12 month contract on T-Mobile. £30 per month line rental on Combi 30. You can claim £180 cash back, which is effectively 12 months half price line rental. 300 anytime minutes and 200 texts per month.
The Samsung F480 Tocco is a 3G touchscreen phone with HSDPA 7.2Mbps for high speed data access. It has a 5 megapixel camera and a large 2.8 inch display with a haptic touchscreen interface. Built from high quality materials, the Samsung F480 has a flat face with a glossy black surround and comes with a wallet-style leather case.to protect the screen. There are just three keys on the front of the phone. On the side of the F480 you’ll find a camera shortcut key, a volume rocker control and a hold key which locks the keys and screen.
The Samsung F480 uses the colourful, award-winning Croix touchscreen interface and provides haptic vibration feedback. The built-in music player is reminiscent of the iPod touch. Music can be played in the background while other applications are being used. A widget allows you to pause and skip tracks from the home screen as well as providing quick access to the full music player application. With about 230MB of internal memory there’s enough space to store a decent selection of music. Memory can be expanded up to 8GB using a microSD card.
Other features of the Samsung F480 include an FM radio with RDS, stereo Bluetooth, a brilliant organiser, a good web browser and course a 5 megapixel camera with autofocus, face detection and video stabilisation. The Samsung F480 is a good all-round device with plenty of features that will keep you entertained for a very long time.
Some great new deals this week with the Samsung i900 Omnia on T-Mobile. It’s now free on a 12 month contract for just £30 per month line rental.
The Samsung i900 Omnia is the latest touchscreen smartphone from Samsung. It can be used for all your mobile, sat nav, internet, email and photography needs. Or, in techy terms it has 3G, HSDPA, Wi-fi, a GPS receiver and a 5 megapixel camera with auto focus, face detection and smile detection! Photographs can be geotagged, this means that every photo you take is not only stamped with the date and time but also with it’s exact location.
The Samsung i900 Omnia targets two types people in a single device. It’s suitable for the business user who is constantly on the move and need access to the web, emails and Windows Mobile applications. The Samsung i900 can be plugged into a laptop and used as a USB modem. It’s also suitable for busy bodies who are anxious to access their social networks 24/7 and like to have the latest multimedia technology in their pocket.
As a media device, the Samsung i900 is among the best. The 3.2 inch touchscreen display has a 16:9 widescreen aspect and thanks to a built-in accelerometer the screen automatically rotates when the phone is turned on its side. It has TV output too, movies and photos can easilly be viewed on a big screen. There’s 8GB of internal memory for storing music, video, photos or presentations.
Samsung’s latest touchscreen, 8 megapixel cameraphone is free on a 12 month contract for just £30 per month.
Plus you can choose a free gift such as an ab trainer, a stepper, hair devils or £25 automatic cash back. Great value deals with no nonsense.
The Samsung M8800 Pixon is a full touchscreen cameraphone with a built-in GPS receiver. The 8 megapixel autofocus camera can take photos with a resolution of 3264×2448 pixels. It can capture high resolution video at 30 frames per second and it has auto-panarama, image stalisation, smile detection and blink detection. There’s also a video call camera.
The Samsung Pixon is a 3G phone with HSDPA support. It has a GPS receiver for geotagging photos but unfortunately there is no Wi-Fi. The 3.2 inch touchscreen uses Samsung’s TouchWiz interface, sensitivity is good and the screen provides haptic feedback.
Now only £35 per month on an 18 month contract with a choice of network. Up to 750 xnet mins per month and unlimited texts.
When you first pick up the Nokia N96 you know it?s something special. The 2.8 inch screen dominates the front of the phone and is great for browsing the web or using the Nokia maps application. Beneath the screen are the usual navigation and menu keys and on the back is a useful kick stand, allowing the N96 to be placed on a desk for viewing videos or movies. The Nokia N96 has 16GB of internal memory which can be expanded to a huge 24GB using an 8GB memory card.
The Nokia N96 supports most video formats and using a Wi-Fi connection it also supports the BBC iPlayer. You can watch all the top BBC programmes on your mobile for free. Your N96 can sit on your desk while you catch up with the latest EastEnders or Holby City. You?ll never miss an episode again and you can watch them any time.
The 5 megapixel camera has a top spec and takes brilliant photos. It has a Carl Zeiss lens, autofocus, digital zoom, LED flash, macro mode for close-ups, light exposure adjustment and a range of timers. Don?t be bedazzled by the marketing hype surrounding the 8 megapixel war. The camera on the N96 is absolutely brilliant, you won?t be disappointed.
I was asked to pop along to see the new BlackBerry Storm yesterday which is Vodafone’s answer to the iPhone on 02. The guys from Vodafone and BlackBerry were there to answer any questions and of course to let me get my grubby mitts on the next potential iPhone Killer so here is what I made of it…
The BlackBerry Storm (previously known as BlackBerry 9500) needs to be directly compared to the iPhone as both are now aimed squarely at the same lucrative audience of both business users and the everyday phone users with their rich featuresets and enterprise level functionality.
