The Motorola Xoom is a 10.1” Tablet that runs Android 3.2 (honeycomb) with Ice-cream Sandwich  (4.0.3) coming to the UK Soon. This started life as a £399 device competing again the iPad 2 but came with a default of 32GIG storage instead of 16GIG. It first dropped to £329 (which it currently retails at) but for a short period of time, a couple of stores had it for £249, which made it somewhat of a bargain.  I managed to get the last on in stock while passing Carphone Warehouse, would this have the same issues as the Blackberry Playbook or would I end off keeping this device?

 Hardware

 Some people love 7” tablets (hold it with one hand, lighter etc) while some people prefer the much bigger 10” tablets. I have tried both now and think I am more of the 10” camp. The device has MicroUSB on the bottom; this can be used to transfer data across. There is also a Micro HDMI connector to allow you to connect your Xoom to your TV / Monitor and this requires a cheap cable, I bought one for £3 and this worked just fine. Finally we have the power connector, the cable from the plug is very long for placement anywhere.

On the top we have a slot that pulls out exposing the SD Card slot and the shape of the piece of plastic you pull out allows you to fit an full sized SIM card in there but I tried it myself and no 3G came forth. They sell a WiFi Only and 3G+WiFI model. The only other things on the tablet are the volume up/down on the left hand side and a power button on the back of the device (near the camera).

Android 3.2

We have now a bar (software) on the bottom, this includes back, home and running tasks along with a clock and notification display on the right hand side. Honeycomb gives you 5 screens to add icons, widgets and apps to suit your needs. As an example of this, you could have one screen that displays the info (Twitter updates, email, Google+ etc) while another contains shortcuts to your most used applications and so forth.

As far as multitasking goes, it was quite easy to jump to running programs and testing say for example an IRC Client, this stayed logged into the channel even while jumping around different programs.

Video & Audio

 One of the main things I wanted to do with tablets is to communicate with other people, so we set about testing a broad range of applications. Skype was an obvious choice and it was not until we entered video mode that it did not display any video but could not end the call have to force quit the program. After some research it seems the latest version (currently 2.6) does not work with a whole range of tablets while the last version (2.5) worked 100% fine – we have a video call going and the quality was quite good.

The next program was Tango and this took a bit of getting used to, it uses your contact book I think to find other people. Eventually the other person popped up and we had a video chat, quality was workable but not as good for some reason as Native Camera mode and even swapping cameras did not make much difference.

The final test involved Google Hangout and Google Talk, I had no issues myself and was able to join hangouts and do video calls in Talk but on Android 2.3 (the test subject) it was having issues. Quality was not that hot on the video again and I can only imagine that it has to do with the software and not the actual camera.

Playing Videos

 I have tested video playing including 720P across the wireless network on the iPad, Windows 7 Phone, iPhone 4S and the Playbook and every single one of them can play a video without slowing down. I tested non-HD videos on this device and it played just fine – along with MX Player and ES File Manager, I can play any format that is out there. Playing 720p or 1080p was a mixed bag. It can only support Baseline Profile HD encoding which means that most of my HD movies are not going to play on the device properly. I do not want to re-encode my entire collection that’s for sure.

Odd Quirks

 Since using it, there has been the odd thing that stops it working properly, such as slow down, a white screen when opening browser and other odd stuff. I assume that this is honeycomb at fault and will all be fixed in the next update. I know that if the device is playing up big time, a swift reboot generally fixes the issue. The boot time is not too bad, when comparing to the Playbook, which took well over 3 minutes to boot (roughly) – this thing is a lot quicker.

My Overall impression

 While I was eager to return the Playbook before even a week had run out, I am more than happy with this device and what it does. I feel that for £250 it was a good deal and I already bought a Gel Case and the HDMI lead. I cannot see myself buying the Bluetooth Keyboard (£50) or the stand (£30), at the moment I am using an old plate stand I found and this does the job just fine.

If you have been following my blog of late, it has a Tablet slant and the reason for the sudden need for me to buy a tablet is the various companies dropping prices of the said items. I had already written about the Motorola Xoom dropping in price to £249 and how I struggled to actually buy one from a bricks and mortar store. I was out and about yesterday and thought I would try my luck at buying a tablet, any issues and I was happy to walk away – I just do not need a tablet that urgent.

