Samsung Galaxy Apollo i5800 review – deals, rates and tariffs

Posted on 17-11-2010 | By: david | 

Category : Mobile Phones, Samsung

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A high end touch screen Smartphone, the Galaxy Apollo I5800 utilises the Android operating system allied to an extremely user friendly interface. This 3G equipped smart-phone comes with an amazingly sensitive 3.2 inch capacitive touch-screen, 3.1 megapixel camera (with face/motion detection, picture geo tagging and video recording capabilities), music player, integrated Google search, and a whole host of networking, messaging and communication features.

The Galaxy Apollo i5800 and the the Apollo i5801 are often confused, the only real difference is the i5801 version features a silver bezel, appearance aside, essentially they are the same phone.

The Galaxy Apollo i5800 is available in black or white, both have a sleek and smooth appearance. The most obvious feature is the 3.2 inch touch screen with the navigation and call keys below. The screen offers up to 16 million colours with 240 pixel by 400 pixel resolution and auto rotation between landscape and portrait modes.

Entertainment is the name of the game with the Galaxy Apollo. Music, video, radio and gaming are all covered. The music player supports all popular file formats such as MP3, WAV & eAAC+, the radio has RDS with FM tuning, and high resolution video playback is offered in MPEG4, MWV, DivX, H263 & H264.

In terms of communication and connectivity, the Samsung Galaxy Apollo i5800 does not disappoint. Staying in touch with SMS, MMS and Google mail is straightforward and with easy access provided to social networks like Twitter, MySpace and Facebook, status updates are only ever a couple of clicks away.

A GSM and 3G capable handset, the battery on the Apollo i5800 will provide around 15 hours of talk time (and up to 625 hours of standby) for GSM and slightly less over the more powerful 3G network. GPS satellite navigation is built in with Google maps application and the microSD memory slot can accept up to 32Gb (a 1Gb memory card is supplied in retail pack). Additionally the Galaxy Apollo I5800 is WiFi enabled allowing easy and fast connection to local wireless LAN.

Advantages: Smooth transitions and sensitive touchscreen, simple and responsive navigation, great camera, good music and video player, standard 3.5mm headphone jack, multi-touch for page zooming,

Disadvantages: Android skins can be confusing, sometimes there are simply too many options and widgets to choose from, no LED flash on camera, 324 x 240 resolution for video player is not in the same league as the Samsung Galaxy S with 720 pixels.

A great phone with a very competitive price right now from Orange, O2, Vodafone, T mobile and 3.

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Samsung Tocco Lite – full review of budget Smartphone

Posted on 17-11-2010 | By: david | 

Category : Mobile Phones, Samsung

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The Samsung Tocco Lite is marketed as the touch screen phone for the masses! Cheap contracts and competitive prices on pay-as-you-go, make the Samsung Tocco Lite an attractive buying proposition for those that want all the goodies associated with touch screen smart-phones, without the normal high price tag!

The first thing you notice about the Tocco Lite is the large screen, essentially the phone is one big screen with no keypad. This 3 inch screen is exceedingly bright, with sharp colours and contrast, although it has to be said it’s no match for the current class leaders with AMOLED screens such as the Samsung Galaxy S, the Omnia 7, Google Nexus One, Samsung Wave and HTC Desire. The Samsung Tocco Lite uses an older technology, the resistive touch-screen. However, in this application the screen is responsive to use and the quality is surprisingly good. There is also a built-in accelerometer which automatically rotates the screen to switch between portrait and landscape viewing mode.

For the price, the Tocco Lite is packed with features, there’s a 3.2 megapixel camera with digital zoom and basic camcorder, a music player, FM radio with RDS support, memory is expandable to 16GB using microSD card. Bluetooth and USB capabilities, 64-voice polyphonic ringtones, handwriting recognition, Quadband GSM and hands free speakerphone. Unfortunately, there is no WiFi nor 3G, it relies completely on GRPS – well you cant get everything for this competitive price! The real downside to this phone is the data speed, You-tube videos for instance are slow and often suffer pixelation due to high compression necessary to compensate for low bandwidth. But for a budget phone in this price range, this would seem to be a reasonable compromise. That being said, the Tocco Lite is perfectly fine for moderate internet use and when using email, Twitter or Facebook there were no problems at all. Available on T-mobile, o2, Orange and Vodafone.

