The Orange San Francisco / ZTE Blade offers an extremely cheap entry into the world of Android. Priced around £99 (with a mandatory top up of £10/£20), it offers excellent value for money, and is one of the higher spec phones available around that price. Offering a large 3.5″ screen with a high resolution of 800×480, a 600mhz cpu, and 2gb of Micro SD ram.

Another big feature of the phone is the community support for the phone, allowing it to be unlocked for free (found via Modaco), and upgraded to Android 2.2 (Froyo), and potentially newer versions when they are released, it has it’s own dedicated forum here at Modaco.

Nokia N8 OLED - Orange San Francisco TFT

The “SanFran”, as some people affectionally call it, has 3 physical buttons at the bottom of the screen: Home, Menu, Back, one power button at the top, and volume buttons at the side, there is no dedicated camera button or unlock button. To unlock you press the power button and slide something on the screen based on what version of android (or screensaver) you have. Considering the whole touch screen ethos of the android operating system, it seems strange to have to use physical / moving buttons to navigate – it would make more sense for these to be soft touch buttons (as I’m sure other android phones do).

Box Contents: Phone, Battery, Orange SIM, Earphones with microphone (earbuds, NOT in-ear earphones), Wall charger (Plugs into wall and has USB socket), USB Cable (used to charge phone with wall-charge or plug into computer), User guides (quick start guide, printed 133 page manual, plus 2nd manual for orange software), 2GB MicroSD Card.

Phone quality – Making and receiving calls, the audio quality is very good, the speaker is loud and clear, and quality seemed very good with no feedback or echo noticeable. (Although you network coverage may alter your experience)

Music playback – full volume is still on the quiet side of things. The music player app is fine, nothing seems to be missing, but nothing stands out as particularly interesting either. It does the job, but only seems to work in portrait mode (and not landscape). Music playback is interupted by other app notifications!? (Could just be my OS build, 2.2, and even when the other notifications are set to silent!?)

Web browser – this is quick, responsive, and works well.

Some screenshots, click to enlarge, homescreen, app updates, task manager.

Android market (app store) – this has very nice integration with websites, you visit the site, click the link to download from the store, it takes you there and you click install, it then takes you back to the website and downloads and installs the app in the background. Very swish, very un-intrusive, very simple, very easy, the way it should be done. (I’m looking at you Nokia) It’s also ironic that you can get Snake free for the android – but no official version from Nokia for Nokia phones…

Orange San Francisco ZTE Blade Back / Battery / MicroSD / SIM slots

Expansion – Under the one piece back cover (made of plastic), you’ll find slots for the MicroSD card, SIM card, and battery. Small hole next to the camera lens – could be a reset button?

Battery – a 1250mah 3.7v battery.

Build and size: Slim, compact, the back cover covers the power button, and needs to be taken off / put back on carefully as, like the Nokia N95, it could cause problems if not treated with care or over-used. The plastic is coated with a rubbery texture, making the phone feel like a higher quality / higher price handset than it actually is, and internally the circuit boards seem very thin. The use of philips head screws make it very tempting to take apart…

Orange San Francisco ZTE Blade Taken Apart (Teardown)

There’s a hidden screw under a white dot, so no doubt taking it apart will void your warranty, there’s also a moisture detector dot under the battery, as shown above, and there are 8 screws in total holding the phone together, after taking these out, the phone then unclips with some encouragement – although you can help it along by pushing the clips surrounding the battery area – I didn’t want to go further than this as the rest looked like it needed the ribbon cables disconnecting, and this is often fiddly.

Orange San Francisco ZTE Blade TFT Screen Removed (back) - Click to Enlarge

To remove the front glass / case, you need to remove / disconnect the top ribbon cable that connects the *something* (don’t know what). The ribbon cable connections are held in place with plastic that “pops” up, and the wi-fi aerial also pops-off. The screen is quite firmly glued on to the main plastic “chassis” in the middle of the phone, and there is also a ribbon cable behind the main board connecting the top led and light sensor, and the volume control ribbon cable is soldiered on, and the buttons are glued onto the chassis, making it very difficult to disconnect / remove – it quickly becomes very fiddly.

Identifiable chips / components: (Click images above to enlarge, or to view additional images!) Top: Samsung SWB-A23 (Wifi, bluetooth), Qualcomm (hidden from view), Qualcomm PM754, AH56714, C1034003 (Power management), Underneath: Samsung 040, KA1000015M-AJTT, YK10338E (RAM), Qualcomm MSM7 (CPU, hidden from view), TriQuint 7M5012H, 1037, KORE, AT9366. Camera module: Made by MCNEX MC_32A2_48, 2010.06.04, the chip on the front of the phone, above the screen: 1KAAV0QW, Z1A0AD09.

