iPhone 3.0 Review

iPhone software 3.0 Beta 1 is now available to developers, and as we couldn’t wait to get our hands on it, I asked a friend of mine, Darryl Mitchell, to have a play with the new software and let us know what’s new and if it’s any good. This is his review:

Spotlight on iPhone

I’m going to start with the Home screen and work my way through. The new things about the home screen that are noticeable so far is there are a few new icons. Its not all that noticeable, but the phone icon, the ipod icon and the messages icon have changed, and now have a more contemporary brushed effect. You’ve also got the new spotlight feature which is really helpful if you want to search for songs, emails or contacts, it searches everything. You just swipe to the right and it brings up the spotlight search screen. Its a really good feature and is surprisingly fast, I thought it was going to lag for quite some time, but it’s quick and snappy. That is it for the new home screen.

Moving on to the phone features, there’s not much added to the this bit, however, when you get a missed call or it shows you your recent calls, it now shows you what they called you from, for example if you called them on their mobile, or work phone you can now see this in the Recent calls screen. So that’s a really easy way of showing where they called you from.

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Sony Ericsson W890i review

After previous good experiences from other Sony Ericsson phones, the Sony Ericsson W890i didn’t disappoint.

Firstly I have to say that the design is very nice with a brushed aluminium finish. It feels well built and solid. The design is very different from it’s predecessor, the W880i, and seems to be better in most ways, in terms of design and build quality. Also the keypad buttons are larger than the tiny ones that existed on the W880i, but still may be a little on the small side for some people, you now get a 3.2 megapixel camera and HSDPA for faster Internet browsing, plus an improved Walkman player and user interface.

I was impressed with the usability of the W890i, it is very simple to use and the menus are easy to understand. The buttons have a nice feel and are positioned well, with Walkman and camera buttons on the sides of the phone also.

Although the camera does not have auto-focus, the images taken with the camera are of a good quality. Sony Ericsson’s latest Walkman player is probably the best music player on a phone to date, in terms of functionality and ease of use. The 2" screen is clear and a good size for browsing the Internet and reading emails.I didn’t have any problems with reading the screen in direct sunlight.

To remove the aluminium battery cover, two clips must be released, then the cover can be removed to reveal the memory card slot. It’s a shame that it’s no longer "hot-swappable" like in most current handsets, but the W890i comes with a 2GB M2 memory card which should allow you to store a plenty of music, photo’s and videos.

Sony Ericsson have taken all the best bits of the extremely popular W880, added a better camera and faster internet and the result is the W890i. A great handset, that will no doubt be as popular as its predecessor.

First Impressions of the LG KF600

This weekend I decided to take a break from my Nokia N82 and spend a little time with the LG KF600.

The KF600 is the latest handset from the Korean manufacturer and is trying to change the way that we use our phones with the introduction of its “InteractPad”.

The phone looks stylish, is a decent size and weight and feels well built. The one thing you notice immediately is the lack of keys on the front of the phone. The KF600 is a touch phone, but with a twist. Rather than having a large touch screen display that drains battery power, the screen has been split into two parts, the display and the InteractPad.

The InteractPad is a unique way of using your phone, from the standby screen you have 6 touch sensitive keys, and as you move through the different screens of the phone, these buttons move and adapt to suit the application you’re using. In some cases I found the InteractPad to be a bit awkward, but in other applications it works really well.

I tend to use my phone mainly for photo’s, music, email, internet and texting rather than making calls. The camera on the KF600 is a 3 megapixel and has an LED flash. Photo’s come out clear and pretty sharp, and if you print them out they will be of a decent quality at 6″ x 4″ size. The flash is ok for taking photo’s in low light close up, but if what you’re taking photo’s of is more than a metre away, it probably won’t be much use.

The KF600 works really well as an MP3 player. There’s a dedicated shortcut key on the side of the phone for quick access and I found it easy to transfer tracks to the phone using Bluetooth or the data cable and software that came with it. The music interface is probably the best use of the InteractPad, you have the usual play/pause, forward and rewind, as well as a track progress bar. Normally these just scroll along with no purpose, but with the interact pad you can simply drag the slider to get to the part of the track you want – great if you want to skip sections of podcasts.

Email and texting works well too. Predictive text meant writing messages is quick and easy, and setting up POP3 email was very straight forward. The only thing I found to be not so great here was the handwriting recognition. In theory it sounds great, but in reality, writing with the end of your finger just isn’t accurate enough, and for hardcore texters, you’ll be able to text using the keypad a lot faster.

Internet access on the KF600 is pretty standard, it runs off a GPRS connection, so a fairly slow connection, but if you just want to check the odd train time or find out what’s on at the cinema then it does the job with no problem at all.

Overall the KF600 is a good all round handset. It will take a little getting used to with the InteractPad, and for the first few days I can guarantee you’ll be touching the top half of the screen and wondering why nothing is happening, but give it a week and you’ll be flying through the menus, but once you’ve got used to the interact pad, you may struggle to go back to a conventional phone.