The BlackBerry Storm is slightly beefier than the iPhone at 112.5 x 62.2 x 14mm compared to the iPhone’s 115 x 61 x 11.6 mm but it’s hardly noticeable in your hand. The extra 20g weight (155g) compared to the 135g of the iPhone might be a bit more noticeable though.
Where does this extra bulk go then?
Well first off it didn’t go on a WiFi chip which is the most striking omission to the BlackBerry Storm’s specifications in my opinion. No built in WiFi means you will have to rely on the all you can use Vodafone mobile Internet data policy which is bundled with all BlackBerry Storm contracts. Obviously this isn’t really an issue if you are within Vodafone’s super fast HDSPA (3.5 G) areas, which are among the UK’s fastest data networks but browsing / emailing where there is a FREE, faster WiFi connection and only GPRS network coverage would seriously annoy me!
The large 3.25″ high-resolution screen (480 X 360 pixels) screen is very clear and crisp and will definitely make journeys fly when coupled with a few movies stored on a microSD? memory card. The screen also makes viewing the images captured from the 3.2 mega pixel camera great as you can see the extra fine details this camera picks up compared to the 2 mega pixel camera found in the iPhone. This camera has auto flash, auto focus and 2x digital zoom and coupled with the in built Flickr? and Facebook? applications you will be able to upload your snaps quickly and easily to share on the web.
Browsing the web using this large screen and the built in BlackBerry browser is a good experience but is maybe a shade less pleasurable compared to the iPhone’s browser and even the bundled Opera browser on the latest HTC Touch handsets which are both top notch. However one advantage the BlackBerry Storm does have over its rivals is a feature called Cursor Mode which enables you to have an on screen mouse pointer and by moving your finger around the screen and clicking on any point on the screen gives you get left click, mouse like precision for web links and editing documents etc.
Music wise the inbuilt music player is good and is tightly integrated with Vodafone’s Music Store service where you can download new tracks, albums and listen to 30 second previews of the latest songs. Also for the majority of people who use Apple’s iTunes to organise their play-lists and music collections you will be pleased to know the BlackBerry Storm can sync with iTunes however this will only be with your own ripped content not Apple DRM protected music!
The inbuilt GPS in the BlackBerry Storm uses Vodafone’s Find & Go service which is much like other GPS technologies however it does come with a nifty search and share service built in to allow you to share and view places of interest people have uploaded via their GPS phones. The downside to this native Find & Go GPS service though is you only get 6 months Find & Go Sat Nav subscription with your new contract compared to the unlimited usage of the iPhone’s Google Maps software which seems a little stingy on Vodafone’s part.
In the short time I had hands on with the BlackBerry Storm I couldn’t say I like the new “tactile-touch” on screen keyboard compared to the old faithful physical QWERTY keyboards found on other BlackBerry phones.
The “easy and precise touch screen typing that is claimed via this new on screen QWERTY keyboard (full QWERTY in landscape mode only) felt a little more like clunky and cumbersome compared to say the iPhone and HTC’s Touch Diamond on screen keyboard efforts.
The primary reason for the difficulties I had getting along with the new keyboard is the fact the BlackBerry Storm’s screen is built using a unique new technology where the screen is actually spring-loaded so the whole screen effectively acts as one big button. So rather than the keys sensing my fingers like other touch screen keyboards I had to physically press the screen down down to press the keys. I suspect you would get used to this new style on screen keyboard but losing the brilliant physical QWERTY keyboard in place of this radically different, push down, on screen version might put a lot of people off within their initial contract cooling off period.
All the standard enterprise level BlackBerry email functionality and remote administration features that Research In Motion’s (RIM) success has been founded on are still present and do set the BlackBerry Storm apart from its competitors in the corporate environment. However the other large target audience of ‘normal’ end users who Vodafone and BlackBerry are going after with this handset won’t really be interested in locking down certain features and applications so I can’t see these features selling extra handsets to these ‘normal’ users.
So in summary the BlackBerry Storm is the most consumer friendly handset that RIM have released to date and a lot of new ‘normal’ end users will buy it.
The Nokia N85 has a dual slide design similar to the N96. It?s slimmer and lighter than Nokia?s flagship and it has a 2.6 inch OLED display, which uses less power than a normal LCD.
Classed as a multimedia phone, the Nokia N85 has dedicated multimedia keys and a touch sensitive navi wheel. It has automatic screen rotation for viewing movies plus stereo Bluetooth, a standard 3.5mm audio jack, TV out and an FM transmitter. An 8GB memory card is included for storing music and video files.
The Nokia N85 is also a gaming phone with 15 N-gage titles pre-loaded. An unlock code is provided only for one game though so you?ll have to choose carefully.
The camera has 5 megapixels with autofocus and it can record video at 30 frames per second. With GPS, photos can be geotagged with their exact location. Nokia Maps is pre-installed and a 3 month free navigation license is included.
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In the short time I had hands on with the BlackBerry Storm I couldn’t say I like the new “tactile-touch” on screen keyboard compared to the old faithful physical QWERTY keyboards found on other BlackBerry phones.