edit channel information, so you can't rename the frequencies to remind yourself what channel each represents.

In addition, just as with the original Orange San Francisco, we couldn't find a way to play music through the loudspeaker. And the sleep timer from the original Orange San Francisco has gone, which is disappointing.

The music player is basic to the point of boredom. Oh, it plays tunes reasonably well, and can manage playlists, shuffle tracks and set tunes as ringtones.

But it didn't manage to pick up album art from the SD card on which our sample music sat, and there's no equaliser for you to fiddle with sound quality.

Orange provides a reasonably good pair of headphones, although they are the flat in-ear type that are often the least comfortable to wear. There's an inline pause button on the headphones, but no forward or back option.

The handset speaker has high volume, but crank it up and the sound quality breaks up rather too much for our tastes.

Video playback support runs to MP4, H.264 and H.263, and we were pleasantly surprised at the way the handset coped with our samples. Playback wasn't jerky, colour rendition was good, if a little on the dark side, and sound quality, provided we didn't push the speaker to full volume, was fine.

If you want more video, there's the standard Android YouTube client on offer.

It's nice that Orange provides a 2GB microSD card, particularly since right out of the box our review sample was only able to offer 130MB of storage.

You might guess from this that media playback isn't a high priority for this phone, but at least there's no faffing to get music on and off the handset. It drops into USB storage mode nicely, and you can just drag and drop files across to your computer.

Battery, connectivity and apps

Battery life

The Orange San Francisco 2 is equipped with a 1200mAh battery, and that's about what's to be expected from a budget smartphone.

Orange says you'll get 250 hours on standby and 280 minutes of talk from it, but of course, we all use our phones for a lot more than chatter. We got about a day and a half from each full recharge we did while testing the Android smartphone, with a fairly frugal usage pattern, involving minimal 3G data browsing while on the move.

Connectivity

Higher-end connectivity such as DLNA and HDMI are absent, but then you wouldn't expect to see them in a budget smartphone such as this, would you?

The basics are present and correct on the Orange San Francisco 2, though, with Wi-Fi and A-GPS both here. You can use the handset as a portable Wi-Fi hotspot, and Bluetooth is also on board.

Maps

Mapping is catered for by both Google Maps and Orange's own Maps application. Google Maps is so good that we can't really see why Orange still bothers developing its own offering, and since Orange Maps refused to run for us, it rather shot itself in the foot by not letting us experiment with it.

Apps

Orange includes its nifty Orange Wednesdays app on the Orange San Francisco 2, as well as its own weather app and a Wi-Fi app that can help you find local hotspots.

There's also an Orange app store and an Orange games store to buy further apps, in addition to the Android market.

The rather excellent Signal Boost app is included on this budget model - likely to entice a LOT of people that suffer from poor signal who can simply connect to their Wi-Fi to enjoy perfect signal in their homestead.

Orange also adds a Gestures app so that you can use screen gestures to unlock the handset or run specific applications.

Add in other extras such as a Tetris game, stopwatch, Documents to Go for viewing but not editing Word, Excel, PowerPoint and PDF Documents and you have an eclectic mix that can be easily augmented further from the Android Market.

Hands-on gallery

Official gallery

Verdict

We really, really liked the original Orange San Francisco, and it became out benchmark for budget mobile phones throughout 2011. We thought the Orange San Francisco 2 might become the one to beat in 2012. But having spent time with this sequel, we aren't so sure.

Budget smartphones such as the HTC Wildfire S, Samsung Galaxy Y, BlackBerry Curve 9300 Huawei Blaze and Motorola Atrix 2 have proliferated over the last year, and to lead the pack a phone has to be really special. The Orange San Francisco 2 does move things on from its predecessor, but not hugely, so it doesn't sit head and shoulders above the rest as the original Orange San Francisco did.

We liked

The touchscreen is sharp and clear - 480 x 800 pixels in a 3.5-inch screen are bound to deliver well.

Battery life is pretty good, although as ever we temper that comment with the fact that your own pattern of use might drain it relatively quickly.

We disliked

We wanted the Orange San Francisco 2 to be more of an upgrade than it is, so we feel a bit let down overall.

The build isn't as great as we'd have liked. The Orange San Francisco 2's shiny black plastic is so-so, although we haven't seen the white version, so that may be a nicer-looking handset.

The absence of Twitter and Facebook clients and the lack of integration of their contacts is a big chasm in functionality.

The Orange San Francisco 2's touchscreen feels a little unresponsive to us, especially when entering text.

Final verdict

Small, neat and affordable, the Orange San Francisco 2 is far from being a bad buy. But Orange set the bar very high with the original San Francisco, and this follow up just doesn't represent a giant leap forward.

That's got to be good news for the competition, whose budget Android handsets have been overshadowed by the Orange San Francisco for many months. So come on, everyone, the field is now wide open.

Overview, design and feel

From stick-on Swarovski bling to mobile phones shaped like make-up compacts (ick) to laptops with 'accessorisable covers to match your outfit!' (seriously?) tech companies have always had a hard time marketing at women without making their product look and feel entirely dumb.

The HTC Rhyme may not be explicitly aimed at women (though all the mentions of purses and bags in the blurb might be a giveaway), but there's something about this tactile handset that's going to appeal to the ladies out there.

The colour, for a start. It's not pink. Fancy that! Instead, the handset is a deep, delicious plum colour, instantly giving this mid-range HTC a little something different to the blocks of black that dominate the market and, perhaps, not entirely alienating men from their target market either with their second bronzey-silvery colour that's available.

It also comes with some sweet accessories: a dock that, once the phone is cradled in it, automatically displays the time, calendar, gallery and music; Dre Beats-style headphones and a nifty little charm that lights up when a message or call is being received.

We rather like this idea, after all, it can often be a little difficult to wrench a phone out of a bag in time to catch the call…

As for the design of the phone itself, the part-rubberised, part-brushed-metal casing is smooth, also allowing for a decent amount of grip with one hand and minimising the fear of dropping it when trying to text/tweet/call on the go.

The 3.7-inch capacitive touchscreen houses the home, menu, back and the dedicated search touchscreen keys plus a VGA cam.

The soft lock key placement at the top of the chassis is a little annoying for small hands, meaning you have to shuffle the phone around a bit to unlock and then use it, but that's a minor point.

On the back of the phone, above the metal HTC stripe sits the 5MP camera, LED flash, external speaker and three sensors for the accessory dock. The battery cover takes a bit of cajoling, but eventually slides right off.

The volume rocker blends into the right side, the Micro USB is a covered dock sitting on the left side and the 3.5mm headphone jack sits on the top next to the power/lock button. The unibody design is definitely sleek.

The HTC Rhyme weighs a good 130 grams and is 10.85mm thick…not the thinnest or lightest but by no means a brick either. In fact, it has a good weight and feel in the hand that reassures you of its solid build.

Once on, the HTC Sense 3.5 overlay delights; it's quick, it's intuitive, it's pretty customisable and it looks great on the 480 x 800 resolution screen.

Running on Gingerbread and a single core 1GHz processor, this HTC doesn't keep up with the hardware packed into the likes of the HTC Sensation or the HTC Evo 3D, but it does a decent amount for a mid-range phone and of course, looks great.

Interface

There isn't much to say about the HTC Sense overlay that hasn't already been gushed over before, but we'll give it a go given the HTC Rhyme comes with the new 3.5 update.

The customisable lockscreen shortcuts are pretty awesome, allowing you to pick up to four shortcuts to get to from the lockscreen without even going into the home screens. It's especially handy for the camera given there's no physical soft key.

There's no juddering and it's quick to scroll through the menu and the seven home screens, all of which, of course, are fully customisable as well with widgets and shortcuts galore. The old standard favourite of the live weather wallpaper is also there, happily aping the conditions outside. Pinching in on the screen will bring up all homescreens at once.

To change anything is simple; tap and hold the homescreen to be faced with the personalisation list to choose either a folder, shortcut, app or widget to put on your page, or toggle the display and sound settings.

The menu is displayed in a simple list or grid form that can be ordered into alphabetical or most recently used apps, though not entirely personalised and no folders can be created here.

There's also, of course, the often-stolen notifications pull down bar from which you can enable and disable connectivity settings such as Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi hotspot, volume, and airplane mode. It also displays a list of your most recently used apps.

Gingerbread isn't a difficult operating system to pick up, especially for someone who's looking for say, a snazzier HTC Desire S; it will all be familiar.

That said, it's not even difficult for someone who's never used the HTC Sense overlay. It's intuitive, with every important app and most-used setting within easy reach and enough processing power to ensure it all keeps ticking along nicely.

Contacts and calling

Contacts are one of the aces-in-the-hole of HTC, so to speak. Their social networks integration, even for their mid-range handsets, is always superb and really sets them apart in terms of the small thoughtful details that mid-range handsets from other manufacturers lack.

The contacts (simply called ''People'' on the HTC Rhyme) can be connected to a range of your networks, including Twitter, Facebook and Gmail. They're accessed by the phone or dedicated shortcut on a home screen, which brings you through to the list populated by images, updates and oh yeah, your contact numbers. If some of your contacts are social butterflies with various accounts, it will show the most recent update.

One thing it doesn't do is match up contacts with different names in your contacts list to their Facebook profiles if the names don't match exactly, so it can get a little dull going through and manually changing those with nicknames, which is odd for HTC as it's usually a company that can link up anyone to anything using some weird voodoo magic.

Still, again, minor grumble given the depth of integration it has already.

Clicking on a contact will bring up their details, including all the ways you can get in touch with them.

Across the bottom is another menu including a universal message history inbox to capture all the conversations you might be having with said contact across text, email and call.

And, if all those ways of contacting friends aren't easy enough, there's a home screen widget to house your most-used numbers and contacts, which also displays the latest social media updates.

Adding a contact and editing their information is easy, simply press the '+' symbol at the top of the screen to reach the editor and input away.

As for calling a contact, the speaker clarity is great, plus it gets up to a decent volume too, which, along with noise cancellation, makes it a good phone for crowded spots. We had a strong signal a fair amount of the time, though would occasionally walk into some restaurant black spot despite being in the centre of London. For the most part though, it does the job of an actual phone well.

Smart dialing is a feature of the phone, either by tapping in a name or the actual number, the phone will match them all.

And, along with the dialer, contacts and groups is the call history which even provides a shortcut to your 'thread' (the universal message inbox) that you share with that particular contact.

Another small but great touch from the Sense overlay.

Messaging

Messaging on the HTC Rhyme is compartmentalised into the several different platforms: email, SMS, Facebook, IM and so on. There are a plethora of ways to message someone with the Rhyme, including SMS, MMS, pre-loaded Facebook chat (but no Google Chat), and email clients.

There's no universal inbox, but it's easy enough to flip through the different apps, with the ability to put widgets and shortcuts on every home screen, not to mention holding down the touchscreen 'home' button to bring up your recently used apps.

Compose a message by clicking through one of said widgets or shortcuts to the SMS inbox, where messages are set out in a traditional list format.

If you don't like that though, there's the snazzy home screen widget that displays your messages in a fountain of texts for you to flick through like a stack of playing cards

Either way, the content is the same and composing a message is the same (again, press the '+' tab).

The QWERTY keyboards are nice to use either portrait or landscape, with the 3.7-inch screen giving just enough width to make the spacing of the portrait keyboard feasible and comfortable to use.

One small gripe about the keyboard is the need to tap and hold keys to reach special symbols, which slows down typing somewhat. But other than that, the predictive text is smart and often accurately substitutes the right word for the misspelled one, providing a range of easy-to-reach substitute options across the top of the keyboard.

This does cramp the screen somewhat, but it's useful enough that it's worth keeping it in there.

As previously mentioned, IM in the form of Facebook chat is pre-loaded onto the phone, though, interestingly enough, not a Google Chat app. It looks much the same as every other Facebook Chat app, though with some subtle changing of colours, HTC put its own stamp on it.

The Mail app will link you to your email accounts, though only showing one inbox at a time. The Gmail account worked great, however having synced a Hotmail account too, only so many emails seemed to load into the inbox, which was frustrating. And by 'only so many', we mean nine.

The Mail app is as intuitive as anything else on this phone though. Folders, accounts lists and the refresh button are all accessible through the menu button.

Tap the '+' again and you jump to the compose screen:

It's a very compact app with everything you need for checking and responding to emails on the go. Excellent.

Internet

The HTC Rhyme's connectivity capability is very good, but exactly the same as the HTC Desire S, at 14.4Mbps 3G, Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n) Wi-Fi hotspot enabled.

The pre-loaded Android browser works reasonably fast on a Wi-Fi connection, but often has trouble with loading speed on 3G. Once a page is loaded, however, the 252ppi screen is crisp and clear, with good colour contrast.

Text reflows at a tap and there's no pixellation text-wise when zoomed in but images do get a little fuzzy.

It also copes brilliantly with Flash, with smooth clear playback, though full-screen video reached through the browser (such as BBC iPlayer) does get a little pixellated too. Still, there's no juddering.

The browser can handle several windows at once, with a nice scroll view to click between them.

Thanks to the dedicated touchscreen menu, back and search buttons, navigating is easy and flows well. It's also incredibly easy to reach the bookmarks and history screens, the first of which is set out in thumbnails to create a rather fetching bookmarks screen.

If you're looking for something a little sleeker, Dolphin, Opera and Mozilla all offer different browser experiences, available to download from the Android Market.

These offerings don't render images any better but Dolphin loads pages marginally quicker on a 3G connection than the standard Android app, and is a full-featured browser with tabs and touch-navigation.

Camera

The HTC Rhyme's 5MP LED flash camera comes with an absolute glut of settings to choose from. From the manual camera-lover's ISO, white balance, contrast and exposure to the more casual scene choices (panorama, close up, lowlight, portrait), to the downright hipster (hello tint effects).

You can tap to auto-focus, post-process with effects and post to your favourite social media networks. Every setting you might ever need is available at a touch on the floating menu bar.

This camera really has it covered.

Which is a shame then, because the images produced won't blow you away. They're pretty good sure, but you can't go that step further… perhaps we're just not great photographers, but we couldn't get a good blurry-depth-of-field shot no matter how we tried. Even in macro mode.

Taken indoors in lowlight mode, the image is very crisp for one taken without a flash. The colours are a little washed-out, but all-in-all very little noise for an indoor image.

Taken at night with and without flash in auto. Despite being taken in a well-lit area, the image has far more noise than the previous and is quite grainy in places. There is very little between the images, with the colours more saturated in the flash version and the non-flash image having a softer tone to it overall.

The full-zoomed image of the two birds is quite sharp, but overall the colour is washed out by the harsh sunlight.