Nokia N8 Camera with Flash - Orange San Francisco Camera with no Flash

Camera – 3.2 megapixel AF (Auto-focus) lens. Photos are awful. Terrible. Horrible. Utterly crap. Seriously substandard.

Other features? Impressions? The top bar shows you your notifications, things like texts, twitter or app notifications, and battery / connectivity status etc (3G, Bluetooth etc), but doesn’t actually let you interact with the notifications on the right of the bar… you can’t click the battery, for example, to see how much remains (like you can on Symbian ^3), instead you seem to have to go through the phones setting menu to get the information.

Updated conclusion: 6 months later: (10/07/2011) Some have said, in the comments that this review is overly negative, and somewhat lacking in it’s conclusion, and I agree. In retrospect, the ZTE Blade (Orange San Francisco) is still, to this day, 6 months later, one of the most fully featured, and lowest priced android phones available, and the good screen, and low price make it very apealling, especially with such a huge homebrew community of support. I bought it as I wanted to see what all the fuss about Android was, and I wasn’t as impressed as I felt I should have been, especially considering all the hype. There are areas of weakness such as the poor camera software (camera is poor on this phone, but may suffice in great weather, outdoors), and generally android isn’t as polished as I think it should be (this may have changed with newer versions, I tested 2.2). The ZTE Blade with a lower spec processor than most, won’t do flash, which is a huge drawback for me as I need iPlayer on my phone. Another big weakness is the high SAR levels (1.35 W/kg) – enough to give some users enough of an issue that they’ve seen a GP (Doctor) about it… Another big issue is the fact that everyone feels the need to mess with the google version of android, and try and add their own skin, apps, and money making programs to the phone. Very annoying. Anyway, to try and conclude this as quickly as possible, the ZTE Blade (OSF), is a great phone considering the price, and if well worth looking at if you’re on a limited budget and don’t mind the various issues the phone has.

Pros: (Positives)
+ High resolution 3.5″ capacitive screen (responsive)
+ Extremely good value for money
+ Easily unlocked, for free
+ Upgradable to Android 2.2
+ Tons of apps, good app store experience
+ Notification of app updates, and “Update all” button (not just OS)
+ Full screen PDF viewer (in QuickOffice)

Cons: (Negatives)
- Home screens don’t work in landscape mode (see Symbian ^3, or Launcher Pro for Android)
- Music playback is interrupted by other app noises! (even when the phone and notifications are silent)
- Limited memory as standard (only 2gb MicroSD provided)
- AWFUL camera (see Nokia N8!), lacks even basic LED flash
- Fragmented OS / Features ie BBC iPlayer is supposed to work on 2.2 (using Flash*) but wouldn’t for me, 2.1 it just isn’t available (see Nokia / Apple)
- Poor battery life (8 hours)
- No strap loop / wriststrap mounting hole
- Camera shutter sound on, even when all sound muted.
- Default install location is the phones memory, not MicroSD, easy to fill the 512mb built in.
- Difficult to use one-handed (back button awkward – and pressing the background of the screen doesn’t take you back so you have to press the back button – easier on Symbian ^3 to just press the screen behind the pop up menu)

* Flash 10.1 is needed, which isn’t available for the ZTE Blade due to the ARM6 processor.

Useful links: ChrisLowthian.co.uk How to Unlock.
Orange San Francisco also available from Amazon UK (Unlocked).

The HTC Desire HD. Let’s get the specs out of the way eh?

None of which tells you anything useful. Well, there are loads of things to talk bout with this phone so lets go.

Screen

It’s a 4.3 inch screen and it’s a bobby dazzler. Despite sounding massive it feels really natural in the hand. It’s noticably bigger than the iPhone but the weight and smooth contours make it easy to hold. The camera lens protrudes from the back a good few millimetres. I really thought that it would catch my palm and do my head in, but not at all. Ergonomically it’s a decent phone. Typing is tough with one hand unless you use the excellent, yet love it or hate it Swype. Swype lets you type with swipes, moving from one letter to the next without taking your finger off the screen. If it sounds weird it is at first, but now it’s a ‘how did I do without i?’ app for me. It’s predictive and lets you add to the dictionary. Provided you’re not typing nonsense words it is seldom wrong. There are no hard keys as such. They have been made in to touch sensitive buttons for Home, Menu, Back and Search. Gone completely is any trackball or trackpad. I don’t miss it.

Apps look great on screen and the touch screen is unintrusive and useful. Call quality is good but the bundled hands free kit is predictably crap. Terrible sound and earphones that fall out of your ears.At the bottom are the SIM and Micro SD slots, with a hatch that slides off  so no need to turn the phone off or take the whole back off to remove either. Left side has a volume rocker, which can be hard to operate, rather irritatingly, and top left is power, again, irritating to access. Minor points but they do annoy me.