Advantages: Responsive, vivid and bright touch-screen, short cuts to popular social-networking sites, long battery life (for a touchscreen smart phone) and expendable memory up to 16Gb, offers a lot of phone for very little cash!

Disadvantages: No 3G connectivity means slow uploading and naff video streaming, No headphone adaptor for proprietary headphone jack, lacks the superior AMOLED screen of more expensive competitors, essentially an updated version of the LG Cookie, but very little in the way of advantages over the older model, should be more improvements for the price increase over the LG Cookie.

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Full Review of Samsung Galaxy Tab P1000 mobile device

Posted on 16-11-2010 | By: david | 

Category : Mobile Phones, Samsung

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The Samsung Galaxy Tab P1000 is an advanced tablet device which can be used as an alternative to a PC/laptop in addition to servicing all your communication needs. A tri-band mobile phone and a mini tablet PC all in one! Available in black or grey, the Galaxy Tab has modern, yet classy looks, concealing a powerful 1Ghz processor with VR SGX540 graphics running on the Android operating system.

This designer handset measures just 190mm x 120mm x 12 mm compatible size and it only weighs 380g (compare that to carting a laptop around!). Games and HD videos are superb on the 7-inch 600 x1024 pixels screen and the 512Mb RAM plus up to 32Gb storage means the Samsung Galaxy Tab never feels underpowered.

The best way to look at the Samsung Galaxy Tab P1000 is to consider it a mini tablet PC with mobile phone capabilities! The Galxy tab has integrated loudspeaker and microphone so you dont even have to hold the phone like a conventional mobile, in fact you may have seen this device in use already via some very strange viral marketing advertisements from Samsung!

The Galaxy Tab P1000 is powered by the latest version of Android Operating System called Froyo and connectivity options are definitely top notch. With HSDPA at up to 7.2 mbps, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 3, high speed data transfer is just that!

As with all high end mobile devices, the Galaxy Tab P1000 has a digital camera (3.15 mega pixels )with LED flash and auto focus. Camera resolution is a huge 2048 x 1536 pixels and of course video recording is supported (at 30 fps). There is also an additional front facing camera for video calling.

In terms of entertainment features, the Galaxy Tab is fully loaded with media playing capabilities for all popular music and video file types. (MP3, WAV, eAAC+, AC3, FLAC, MP4, DivX, WMV, H.264, and H.263).

Advantages: great looks, cool functions, huge range of features, super fast operating system giving slick gaming and video playback, good camera, high speed data transfer with a range of connectivity options, probably the first true rival to the Apple iPad!

Disadvantages: cannot really replace a laptop or PC just yet, but its the best effort from any manufacturer we have seen!

The Samsung P1000 Galaxy Tab is an amazing device, in theory with all the capabilities of a smartphone and the performance of a PC or laptop. However don’t throw your laptop away just yet! The Galaxy cannot quite perform all the functions of a computer. However, it is certainly the most functional and user-friendly mobile attempt from a mobile manufacturer at the moment. Available on Orange and Vodafone


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Samsung Omnia 7 i8700 full review

Posted on 16-11-2010 | By: david | 

Category : Mobile Phones, Samsung

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With the latest Windows Phone 7 operating system and a amazing bright AMOLED screen, the Samsung Omnia 7 i8700 looks like it means business! The Omnia 7 is one a relatively few handsets offering the Windows mobile operating system (other models include the HTC HD7 and LG e900 Optimus 7). The new windows powered smart-phones are of course looking to seek domination in the high end mobile phone marketplace and usurp the Android or Apple OS powered handsets. From first impressions of the Samsung Omnia 7, this may be possible .