Click here for the full-res image

Another mode of shooting includes panorama, which walks you through gently panning across the view and then stitching your shot together. The outcome is great, though it needs to be viewed on a bigger screen than 3.7-inches to get the best effect, as it blurs on the small Rhyme screen.

Video

The video output of the HTC Rhyme is a decent as the camera. With 720p HD capability you might expect a little something decent, and it doesn't disappoint.

There are far fewer settings to play with in video mode – simply image adjustments such as white balance and contrast and resolution quality, but there are a few post-processing effects you can add, such as sepia colour or a negative effect.

The HD really becomes apparent in the bright sunlight, with even the swish of the leaves on the tree captured in some detail. The colour is quite saturated with little juddering (ignoring the hand shake).

The camera doesn't cope well with shadows and sunlight, with half of the video in darkness. The image quality is great zoomed out but zoomed in it really suffers, with the whole scene becoming blurry. The swimming bird just becomes a moving black spot on the pixellated water.

This video taken on an low-lit street at night (in night mode, with the LED light on) showed the Rhyme's inability to cope without added light source. Pretty poor.

Media

The HTC Rhyme is media-enabled the way most mid-range smartphones are these days…definitely capable, but by no means the defining feature. Arriving with an 8GB MicroSD card, the Rhyme is particularly media-ready.

The music player is a functional rather than beautiful beast (i.e. there's no iFlow-like Album view), with the choice to display the library list by Artist, Albums, Songs, Playlist or Genre.

Tap-and-holding a song title will pop up a list with several play or playlist choices.

Music player widgets are also available for home screens. You're also able to access them from the lockscreen without unlocking the phone, which makes for changing tracks easily.

The external speaker is located on the back of the chassis, which makes it too easy to cover when holding in your hands, but makes complete sense when the Rhyme is placed in the provided dock. Instant stereo sound.

The provided ''no-tangle'' Beats-esque earphones are interesting too. Following HTC's teaming with Dr Dre's Beats these are precursor earphones, so aren't actually the excellent Beats Audio earphones included with the HTC Sensation XE. You can buy these separately, though.

The sound is good quality, the balance is good and the volume is just loud enough to make it possible to watch a good film on the tube, but their flat, tape-like cord causes them to sit oddly in the ear. That said, they're more comfortable than most to wear… when you can get them to stay in your ears for more than five minutes.

Supported music file types include MP3, M4A, MID, WAV and WMA.

For the video player, a good range of codecs are supported including 3GP, 3G2, MP4, WMV, AVI, and XVID. It's a great little phone to watch video on, with the soft-touch casing and rounded shell sitting nicely in the hand, though, if you're using the external speaker as we previously mentioned it's a bit too easy to cover it up with your fingers.

One frustrating thing about video playback on the Rhyme though is the way full screen mode will slice off the top part of the film you're watching, but watching it in normal mode squishes in the view. That's a bit rubbish, we must admit.

But otherwise, the colours are beautifully rendered, even with only 252ppi and the 3.7-inch screen is a just-about-acceptable size for watching. It's also possible – in theory – to stream via DLNA to a laptop or TV using the 'output' tab, but we couldn't get our device to find our laptop.

Most of the media playing apps – music, photo galleries, FM Radio – are all reachable via home screen shortcuts and dedicated widgets.

An FM Radio is included, with a pretty cool interface (for an FM radio), though disappointingly it doesn't work when docked; that would have been a great feature.

Battery life and connectivity

Much like any smartphone in the market, mid-range or otherwise, the HTC Rhyme lasts about a day with general use before it needs to be charged. Sustained use of Wi-Fi will drain the battery in around four hours, with calls and about an hour of video use helping that battery drainage along.

Some apps will hum along in the background if you forget to exit them properly, so be sure to use the task manager app to kill any you're not using at that moment to help sustain life a little longer.

At 1600mAh to the HTC Desire S's 1450mAh and the same single core 1GHz CPU, the HTC Rhyme should by rights last a little longer, but the extra battery power doesn't translate into too many more minutes if you're really hammering the internet. The quoted 8 hours talk time is probably a tad high, we'd say you really only get about 6 hours of strong usage out of this machine.

In addition to the Wi-Fi and 3G, the HTC Rhyme is loaded with Bluetooth, a MicroUSB port, DLNA client and Wi-FI Hotspot capability.

The Wi-Fi Hotspot app makes it laughably easy to hook up your laptop to your 3G connection and the speed is actually not that bad – we managed to stream a five minute YouTube clip without too much hassle.

So in those emergency no-coffee-shop-or-train-Wi-Fi times, this would definitely make a decent substitute, though, needless to say, a ten-minute browse killed a good 15% of the battery, if not more. Charging will be needed (and an understanding data tariff too).

Connecting to a PC or Mac is easily done via the MicroUSB cable, which, when connected, offers several ways of connecting to the PC including 'charge only' and 'mount disk drive', the option that enables drag-and-drop media loading.

The desktop client HTC Sync is available to use, but must be downloaded onto your computer first. For forgetful moments, there's also htcsense.com which will sync to your phone and from which you can call it when you can't find it – as useful for when it's hiding under the duvet as for the thievery-blocking potential.

Maps and Apps

The HTC Rhyme comes to the user as a fairly blank slate apps-wise. Perhaps this is a nod to the burgeoning choice of the Android Market store, but the only things pre-loaded on the handset of note are Twitter, Facebook, Tango (a Skype-like calling app), Polaris Office, Gmail, Reader e-books, Maps and a fantastic-looking fitness app called Endomondo. That's pretty streamlined: not a single game/game preview in sight.

There are some minor functionality apps though which are good – the flashlight app, mirror, task manager and Wi-Fi HotSpot are amongst the handiest touches.

It's interesting that a fitness app should be one of the biggest apps pre-loaded onto the HTC Rhyme, but Endomondo truly looks awesome, with options to track your workout via GPS, set a goal, beat a friend's PB or just beat yourself.

It would be interesting to know if HTC included that for the female market specifically or whether they included it to entice the male buyers who are less entranced with purple phones.

The Android store is well-stocked with all the big-hitter news and social media apps plus the ubiquitous mobile games. What's a nice touch is the way most can be used not just as shortcuts from the home screens but as their very own widgets as well.

The Tumblr one, for example, is particularly nice; a simple dashboard bar that allows you to shortcut to say, the camera for snapping and quick uploading of a photo.

The Foursquare app also has to widgets – one to display friends' latest check-ins and one to display the nearest places to you for easy check in.

The mapping capability of the HTC Rhyme is, of course, excellent with Google Maps and Locations as standard. Once opened the GPS is quick to lock on and very accurate.

All the usual excellent navigational tools are included such as sat nav and the various satellite/terrain/transport line views.

Locations takes a fair whack of data and time to download the country-specific maps, but with a Wi-Fi connection it's not really too much of a bother, and handy to have if you find yourself somewhere without an internet connection.

Hands on gallery

Official gallery

Verdict

The HTC Rhyme leans more on included accessories and the new coloured-chassis design than it does on massively upgraded specs. It is, essentially, a HTC Desire S with a little more battery power, a refreshed HTC Sense and a pretty face.

Maybe it will only appeal to women, maybe the second non-purple colour will save it. Still, we have a lot of love for HTC and even for 'mid-range' phones they have a lot of capability – the HTC Rhyme simply displays that to a tee.

We liked

So, what we liked: we liked the solid build and swish soft-feel/aluminium unibody design. We even liked the purple colour, which we think looks pretty classy.

The Sense 3.5 update had some nice touches, such as the lockscreen shortcuts. The camera is only 5MP but still produces some nice shots, and the phone is essentially a capable blank slate with some cool accessories that you can customise to your heart's desire.

We disliked

We didn't like that it is, essentially, a purple remake of the HTC Desire S with very few different elements. The battery isn't removeable, so if it does spark out or freeze it's difficult to kickstart. It's also still a single core CPU, which puts it far behind the a good chunk of the HTC output in terms of processing power.

Final verdict

While the HTC Rhyme is a stylish version of a phone that's already great in its own right, this mid-range smartphone doesn't bring anything new to the table except a few fancy accessories - but will attract those stylistas looking for something that isn't yet another iPhone clone.

Did you know you can use your iPhone or iPad as a baby monitor? Neither did we until we came across the Withings Smart Baby Monitor.

It connects over Wi-Fi, and via the free app, streams video of your little one from anywhere you can get an internet connection – even over 3G.

The app doesn't just stream video though. It tells you all sorts of other things, such as the humidity, temperature and noise levels in the baby's room. And you can get it to issue alerts for all these different readings.

The camera can take a picture, and you can play a lullaby or speak to your child to soothe them back to sleep with the sound of your voice. The 3-megapixel camera also has an essential night-vision mode.

The setup procedure was refreshingly easy and we were soon up and running. The picture quality isn't particularly high, but it was good enough for its intended purpose, and the night vision worked well.

We also really liked the ability to talk through the unit from our iPhone. The app keeps the audio going in the background, so you can keep listening even when you're using your email client or browsing the web.

But the main problem is that if you start playing with more demanding apps on your iOS device you can interrupt the stream coming from the camera, and a restart of the app is required. You could use the Withings unit as a security camera to keep an eye on your home while you're away, but there are cheaper options available if that's all you need.

Designing an audio product presents manufacturers with a dilemma. Do they forego convenience and build a great sounding but bulky system, or sacrifice audio quality in favour of a smaller footprint?

Thankfully, Revo's new K2 iOS dock, radio and audio streamer makes no such compromises.

The K2's square-shaped base with sides of just 10.6cm and two alarm settings make it ideal for your bedside table. But its brushed aluminium bodywork, black rubber details and invisible-until-lit OLED means it looks good just about anywhere.

Its 30-pin connector can be retracted when not in use, and can hold any iPod or iOS device, including an iPad. DAB/DAB+ and FM with RDS radio formats are covered, as is internet radio, Last.FM (a month's free trial supplied) and streaming audio from your Mac or any DNLA-compliant source.

You can join it to a home network through Ethernet or Wi-Fi, and connect it to an existing stereo setup through RCA or digital optical out. There's also AUX-in, a headphone socket and a composite video-out port for watching iPod videos or slideshows on your TV. A handheld remote augments the neat on-board buttons.

Sound quality is excellent. Its stereo effects are surprisingly good given the narrow form factor, and thanks to the rear-mounted bass port, the low end of the sound spectrum is clear and crisp. The audio as a whole is complete and lively, with a detailed top end, bouncy midtones and a near 360-degree dispersion.

The user interface deserves a mention too. Revo products are famed for their accessibility, and the K2 is no exception – steady improvements make it the best yet. If you have a sound system you're not using to its fullest because you can't be bothered to keep dipping into the instructions, you should have bought a Revo.

Revo's K2 delivers a sound that belies its small form factor. It's possible to get more out of bigger, more expensive systems, but for a compact £300 device, it's among the best we've heard.

Overview, design and feel

Updated: Our camera team has spent some professional time with the iPhone 4S, so check out our in-depth findings of the snapper.

The iPhone 4S caught many by surprise, with Apple expected to release the iPhone 5 - but instead we got an iPhone 4 with overhauled innards.

While the masses were initially disappointed, the iPhone 4S features a glut of top-end tech that is designed to put it on a par with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S2 - but does it manage to do that?

The changes to the iPhone 4S are easy to document - the camera has been upgraded to 8MP (with an improved aperture ratio), the CPU is now the same dual-core A5 processor as seen in the iPad 2, and a seven time increase in graphical processing power.

Check out our video of the iPhone 4S in action - is it the phone for you?

Also we've got Siri, Apple's voice recognition service - will this be a game changer for mobile phones or will it be nothing more than a gimmick?

As we've mentioned, the iPhone 4S is almost identical in outward design to the iPhone 4, which might irk those that like to show that they've got the most up to date device from Apple when out and about with friends.

However, the flip side of this is that things like the plethora of iPhone 4 covers on the market at the moment will still fit.

Apple has slightly changed the design of the iPhone 4S somewhat though, by changing to a dual-band aerial design, making sure it doesn't encounter an embarrassing repeat of antenna-gate we had to endure with the iPhone 4.

For all those that haven't seen the older version of the phone, we'll take you on a tour of the new handset: the top of the iPhone 4S houses the power/lock button, as well as the headphone jack, plus a microphone for noise cancellation.

The right-hand side of the phone is devoid of any buttons, but holds the slot for the micro SIM card, which pops out using the included tool (or a paperclip).

The bottom of the phone is pretty standard, with the Apple connector and dual speakers which pump out the (actually quite decent) sound.

The left-hand side of the phone sees the rounded volume keys, with the top one of these also acting as the camera shutter button to make it easy to snap with the new iPhone. We've also got the silencer switch too, which has been slightly moved upwards from the previous iteration.

As you can see, Apple has altered its antenna band technology to move the gaps that plagued the iPhone 4's reception to a less-touchable location.

Interface

The iPhone 4S is the flagship model for the new iOS software from Apple, making it much snazzier once more.

We'll walk you through the big changes to start with - and Notifications is up there with the best of them.

The new system apes Android by using a drop down menu from pretty much anywhere in the phone to let you see all manner of updates, weather news and messages, plus new notifications will now ping across the top of the screen rather than plopping straight into the middle of the screen like before and disrupting whatever you were doing.

It's not revolutionary by any means, but it's well-integrated and makes the whole system feel a whole lot different to iOS 4.

The lock screen is now called into more use than ever before too, with new notifications sitting on top to be easily accessed without needing to mess about inside the phone.

We quickly got to grips with this new system and can see a lot of people really enjoying being able to open the camera quickly too, which you can do by simply double tapping the home button on the lock screen.

The original system we're fans of is also back in full force, with swipable home screens filled with icons for apps, which you can easily sort into folders or edit by long pressing on the screen.

Double tapping the home button will let you see all your open applications, making it easy to multitask on the go, and swiping to the left gets you to the iPod menu to quickly access the controls. It's the closest we get to widgets with this phone, and we're still hankering after more... but that's the choice Apple is making in the face of the widget-laden Android opposition.

We would like to see contextual menus throughout the interface, for instance being able to change the settings for an app without having to jump out of the main menu - we're sure this has to be coming soon in a future release.

As we've mentioned before, the iPhone 4S now comes with the dual-core A5 processor, which means battery life is meant to be better and the rest of the phone should operate even more snappily.

In our tests, we barely noticed that much of a difference in speed with the iPhone 4, as there was never really a problem with opening and closing applications. With the animations still present, it still seems like the iPhone 4S is a little slower than other dual core handsets on the market (although we mean a tiny amount) but in general use it works perfectly.

It's the most intuitive system on the market in our eyes - we're fans of the complexity of Android, but not everybody is a power user and for the person that wants a simple smartphone that's easy to pick up and start using, the iPhone 4S is one of the best.