PC World

My First port of call was PCWorld/ Curry’s based in Grimsby, quote a large store and in theory should have stock of ‘things’ right? While I was there I had another look of the Logitech Mice (I need a new one) and sure enough the items they had on offer they had zero stock of- how handy was that (my local store also carried zero stock). I looked at the Motorola Xoom and sure enough the price was £329. I asked a local sales person about this pricing and they have either been briefed on what to say already or have many people asking. What did the person say? Well first that they had zero stock (this is without checking any computer – straight from the top of their head). The next piece of propaganda was that the price of £249 was ONLINE price online and not in store. Once again I stated that you cannot buy it (when I checked) for home delivery and you can collect form store BUT no local store (within 45 miles of me) had any in stock. I seriously think PCWorld need to change their attitude towards the customer or they will go the same way as Comet.

Carphone Warhouse

I spotted a Carphone Warehouse a short walk away and as I knew these also offered the Xoom at £249, I thought I would have a quick check. The person who greeted me was polite and was happy to tell me that the Xoom was indeed £249 in-store and while they had none in stock, the one located in the town centre had 3 in stock last time he checked. While I was there I noticed they had an Archos Tablet for £150, this was a 10.1” device running Android 2.3 with 8GIG Storage. It did cross my mind that this might be enough of a tablet to suit my needs and been £100 cheaper than the Xoom, would it be as well to buy this instead? I knew from experience that if you pay cheap, you get cheap and it will never been as good as the better Xoom Tablet.

Stay Tuned for the full review of the Motorola Xoom.

I came across DC Universe on my PS3 while looking around for some new stuff and it took forever to download and install (and update etc). You can also download and play this for free on Windows, not 100% sure if they are the same servers. The game is a 3rd person viewpoint and you get to choose Male or Female, Good or bad and various skill types to start the game with.

 The initial starting block

Once you have created a character, you go through a level that eases you into the game and you have to fight you way off a ship using your various powers. As you achieve various tasks, you get points to spend on your skill tree and this gives you some extra powers. Along the way you also get stuff in your inventory which pays to put on as it helps you kill the enemies quicker.

Quests 

You get tasked with various jobs and this in turn allows you to fight enemies of your own level, start to level up and get other items along the way. It felt different from say World of Warcraft type MMO as you can level up just by killing monsters, this seems to be quest based on getting to the next level.

Free to play

While the game is free, it does have the shop and you can buy extra stuff. One is a monthly fee and this can cost £8.99 (if you pay monthly) or £71.88 for a full year membership. This gives you DLC packs, more slots, bigger inventory and so forth. Another option is to buy as required, such as the lightning pack for $9.99. The last method is to add cash to your in-game account to buy thing from the shop in the game, such as better helmets and so forth.

The Motorola Xoom started life as a £399 10 inch tablet, competing against the iPad 2, the theory was it had double the ram for the same price as the baseline iPad 2. Sales were bad and soon they dropped the price down to £329 and in November 2011 brought out the Xoom 2. Recently a few retailers have slashed the price down to £249, such as PCWorld & Carphone warehouse (the same people who also slashed the prices of Blackberry Playbook). I thought I would pop along to local PCWorld and see if they had any in, online stated they had none in stock.

Selling the lie

I asked a sales woman about the price – she stated that the price was only available on-line and I had to buy the product (and have it delivered) on-line also. I went on to explain that it gives you the option at the on-line price to pick up from a store, so the only Online bit was me actually choosing it online. She went on to say that she has no stock and this was without checking in any form, we can assume that she has already been asked about these today or is in fact guessing. She went on to tell me about the brand new Xoom that is coming soon and this is why they have reduced the price, when I asked about which model, she was unsure but as soon as I mentioned Xoom 2, she said that was the one.

I went on to inform her that the Xoom 2 came out in November 2011 and can be bought anywhere and is not ‘coming soon’. The last bit of info she shared was the fact that PCWorld was the only retailer that is selling the Xoom at £249, once I explained Carephone Warehouse have the same model and price – she walked away, almost annoyed I guess.