Looks wise, the Omnia 7′s is dominated by its whopping 4-inch Super AMOLED front screen display (actually the layout and first impressions of the phone are very similar to the Samsung Galaxy), with amazing pixel resolution of 800×480 the clarity of this display really has to be seen to be believed. Stunning colours, sharp contrast even in bright sunlight, and amazing brightness. Photographs and images are crystal-clear, and viewing pictures or video is a real joy.

The super advanced 1GHz CPU in the Samsung Omnia 7 provides the power to play games and switch between applications at incredible speed. Transitions between screens and fast moving games are completely seamless.

Advantages: Incredible AMOLED high resolution screen, it’s no exaggeration to say you have to see it to believe it. Funky and cool looks (though not as cool as some), slick and fast performance from Windows 7 based OS, wide range of connectivity options, turn-by-turn satellite navigation (Orange customers only), wonderful Zune software included, future Xbox Live integration will be awesome!

Disadvantages: hard to find power button, not able to expand memory (although the supplied 8Gb is adequate), currently few applications and games available from Windows – however this is expected to improve dramatically over time, does not have the QVGA resolution video recording mode like the HTC HD7.

This is a solid debut for the Windows 7 phone, minor quibbles aside, this mobile is one of the best smart-phones available. Improvement in terms of availability of Windows applications for this handset will make it an even better ownership proposition. Applications aside, the only real problem is the Omnia 7 i8700 arguably isn’t quite as cool to look at as some the rivals, the build quality is certainly impressive, but the “Wow” factor is missing. In general, the powerful software running the Omnia 7 makes it a pleasure to use across the board, surfing the net, checking email, playing games, listening to music or social networking – its all a breeze!.

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Samsung Tocco Ultra Mobile Phone Review

Posted on 22-04-2009 | By: admin | 

Category : Mobile Phones, Samsung

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Samsung Tocco Ultra – this fabulous slider mobile phone from Samsung (aka the Samsung S8300)is set to be one of the biggest sellers in 2009 as their new top of the range model. Using Samsung’s TouchWIZ interface, huge 2.8 inch AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode) WQVGA touch-screen (screen resolution 240 x 400 pixels), because of this new OLED screen technology no backlight is required which extends battery life.

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With the huge range of features packed into the Samsung Tocco Ultra you may think you have been given the wrong phone when you take this handset out of the box, it’s tiny, just 12mm thick with technologies and features such as GPS with Google maps, Bluetooth with A2DP, 7.2Mbps HSDPA support, 8 mega-pixel camera, video recording at up to 30 frames per second with DivX, WMV, MPEG and Xvid codec support for playback, FM radio with RDS, music player (MP3, AAC, AAC+ and WMA) with 5.1 Virtual Surround Sound, 75MB internal memory, PDF, excel and word document viewer and quad band GSM reception.

The 8 megapixel camera is simply amazing, featuring auto-focus, face-detection, and geo-tagging for photographs. it gets even better with moving video – recording at up to 30fps and a full video editing suite. Sharing pictures or videos has never been easier with the photo blogging feature.

Pros
Slim 12.7mm body.
Anti-scratch metal frame.
Scratch resistant screen.
Music player
FM radio with RDS.
MicroSD HC memory card slot supporting up to 16GB.
75MB internal memory.
1GB microSD memory card in-box.
HSDPA 7.2 Mbps.
Bluetooth v2.1

Cons
No Wi-Fi
No 3.5mm headphone jack

The Tocco was one of Samsung’s top selling mobile phones in 2008, and by taking the decision to upgrade to this latest model, the Samsung Tocco Ultra Edition, Samsung are obviously looking to build on their success. There really is little negative to say about this handset. It does everything well, some things brilliantly, nothing badly, and really the lack of standard 3.5mm jack is the only bad point worthy of mention. Lack of Wi-Fi LAN is not the big problem it can be on other phones, with the Samsung Tocco Ultra Edition offering high speed data access at up to 7.2 Mbps (HSDPA). Watch out for this one!

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