Calling and contacts

The iPhone 4S has the same range of calling options as before, and the contacts menu has barely changed in the latest version of iOS, but it's an easy system and one that people will pick up with little fuss.

Contacts

The contacts system is one that makes simple sense: you hit the phone section, and are presented with many options, be it calling one of your favourite contacts list, seeing your missed or dialled calls, accessing the dial pad or just seeing the phone book in its entirety.

It's as easy as you could imagine to add in a contact on the iPhone 4S, with a phone number entry presenting an option to save the number to a new or existing contact without a problem.

However, and this is a gripe we've had about the iPhone contacts' system for years - it's pretty basic and doesn't really add in a lot of functionality.

You can add in some basic information, like a photo, address or instant messaging handle, but it pales in comparison to the super linked-up options present on the likes of the Android range.

There's no social networking integration, or message history present in the phonebook, which would surely be a pretty cool thing for Apple to add in.

Calling

You may have noticed that the iPhone 4 had a few... issues with its antenna. It was blown way out of proportion by many, as it was a slight attenuation issue present in a few handsets, but Apple is keen to make sure no such attack can be levied at it again.

We've already covered the new antenna system, and we're happy to tell you that it works just fine - no problem with signal quality no matter how you hold the phone.

Call quality itself was top drawer throughout our test, with absolutely no drops no matter where we were. We've used other phones on O2 regularly around London, and the iPhone 4S showed itself to have more bars of signal in areas that have been notoriously dodgy before.

We did notice a number of times where the 3G signal would drop to Edge and take a little while to jump back to the fully fledged signal level. It would also be nice if we could see when the iPhone 4S is running on the super-speedy HSDPA 14.4Mbps connection speeds, but it seems Apple only thinks the masses needs to know when things are 3G or not.

One thing we would have liked to see is smart dialling included, i.e. being able to type in a number and see the right name come up - surely that's something Apple is looking to include in the future?

Messaging

Messaging on the iPhone 4S has been given something of a boost by the inclusion of the iMessage, which is a BBM-a-like service for iOS devices. It can be used on any device running iOS 5, which means conversations can be easily carried across on loads of Apple products without an issue.

While many will expect iMessage to be a separate app in the same manner as BBM, it simply jumps in when a relevant phone is on the other end of the conversation, meaning essentially free text messaging and cool features like read receipts and being able to see when the other person is typing.

However, this will be more useful for iPhone 3GS and 4 models, as it's surely only good to replace text messaging for those that need to save money and haven't got a price plan that offers thousands of messages for free each month.

Email

iPhones have always been looked at as decent messaging devices, and that's certainly true when it comes to email. There's a unified inbox for all your accounts, with multiple email addresses supported on the phone.

Setting these up is as simple as you'd imagine, with only an address and password needed in most situations. As we mentioned earlier, it's so easy to keep track of your emails thanks to the new notifications system, but it's hardly anything new, so not really a unique selling point.

The keyboard is another great selling point from Apple for its iPhone - some people have complained that it's a bit hit and miss in the past, but most people should have become trained in the art of tapping out a message on a touchscreen, so most will quickly be up to speed with the well-known keyboard.

There's a new addition to the keyboard, and that's an option to speak out the message reply using Siri. It's almost unerring in its accuracy compared to other voice recognition systems, although you do need to say things like 'comma' or 'exclamation mark' to add in the punctuation.

We sent 100 messages using Siri to see the accuracy, and found that the accuracy was around 45%, although shorter messages were obviously better.

However, we were relieved to be able to head back to tapping out our messages on the keyboard, as you could make sure what you wrote was correct first go. If you're going to speak your messages, why not just call the person?

Internet

One of the greatest things about the original iPhone was the Safari internet browser, and that's still the case with the fifth iteration of the phone.

The iPhone 4S has the new and iOS 5-upgraded browser, and it comes with some nifty new features we'll get to in a moment.

The main feature of the iPhone 4S browser is the fact it's simply so fast, and able to handle pretty much any web page in seconds over Wi-Fi or 3G.

We tested the loading time for the TechRadar website compared to the iPhone 4, and found that it was around 3 seconds quicker for the newer device over both Wi-Fi and 3G connections. When loading mobile-formatted sites, it was like there was no delay at all in some cases, with most loading up in under a second.

There's something that the Android browser has always had over the iPhone version in our mind, and that's the ability to resize the text to fit the screen should you want to get closer. That's still the situation now, with only two zoom levels on offer from the iPhone 4S should you want to read an article in a larger font.

However, Apple has done something new here and introduced Reader to the Safari browser. This means once the page has loaded you can hit the Reader tab in the URL bar to see a stark, e-reader-like version of the page, stripping out ads and unnecessary pictures to mean you can quickly and easily read the longer articles you want to.

If you've ever used Instapaper, you'll know what the experience is like... you've got to feel sorry for that service now Apple has developed its own version.

Another way to read the articles you want to is the Reading List function, which is simply a temporary bookmarks list - you can sort them by 'All' or 'Unread' so you know which sites you want to check back with. It's a nice idea, and one that we found ourselves using more than we expected to, keeping a number of articles on the backburner when we didn't have time to scan through.

However, surely it would have made sense to format these automatically using the Reader, or at least have an option to? We found ourselves getting irritated with having to wait for them to reload every time to just reformat them... so maybe this is something Apple can change in the future.

Oh, and let's not forget our favourite refrain for an Apple iPhone review - the lack of Flash video. We've no idea how Apple has managed to survive all of these years without adding in some kind of Flash support, but those little error boxes strewn all over the internet still grate a fair bit.

Sure, they are abating as more sites become more mobile friendly, and HTML5 video support is built into the iOS browser, but that's still a long way from being an oft-used video format for the web, so iPhone 4S users will have to put up with a substandard internet performance compared to their Android counterparts when it comes to web video.

Camera

We've teamed up with Future's camera team to bring you our new, in-depth test for the iPhone 4S camera - see our professional findings below:

With 8MP at its disposal, the iPhone 4S produces images that are roughly 3MP larger than its predecessor.

But Apple hasn't just squeezed a few more pixels onto the sensor; it's used a new sensor design that has larger capacity pixels. This means that each pixel receives more light and generates a stronger signal, so images have less visual noise to produce a more attractive and well-defined snap.

Apple has also used a new lens with an aperture of f/2.4. In photographic circles this is quite a big deal, as it lets in more light to allow faster shutter speeds in darker situations and thus helps keep motion blur at bay.

A wide aperture is also useful because it means the depth of field, or sharp zone, can be restricted to isolate the subject from its background. This is only really likely to come into play when shooting objects close-up with the iPhone 4S.

As with all cameraphones, because of it's small sensor size the iPhone 4S will have lots of depth of field in most other shooting situations. This is ideal for holiday shots and the like when you want to photograph someone in front of a jaw-dropping scene or a famous landmark and you want both to be sharp.

Controls

The iPhone 4S doesn't offer much in the way of camera controls. The sensitivity settings, white balance and exposure, for example, are all set automatically with no way of adjusting them prior to taking a shot. There's not even an exposure compensation facility to tweak the exposure.

A camera manufacturer wouldn't be able to sell a compact camera with such a limited level of control unless it was for a child.

However, it does make the iPhone 4S camera very easy to use and, of course, extra functionality can be added via apps.

One useful option that is available is the ability to manually select whether the flash fires or not. Those who prefer to handover complete control can leave this set to 'Auto' - and generally we found it fired at the correct points, often appearing to improve shots we considered already well-lit.

The flash is weak, but it's useful for illuminating very dark scenes or adding a little sparkle to eyes in daylight. It's a very small light source, so if it is the main one for an image, expect strong shadows and highlights – it's not the most flattering option for a night-time portrait, but very strong for a single LED.

A tap of the screen is all that is required to set the focus point. The camera then usually does a quick backwards and forwards focus adjustment before the subject is made sharp. There's no clear focus indicator, the subject just looks sharp when the focussing has completed.

Although the touchscreen is core to the iPhone, Apple hasn't given the camera a touch-shutter facility.

This would trigger than camera to focus and take the shot with a single touch of the screen. Instead, after choosing the focus point, the shutter icon needs to be hit to take the shot.

The 'up' volume control can now also be used as the camera shutter button too - however, it was very stiff indeed on our test sample, meaning there was an element of shakiness about some of the photos that simply pressing the screen could accomplish.

However, it's still a nice touch to have - taking pictures of yourself is much easier with this as an option.

Although there is no optical zoom facility, the iPhone 4s camera allows users to zoom digitally into the scene using the pinch to zoom option on the touchscreen. Plus you could always look SUPER COOL and get one of those optical attachments for the iPhone 4S to make it into a longer range shooting device - but you'd have to be really dedicated to do that.

Rather than reducing the size of the images, however, the iPhone interpolates the digitally-zoomed shots so they have the same 3264x2448 pixel dimensions.

On-screen icons provide access to the secondary camera and the grid display, flash and HDR options. These icons can be difficult to see when you're shooting from an awkward angle and it's easy to touch one accidentally when you are trying to set the focus point.

It's helpful that, if the camera is active when the iPhone 4S is put into sleep mode, the camera is available as soon as the lock screen is swiped open.

You can also jump straight into the camera from the lock screen with a double tap of the Home Button, although you can only see the snaps you've taken from that session, meaning you can't sneak into the photo gallery of a code-locked iPhone.

Exposure

As with any camera the point of focus needs to be selected with care, but for the iPhone it is particularly important as the brightness of the main subject has an impact on the overall exposure of the image.

If the subject is very dark, for instance, the image is often made quite bright and vice versa. It is often worth playing around with different focus points to get the best exposure as you can't do anything to change it manually as we mentioned earlier.

If a face is in the scene, the camera recognises it quickly and focuses ready for the shot to be taken - and it's one of the best examples of such integration on a phone, focusing almost instantly when a face is present.

With scenes that have lots of contrast the HDR facility, which we first saw on the iPhone 4, comes in handy. In this mode the camera creates three different versions after an image is captured and then merges them down into one with greater dynamic range, that is, more detail in the highlights and the shadows.

We found that the HDR modes produces subtly enhanced images, with the greatest emphasis seeming to be on brightening shadows.

Colour saturation is sometimes overly-boosted by using the HDR mode, but generally the results look very natural and subjects aren't surrounded by obvious halos (unwanted bright areas around the object).

Image quality

When we test cameras the first thing we do is shoot our resolution chart to see how much detail it can record. We'd normally do this at every sensitivity setting, but as the iPhone 4S doesn't allow the ISO setting to be set manually, we just had to plump for what it chose automatically in the bright lights of our lab.

The image EXIF data shows that the iPhone selected ISO 80, which is a low setting that should ensure plenty of detail is captured.

We found that the iPhone 4S is capable of recording around 1,400 line widths per picture height (LH/PH).

This doesn't compare well with the average camera, or even another phone like the Nokia N8, which managed to notch up 2,200 LW/PH.

However, the resolution score isn't the whole story. At 100% on the computer screen the images look natural and not overtly digital.

They look a little soft, and have a faint granular texture, but they aren't over-sharpened so there are no harsh edges or halos.

At more sensible viewing sizes most of the iPhone 4S images look great: sharp and sufficiently detailed. Out of focus areas look naturally soft and there's none of the watercolour effect or bold outlines that we have seen from some other cameraphones.

Colours are generally good, but there is some variation. The white balance can shift from one shot to the next, possibly because of slight changes in the colour of the subject under the focus point, which the iPhone will select for you unless told otherwise.

Some colours look a bit subdued on the screen at the point of capture, but they are recorded well and show up much more vividly on a computer screen.

Standard cat: Taken with the iPhone 4S, the low light sensors do a good job raising the brightness, but lose a little detail.

Click here for the full resolution picture

Garden shot: Taken with the iPhone 4S, this shows a decent colour balance with a quick snap

Click here for the full resolution picture

Here we can see the same photo from the iPhone 4S with HDR on, and the balance is much better compared to the original and the S2

Click here for the full resolution picture

Billiard-tastic: This well-lit shot captures colours well even without HDR turned on

Click here for the full resolution picture

AE/AF lock: You can long press on a certain part of the picture to lock the exposure and focus settings - here we concentrated on the foreground

Click here for the full resolution picture

HDR overhaul: But the same picture with HDR enabled is dramatically enhanced, with detail throughout the shot excellent

Click here for the full resolution picture

HDR warning: Be careful about using the option all the time, as strong light and motion can result in ghosting

Click here for the full resolution picture

Front facing: The front camera is more than good enough for quick self portraits

Click here for the full resolution picture

Up close and personal: The macro mode is automatically enabled and quickly manages to take close-up pictures (HDR on)

Click here for the full resolution picture

The same leaf from further away - you can see the level of detail the iPhone 4S captures is very impressive

Click here for the full resolution picture

Verdict

It's interesting to note that the EXIF data shows that the camera sometimes switches been a general purpose multi-zone metering system and spot metering even when the same scene is being shot, introducing some variation in the colour and exposure of images taken in a sequence.

This probably won't bother most casual cameraphone users, but should explain how you can take multiple images of the same scene and get different effects.

It may not be the most feature-rich camera, but the iPhone 4S is very easy to use and is highly responsive, with one of the best (ie shortest) shutter lags in the industry. While other cameraphones are capable of capturing more detail, we like the naturalness of the iPhone's images.

It's worth noting that image colour can vary a little bit and it's an idea to take a couple of shots if you don't get exactly what you were expecting first time.

It's a shame there's no touch-shutter option though.

We'll be honest - there are other cameras out there that are worthy of a mention - the Samsung Galaxy S2, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc and the HTC Evo 3D are all pretty darn good.

But to our eyes, the iPhone 4S trumps all of these by producing the best quality shots on most occasions. And if you turn off the HDR shooting mode to just get 'normal' quality snaps, the speed at which you can move from taking one photo to the next is simply mind blowing - although already bettered by the 'zero lag' option of the Galaxy Nexus.

Video recording

The iPhone 4S now packs 1080p video recording, making it much easier to take footage and spew it across to your big screen TV in full pixel glory.

Apple's hasn't just stopped at Full HD with the iPhone 4S though, as it's also included anti-shake functionality that really does work to stabilise video, as you can see in our samples below:

The same backlight illumination sensor has been added in to the video mode as well, making it easy to get good quality shots in low light. The video light is nice and bright too, as you can see in the cat video, so you've got a choice of shots should you want to mess around recording at dusk.

Apple has packed the same video editing tools into the new software as before - basically you can trim video by dragging the slider across, or install iMovie (for a price) to make more professional versions of your home movies with ease.

Siri voice recognition

When Apple announced the new Siri software for the iPhone 4S, it was easy to just dismiss it as another company trying to get on board with the voice recognition gimmick we've seen companies trying to make work for years.