Tablets going down in price

It stands to reason that as CES 2012 has been and gone, there will be a whole bunch of new Tablets coming out, these are faster (Quad core), better GPU (Tegra 3) and features Ice Cream Sandwich (V4 of android OS). The tablets that are left in the stores have two options, reduce the price to attract the impulse buyer / looking for a cheap tablet or not sell any more of them.

Let us not also forget the Apple iPad 3 is due out soon and this may be a game changer on what to expect in tablets. I am no hurry to buy a tablet and it seems its hard to get them anyhow, maybe the staff bought them all as they did with the HP, at least I have saved myself £250 once again.

The Playbook started life at full price, about the same price if I recall as the iPad and then we had the first drop which saw the device go for 16GIG – £249, 32GIG – £329 and 64GIG – £409. We next had another price drop just the other week and now it was 16GIG – £169, 32GIG – £200 & 64GIG – £329. They are having another go with the prices going up instead (and down on the bigger models).  As you can see from the screenshot, 16 GIG – £249 (£80 Increase), 32GIG – £259 (£60 Increase) and 64GIG – £269 (£60 decrease). If the £169 did not seem worth it – cannot see why people would spend more now?

Spiceworks is a free browser-based network management and administration program. It provides the user with a single dashboard from which he or she can inventory, monitor and troubleshoot the network.

When you first install it, Spiceworks scans your network. It checks Active Directory, does a NetBIOS scan and pings the addresses in your specified IP range. It took us a fair bit of fiddling with the firewall to get all the devices on our network inventoried, and even then our locally attached printer wasn’t found. This was a bit odd, given that it was attached to the PC Spiceworks was installed on.

Once it has its inventory, though, Spiceworks is refreshingly intelligent in the way it uses your information. For instance, wherever it can it will identify a client PC’s make and model. It will then automatically link that PC’s entry to the driver download page on its manufacturer’s website. It will also show you the machine’s spec, the programs that are installed on it, the amount of disk space free and so on.

BlackBerry Playbook

I currently own an iPad 1, wife has an iPhone 4S and I have a Windows Mobile 7 Phone, so I have enough devices to do what I need on the go. I have been looking at tablets for a while now and a few caught my eye such as Sony Tablet S, Blackberry Playbook and the Motorola Xoom. The end choice is always about money, splashing out £400 for an iPad 2 was too much money in my books and even the £329 price points of Android Tablets seem a bit high. The two machines that are at the £200 price point are the Blackberry Playbook and Arnova 9 G2.

Buying on Impulse

I had watched some YouTube videos already and was in two minds if this device would suit my needs or not, I was standing in the store and had they no 32GIG models in stock (as the online site told me) I would have happily walked away but they had 4 in fact. I bought the device on the grounds that I could take it back for a full refund, this would allow me to try it out fully and see what it can really do.

Packaging & Initial Boot

The box that it came in is very well presented and contains the Playbook, Neoprene Sleeve, Micro-USB Cable Cleaning Cloth and the Mains Charger. There is a piece of paper that tells you to make sure you have Wi-Fi Coverage, press the power button and follow the steps on-screen. The initial steps including connecting to a Wi-Fi, setting up a Blackberry account, country based settings and finally checking for updates. It took a while to download and update the device, nothing major but until this is complete, you cannot use the device. The last thing it does is take you through a guide on how the device works.

Specifications

• 7″ LCD, 1024 x 600, WSVGA, capacitive touch screen with full multi-touch and gesture support
• BlackBerry Tablet OS with support for symmetric multiprocessing
• 1 GHz dual-core processor (Cortex A9 Processor), w/ GPU
• 1 GB RAM
• Memory: 16GB, 32GB and 64GB versions to be available
• 5300mAh battery
• Dual HD cameras (3 MP front facing, 5 MP rear facing), supports 1080p HD video recording
• Video playback: 1080p HD Video, H.264, MPEG, DivX, WMV
• Audio playback: MP3, AAC, WMA
• HDMI video output
• Wi-Fi – 802.11 a/b/g/n
• Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR
• Connectors: microHDMI, microUSB, charging contacts
• Open, flexible application platform with support for WebKit/HTML-5, Adobe Flash Player 10.1, Adobe Mobile AIR, Adobe Reader, POSIX, OpenGL, Java
• Ultra thin and portable:
• Measures 5.1″x7.6″x0.4″ (130mm x 193mm x 10mm)
• Weighs less than a pound (approximately 0.9 lb or 400g)

