Tag: iphone alternative
The Samsung Jet screams onto the scene at 800MHz speeds
The Samsung Jet is going to seem like a silly name at the other end of your 18-month contract but, as of today, it’s the fastest handset available in the world right. The impressive 800MHz processor is at the heart of its creed, backed up by the Samsung Dolphin browser, an improved TouchWiz 2.0 interface and support for just about every kind of file and feature you could shake a stick at.
There’s a 5-megapixel camera with double LED flash, autofocus, smile shot, face detection, blink detection and armpit detection. (One of these is not true). But best of all is the undoubtedly stunning 3.1″ AMOLED display with the kind of resolution that makes my CRT weep. It’s WVGA, so that’ll be somewhere slightly beyond 800 x 480. Oh, and it’s touchscreen too, but you knew that, right?
It does support 3G and Wi-Fi, it does have a 3.5mm jack, in fact there’s very little it doesn’t do. It’s perfectly happy working with all your DRMed music files and the other usual audio standards – MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+ and WMA. On the video side, it’ll play DivX, Xvid, WMV, MPEG4, H.263 and H.264 formats. You’ll be able to record your own at a healthy 30fps too.
You’ll be able to beam all the sounds straight to your ears with Bluetooth 2.1, you can link it up and charge via microUSB (praise the lord) and you’ve got both mircoSD and 2GB of onboard storage to play with – or what we call in the business “enough”.
The most intriguing part of the package for me, though, is the Dolphin browser. Samsung has got some serious competition in the shape of Opera Mini and, well, Opera Mini really but they’re talking the talk with this software addition.
It’s got a built-in ad blocker, offers multiple downloads and you can have five pages open at any one time. They’ve also got around the multitouch barrier with one finger zooming, Interesting to see how well that works.
The whole package measures a really quite neat 108.8 X 53.5 X 11.9 mm with perhaps the only question mark for me the 1,100 mAh battery. It’s often hard to say how well it preforms because of the nature of the processor and how effiicient a piece of engineering the whole handset is, but all I know is that that’s less than all the super smart phones I compared the other day and even less than the G1 which’ll barely get you through a single day of proper use.
That said, I’m pleased to say that I’m liking what Samsung’s come up with; the fastest handset in the East and West, at least until Toshiba gets its act together.
Samsung Jet
SHINY VIDEO REVIEW: Nokia N97 – part 1
So, here we are. The Nokia N97 review. Can’t say I was waiting too anxiously for this one what with the Pre and the Jobs 3.0 on the horizon but, as it turns out, well, watch the vid first, eh…
So, very impressed. Big, big grower the N97. It’s a little unfair in some ways because, on the surface, it doesn’t have the sex appeal of the other mega handsets of the summer, largely because of the OS. The Palm OS is new, Android’s still fledgling, iPhone 3.0 plugs all the holes we’ve been waiting to be filled but S60 is, well, S60. It’s been around for bloody years. It’s even on a whole bunch of very average phones out there.
Once you get over that, the N97’s a bit of a dream though. It’s not a simple phone to get to grips with. It’s straight forward in its design and lay out but there’s a lot to it. It’s not a small piece of kit either at 150g but I really feel like it could become the kind of indispensable pocket computer I’ve been waiting for. Just a question of downloading your own browser, maps and other software of choice.
As I say, though, it’s the apps that this thing needs to be a real iPhone killer and, sadly, so far, Ovi has been choking worse than when I accidentally breathe beer. I’ll give it another week but the second half of the review will come out then, whether you’re ready or not Nokia.
£499 SIM free