But there are a couple of things to remember here: firstly, this is Apple, a brand that will always make something seem cool and work pretty well. And secondly, it's not a technology that it's had to develop fully in house, with the company buying voice recognition development app-maker Siri.

We've played with some pretty advanced voice recognition software on the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S2, so we've also taken a look to see how the same command is registered on both phones.

Long pressing the home button will result in the Siri voic icon popping up - or alternatively, you can set the iPhone 4S to activate the service when you hold the phone up to your ear in standby mode, so you don't look as ridiculous when talking to your handset.

From there, you've got quite a range of things you can achieve with speech alone, be it sending a message, playing a song (or even a playlist), setting the alarm, creating a reminder... we were very impressed with the range of options on offer.

And the system is quick too - where with many other phones you have to open up the voice recognition function (often in a long winded way) and then wait for the beep to speak, Siri opens up in around a couple of seconds from anywhere in the phone.

The voice recognition is pretty darn good too - we were straight away impressed with how many phrases it managed to get right on the first go, including some pretty obscure bits and pieces of speech. You do have to pronounce your words a little more clinically than you might do normally, but even garbled speech comes through pretty well.

To put a number on it: we went through the list of functions Siri offers, and found that around one in three or four attempts went awry, which is miles better than the one in two we encounter on most other phones.

However, before we get into the comparison, we should say this about Siri in the UK - the full range of services aren't available, and that's a real shame. This means you can't ask where the nearest McDonald's or petrol station is, a feature that's been talked up in the US.

We do have high hopes that the same features will eventually be enabled in the UK, as it's just a matter of licensing the information and incorporating it into the system, but it will be annoying for a number of users to see that Siri comes back with 'I cannot do that' time and time again for cool functionality.

But what it does do well is work out the context of what you're saying, something that most other voice recognition software fails to do. So if you say 'Tell Andy his hair looks amazing today' it will work out that you'll want to tell him by message, rather than asking what method you'd prefer to speak to him.

Messaging isn't as straightforward as we'd like though, as using the 'Send message' command to a person in your address book will result in you being asked whether you'd like to do it using the phone number or email address - and there's no way to set a personalised choice.

Let's compare the iPhone 4S to the Samsung Galaxy S2 to see which phone comes out top in the voice recognition stakes:

Firstly, the iPhone 4S has a range of functionality that the S2 simply doesn't have - things like being able to set the alarm and play a specific song or playlist aren't available on the Samsung option, which is rather annoying.

We asked both phones: what's the weather like tomorrow?

The iPhone 4S managed to nail that in a few seconds, whereas the Galaxy S2 couldn't read the 'tomorrow' part of the command, meaning we had to ask 'What's the weather like?' which simply showed us an (admittedly very useful) Google search to give the information.

We asked both phones to set a reminder to 'Buy apples tomorrow at 11.35am'. The iPhone 4S simply made a reminder that said 'By Apple' but at the correct time, although sadly the S2 couldn't register a time stamp in the message and decided we wanted to 'Buy Apple store'.

The final test went better for both handsets: Asking both to send a message to Rich Fields, it managed to get what we said with ease and then managed to send it with a quick voice command.

As you can see, the iPhone clearly has the edge when it comes to voice recognition, but it's still not perfect. Especially as we noted that on more than one occasion it failed despite being connected to a Wi-Fi router, stating it could not connect to the network.

We are being pretty picky here, as Siri is by far the best voice recognition software on the market for a mobile phone, so it's a big 'Bravo!' to Apple for leading the way with this technology.

However, while it's cool and fun to play with as a new feature on your phone at the moment, the key to whether Siri will be a game changing piece of technology depends on other applications being able to use the API and integrate the functionality into their own offerings - something Apple currently doesn't offer but we hope it will soon.

Apple also has to improve the service to gain more scope and include more functions, but for now it's a very good start and the future for the tech can only get brighter in our eyes - it seems this won't be another FaceTime after all.

Media

You may have noticed that iPhones have always been pretty darn good when it comes to the media side of things thanks to the rich iPod heritage Apple had before the iPhone ever existed.

That's still present and correct now, with some slightly new additions - plus Siri is getting in on the act by helping control your music through your headset.

Music

The iPod experience on the iPhone is no more - music is now rather boringly entitled 'Music'. We suppose it makes sense... but still sucks a bit. We liked the name.

Anyway, there's not a lot different if you've used the player before on any iOS platform. You can simply look through your music in the boring old list format on a white background, or turn the phone on its side to see the now-famous Cover Flow style.

The iPhone 4 was already fast enough, but the dual core processor means there's not a hint of slow down when it comes to swiping through your music collection.

You can tap an album cover and see the list of songs on there to play - it's a pretty nifty system, and one that just makes the iOS system seem that much slicker.

And don't forget last year's big hitter: Genius. It's still a very clever system, and the ability to tap a button and simply get given a decent playlist based on the song you've chosen is brilliant.

It's still not 100% perfect, but then again, we're not sure our music collection is among the coolest anyway, so perhaps we're just frying its little Genius brain.

Siri once again proves its worth when you're out and about listening to music. Although most headsets can skip tracks and pause music with the inbuilt button, using Siri you can shuffle tracks and open a given playlist. This was possible with the previous voice control on the iPhone, but now it's so much more accurate.

Sonically, the iPhone 4S is among the best again - we're talking rich sounding bass and some nice top end reproduction, especially when you upgrade your headphones to a decent set. (Oh, look. We've written a 'best headphones for phones' feature right here with all that info in. Aren't you lucky?)

Also you can control the music from the phone's lock screen – simply double tap the home screen when the screen is in sleep mode and you can interact with the songs.

Video

The Retina display is perfectly designed for video playback, with the high res screen in the smaller form factor making it very easy to sit back and enjoy a movie.

However, you won't be able to enjoy the whole thing, as in our eyes the screen is just mite too small to be able to get a marathon movie session out of. It's got a decent enough contrast ratio at 800:1 (well, we assume it's that, as that's the spec of the iPhone 4 and placed side by side the movie experience is the same) although the dark scenes look a little too dark at times.

The video format support is mostly acceptable as well, with H.264, MP4, MOV, M4V all supported. Nothing for AVI or DivX in there... and the latter is certainly missed as re-encoding all our (home-taken, of course) ripped DVDs takes ages when they were already nicely packaged up with DivX.

Other nice touches include the iPhone 4 remembering which videos you're yet to watch, and how far you are through those you're watching - allowing you pick it back up again when you re-open the file. Nice.

And you can always get your content from the iTunes library that comes bundled with the phone instead; it's as simple as clicking the application open and browsing for music you'd like, or movies and TV shows you fancy watching.

And the prices seem to have come down a tad since last year, with £10 seeming to be the average price for a title in the library. Plus you can now rent films too for a lot cheaper... although we're still sure BlockBuster is a better bet for these things. (Is it just us that doesn't want to see our childhood video rental chain go under?)

Apple has now also thrown in mirroring to a larger TV - at 720p resolution if you do it wirelessly over Airplay 1080p with a VGA adaptor. We've still yet to lay our hands on one of these so we can't test all the cool new features - but rest assured as soon as we get them in we'll give it a thorough going over.

Games

The iPhone 4 came with something cool: the gyroscope, and while it was meant to herald a new way of playing games, it hasn't set the world on fire in the way we'd expected.

Things like Gun Range and NOVA are excellent examples of what you can do with the technology, but to our eyes, this needs a virtual reality helmet as an attachment to really work. That would be ace... Apple, please make it happen, then we could jump around our living room firing at things all day long.

But the real advance when it comes to gaming on the iPhone 4S is the seven times performance leap the graphical processor offers up - and boy, are we excited to see the power this offers.

We've yet to properly stress the graphical properties of the phone as yet - Infinity Blade is the best we can manage, but we really want something that we can hold next to the power of the Samsung Galaxy S2 to see which really is top dog when it comes to chucking out the polygons.

Battery life and iCloud

The iPhone used to be notoriously bad when it came to battery life, but thankfully that seems to have changed since Apple plonked its own processor in the iPhone 4, which yielded a much better battery life indeed.

We didn't notice a huge amount of difference between the iPhone 4 and the iPhone 4S' battery life during normal use - in standby mode we noted around a four to five per cent drop rate in the battery meter when we were doing nothing, but with Push notifications turned on.

We tested this in two ways - the first with high intensity usage (which is pretty hard not to do on the first day you get any new phone, let's be honest) where we managed to run the phone down from morning to evening... but only just, and this was with the screen brightness up full and most connections active.

However, we dialled down the usage massively after that to see how the iPhone would survive, and we were pleasantly surprised to see that even with Push notifications active, the phone managed to easily last two days.

This was with around 30 mins of internet usage, opening and playing briefly with around 10 apps, using the camera three times and parsing emails on the odd occasion - easily enough to not feel like you're totally neglecting your iPhone 4S.

iCloud

iCloud is a new service from Apple that debuted with iOS 5, and while it's not revolutionary, it's certainly a really nice step forward.

The main function of the service is to automatically keep all the important things backed up to the ether, be it Mail, Notes, Reminders, Bookmarks and Photos.

The latter option is the key one there, with all the photos turning up online safely in the event of a device breakdown or loss. However, be warned: once those photos are on there, there's no way to delete them again.

Apple has offered up 5GB of storage for all your stuff, so should you have multiple iOS devices all signed into the same Apple account you'll be able to see the same thing across all, so photos and reminders won't be confined to the one device.

Make sure you're careful with what you upload though, as the 5GB of storage will quickly start running down if you simply back everything up.

And the good news is the backing up happens automatically and wirelessly - when you've got the phone charged, locked and connected to a Wi-Fi network (ie, when you sleep) you'll be instantly kept updated via your online storage.

Hands on gallery

Official photography

Verdict

The iPhone 4S is a great piece of kit, and one of the best devices Apple has ever produced. It's easy to find things that will make you coo with excitement, and the way the phone is packaged makes it very easy to use from the beginner to the expert smartphone user.

Every time we write a new iPhone review we wonder if it's enough of an upgrade to warrant being heralded as the next greatest phone (aside from the iPhone 4, which was a real step forward).

We are left with the same feeling with the iPhone 4S - is an upgraded camera, new processor and voice recognition enough to encourage phone sales on a record breaking scale? In all likelihood, yes; Apple has never failed to create an update to a phone that just manages to sneak over the line of being desirable enough to update to, and the iPhone 4S is no exception.

We liked

What do we like about the iPhone 4S? Everything we loved about the iPhone 4 and more. The Retina Display is still one of the best on the market, and even in 16 months very few phones have managed to come close to the eye-popping quality.

The new camera is fantastic, and as we said: a genuine alternative to a compact point and shoot. We know that's been said before, but we were mightily impressed for a day-to-day snapper.

The upgraded processor is going to be a real winner in the future when more heavy-duty apps and games start coming to the market; right now there's not a lot going on that can really draw on the improved graphics and CPU, and the phone was already pretty snappy anyway.

Siri is a fun tool - we're undecided about its use in day-to-day life, but there were enough useful options to play with to make it genuinely worthwhile.

We disliked

The gripes we have with the iPhone 4S are the same ones we've had for years with Apple's iPhones, and despite the record number of sales for the phones we still think they need to be addressed by Apple.

Flash video. We know it's a tired thing to keep talking about, but if Apple isn't going to allow it to work on its phones then it needs some kind of strategy to rid us of the annoying 'You need to download the latest version of Flash player' notifications on websites.

The price: it's still way too high in our opinion on contract, with the upfront cost for the iPhone 4S way in excess of anything else on the market on the same tariff. When you see that the likes of the Samsung Galaxy S and HTC Sensation can be bought off contract for the same cost, you have to question where that up front fee is coming from.

The contacts list needs an overhaul too, as it's still too spartan for our tastes. Some sort of social networking integration, message history or album connectivity seems right up Apple's street, so we're still wondering why the firm has yet to improve this section.

Verdict

Let's make no bones about it: the iPhone 4S is one of the best phones on the market at the moment, and the best thing Apple has ever created.

It's got all the right bits right: good camera, slick web browser, quality screen - and made it all work together in the way we've come to expect.

Some people might be disappointed not to have seen the fabled iPhone 5, with the larger screen and new design, but the iPhone 4S is more than enough to keep Apple fans happy.

Simply put: if you've got an iPhone 4, you don't need to upgrade (as long as you update to iOS 5) but for anyone else on an older device, or hankering after finally making the jump to an iPhone, you should run down to the shops and pick one up now - you won't regret it.

Thanks to O2 for sending us the iPhone 4S to review!

Overview, design and feel

O2 sent us a test version to review and the firmware is not final. We'll update this review - with a score and more detailed points - when we get the final version in very shortly, as per our reviews guarantee.

Budget Android smartphones such as the Samsung Galaxy Y are an attractive proposition on paper. Who wouldn't want to spend less than £100 for a smashing PAYG Android mobile phone?

The competition is rife at this end of the market. HTC is in there with its Wildfire S and Samsung has a couple of fingers in the pie already with the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Europa and Samsung Galaxy Mini. The one to beat is still Orange's San Francisco though. So, how does the Galaxy Y stack up?

O2, whose version has a slightly tweaked chassis design, gave us an ex-test unit for a detailed look. Selling at £89.99 on O2 PAYG, we aren't sure the Samsung Galaxy Y is a bargain.

The first thing you notice is that it has a tiny screen. Just three inches across diagonal corners. And it has a resolution of 320 x 240 pixels. That's just too low for a serious smartphone.

Text looks a bit fuzzy, there's not enough real estate for serious web browsing or video viewing. It feels under specified.

Moreover, the screen might be capacitive but it isn't great under the fingers. We felt it was sluggish at times and it often got confused between a sweep and a press so that apps opened when we were simply sliding a finger around.

That's not helped by the fact that the 830MHz processor seemed to be working to rule. It was mighty slow to respond to our commands at times leaving us waiting while it did our bidding.

Remember, we had an ex-test unit to review, and firmware changes might be in order for the final retail version, but we weren't entirely happy.

Build quality isn't bad for a handset of this price, though, with a solid plastic chassis topped off with a metal-look backplate. We reckon it'll take a few knocks and bangs.

The chassis is small and light so this is an easy phone to tote. For the record, we are looking at 104mm x 58mm x 11.5mm and 97.5g. And of course that small screen means most hands can reach right across it for one-handed use.

There are just two touch buttons on the front below the screen, for Android Menu and Back functions. Home is catered for by a physical button that sits between these, and in O2's case this is rectangular while on other versions of the handset it is square. If you want Search you'll need to use a Widget.

There's no side button for the built-in camera, but aside from that ports and connectors are not a problem. The volume rocker on the left side is mirrored by a power button on the right, and the USB connector is on the top edge under a protective hinged cover. The headset connector is here too.