The Device – Connectors

This is a 7 inch tablet, a lot smaller than the iPad (9.7”) and it runs the screen at 1024×600 which compares nicely to the iPad 1024×768. There are very limited connectors on this device; there is a power button along with volume up and down and a play button on the top. Underneath we have a Micro HDMI, no lead is supplied but you can get this cheaply online. Given the low cost of the cables, I am not sure why RIM did not include this in the box? Next this this we have Micro USB connector and I guess another connector for the Dock you can buy.

Hardware – Camera, Speakers & Microphone

The Playbook has a better front camera than most tablets have back camera. Both cameras can do full HD (that’s 1920×1080), the back camera of course been better quality. They are rated as 3MP front and 5MP back (2592×1944). The microphone is just amazing and can pick up very clear and loud audio. Finally the speakers, unlike most tablets, they have placed them on the front and they are loud and have good bass, perfect for playing music. If you want to think of this device as a HD Camcorder, then that is money well spent in this regard and of course it can do so much more.

The Web Browser

I have tested many sites on this device and I would say that just about all of them work as they would on a normal desktop web browser. I could happily view a stream on Justin.TV and access many of the file sharing sites. The one site that did not work was soundcloud, I could not press the arrow to start the music playing for some reason. I noticed a lot of the applications were in fact just a short cut to the web site, for example BBC iPlayer. Using TVCatchup website allowed me for example to watch TV live which was handy. The reason why most work? Simple, it has a fully functional adobe flash built right in and in no way did the device slow down because of this.

Application Store

This is where the device starts to fall down, there are a lot of applications that are just not there and a lot are things you have to buy. I failed to find for example a decent Twitter program, teamviewer, Skype and so on. One of the reasons why there are applications missing is simply the fact you open a web page and do the same thing, such as Tweetdeck.

Gaming

Battery Life

This is one area where I heard was not so good and it is claimed an 8 hour battery life. With general use throughout the day, I went from 100% to 56% and that was with using it heavily. I agree the iPad has a longer life which means it can last for a whole week without charging but maybe as the iPad does not fully multitask and has no flash is the reason why. I did not feel the battery life was an issue since using this device over the last few days, maybe as I was plugged in via USB half of the time and it trickle charging it?

OS2.0 Beta & Android Applications

I followed a guide online which was as simple as going to the Blackberry site, typing in your PIN number plus email address and I soon had an update flagged on my device (511MB) to the beta OS, which is due out Feb 2012. Before I went ahead with this, I wanted to make sure I could go backwards and again on the same site, it tells you how to do this. One major update here was the fact that wireless which was previously connecting at 11Mbps was now at 65Mbps. You can side load BAR files (Android apps) via a tool called DDPBInstaller. I tested a handful of Android programs and some worked 100%, some looked like they were working but did not function properly and finally some just crashed straight out.

Using this method I was able to get Citrix installed and connect to my work Citrix farm and access the desktop without any major issues. I tried Skype but that failed as well as teamviewer. DS File & DSAudio (both Android Applications to access files from my Synology NAS) worked 100% and I was able to stream any of my music or watch any movie on my NAS box (as long as the format was correct). Doing some testing as to what video formats it can play, it copes with MP4 just fine, it can also play WMV & MOV formats as well. AVI and MKV was a no-go and instead of playing them, just copied them to the device instead.

Bluetooth Keyboards

I used the Apple Bluetooth keyboard as a test and set it to search for devices. It found the keyboard (I held the power key on the right hand side until the LED flashed) and asked me to type in a number on the keyboard. I typed it and pressed enter and the keyboard was paired. I tested an IRC application and was typing away at full speed. Any Bluetooth keyboard would work of course as would a headset.