Performance

Lightning fast apps, switching, animations and functions make this phone a joy to use. However, the big issue. Battery life. When I started using this phone I was horrified at it’s 6-7b hour standby time. I thought it was faulty at first until I did some research, and here is how you get 30-40 hours out of it.

• Accounts sync. I had a total of 11 accounts  syncing, such as Twitter, Facebook, Google, News, Weather, Stocks etc. They set themselves to sync every 15 minutes by default. Massive drain. I killed all bar the Google and Facebook accounts. Google updates every 2 hours and Facebook daily. This alone extended the life to a days’ use.
• Install a task killer, kill all tasks that do not need to be running. This makes a huge difference.
• Get rid of pointless apps. They are usually badly written and drain power. Apps like this are the price of the more open Android market, as opposed to Apple’s ‘Dolphin’s Butt’ approach.

There are other optional steps that I took.

• I rooted the phone using VISIONary, a free app that needs no restart and doesn’t flash the phone.
• Installed Titanium Backup free and  deleted all the crapware that came with it. I dumped a load of pointless widgets, HTC bloatware apps that offered wallpapers etc and, astoundingly, there are two bundled Twitter apps with the phone, the official Twitter app and the HTC one called Peep. I use the far superior Tweetdeck so I have no use for those, off they went. A factory reset puts all of this back on the phone so you need not worry about that.
• After this run the phone as normal for ten days, then drain it completely and calibrate the battery.

My battery clocks in at 30-40 hours business use now so it can be done, Don’t believe the propaganda. I am the sort to plug my phone in whenever possible anyway, always have been. It’s hardly Apple’s ‘It just works’ appeal but I like Android for playing with it so I’m not bothered, you might be.

Running widgets, particularly live feeds will drain it but it’s nothing to worry about.

Media

Music is well played, no skips etc but you’ll need decent headphones as cheap ones sound tinny. The screen is perfect for iPlayer/YouTube and the playback is very good indeed. Sharp, vibrant and well-balanced with intuitive controls. YouTube lets you sign in to a different account from the phone which is a useful idea. Photos look crisp and sharp too. Flipping between landscape and portrait is snappy and works perfectly. The music app displays album art and controls music whilst the phone is locked without having accidental presses. Clever. You can install different ones if you like, notably Tune Wiki, but I see no need. There is some sort of Dolby sound thing going on here, but I have to be honest, in my experience the rule is spend a few quid and it sounds good. This phone doesn’t convince me otherwise. It sounds good, but if I am supposed to notice some sort of sound revelation, sorry. It sounds good provided you don’t use a terrible bit rate on MP3 files.

Navigation

Google Maps and Navigation is there. It works snappily and the voice search is brilliant. No complaints. With it being a cloud based app there’s nothing new here that isn’t on other phones. What is new is HTC’s proprietary Locations application. It has several features. Free maps and mapping but navigation is a premium feature. Unless you’re a heavy user then navigation is free with Google. If you use it daily then buy the premium as Vodafone only give you a measly 750 MB data plan. I think this is taking the proverbial a little now. One gigabyte is not a huge amount so it’s clear they’re looking to squeeze a few pounds out of us on data.

Fortunately, the free element of Locations is offline mapping. No data usage, but sadly the database of locations is absolutely hopeless. It’s empty compared to Google Maps and as far as I can see it does not accept postcode searches. They had better update that pronto. If you search then every space sees a lag as it tries to match what you just typed. That is extremely irritating and a flaw that needs to be addressed. However, most of the time, if you give it the data it will find what you need. If so, then the maps have 2D and 3D views – very nice indeed – and they work with the compass so that the map turns wherever you are pointing it. No more walking for a bit to see which way you should be going. Very nice feature and one iPhone has had for ages. I can’t for the life of me figure out why Google haven’t  done it  with maps. Locations also does general keyword shops. You can select whatever category of place you want, e.g. pubs, and find the ones in the area along with ratings and reviews. This is very good and means no worries about using your data up on Google Maps. As an aside, as these apps move to the cloud then networks need to be fairer on data allowances. I would happily compromise on say, mapping and browsing only, no downloads or streaming, in exchange for unlimited 3G data. I think that is a better way to keep everyone happy. No nasty surprises in our bills and the networks don’t have to worry about media streaming brining 3G networks to their knees. I am sympathetic as the traffic on 3G has exploded since iPhone changed things, but then they’ve had three years to beef up their infrastructure. If they keep this up it will stink of profiteering. Having expensive data tariffs on always-online devices is a gun to the head scenario in my opinion.

GPS signal acquisition is lightning fast and as accurate as I have ever seen. Any thing like maps or navigation looks brilliant on that 4.3 inch screen.