Features wise, there is 178MB of free internal storage, and you can add microSD cards to that via a slot under the backplate.

The camera is a woeful 2 megapixel version, but Samsung adds its Social Hub for social media fans, and there's Wi-Fi, GPS, HSDPA and Android 2.3.5.

Overall there's nothing here that makes us say 'wow' and at first glance the screen and camera could well be trouble spots.

Interface

The skin Samsung has used on its Galaxy Y will hold no surprises for anyone who has seen a Samsung Android handset before.

You start off with just two home screens, but can easily bump this number up by using the Edit option after pressing the menu button on any home screen.

You can create up to seven home screens this way.

The main home screen by default shows the time and date, Google search box, four shortcuts and a panel which sits on every home screen offering shortcut access to the dialler, contacts, email and apps.

Widgets are in reasonably good supply, though, because of the low 320 x 240 pixel screen resolution, screens soon fill up. Look what adding just a dual time clock and some quick settings for connection options does for a home screen, for example:

The notifications bar has plenty on offer. Pull it down and there are toggle settings for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, GPS, speaker and screen rotation as well as messaging notifications and some application dependent shortcuts. Again, though, the low screen resolution means you may need to scroll vertically to see everything.

Apps are organised in horizontally scrolling screens, and that bar of shortcuts remains. Again it offer quick access to dialler, contacts and messaging, but where the apps shortcut was before there's now one that takes you out to the main home screen.

Samsung has even added something a little neat to the lock screen. If there's a message waiting for your attention, you are told on the lock screen, and a quick drag of the notification towards the left opens up the relevant messaging app for you to knock out a quick response.

Contacts and calling

We'd love, at this point, to write about how the Samsung Galaxy Y handles contacts that it pulls in from social media accounts, but we can't.

Our review sample, which was an O2 ex-test unit, wouldn't log in to our Twitter or Facebook accounts.

However, you should have the ability to do both, as well as pick up Exchange Active Sync, Google and Samsung accounts.

If you do get your social media accounts syncing, then the Social Hub app should pick them up, alongside SMS messages. In our case, though, it was just SMS we collected.

Contacts can be added in other ways too, such as being imported from a SIM card or entered manually.

When entering contacts manually you can add a fair amount of information for each person including plenty of phone numbers and email addresses, but there's no special field for a Twitter handle.

Contacts can be pulled into groups with default ringtones. There are already family, friends and work groups configured and it is easy to add more.

The dialler has a very familiar look to it, and it incorporates smart dialling. Just start tapping out a name on the dial pad and matches are shown in a small window above it. If there is more than one match, tap the down arrow showing the number to see the lot, or keep typing till there's just one left, then tap it to call.

Note too that once you've selected a number you can tap the envelope icon to pop straight into messaging.

We found making calls easy and the dial pad gives you the facility to add more than one person to a call, putting the first one automatically on hold as you add the second, then letting you merge the two together.

Speaker volume is not particularly loud though, and we found there was a bit of feedback during calls too making them echo a little at times. This may be due to the fact that our Samsung Galaxy Y was a test unit - we'll report back when we see final firmware.

Messaging

Messaging is all about tapping out information using the Samsung Galaxy Y's keyboard.

Well, we defy anyone over the age of about five to be able to use the keyboard in tall mode. The keys are really, really small.

We lost count of the number of times we hit the wrong key, and the predictive text, while good, should not be something you have to fall back on because the keyboard is too small.

Switch out to widescreen mode and things get a bit better, but the keyboard was still too small for us to tap quickly with two fingers successfully, and the window in which to see what you've typed so far becomes very small.

You could choose a 3.4 keypad in tall screen mode, though, or handwriting recognition if you really can't cope with the keypad.

There are very few long press options on the QWERTY keyboard, so if you want punctuation or other characters you have to hit the '123' key, and no, it doesn't automatically revert back to the QWERTY option when you've made a tap, which we found very irritating.

On the other hand, messages are shown in neat little threaded views which let you scroll up and down to review a conversation. It's hardly rocket science, but it's neat nonetheless.

When it comes to email you can add your Gmail account as previously noted, as well as other email accounts you may have. The procedure here is straightforward, though you may need to get some settings from your ISP to help you along.

Once your email is set up you can configure regular pickup so you're never out of touch.

If you want messaging widgets on a home screen, well, there's not a great deal going on natively. An email widget occupies a complete screen, but that's all you get.

Internet

With Wi-Fi and HSDPA to 7.2Mbps downloads you might expect reasonably good things from the Samsung Galaxy Y in terms of web delivery.

We downloaded the TechRadar home page over the network and it took more than a minute-and-a-half because our handset kept slipping back to GPRS for reasons we couldn't fathom.

Over Wi-Fi downloads were a lot faster, but it still took 30 seconds to resolve the full TechRadar home page. And when the task was done, the image was so small we could barely read it at all thanks to the 3-inch 320 x 240 resolution screen.

Double tap and things get a whole lot more readable.

There is bad news in the text reflowing department, though. When you want to zoom in far enough to be able to read a serious amount of text, you'll have to pan around, as text reflow appears to be non-existent.

An option on many web pages will be to nip into wide screen format. But how well that works really depends on how the original web pages are formatted.

If you want a bit of good news, then the here's some. Tapping out search terms on the small keyboard for Google is a pain, but the voice search worked really well for us. Tap the search bar, then the microphone and speak a search term.

However, there's a bit more bad news to come. The Samsung Galaxy Y doesn't support Flash. So that means no embedded video. We're not fans of any handset that simply refuses to play video that's embedded into a website.

Another tip of the scales with a further positive comment comes in that while we did have some general problems with screen responsiveness, its pinch to zoom and panning support was really pretty good. If you don't mind squeezing your browsing into a three inch screen, this will be a definite plus point for web fans.

Overall, though, the small screen and lack of Flash combine to mean this is not a web browsing fan's smartphone.

Camera

The camera on the Samsung Galaxy Y is probably the handset's weakest features. Stuck at an unforgivably low 2 megapixels for stills and 640 x 480 for video, and lacking a flash, it barely warrants talking about, to be honest.

There are very few shooting modes, though a range of scene modes including landscape, night, party/indoor, sunset, dawn, fall colour, candlelight and backlight suggest the camera is far more capable than it really is.

The best of our test shots were taken indoors in reasonably good lighting conditions. Step away from that and the cracks show.

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WHITE SKY: We admit this was an early morning shot with low light levels, but the sky was not white. The pixelation is extremely noticeable.

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PIXELATED: A similarly pixelated shot, taken on the same morning the look of the water gives away that this camera has a fairly slow shutter speed.

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NEGATIVE: The same shot, this time trying the negative effect, looks a little funky.

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BLACK AND WHITE: In black and white mode the shot looks rather fuzzy, though we're sure we were not moving when we took it.

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SEPIA: This is probably the best of the effects styles because the old fashioned look of the shot means it is easier for the eye to forgive blemishes and aberrations.

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INDOORS: Indoor shots with good lighting were probably the best-quality photos we took with this camera, but still you can see the pixelation without looking too hard.

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PANORAMIC: The camera automatically stitches together eight photos into a panorama 192 pixels high and 1440 pixels wide.

During shooting in panoramic mode it tells you if you need to raise or lower the lens. You need to move very slowly for the panorama to work properly due to slow shutter speed. Notice the blurring towards the start of our shot. And even then, just as with normal shots, the camera copes badly, with light variation.

Video

The Samsung Galaxy Y captures video to a maximum resolution of 640 x 480 pixels, apparently, but our review sample refused to do so.

Remembering that this was a test sample from O2, we're chasing up the reasons why, and will update this review when we are able to shoot video.

Media

The music player on the Samsung Galaxy Y doesn't do anything especially inspiring.It is fairly basic and it didn't even manage to pick up album art from our microSD card.

Still it does the basic of playback well enough.The handset speaker is a bit shrill, but put earphones in and you can use an equaliser and a 5.1 channel setting. The equaliser has some effect on sound quality, changing the tone somewhat. But all the 5.1 setting seemed to do for us was add a popping sound over the top of the music, which is hardly what you want.

We reiterate that our review sample was a test sample and this may well be dealt with in the final version of the firmware.

Media playback controls are accessible from the notifications area, so you don't have to drop into the player to pause or skip tracks.

Video playback is nothing much to write home about. Samsung says the Galaxy Y supports 3GPP, H.263, H.264 and MPEG4, and it did indeed play videos for us in MP4 format, but it wouldn't play our AVI samples.

The 3-inch 320 x 240 pixel screen isn't ideal for video watching. It is too small, and colours are too dark for real enjoyment.

If you can't watch video at least you can listen to radio. It filled 24 presets on an auto scan which is nice, but you actually have to enter the names of stations yourself which is a pain.

There's a radio widget for the notifications area and the forward and back icons in this case enable you to skip to the next and previous stored stations.

Battery life and connectivity

With a 1200mAh battery on board you might think the Samsung Galaxy Y has little staying power.

Left on overnight on several occasions with Wi-Fi running, it barely lost any power at all. Admittedly it wasn't actually polling any data like email or social media updates, but just the process of being on didn't seem to hurt it.

During the day, however, when it was doing things like surfing the web, playing music and making voice calls, the story was different. We would get down to about half life by lunchtime, and feel the need to administer a power boost.

Now, our review sample, as we've said before, was a test sample, and things may be different off the shelf, but on our experience you'd need to find mains power during the latter part of the afternoon to ensure a full evening's worth of entertainment and use.

Samsung says you'll get up to 1020 minutes of talk on 2G and 370 minutes on 3G, up to 850 hours of standby on 2G and 540 hours on 3G.

Connectivity wise, there isn't much to grumble about. This is a low cost handset so expecting fancy stuff like DLNA and HDMI is asking too much.

But Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n) and A-GPS are here of course, as is Bluetooth 3.0. Samsung Kies is supported for PC connections and the HSDPA supports downloads to 7.2Mbps. And you can use the Samsung Galaxy Y as a mobile Wi-Fi hot spot.

Maps and apps

The Samsung Galaxy Y doesn't have the vast range of extras in terms of apps that you'd find on a top end handset, but there are a couple of goodies here to make use of.

The copy of QuickOffice might seem like an odd addition to a handset with such a small and fiddly keyboard, but in fact you don't get to use the keyboard as QuickOffice is only for viewing documents in a range of formats, not for editing them.

If you do want to use the keyboard, you can go to town with Memo, an app we've seen before from Samsung that lets you create little notes to yourself.

There's also Samsung's own App Store to complement the Android Market, but that's your lot.

If you want to use the Samsung Galaxy Y for getting from A to B then Google Maps makes its usual appearance, and you can add satellite and traffic layers among others. You could just about use the small screen as an aid when walking around town, we reckon.

Hands on gallery

Official gallery

Verdict

The Samsung Galaxy Y is yet another low cost smartphone. It doesn't have any features that stand out particularly, and indeed it has some which make it rather less attractive than other low cost options.

We liked

There's no doubting that the Samsung Galaxy Y is compact, but that's its major plus point, fitting nicely in the hand.

However, we did enjoy the range of Samsung apps on show, and the lower cost is bound to appeal to some... although the quality of the screen might equally put some off. Google is well represented here, and if you can see past the display quality you've got a decent sat nav and music player for less than £100.

We disliked

The small screen we can forgive. After all, costs have to be kept down. But the low resolution is not something we forgive so lightly. Over a year ago Orange produced its 480 x 800 3.5-inch screened San Francisco, and against it the Samsung Galaxy Y's screen looks pedestrian.

The camera is poor too. We weren't able to test video recording, but its low resolution is a worry, and at 2 megapixels for stills we aren't impressed.

Final verdict

Even though our review handset was an ex-test unit, and there may well be some upgrades to the final firmware, we have trouble recommending the Samsung Galaxy Y. We'd suggest holding your horses till the new Orange San Francisco II comes along before making a final decision.

Overview, design and feel

The HTC Explorer is a dinky little thing. Pebble-shaped and mainly covered in hard-wearing rubber with a metallic embossed panel on the battery cover, it's amusing to see HTC equate 'first smart phone' with 'as potentially unbreakable as possible'.

That said, we've been known to drop some pretty nice kit in our time, so maybe it wasn't the worst idea in the world to cushion the HTC Explorer somewhat.

Still, it's small - with a 3.2-inch screen - it's chunky - at 12.9mm thick - and it has a nice weight behind it that suggests a solid build...108g of weight, to be exact. With its curved back and rounded edges, the HTC Explorer sits very nicely in little hands, but larger paws might find it a bit too small.

Looks-wise it won't win any awards, but it feels durable, which we can imagine might be good for someone more used to looking after, say, a Nokia 5140.

Looking at the capacitive touchscreen, we have the standard HTC touch keys – the home, menu, return and search – plus two soft keys (volume rocker, lock/power key) and a micro USB port.

Running on Android Gingerbread, the HTC looks and behaves much like any other phone with HTC Sense does. For a start, there are seven home screens, all customisable with widgets and shortcuts. Contacts have deep social networking integration, with the standard HTC layout. There are lock screen shortcuts too - in other words, bread and butter HTC Sense stuff.

If this was a truly budget smartphone coming in at the lower end of the price scale, that would be pretty impressive...not so much if it ends up sitting in the middle of the price ranges, costing around £200 on Pay As You Go.

The 3.2-inch screen is bright, with decent visibility in sunlight, and at 320 x 480 pixels (180ppi), it matches its mid-range sibling the HTC Wildfire S pixel for pixel.

That said, text often seems a little fuzzy around the edges and graphics a little pixelated, such as when the unlocking the lock screen. It's a shame, because it makes what starts out as budget feel a little cheap.

Additional specs also show where the production money has been saved: a 3.15MP camera with no flash, 90MB of internal storage (but microSD storage up to 32GB) and a tiny 600MHz processor. At an average of £18-£20 on contract, will the HTC Explorer really be worth it?

Interface

Running on Android 2.3 Gingerbread, the HTC Explorer is quite quick for such a small processor, but let down by the occasional judder. The interface will be familiar for any HTC user, but given the simple, pared-down tech for the target market of first-time smartphone users, it's unlikely anyone will pick up the HTC Explorer having already had, say, the Wildfire or Desire.

Lucky then, that HTC Sense is one of the most intuitive overlays for Android, an easy-to-pick up system that can be fairly well customised, and that the HTC Explorer benefits from the 3.5 upgrade.

There are some small options missing, such as the full range of HTC Live wallpapers, but there are still little HTC Sense treats such as the drop-down notifications menu and lock screen shortcuts that enable you to straight away open one of four different apps or features.