Comparing it to iPad

Before I compare devices, remember that a 32GIG iPad 2 is currently £479 and this device only cost me £200. The iPad is bigger (9.7”) but no much more screen estate (1024×768 vs. 1024×600). As iOS has a wealth of application, you can normally find just about anything you want but the reason it needs applications in the first place is due to the browser on the iPad not been able to do flash or air stuff. A good example of this is either Ustream or Justin.TV, both need an application on the iPad (which is the iPhone version) while the playbook can not only use the proper website but also stream using the built in camera & microphone. If we add the ability to use Android applications then this opens up the playbook to a more level playing field.

Conclusion

I bought this device with the express thought that I could take it back should it be a waste of my time and for the first couple of days, the “swing-o-meter” was edging towards “take it back”. In fact I almost put it all back in the box and took it back just the other day as I felt it did not do what I wanted out of a device, this was until I placed 2.0 Beta and side-loaded some Android application. Ask yourself this question; what else is out there that will cost you £169, £200 or £329 (16GIG, 32GIG, 64GIG) for so much hardware? I looked at the ‘cheap’ android tablets (Arnova 9 G2) and that cannot do half what this can do plus only has 8GIG ram and costs the same price (£200).

The plan is simple, I keep using this device for another week solid and by time Saturday comes around, if I feel this is just a mere toy and a waste of my £200, I shall flash it back to production OS, wipe it clean and take it back. If it lasts the full week then I shall keep it plus buy myself some much needed items such as a case (which doubles as a stand) and a mini HDMI convertor.

The one last thing to mention is this device has no GPS which means it cannot really function as a replacement SatNav in your car which is a shame as it wound have rounded the device off nicely.

****** UPDATE 10 Jan 2012 ******

I grabbed the device last night to sit down and chill out, I had problems, lots of them. The video player just quit half way through a movie, the browser would hang for a long time on flash related sites and the Android Apps would crash out for no reason. I followed the guide to bring the device back to 1.8.0, cleaned it up and re-boxed it “good as new”. I took it back to the store today and got a full refund. If you do buy one due to this review, the device might work out better for you but I cannot wait until RIM get the software working correctly, maybe this is why they are so cheap?

For the record

My Browser has a spell checker built right in, as I type words, I tells me when it spots a word that is wrong. Quite often the default spell checker is USA and as I am based in the UK, it flags words that are in fact correct. When I am writing a new blog post, it means something has come to my head and I want to get this down onto a post, in other words I rush writing it.

What I normally do at this point is read it through a couple of times. I look for any obvious spelling mistakes or when I use the wrong word (which is technically spelt correctly). The human brain is a strange thing, it can skip over things, which are wrong, and you will not see it until someone has pointed it out.

When I read anything written down, unless what I am reading makes little sense, then even if the thing is riddled with spelling mistakes and the wrong use of words, this does not matter to me at all. Do I really care if I read THERE instead of THEIR? The story remains the same. Here is something to think about, I do not get paid for anything that I have written and my style is not that bad that you struggle to read it without been physically sick.

I have a great idea that will help, I will start using a word processor (MS Word) and this can not only trap the bad spelling but also the bad grammar. I shall re-read it 5 times and then publish the work. The side effect of this is time, instead of having something great to read today, you will have a wait until I am happy it is correct.

I want to take you back all the way to 2007, this is when the first sites started to come up which allowed anyone with a computer, webcam and a microphone the ability to have their very own TV show if you like. Back in them days, of course, we had no adverts and there was many people jumping on the bandwagon to start their very own show. If we look towards the tech shows of the time, two people were ahead of the game; this being Chris Pirillo & Leo Laporte. These people were no strangers to TV, they used to be on the USA show TechTV and many people strived to be like them, the same sort of show, the same graphics and even the same format. I wish to chart the rise and the fall of Tech Shows in general and look towards the future.

Ustream versus Justin

Back then, UStream was the king with the upstart Justin.TV seen as a childish attempt at a streaming host. Ustream had its good and bad features, the main thing that comes to mind was the ability to record segments and have a loop playing when you were off-air. This was also the bad side of course as you might have forgot to start recording and people will miss the action later on.

Justin.TV on the other hand records all shows and keeps them for 7 days, you can highlight what you need to keep and download them to your computer (if you are the host). The problem came when these hosts needed to make money and this is where adverts started to come into play. If you look at Ustream now, it plays an advert as soon as you jump on the stream, it lasts for 30 seconds (at least), and plays adverts every so often as well as all over the page.

