Category: Hands-on
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The Samsung Galaxy S Advance comes by, we film the whole thing

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Samsung is dead set on filling every niche, whether big or small, in the smartphone market, offering a Galaxy phone as a choice for just about every occasion.

You’ve got low range droids, high end droids, durable waterproof droids, “phoneblets” and lets not forget, yesterday’s flagships that are today’s midrange shooters. Read more »

We take the Porsche Design BlackBerry P’9981 for a test drive

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RIM have teamed up with Porsche Design Studios to create the BlackBerry P’9981, a mix of hard edges and precise angles unlike any other BlackBerry we’ve seen before.

The PorscheBerry and its box

The P’9981 enters the market as the elite BlackBerry, demanding an exclusive price tag for an exclusive device. We spent some exploring how the Porsche Design treatment changes a product like the P’9981. Read more »

Sony Xperia S gets in front of our camera

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We met it at CES this year, but now the Sony Xperia S is on our home turf. It’s a huge leap forward compared to Sony Ericsson phones – it’s all dual-core processors, 12MP still shots and FullHD videos.

We had a bit of free time, so dragged the Xperia S right in our studio for a quick hands-on video. Read more »

BLU Studio 5.3 in white makes a point out of not being your typical budget smartphone

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Let’s face it: the BLU Studio 5.3, which is on our hands today, looks like anything but a budget minded Android smartphone. It is very big and very white. And yes: it also packs two SIM card slots and two (!) homescreen buttons.

Without a closer look at its hardware and specs, the BLU Studio 5.3 can easily pass for a direct competitor to the mighty Samsung Galaxy Note. But it is not. It costs less than half the Korean royalty, and doesn’t have the ambition to go head to head with it Read more »

The Samsung Galaxy mini 2 is here just hours after being announced – scoop and video after the break

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The Samsung Galaxy mini 2 is the heir to a very popular Android device on the cheap.

It had leaked earlier but today it became official and (surprise!) we have it right here in our headquarters. We’ll be bringing you a full coverage in due time but for now we’ve prepared some pictures and a video. Read more »

Samsung Galaxy Note ICS ROM leaks, we take it for a spin

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At this point we shouldn’t be more than a month and a half away from the Samsung Galaxy Note official Android 4.0 ICS update, but how about getting a little preview of what’s to come? The first ICS 4.0.3 ROM for the phoneblet just leaked and we even managed to install in on a Note we had lying around and test it.

As you will see in a bit, the ROM is really stable and snappy and seems good enough for everyday use. All the hardware is supported, including the S Pen. Read more »

Pantech Burst for AT&T visits us, packs a lot of ambition

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Let’s be honest here – when talking high-end, dual-core Android smartphones, Pantech surely won’t be on top of your list of brands. The Korean company is mostly known around the world for making highly affordable feature phones, or low-end smartphones, with its home market being an exception of sorts. The aforementioned facts make the AT&T exclusive Pantech Burst quite interesting, as it aims to (cautiously) change the company’s image in the United States, where the market is brimming with options.

Believe it or not, the LTE sporting Pantech Burst has a spec sheet, which can compete with the top dogs in its segment. Read more »

Samsung Galaxy Note for AT&T comes our way, here’s the hands-on

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Despite looking just as imposing as its global sibling, the LTE packing Samsung Galaxy Note I717 for AT&T certainly is a different character from the international N7000. For starters, the U.S. bound phoneblet has gone through the same treatment as its local cousins from the Galaxy S II family, which includes having four touch-sensitive buttons at its front, instead of the three button configuration with a hardware button at the center of the global version. The AT&T Galaxy Note has also ditched the mighty Exynos chipset for Qualcomm-made silicon instead.

Like I mentioned above, the Samsung Galaxy Note for AT&T features a Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 chipset with two Scorpion cores, clocked at 1.5GHz. The GPU is Adreno 220. Read more »

Aluminum-clad Huawei MediaPad droid tablet gets hands-on treatment [VIDEO]

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The Huawei MediaPad came by our office and we took some time to get to know it better. Huawei is one of those manufacturers that are big, but not very well known. They seem to have created a top-notch product with the MediaPad.

The MediaPad is a 7″ Honeycomb tablet with an aluminum unibody. At 390g of weight and 10.5mm thickness, it’s lighter and thinner than the Amazon Kindle Fire. Read more »

White out: A look at the Nokia Lumia 800′s bright and shiny new outfit [HANDS ON]

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We took a trip into London this morning to pay a visit to Nokia who have been itching to show off the latest edition to the Lumia 800 family.

The Lumia 800 family

The white Lumia 800 joins the existing lineup of black, cyan and magenta handsets and we expect it to hit UK stores in March this year. Read more »

Google Chrome beta for Android review [HANDS-ON]

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Google Chrome. Google’s web browser didn’t waste any time in becoming a hit on desktop PCs and in a matter of just a few years placed second in the browser rankings. That’s crazy even for Google, but they pulled it off.

With the release of Google Chrome beta for Android, the search engine giant will attempt to redo the browser’s success but this time on mobile.

But as you know – mobile isn’t the same as desktop. And now we are going to take a deeper look at Google Chrome beta for Android and see if the Chrome team has pushed the right buttons to shoot the browser in the right direction. The path to Android’s new default browser that is. Read more »

Motorola DROID RAZR MAXX review

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The Motorola DROID RAZR MAXX looks so familiar, you can easily mistake it for its slimmer brother from certain angles. Aside its massive built-in battery and a change in the internal memory capacity, the newcomer in Verizon’s LTE lineup is identical to the DROID RAZR, which broke cover in November last year.

Quite frankly, I never thought that battery capacity will be the star feature in a high end Android smartphone, but, given my experience with a number of top notch devices from the past year, it makes perfect sense. After all, I witnessed several Android top dogs with massive spec sheets display battery performance, which puts their daily usability in question, thus forcing me to walk around with a charger in my pocket. The DROID RAZR MAXX is clearly aimed at this painful issue. Read more »

Dual-SIM Nokia Asha 200 is here and ready to text [VIDEO]

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Now that we’ve gotten the 300 out of the way, it’s time for the super cheap Nokia – the Asha 200 to have a go at our reviewing course.

The Asha 200 is a non-touch device with a full four row QWERTY keyboard, which has the ability to operate two SIM cards at the same time. Trying to keep the asking price as low as possible, the Nokia Asha 200 has a modest specs sheet, covering little else but the basics. Read more »

JLab Audio’s J.Fi.M Acoustic and JBuds J6M in-ear headphones rock [HANDS-ON]

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My first experience with JLab Audio headphones goes a few years back, when I tried a pair of the company’s highly affordable JBuds. Priced at only $9.99, the earbuds certainly did not blow me away with acoustic supremacy. They were however, way too cheap to get any sort of criticism.

Recently, I got a chance to spend some quality time with two of the company’s premium offerings – the JBuds J6M and J.Fi.M Acoustic. Read more »

BlackBerry Bold 9790 stops by, we take it for a spin [VIDEO]

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The BlackBerry Bold 9790 has just arrived in our office. It’s the second BlackBerry OS 7 running Bold we get our hands on and just as the Bold 9900, the 9790 also comes with a touchscreen.

The Bold 9790 is has less-capable raw power and specs than the Bold 9900 – it comes with a smaller 2.45″ HVGA touchscreen, a 1GHz processor and a 5 megapixel snapper capable of capturing VGA videos. Read more »