There are the usual seven home screens, all of which can be customised with widgets, shortcuts or folders. The full app menu is reached via the capacitive menu button, displaying alphabetised apps either in a grid form or list.

It looks and feels much like any other HTC handset, but with the small screen and occasionally pixelated graphics, and the pared-down offerings in some of the HTC features, it feels as budget as it is. Still, everything you might need is there – messages, networking apps, internet, camera and so on.

Contacts and calling

The fab thing about the HTC Explorer is that, even on a budget, you still get deep social networking integration in the contacts list. It's the HTC special feature that makes other handsets look worse in comparison if they don't offer a similar function, and luckily the HTC Explorer is well equipped.

However, with the HTC Explorer not coming pre-loaded with Facebook and Twitter apps, it takes a little fiddling, downloading and logging in before you can sync your SIM contacts to your social networks.

But once it's done, the HTC Explorer will automatically populate your phonebook with images and – if synced – the latest network update.

Then, when you tap into a contact, their details card includes not only their phone number and email address but their Facebook and Twitter updates too.

Scroll along the tabs to find your message and calling history thread, their updates and image gallery. This sort of integration in the contacts is fantastic, marred only by the occasional blurriness of images.

Adding a contact is simple - either add one straight from the unknown number or go to your People app and click the '+' sign in the top right corner to be brought to the screen to input contact details.

As for calling, while the speaker volume is quite loud, there's no noise reduction, so any background noise will be transmitted to your ears in a loud series of hisses and bangs. The connection was strong in urban areas, though, with neither side of our test calls experiencing drop.

There's also the usual smart dialling included - start to tap in a name or number, and the applicable contacts will appear in a list.

Messaging

Even with its simple and uncluttered ethos and coming with few apps pre-loaded, the HTC Explorer still has several messaging systems available to you as a user.

SMS/MMS is easy to get to from the home page shortcut and has a sleek inbox with messages viewed in a chronological thread.

When composing a message, converting SMS to MMS is dead simple - simply tap into the paperclip icon to be shown the menu of attachment options, including the option to attach a picture, video clip, audio file, contact card or calendar entry.

In a separate inbox is email, with the app prompting you to attach up to five different email account types when you set it up. Enter your log-in details and you're away - it's almost too easy.

Once you're in, your inbox is the default folder, but it's quick to reach any others via the Folder icon, sitting next to the Compose button. Switching between multiple accounts is quick too.

For social networkers, Facebook Chat is available on the HTC Explorer within the Facebook for Android app, which can be downloaded from the Android Marketplace.

The one bugbear with all of these apps, smooth-running as they are, is the tiny QWERTY keyboard in portrait and landscape orientation on the 3.2-inch touchscreen, making long bouts of messaging and chatting out of the question, unless you have child-like hands.

Even then, you're likely to be a little inaccurate with your typing. Yes, the HTC auto-correct is pretty good, and definitely a lifesaver when you're quickly mashing out texts one-handed while you walk, but it doesn't make up for the hand cramp you get, curling your fingers and thumbs around the tiny phone.

Internet

The HTC Explorer's pre-loaded HTML browser is slow to load image-heavy sites, despite the 3G (HSDPA 14.4Mbps) capability. Loading the TechRadar site, for example, took over a minute to load fully. Good news, though, there's wireless capability (802.11 b/g/n) and a Wi-Fi hotspot app included on the smartphone.

Navigating the web browser is intuitive, and there's pinch to zoom and double-tap to enable text reflow. Pages don't look too bad zoomed out or in, but be warned you will get pixelated images if you zoom in too far, which is a shame because the display on the HTC Explorer is nice and bright, and decently visible in direct sunlight.

Also, a clever trick on the HTC Explorer is that if you pinch to zoom rapidly from the outside corners of the screen to the centre, you'll automatically be brought to the windows page, where you can zip between open windows or add a new one to the mix.

A nice addition to the usual QWERTY keyboard when browsing the web is an extra .com button, which is really helpful when you're tapping out a URL.

The Bookmarks page is made up of attractive thumbnails of your favourite sites, and is easily accessed via the capacitive menu key.

Of course, if you're not a fan of the HTC in-built browsers, then there's always the option of downloading Opera, Dolphin or Firefox from the Android Market. But with such a functional browser and low CPU, it's probably not worth it unless you're particularly attached to those options.

Camera

For a starter smartphone, the HTC Explorer offers a 3.15MP camera with no flash, which isn't amazing, but for its purpose of snapping quick pictures to upload to networking sites, it serves nicely.

The phone's camera is simple, straightforward and low on functionality, so there are no editing options to choose from besides adding a filter to your images.

Plus, if you haven't got a microSD card, you're looking at being able to fit a meagre five or six images into the tiny internal memory.

There's no tapping to zoom either, although you can manually toggle the zoom on the touchscreen or with the volume rocker.

For some reason, sharing images with your networks isn't as simple on the HTC Explorer as it is on many HTC handsets. Normally you can simply dip into the gallery and tap Share in the photo menu, but not this time. On the HTC Explorer you have to go into the network app itself and then upload your images. It's not the end of the world, but it is a bit irritating that that functionality isn't included.

SEPIA: This image was taken with one of the filters, giving it a nice sepia look. There's a bit of depth-of-field blur, which is nice, but viewing the image on the full screen, even a screen this small, shows horrible pixelation in the blurry areas of the image.

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COLOURS: The colours in the image are bright and nicely saturated. For only 3.15MP, the image quality is pretty good with little noise. Colours are true-to-life.

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NIGHT: Without a flash, night time images are difficult to pick up. There's a lot of noise in this image, but it is just about possible to pick out the shape of the buildings, thanks to the lights in the windows. It's not a horrible photo, but it is one that would have been massively improved with a flash.

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PIXELATED: The image is far too dark, with lots of shadow, not helped along by the overhead lighting. It's badly pixelated and some of the items seem to blend into each other.

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Video

The HTC Explorer's 480p video camera works fine in daylight, for what it is, but there's the expected blur and pixelation. Like with the stills camera, there are no settings to tweak in filming mode, save for being able to add a filter to the movie.

With playback, there's an unattractive hiss from the microphone and no video light, so shooting in the dark is pretty much ruled out.

In the well-lit tube station clip, the colours are somewhat true to life, without over-compensation from the phone for the fluorescent lighting. The camera seems to have a hard time focusing even when held still, resulting in a juddery picture

Despite the room being silent when the indoor video was taken, there's a bad hissing in the background from the microphone. The image is quite sharp when the camera is still, but any sort of movement at all creates blur and intense pixelation. The colours are well-rendered, though, and true to life.

At night on a well-lit road, the vast majority of the final film clip is in shadow, and the other side of the street is in practical darkness, thanks to a lack of a camera light or flash. Movement is easily picked out thanks to the headlights of cars, but there is little else to focus on.

Media

The HTC Explorer comes with a basic media kit suiting its basic smartphone status, but that's OK: it works well, and that's all you really need. Plus, with up to 32GB of storage space with a microSD card - to top up the supplied 512MB of internal memory, of which 90MB is available - you're laughing.

It supports all the usual codec suspects for music, including the MP3, eAAC+, WAV, WMA file formats. There are no headphones supplied, though, so you'll have to add those yourself. But there is a 3.5mm jack, so you're good to go. And let's face it, who actually likes using the headphones that come with a handset anyway?

The music player has an iFlow-esque interface; sweep the album art to the side and you'll skip to the next song. Interestingly, you can only use this function in portrait mode, and it's the same when skipping through albums.

Tap into the menu when listening to a song to add it to a playlist, set it as a ringtone, dip into the sound enhancer (which mainly serves to make the sound tinnier if you decide to move the option from SRS enhancement to Equalizer) and - this is the cool one – 'find YouTube Videos' of the song you're listening to.

Of course, when you're listening to the music player and flipping through other apps at the same time, it's easy to access the player options by pulling on the drop-down notifications menu.

One other thing is that there's a bit of a nasty hiss in between each song that we could have done without.

As for the Video player, the quality of playback is quite low, not to mention the issue of having a small screen, but it gets the job one. Again, we could have done without the background hiss over the quieter movie scenes, but at least the colours are nicely rendered, bright and well saturated.

The handset rubberised back and light weight means it's comfortable to hold, though, so even watching a whole film is comfortable. The HTC Explorer also plays the majority of movie file formats, namely XviD, MP4, H.264, H.263 and WMV.

In terms of reaching both the video and music players, there's a nice home screen Music widget, but you'll have to dip into the app menu to reach the video player.

Other media supplied includes an FM radio, which automatically scans for stations when opened, but asks you to input the radio station names yourself.

Battery life and connectivity

The simplicity of the HTC Explorer is to thank for the good battery life you can eke out of it if you're not hammering the Wi-Fi every day. It's supplied with a Li-Ion 1230mAh battery, and even with a quoted talk time of around seven hours, we found it actually fared better than that with heavy usage.

Having used maps, a good dose of 3G internet and intermittent film watching with texts and a couple of calls thrown in for good measure, we could leave it until the morning to top up on battery power.

Sure, if you're going to be using the Wi-Fi every day it'll need at least one charge per day, but most new smartphone users will probably be able to get a couple of days out of a full charge.

Connectivity

On offer for HTC Explorer connectivity we have A-GPS support, HSDPA (900/2100) Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n), micro USB and Bluetooth 3.0 support. Connecting to a computer to drag and drop files is best left to the USB cable, since we couldn't get it to wirelessly pair with our machine.

As with most HTC handsets, there's the super easy to use Portable Wi-Fi Hotspot app - just open it and follow the instructions to hitch up your laptop to your mobile phone's internet connection. That said, as a mid-range 'first smartphone', we'd be surprised if there was a contract out there that supplied enough data to make it worthwhile using the hotspot app on the HTC Explorer.

Maps and apps

Maps

Coming fully-loaded with Google Maps, your exploration skills don't have to be too spiffy to use the HTC Explorer, despite what its name might suggest. You're not going to get lost with it, that's for sure. The GPS locks on within seconds, and there are most of the usual perks of Google Maps to take advantage of, including transit line overlays, directions and navigation. But there's no in-map entertainment apps for finding cool stuff to do in the area.

Apps

In the apps arena, the HTC Explorer fares well, with access to the Android Market. There are very few apps pre-loaded onto the handset itself, and perhaps new smartphone users won't be into downloading that many. But there's the ubiquitous Angry Birds, Facebook and Twitter apps to be downloaded to join the YouTube and Google apps that are on there already.

While some apps that you can download have widgets to be used on the home screen, even if they don't have that functionality you can always add a shortcut, so you'll be able to reach your favourite apps in a simple swipe.

We also quite like the plain, alphabetical nature of the HTC app menus: there's no scrabbling around trying to navigate sub-menus when all you want to use is the calculator or clock.

The calendar also auto-syncs to your Facebook and Gmail calendars, with reminders given automatically 10 minutes beforehand, so you'll never forget a birthday again.

Hands on gallery

Official gallery

Verdict

With some networks offering the HTC Explorer on tariffs at the lower end of the spectrum for light users (it's currently available for as low as £10 per month), the HTC Sense 3.5 overlay and the functionality of the phone make this a brilliant budget choice for first time smartphone owners who don't need unlimited texts and the like.

For more intensive users who do want more minutes, texts and data included in their monthly contracts, it's sandwiched in the mid-range pricing of the current HTCs, so there it may suffer the same fate of the Wildfire S and be just a little bit too expensive to make it worth opting for such specs.

We liked

We like that the HTC Explorer includes most of the intuitive HTC Sense features that we admire so much in higher-specced HTC phones, such as the deep social networking integration and fully customisable home screens.

We also like that it has Wi-Fi capabilities, that the capacitive touchscreen isn't over-sensitive and that the display is bright. We also like that, while none of the specs are high-end, everything does its job well. There's no 'wow', but it does work, and that's important.

We disliked

However, the hint of cheap that hangs around certain bits of the phone – the rubberised casing, the pixelation of fast moving graphics such as the lock screen ring pull and the occasional lag in the system - let it down.

With its mid-range pricing, the specs are too low to pull first-time smartphone users to this particular HTC handset as opposed to bigger-screened HTC Desire S.

Final verdict

With its intuitive operating system skin, the HTC Explorer would make an excellent first smartphone. But it may not be as much of a treasure as first thought as it's not quite hitting the budget heights we thought it would - it needs to drop a few pounds per month to be a truly cheap-cheap handset.

Thanks to Expansys for our HTC Explorerreview handset.

Overview, design and feel

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Active is one of those odd phones that can survive underwater, help you lose weight and update your social networks, all in one go. But is it actually a decent mobile too?

Sony Ericsson's released a boat load of different Android smartphones this year. We've had two versions of its huge 4.2-inch Xperia Arc flagship, mid-range options such as the excellent Xperia Ray and Neo, plus the smaller Xperia Mini and Mini Pro for those on a tight pocket-space budget.

The Xperia Active sits somewhere at the lower end of that lot. You get a 3-inch capacitive Bravia Engine touchscreen running at 320 x 480 resolution, along with a 5MP camera with LED flash and the ability to record video at 720p resolution.

It's all stuffed in a dust and water-resistant case - plus a few health apps pre-loaded. And there's a stretchy armband in the box for wearing it at the gym, or just keeping it safe.

Prices for the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active, at the time of reviewing, start at around £240 to buy an unlocked model, with monthly contracts available from around £20 depending on how many included minutes and texts you require.

This makes the Active a relatively modest cheaper option in this age of dual-core monster phones, plus you get water and dust resistance as a bonus.

The phone's certainly interesting to look at, with its lightweight brushed metallic surround and bright orange band making it look like an odd blend of mobile phone, kitchen utensil and emergency flotation device. The volume, camera and power buttons sit in the orange plastic bit, so are rather lightweight and flimsy - but that's your trade-off for having water resistance.

The screen is a 3-inch capacitive model that's very responsive and never misses a touch, plus Sony Ericsson claims it has "wet finger tracking" so you can use the thing while it and your hands are both soaking wet. And yes, you can.

As with Sony Ericsson's Xperia Arc and the rest of its 2011 lineup, the screen also uses the company's Bravia Engine and Reality Display technology...

...although with a low-end resolution of only 320 x 480, it makes no difference, and it's nothing like as sharp or vibrant as the superb displays found on the Xperia Arc S and Xperia Ray.

There are no physical buttons on the face of the Active, just three capacitive touch buttons along the bottom - for Back, Home and Menu - with the Active responding to touches of these pretend buttons perfectly and without lag.

There is also a custom camera shutter button on the bottom-right edge, but it's a pretty rubbish one. It does feature a two-stage press for focusing then pressing harder to shoot, but it's rather tiny and plasticky, so it's all a bit vague.

At least there's an LED flash around the back, plus the sensor is deeply recessed into the case, giving it a little protection against scratches and general grime.