People started to notice how Ustream were happier hosting the stars (who paid the money of course) over the ‘normal’ people who helped get Ustream noticed and soon many jumped ship to Justin.TV who had less adverts.

From ad-hoc to structured shows

The ways the shows worked in the earlier days were quite simple, the person switched the camera on when they were not so busy and had Skype callers keep the show going, jumping from topic to topic. The microphones were not as good, the cameras not HD and there was no lower thirds with shot switching but the fact is – people came none the less. The raw reality is that no amount of flashy graphics is going to paste over the fact that a show is lacking in any sort of content and have ‘no soul’ if you like.

The first thing that came with many of the shows was simply a time slot – this makes sense as TV works like that. As the majority of shows are USA based, this means the European audience most of the time will miss out. Why not watch the show via Recorded content or another means (YouTube, iTunes subscription etc.) – this is possible but you miss the interaction that the show brings.

The next thing that started to crop up I noticed was “Pre-recorded” and by this I mean the hosts would stream the last few shows they had recorded to HD on a loop, which meant the show always looked like it was live but in fact it was an old show. Twit does this but they have so many shows running through the day that there is a good chance you have not seen them anyhow.

The rise and the fall

 It starts with a mixer, add in a microphone, a better camera, more cameras, better microphone, better stands, compressors, higher bandwidth, tables for guests and the list goes on and on. Were these people making money from this? They got some trinkets for their trouble but is it worth it? Would you go to work for 8 hours a day and be happy to get a couple of hard drives for your trouble?

The constant streaming soon started to take its toll on real life stuff such as jobs, family and friends. First came the ‘break’ – what this meant in real terms was they were sick of doing live shows but did not want to see all their hard work go to waste, this gave them a means to come back online at a later date. Many shows just dropped, never seen again with most people heading to make YouTube Video’s instead.

One show I wish not to mention had a break, came back, hand another break and when they did come back, they were always late and by this I mean not 30 minutes late but like hours late. They probably wondered why they had no audience left but the reality of that was if a person thinks the show is dead, they are not going to keep coming back ‘just in case’.

Who is still around?

Looking through the sites out there, there is maybe a handful of shows left doing tech, the majority stream late USA time, so for the purpose of this post, I shall discount them. There is a few UK based Tech shows but these follow the format that is old and tired and by this I mean they have a ‘panel’ of guests who discuss the news (I already know the news thanks), discuss something they read online and normally only do one hour long show.

The stark reality is I can get more entertainment and discussion from a Google Hangout then I can any show left running these days. I did some random testing of streaming as it goes and for this experiment, I streamed Movies + TV Shows on one account. I never tweeted it out, I never told anybody yet many came. I streamed The Tech Buzz old Youtube Videos and the reason for this was so it looked like a tech show (if you see what I mean) if you were cruising around looking for a show and it’s not like there is page after page of tech shows on Justin. I had nobody turn up and this was to be expected.

The Future

Does this mean this is the end for Tech Shows, as we know them? When there is people doing something, more people want to join in and the momentum grows, the opposite is also true. If you think the tech side is dead, then why would anyone waste time making one? Chicken & egg we think.

Two ways to look at this – if a person wanted to make a stream so they can get money and goodies instead of a real job then I can see this failing as they will be driven by the sponsors (if they got any). If a Person just wanted to do an ad-hoc show with no rigid format, have fun and do some proper tech instead of just talking about it – then I can see this growing bigger over time. The only hurdle in the way is making time to do a show and having something to talk about on said show. I do not think they need a panel and if they do, Google Hangout is good enough I feel.

Thoughts

What about your thoughts? Do you see it getting better or has it been and gone as they say. What do people gain from running a show, is it the same as somebody running a free MMORPG for example?

Work supplied me with HTC Trophy which runs Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) as it’s core operating system. I have been using this phone for a few weeks now as my main mobile and I would like to go through my thoughts on how it pans out as an all-in-one smartphone. The phone has no form of memory card slot and comes supplied with 8GIG Storage, you cannot increase this in any form (rather like the iPhone) but it does come with Microsoft Skydrive which allows an extra 25GIG worth of stuff ‘in the cloud’.

Setting up the phone

The first thing you need to do is install Microsoft Zune software and I am not sure what you would do if you only had an Apple computer of for that matter a Linux PC? Once the software is installed, it detected the phone and Windows went through its normal steps of finding hardware many times. It found an update, I left it installing and this went on for hours on end, by the time I was finished my phone was now running Mango (7.5) and all my data was intact.

Choosing what the Sync 

  The first thing I noticed was how unresponsive the software was, I am clicking Phone but nothing happens, it is doing something in the background you see (finding my music for example).

As you can see from the screen shot above, you can control how to sync the various items.  This works best for me as it gives me more control over what is on there. Talking of finding music and so forth, it operates on ‘Watched folders’ and in my case the music is stored on a NAS box, once I had added the folders (which took a bit of stabbing around on how to do this), off it went and added all my music collection. As I stated it was a watched folder, so anything new in there is added without any further effort from me, I just wish iTunes would do the same thing.

The phone itself

The Snapdragon 1GHz CPU is plenty fast for anything I have chucked at it so far which includes games. Mango operates on Two screen, the first been the tiles and the second screen is the complete list of apps installed on the phone.

Tiles provide a very quick way to display information, I can see at a glance on mine if I have any emails from my Google or Work email account, what is coming up in my calender and so forth. The three buttons on the bottom of the phone provide me with back, Windows Key (home) and Search. A long press of the back button shows a list of running applications and easy to get back to them.

Market Place

A Smartphone lives and dies by the number of applications a person can get there hands on and I was surprised by the large number of choices I did have. I can either use the zune software to find and install software or the phone itself. The way I rate any phone + Applications is how many free one’s you can get, it’s all very well been able to buy stuff.

There is no Skype for the phone, they claim they are making one and that will be great. Flash to my knowledge is not supported but there is a trick you can do and this involves telling the settings to do desktop mode on the browser and this allows some sites to show flash. I tested this with Justin.TV but there was no way to get it to run. Twitter is another example, it would have been ideal to have a live tile showing latest tweets but again this is not supported as of yet and Twitter is not buried deep enough so I can share things via it and so forth.

Battery life

At a guess I would say with phone calls and using the phone for various tasks gives you about 2 days worth of charge. The way I use the phone anyhow is having it plugged into my computer via USB (which charges it – yet iPhone does not) or I plug it into the wall at night when I sleep due to the fact I use it as an alarm clock. Like any Smartphone, battery life will be an issue due to how much it is doing, so nothing that bothered me in that sense.

Customisation 

 You can set the Wallpaper for the Lock Screen, you cannot set any wallpaper for the Tiles screen but you can change the colours in the settings menu. Rings tones are easy enough to set and you can set a ring tone per person if you really wanted to. I have for example set up one ring tone for work people, another for family and finally a different one for the wife, this way I can tell who is calling just by the ring tone alone.

Some odd things

I do like the compass application and how it overlays a map of where you are underneath, this is a nice touch and most other phones just show you a compass. Scanning Bar codes seemed to be a lot slower than any other phone I have tried, it took a long time to finally work out what it was and in some cases got the product wrong. I scanned some Champagne and it told me it was a box of coloured ribbons while the iPhone not only got the bar code in seconds but also got the right product.

Camera and video recording

You can check the quality of the camera at this site and I have attached a video as well showing it is capable of 720p.

The specs are 5MP 2560×1920 and it has a flash built in which was the major issue I used to have with my HTC Hero (as in it had no flash). It has a dedicated camera button and I personally prefer this over having to press the screen (as you do with the iPhone). Of course it is not as good as the latest iPhone 4S but it’s good enough I guess. It has no front facing camera and this alone would make it hard for Skype should it come along to video chat.

Overall

To round this review up then, I do like what Microsoft have done with the operating system, it suits a mobile phone well indeed. There is many applications I would want missing from the market place such as Skype and Justin.TV type of thing. It is no iPhone killer and it cannot compete with the sheer might that is Google (Android) but I am happy with it and saves me having to buy an iPhone for now.