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Active's chunky body feels good in the hand, thanks to its curved, rubbery back. One-handed use is straightforward, with the touch buttons high up enough for easy access, and the phone feels nicely balanced. It's not one you'll worry about dropping.

The outdoor credentials are hinted at by the Active's USB connector and headphone jack, which are placed on the bottom edge of the phone, hidden behind fat rubber doors that seal them shut and keep water out.

Take the back off and you get more reassurance that the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active can survive a few seconds in the toilet. There's a secondary back cover inside the outer case, which sits snugly over the top of the internal bits and does indeed keep it watertight.

It's an odd-looking little handset. The orange plastic gives it a bit of a toy town appearance, but the silvery button icons and curved, rubberised back just about bring it back into smart gadget territory.

Interface

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Active arrives running Android 2.3.4, with Sony Ericsson applying its usual user interface over the top.

Again, the Active sits somewhere in the middle of the company's 2011 mobile phone range, taking the 'four corners' icon system we saw working to such great effect on the Xperia Mini and Mini Pro and teaming it with the Android 2.3.4 software, which has all the same options and nuances found in the much larger Xperia Arc S.

The basic system is Android as usual - five scrolling Home pages that take a mixture of app shortcuts, icons and live widgets...

...and if that's not enough space for all your app shortcuts, Sony Ericsson has stuck a collapsing icon slot in the corner of the screen, each of which can hold an additional four app-launching icons.

Editing these links is simple. Long-pressing on an icon enables you to bin it or pull it out and drop it on to the Home screen. Or, if you're browsing the phone's app listings, holding one of those enables you to pull it into a vacant corner slot.

There's another new little app-dragging feature that arrived in Sony Ericsson's 2.3.4 software update - Facebook sharing. When dragging an icon, a little blue pull-down tab appears along the top of the screen, letting you drop the icon on to it and generate a Facebook status update with a link to the app's Android Market listing.

Sony Ericsson has also included folder support for quite some time. Dragging one app on top of another leads the phone to assume you want to make a folder, so up pops a folder, along with the option to give it a name.

There are also plenty of widgets on the Xperia Active, which are Android's way of adding interactive content to your Home pages. The Favourites & Call Log above is one of the best options, pulling out your favourite contacts and sticking their icons into a grid, with a separate tab showing recent calling activity.

It's well worth donating a Home screen to it, if you're a big user of today's smartphone's legacy phoning features.

If you're not impressed by Sony Ericsson's slightly bland visual approach, there are a few Themes to jazz it up. They're little more than wallpapers that change the Home screen background and add a subtle effect to the Menu pages, but it's a useful option.

And, of course, the phone supports Android's animating Live Wallpapers, although only one, Google's Maps background, comes pre-loaded. It worked without crunching up the phone or causing any drop in performance.

Contacts and calling

The Contacts section of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active is the same as those found in the rest of Sony Ericsson's 2011 Android smartphone range, combining your standard massive list of everyone you've ever met with a few clever new Facebook social features.

As well as taking contact details from your SIM card and Gmail account, the phone will pull in all your friends from Facebook and Twitter, should you sign in with those accounts, magically populating your phone with everyone you've ever exchanged an internet wisecrack with.

These can be filtered, fortunately, so it's possible to remove all Facebook and Twitter imports from view with one toggle button touch, or you can have the phone-only display details for those accounts that have actual phone numbers associated with them.

The Contacts page for each person varies depending on how they came about being on your phone. Facebook and Twitter imports will have simple pages with read-only data, so there's no pulling in Stephen Fry and Adam Buxton from Twitter and seeing their home numbers pop up in your mobile.

Those people with phone numbers you've legally obtained will have a more comprehensive personal listing, where you can edit their details, add instant messaging accounts, set specific ringtones for when they call, add custom fields for real-world addresses, email addresses and more.

You can also send individuals straight to voicemail through a toggle on their contact page. Sorry, mum.

One of Sony Ericsson's bigger Android tweaks is hidden in this section, with any contacts that have Facebook accounts associated with them getting their own mini Facebook tab within your contacts area. The Xperia Active downloads photos of your friend, presenting you with a miniature Facebook listing within the contacts area - complete with their 'interests' data from the social site.

Calling quality is good. The earpiece is loud and clear, with calls coming across bright and natural-sounding.

There's a second mic around the back of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active, which gives the phone noise-suppression abilities to make calling clearer still. It can be toggled on and off in the Call Settings, depending on if you like the way it alters the audio output. It's not a big change.

The dialler is pretty plain, giving you a quick access tab along the bottom for accessing the call log, your entire list of contacts or the shorter list of Favourites compiled of people who you've starred within the main contacts area.

Messaging

Text messaging is a simple threaded affair, with Sony Ericsson giving your SMS messages an inoffensive skin based around straightforward little speech bubbles.

If you're attaching an image to an SMS message, the phone will automatically resize it to something less than 300k, to ensure it's accepted across all networks. It does the same with video, too, either pulling up the editor for you to trim and recompress an existing clip, or setting the video camera to its lowest of the low setting to record a clip right there and then, should you select 'Record Video' from the text attachment menu.

Text input is via the bland default QWERTY keyboard, which, on a 3-inch screen, requires quite a bit of patience and accuracy to use reliably. Also, the low-ish screen resolution makes the keyboard look a little murky and last generation.

There's the option of choosing a phone keypad, though, which makes much better use of the screen size, also including predictive text input. Or, if you're happy using both, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active can be set up to use the QWERTY when the phone's being used in landscape mode, and the keypad when it's in portrait. Or vice versa, but that would be silly.

One of the big new additions Sony Ericsson has made to its Android 2.3.4 update that's here on the Active, also on the Arc S and is gradually filtering out to all of its 2011 Android phones, is its line-drawing keyboard.

A complete clone of the popular Swype, this lets you forget about the limitations of using a QWERY keyboard on a 3-inch screen, and start writing by linking letters of words together without lifting your finger off the screen. It's a great little feature that, once you've got the hang of it, speeds up typing time and greatly reduces typos.

Although, instead of typos, you often find it inserts entirely the wrong word altogether. So you may find it just a different kind of annoying.

But if you do need to edit some text, Android's tab system is in here. Touching a text input box brings up a little tab you can use to drag the cursor around, easily correcting all your errant uses of 'teh'.

Email is handled via a standalone app, which supports POP3, IMAP and MS Exchange ActiveSync accounts - plus there's a Combined Inbox for displaying all your important communications about herbal aphrodisiacs in one convenient place.

Sony Ericsson's done a great job of making the email app look pretty, giving it a clever scrolling preview pane that can be pulled about on the fly and sized to your preference.

If you're a power emailer, there are options to set the mail checking frequency to protect your battery, apply a custom ring tone to each account. Plus you can have it delete messages from the mail server itself on an account basis.

Internet

Internet browsing's always going to be a bit of a compromise on the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active's 3-inch screen, with the low-ish 320 x 480 resolution meaning this is one of the less impressive phones for web use in Sony Ericsson's range.

Text is a little rough compared to high-res phones such as the Xperia Arc, but the good news is that the 1GHz processor does a decent job of drawing pages, with pages appearing and building quickly. The Xperia Active supports multi-touch zooming for two-fingered page scrolling, with a double-tap of a lump of text automatically pulling in the view and reflowing it to fit the screen for easy reading.

The Xperia Active can also manage Flash sites, with embedded videos working well. There's quite an impact on scrolling and zooming when there's too much Flash nonsense happening on the screen, but it's still good to see full Flash in here.

The Android browser is a simple thing, really, with common bookmarking and history lists accessed via the tab that sits beside the URL bar. Touch this and you head into a bland world of your Bookmarks, History and Most Visited pages.

There's much more functionality behind the Menu button, with Android enabling users to set their preferences for page zooming, font sizes, turning various media content on and off, disabling plug-ins and so on. So it looks simple, but there's enough in here for proper web nerds to make the phone their own.

Android's link-sharing tool is a great highlight, with a couple of presses enabling you to share URLs via email, ping them to Twitter and Facebook, and indeed send them into any compatible apps you've installed on the phone. You can even send a link to the Home screen, where it'll appear as an icon that instantly opens up the site.

Text management is another area where Android has really come on in recent versions. Long-pressing a chunk of text brings up a pair of tabs, which can be slid about to select a paragraph of copy. Tapping the highlighted area then copies it to the clipboard.

Camera

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Active comes with a 5MP camera alongside an LED flash, which puts it on a par with the sensors found in Sony Ericsson's sweet little Xperia Mini and Mini Pro.

The camera app is the same as we've seen on all of Sony Ericsson's Android smartphones this year. The default option is to sense scenes automatically with its Scene Recognition option, but toggle that off and you can manually pick from the usual modes such as Landscape, Portrait, Party, Sports, Beach and Snow, and one specifically for capturing text called Document.

You also get the same 2D and 3D Sweep Panorama tool in here that also featured on the Xperia Arc S and will soon arrive via software updates on Sony Ericsson's other phones. It attempts to piece together a super-wide shot either horizontally or vertically, resulting in massive pictures that are stitched together very well indeed.

It's a right pain to make work, though, with endless error messages complaining you're moving too fast or slow, plus half-broken shots full of grey areas appearing.

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SWEEP PANORAMA: If you can put up with its eccentricities and don't mind taking shots six or seven times, it does a good job of capturing wider scenes.

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MACRO MODE: The macro does a good job, too, letting you capture all manner of tiny detail.

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LANDSCAPE: The Xperia Active's camera is good at capturing the general mood of a scene, with light and dark coming across well. But detail's not great when pics are viewed at full size on a desktop, with organic features turning to mush and losing some sharpness.

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ZOOM: There's a digital zoom that really flies in, but there's a big drop in quality.

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PORTRAIT: But face shots are great. Red-eye isn't much of a problem, plus the Active seems to like capturing human skin tones more than brighter colours.

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FLASH: The flash is a bit aggressive. It's fast and the camera manages to focus well enough in low light, but we found it produced super-bright results when the LED fired.

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INDOOR: Again, with the flash active, indoor shots are rather harsh.

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Elsewhere, you can turn off the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active's shutter sound effect completely, toggle its digital image stabilisation on or off, plus there's a self-timer, the option to completely turn off the touchscreen shutter button if you're a bit clumsy, and a nice slide-in gallery of recent photos.

It's also very fast to use, firing off shots quickly without lag. In low light it'll take a little longer to focus, but you still feel the camera's generally quick and responsive.

Video

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Active can record videos at up to 720p resolution, which it dumps to your SD card in MP4 format. The LED flash can be left on permanently, too, if you're into filming badgers at night.

As with the Xperia Arc S, there's a crazy 16x digital zoom in here that can be used while recording clips, but zoom in any more than two or three times and it makes a right mess of the resulting images.

The video camera app is largely the same as when taking stills, with manual white balance options, Centre Average or Spot metering, a self-timer, the option to not bother recording sound and a digital image stabiliser.

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Active has a good autofocus system when recording clips, usually managing to focus on the subject after a couple of seconds. If you're not a fan of continual focusing you can select fixed Infinity focus, or stick it on constant face detection.

Videos are pretty good. At maximum resolution, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active produces smooth results, with the desktop VLC Player app telling us the frame rates are a constant 29fps.

It's not the sharpest or clearest footage in the world, though. As with the still camera, some background details get rather overlooked, with trees and grass interpreted as vague smudges.

There's a rudimentary video editing tool hidden away in the Gallery, which enables you to trim the start and end point of your clips. But that's all it does.

Media

What you get here for your music and video playing fun is not much more than the usual Android basics, given a visual tweak and with a few interesting social networking features grafted on.

As with the likes of the Xperia Arc S and Xperia Ray, Sony Ericsson has added two key social tools on the Xperia Active player's main screen - its 'infinite' button and a Facebook Like icon.

Clicking the Like button does as you would expect, generating a link with artist and track details for you to spam out to the social site...

...while its infinite button performs a quick search of YouTube, Wikipedia and more, letting you idly browse for more facts and tracks from whoever's currently playing on your phone.

Playlist support is, again, your usual Android standard. The phone sorts your music by Artists, Albums and Tracks, with a long-press on any song enabling you to add it to an existing playlist or build a new one right there and then. The Sony Ericsson Xperia Active also automatically generates a Most Played, filters out any recently added songs and also displays ones you've never listened to.

There's also a graphic equaliser that, for once, doesn't require the listener to have headphones plugged in, which has a small effect on the sound quality. The external speaker is loud, too, enough to make you thoroughly embarrassed should you turn it on in a public place.

The Home screen Music widget is a simple and quite stylish option, which enables you to play/pause and skip tracks without opening up the app, although there are no controls within the Android Notifications pane or on the lock screen. But the headphones Sony Ericsson chucks in the box do contain a play/pause toggle, so users can pause their tunes without having to fumble with the phone.

As with the numerous other Sony Ericsson Android smartphones, video playback is a little disappointing. There's no DivX support, so all you can manage here by default are MP4 format files. And that awful grey box up there is Android's standard video player, which really, really needs a bit of cosmetic work.

If you need and enjoy new music you don't already know the words to, there's a shop pre-installed. Sony Ericsson's PlayNow shop will sell you MP3s, direct, from £1.50 a pop, plus any data fees you may incur. Which is stupidly expensive, but temptingly easy.

Battery life and connectivity

Sony Ericsson's technicians claim the Xperia Active is good for 5.5 hours of talk time and 335 hours of standby time on 3G, which is all well and good when it's sitting on a test bench in a Swedish laboratory.

In real terms, the battery's a pretty good performer. We easily made it through a day with all the phone's settings left on their defaults, with the average day comprising absolutely loads of Twitter use, several email sessions, a few text messages and quite a chunk of web browsing over Wi-Fi.

Although the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active contains a 1200mAh battery, which is at the low end of what we see in smartphones today, it's a solid performer. Treat it nicely and you could get two days from it, while even hammering the thing should see you make it through a full day.

There's no HDMI output on the Xperia Active, but you do get Sony Ericsson's usual Connected Devices app, which is its way of making DLNA support sound a bit more exciting. It works well, streaming photos and videos to any other DLNA devices you have suckling on your home Wi-Fi account.

The Wi-Fi connection supports 802.11b/g/n connections, while, technically speaking, the handset supports GSM/GPRS/EDGE and UMTS/HSPA for data.

One big extra thing for the active Xperia Active user is ANT+ connectivity. The ANT+ system opens up a world of health gadgets, such as heart rate monitors and bike speedos, which connect wirelessly to the phone, opening up a new world of sporting app use.

And, as ever with Android these days, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active can work as both a wired modem through USB, or be turned into a personal Wi-Fi hotspot, for easily sharing your mobile data allowance with other Wi-Fi gadgets.

There's an FM radio in here, too, complete with integration with Sony Ericsson's TrackID system, which can record a tune off the radio, ping it off to its server for identification, then come back with the title and the option to buy it on the phone though 7digital or Sony's own PlayNow shop.

The radio also integrates Facebook, so you can ID a track then post about it to Facebook. It's all very clever.

Maps and apps

Inside the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active you get a middle-of-the-road 1GHz processor, with a total of 1GB of internal storage, but by the time Android's got itself running, you'll be left with just over 300MB for your app installs.

Sony Ericsson has stuck on a few health apps to help underline the phone's active status, pre-loading the rather awkwardly named iMapMyFitness tool, which is also freely available to everyone on the Android Market so isn't really much of a selling point.

The much simpler step counter WalkMate is a bespoke Sony Ericsson creation that counts your steps via the accelerometer - and comes with a hefty warning about the damage this will do to your battery life - plus there's a digital compass app. Nothing really useful, to be honest.

Of much more use to everyone is the standard suite of Google apps, comprising Gmail, YouTube, Talk, Calendar and the excellent Google Maps.

Maps works very well, with the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active's 1GHz processor scrolling, zooming and panning the screens around smoothly. The GPS system locked on within a few seconds, enabling us to generate sat nav routes quickly and without any hassle.

And once all that's done, the Xperia Active works very well as a complete sat nav tool, with Google also offering the option to upgrade to full turn-by-turn voice navigation, for free, through an Android Market download.

Elsewhere, there's loads of pre-loaded Sony Ericsson junk. There's the Xperia Hot Shots advert for tennis sponsorship, mediocre puzzle game Quadrapop, a link to download a sponsored football app... there's a lot of rubbish to bin.

Of some use is OfficeSuite, which gives you free read-only compatibility with MS Office files, the NeoReader QR code scanner, alternate sat nav app Wisepilot if that's your sort of thing, and Data Monitor, which keeps track of your data usage, should you be on a limited package.

App installation through the Android Market is quick and easy, with the Xperia Active also managing to run Google's latest market app pretty well.

We were seeing a decent 232MB of free memory space left for app storage, even after installing our usual review favourites and the latest update of Adobe's bulky Flash Player app.

And finally, there's the same screen capture tool as found on the Xperia Arc S. Holding the power button brings up the usual Android power menu, only with the added option of taking a shot of what was on the screen immediately prior to you pressing power. Shots are then saved as nice PNG files in the phone's gallery.

Verdict

The Sony Ericsson Xperia Active is a perfectly nice little smartphone, which isn't compromised in any way because of its outdoor/sporty ambitions.

The Android 2.3.4 software is packed with functionality and extra features added as part of Sony Ericsson's user interface, with the phone featuring a good camera, decent enough 720p video output and generally smooth, hassle-free operation all round.

We like

The capacitive water-resistant screen is very sensitive to the touch, with no noticeable slowness or hindrance caused by its waterproofing and 'wet finger' sensitivity.

Sony Ericsson's Android customisations are nice, for the most part, adding in little animations, user-friendly icon dragging and dropping features, Facebook stuff all over the place and hiding away many more clever touches to discover.

It really is waterproof. The very last thing we did when compiling this review, just in case, was dunk it in the sink for a few minutes. It survived. Everything still works. The rubbery stoppers and secondary internal case do the job.

We dislike

The low-end screen resolution of 320 x 480 means text isn't as sharp as it is on many other Android smartphones today. It's not unreadable and does work well in outdoor light, but if you do a lot of reading the slight blotchiness may become an annoyance.

Despite its toughness claims, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active feels rather light and plasticky. We haven't exactly tested it to destruction, but it doesn't feel like a tough, outdoor phone. Plus the plastic buttons around the edges, and the camera button in particular, seem rather flimsy.

Media playback is once again a weak point on a Sony Ericsson phone. You won't be copying across your AVI film collection to this one, not without converting everything to MP4 beforehand.

Verdict

It's another good performer from Sony Ericsson. The Xperia Active is little more than the company's Xperia Mini in a chunky, water-resistant case, but if that's what you want... this is it.

We're used to 'outdoor' mobile phones coming in awful shells and lacking features, but that's not the case here. The Sony Ericsson Xperia Active is a fast, usable, modern smartphone, that just so happens to be a bit better sealed off from rain and coffee than most.

The only possible competition for the Xperia Active comes from Motorola's Defy and the newer Defy+, which, with their huge screens and extra-bulky builds, are aimed at completely different people.

If you want a perfectly capable, cute, light and small phone that's waterproof and doesn't compromise on performance, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Active's a fine choice. Your only choice, but still a perfectly good one.

Overview, design and feel

After playing it cool for a few years, RIM has apparently decided that there's something to this touchscreen phone lark after all, releasing a budget all-touch device in the shape of the BlackBerry Curve 9380.

In the last few months we've seen a touchscreen added to the Bold in the form of the BlackBerry Bold 9900, an update to the Torch line in the BlackBerry Torch 9810, and a new, all-touch addition to the Torch family in the BlackBerry Torch 9860.

Now it's the Curve family's turn, even though we thought it was doing fine without touch in our BlackBerry Curve 9360 review. Instead of taking the Bold route and adding touch capability to the screen above the keyboard, RIM has been somewhat more aggressive with the BlackBerry Curve 9380.

The keyboard's gone completely, in favour of a 3.2-inch 360 x 480 touchscreen. This puts it far closer to the Torch 9860 than its Curve brethren on the outside, although it's rather more like the Curve 9360 when it comes to the internals.

Instead of the Torch's nippy 1.2GHz processor, the Curve 9380 ticks along at 806MHz, though there's a reasonable 512MB of RAM for multitasking. These power the new BlackBerry OS 7, as seen on all the latest handsets from RIM, and also featuring on the Bold 9790.

In its other internals, the BlackBerry Curve 9380 is very similar to the Curve 9360 (erm, do your best to keep up with the numbers, though nobody will blame you for getting a little confused). There's a 5MP camera with VGA video recording and an LED flash, Wi-Fi, GPS support, Bluetooth 2.1, microSD card support and NFC built in.

It's even essentially the same size and weight as the Curve 9360: 109 x 60 x 11.2mm and 98g - a total difference of 0.2 mm in depth and 1g in weight.

The Curve 9380 feels really light in the hand compared to the 150+g smartphones that are becoming the norm, but it doesn't feel cheap. Yes, it feels like plastic, but there's little give, and we'd trust it to survive a few drops.

From the front, the BlackBerry Curve 9380 resembles a smaller version of the Torch 9860, with the same glossy black front and silver edging. The Call, Menu, Back and End buttons at the bottom are part of the main plastic fascia, though, unlike the separate buttons of the Torch 9860.

This is, frankly, a mistake. They're much harder to press, and needlessly so. We know RIM loves its buttons, but it could have kept the same sleek look but made them far easier to hit by using touch-sensitive buttons. The optical trackpad has no such issues, however.

The BlackBerry Curve 9380's screen is nice and bright, with nice natural colours and excellent viewing angles. It is, however quite low resolution. It's actually got the same number of pixels as the Curve 9360's screen, but that was only 2.88 inches, compared to 3.2 inches here.

It's less than half the resolution of the Torch 9860, and is lower than the Torch 9810, which also has a 3.2-inch screen. The result is that icons and text are often noticeably pixelated, which makes for a less pleasant experience in the browser and apps like Twitter. It's still readable, of course, but just makes for a more underwhelming experience.

On the right-hand side of the BlackBerry Curve 9380 is the volume rocker with mute key, and the Convenience key.

Because of the small size of the Curve, we found the Convenience key to be slightly too far down, and a little stiff. Pressing it one-handed actually caused the phone to slip out of our grasp a couple of times. We'd prefer if it were slightly further up.

On the left side is the micro USB port, while the top houses a big Lock key built into the curved fascia and the 3.5mm headphone jack.

The rear is mostly glossy black plastic, which picks up fingerprints and grease at an alarmingly quick rate. At the top are the camera lens and LED flash.

You remove the back plate by finding the tiny little dent near the micro USB port and popping the back off with a fingernail. From there, you can add your microSD card slot, or remove the battery, where you'll find the SIM card slot.

Interface

BlackBerry OS 7 is on board in the BlackBerry Curve 9380, with is iterative improvements from OS 6. It's friendlier and more colourful than the default interface of previous BlackBerry OS versions, and retains the larger focus on touch interaction that OS 6 introduced.

On the Home screen, this is manifested in numerous areas that can be interacted with. The status bar at the top can be tapped to open several quick settings, while below is a notifications area that you touch to open your full notifications list.

By tapping the speaker symbol in the top left, you can switch profiles quickly, while the magnifying glass brings up a screen that enables you to search the phone for certain terms, or send the terms to the browser for an internet search. You can also perform voice searches, although the speech recognition is rather hit and miss, and is a long way from the accuracy of Siri on the Apple iPhone 4S.

The app tray at the bottom of the Home screen can be pulled up to reveal one, two, three or three-and-a-bit rows of apps at a time, or hidden completely. You'll have to open it all the way to be able to scroll through all your apps, however.

This is all presented pretty much identically to the BlackBerry Torch 9860, except that the different dimensions of the screen mean that you can't fit the full fourth row of apps on, as you can on the 9860.

You can swipe left and right on the app trays to access different arrangement of apps, such as Frequent, Downloads, Media and Favourites.

Overall, it's a system that sits somewhere in the middle of Google's Android and Apple's iOS when it comes to intuitive simplicity and customisability, and we like it. The only shame is that there are no widgets for those who like the have the app trays closed - it's just wasted space at the moment.

Alas, despite our fondness for the touch-optimised Home screen, there are many aspects of the BlackBerry OS that haven't had such care. Many apps still use small lists in their interfaces that were clearly designed for use with the trackpad on non-touch devices, with entries that are too small for fingers to select.

There is a trackpad on the BlackBerry Curve 9380 to get around this problem, but having to switch between using touch controls and the trackpad to control a phone isn't what we'd call intuitive.

There are also still irritating niggles such as text boxes or password entry fields appearing without automatically bringing up the keyboard. They're not dealbreakers, but show a lack of polish compared to Android, iOS and Windows Phone 7 devices.

Though generally we found the BlackBerry Curve 9380's responsiveness across the operating system to be acceptable, if hardly super-zippy (which is to be expected for a lower-end phone, to a degree), we did find that it flaked out on us really badly at one point.

It became impossible for us to scroll through any lists or web pages without accidentally selecting things in them. It caused us to accidentally follow people on Twitter, it made it a nightmare to reflow text in the browser, and just browsing through our list of apps became a Herculean chore.

It persisted overnight, but a restart of the phone eventually sorted it out. Though it was undoubtedly an unusual incident, the fact that such a glitch made the phone nearly unusable just during our review period, let alone the two years you might have this phone on contract, is pretty unnerving.

And we have to finish with a final major problem - one that we picked up on in our Torch 9860 review but that persists here. In one app's password field, the autocorrect function is active, not only causing your passwords to go wrong if they aren't normal words, but also overriding the asterisks and revealing your password to the world until it's dismissed.

(Disclaimer: The above picture is from the Torch 9860, due to problems getting a screengrab on the Curve 9380, but the problem is identical.)

RIM is a company obsessed with security, so we're amazed that such an obvious security issue is allowed by the operating system.

Contacts and calling

RIM has been comfortable with its Contacts app for a while now, and that hasn't change in the BlackBerry Curve 9380. It's still the same simple list, although there's plenty of information you can add.

Email addresses, phone numbers, BBM information, custom ring tones and alerts, and all sorts of other information can be stored.

When you select a contact, you can see the stored information and tap on any of it. At the bottom are four shortcut keys: one to edit the contact, one to write an email, one to call and another to delete the entry. There's no shortcut to text - you have to dig the option out using the Menu key.

There's Facebook integration, but it's crushingly basic. Some information can be shared, but compared to the deep integration in Windows Phone 7 devices, such as the HTC Titan, it's barely worth bothering with. And there's none of the kind of interaction and activity panes that you get with HTC Sense phones, such as the HTC Sensation XL.

Though RIM has made huge strides in social network integration elsewhere in the operating systems, and in modernising BlackBerry devices for touch, the contacts list is well behind the competition.

Happily, though, RIM's usual excellent attention to signal quality is here. The Curve is excellent at picking up mobile networks, and getting good 3G connectivity.

Call quality is generally fine, and the earspeaker and loudspeaker are both loud and reasonably clear. It's not the highest quality by any means, but we found it easily good enough.

Messaging

The Curve line of BlackBerry mobile phones has always been a great way to get a good range of messaging features on a budget, and the Curve 9380 is no different.

With email, BBM, instant messaging and social networks all built into the operating system, RIM has fashioned one of the most integrated messaging handsets around.

The Messaging app is the hub, bringing in emails, text messages, direct messages on Twitter and Facebook, and even app updates.

Messages are divided up by date, and then arranged by time. Unread messages have the text in bold and the icon in colour, but turn black and white once you've read the message.

Tapping on a message to read it takes you to the relevant app; Twitter, Facebook, Text Messages and so on. This, at least, is totally seamless and smooth. No waiting, no animation - you just go straight there without any fuss.

The BlackBerry Curve 9380's Text Messaging app uses speech bubbles, like pretty much every smartphone these days, with different colours for you and the other person.

You type a new message using the bar near the bottom, and there's a button for adding emoticons to messages. There are also five shortcuts. One brings up the keyboard, one sends a message, the next adds a new recipient, the next creates an MMS by attaching media, and the last takes you straight to the most recent unread message.

Emails come into the Messages app, and you can easily set up accounts in the Inbox Management part of the settings. There are presets for Yahoo!, Google, AOL and Windows Live, or you can specify settings with the Other option. Our Vodafone-locked review handset also enabled us to create a new email address, powered by Vodafone.

Text emails are reasonably easy to read, with the text a good size, if a little pixelated on the low-resolution screen. You have to turn on the images in anything more media-rich, but once you do it's easy enough to pinch to zoom and then pan around an email.

You've got all the email options you'd expect (forwarding, replying and so on), and from the Menu key you can apply labels, add stars, flag emails and more.

Writing emails is as simple as ever, with an interface familiar to BlackBerry users. Stick your recipients in the To field, your subject in the Subject field and the text at the bottom. Attachments and other options are available from the Menu key.

The Social Feeds app is like the Messages app, but for updates, rather that direct messages. It's all about the short-form, so you've got Twitter and Facebook updates wrapped up with the instant messaging options, including BBM, Google Talk, Windows Live Messenger and Yahoo! Messenger.

Twitter, Facebook and BBM are all integrated throughout the BlackBerry Curve 9380's operating system, with BBM integration particularly ha