Location services on this work really well. I know there are real concerns regarding privacy but I am all over location services like a fat kid on cake. I love them and can’t wait until they gain wider acceptance. Why, for example, can’t 20 Foursquare check-ins at a restaurant equal a free meal? There is an opportunity to make money here, and hopefully the right sort of thinkers will drive this. Foursquare is a great idea, but the app on here needs refining. It works fine, but searches can often be slow and it’s a little  buggy. Not the phone’s fault, but a thought. Facebook works well and includes Places. Tweetdeck (or Peep/Twitter if you prefer) all permit location updates in tweets and geotagging photos os available too. This phone will stretch the possibilities for locatoin applications. It has the capability and the screen to be extraordinarily useful. We just need some original thinking from developers for apps and services. Bring it on.

Camera

The camera is 8 megapixels, twin LED flash and shoots HD video at 720p.

Here is a sample video from bonfire night:

Pretty good, I am sure you’ll agree. A couple of stills from the same night:

The OS is the bang up to date Android 2.2, smooth and fast. There is a vast array of sharing options, Twitter, Facebook, Picasa, Flickr, Mail, YouTube. Uploads are a couple of taps and go just fine.

Internet and Mail

Gmail on this is great, push updates and notifications. The mail client works well with loads of options, including a unified inbox for all accounts. Nice touch. The browser works very well with smooth panning, zooming and pinching there, and in the rest of the apps too. Google search and voice search integrates brilliantly, giving local results for the device and net results too. I did install Firefox beta but for a beta release it has some terrible bugs, notably being the capitalising of the first letters of passwords, meaning you type it, then your full password, then go back and delete the capital. It’s easily fixed but that is a real balls up for something of Firefox’s standards. Quick look up works when you highlight text, you get the usual cut and paste options. The menu also gives ‘Quick Look Up’ as an option so you can get web and Wikipedia results for the highlighted text. Very good idea.Bookmarks are tiles and multiple pages are supported. plus map links and so forth open the relevant app rather than viewing in browser. Perfect touch there.

Software

The market now allows auto-update and update all for installed apps. It restricts that by forcing manual update if application permissions have changed. That stops developers sneaking in data mining and sharing that you did not originally agree to. Thank you Google. The market is simple to browse and the app selection is huge. Not quite up with Apple and there is a fair amount of crapware in there, but there are some great pieces of software. Be wary that quality control is non-existent, which gives app developers freedom but also allows more seedy tactics like apps that are just there to serve ads, thus generating cash, and apps that don’t work properly. Read comments before installing.

Here is how it looks:

I’ve read a lot about the Streak online and it tends to be the same everywhere. Those who’ve never seen it don’t get it, those who see it like it, those who own it are always being asked about it.

For a phone it’s big, almost comedy size, but despite the ability to make calls on it the Streak is sold as a tablet. The interface is set up in landscape mode and you can buy a data-only tariff.  I bought it  outright and got a 30 day rolling data contract. Other options are available, including 18/24 month deals or SIM free from Dell. Keep reading below…

It ships with Android 1.6. Despite my love of Android I have to say that this is farcical. With 3.0 being tested and 2.2 rolled out on most high end phones Dell have really put their foot in it here, and I still don’t know why they did it. The stock answer is that when the promised 2.2 upgrade comes they want it to be just right. I think that’s baloney. since it is open source there is no cost incurred by using 2.2 so I don’t get it. It’s just another one of those barking mad things that makes Apple’s lead easier for Jobs to maintain.  Luckily a2.1 O2 update was leaked online and I promptly installed it. The Streak was great on 1.6 but 2.1 is a quantum leap ahead, and it makes the device faster, more stable and better in every way.

So what do we get? The only real differences between 1.6 ad 2.1, aside from the OS itself are a couple of bespoke widgets for Twitter and Facebook. These are not in the 2.1 leak, but they are not really missed as they were not apps, they just displayed the news feed. Any tap on the widget took you to thewebsites so they were essentially RSS feeds. With 2.1 you get the Facebook and Twitter apps and they are fine, but I use something else that I will talk about later.

In the box is the unit, a drawstring case – replace immediately with a proper leather case – wall charger and lead. The Lead is USB out and the Streak itself has a proprietary charging port which looks to my amateur eye like an 18 pin. This is annoying and the reason they did it becomes clear when you try to buy a spare lead and find they are £19.99. Irritating but to be fair, Apple are as guilty, if not more of pulling this crap on users. When you hold the unit it is reassuringly weighted, solid and balanced and it is only 10 mm thick. It just feels right. Boot it up and you see that the screen is beautiful. This is why people who haven’t seen it don’t get it. The quality of the screen and the extra couple of inches really do make in instant impact. This device is different, and it feels great, pleasing the eye immensely. Pixel density is 800 x 480. Not quite iPhone’s retina, but it looks great. Pin sharp with vibrant, rich colours. Wallpapers look great, live wallpapers (animated scenes) look brilliant – further down you can see my aquarium wallpaper on a video demo.

As with all Android phones, you sign in to your Google account and all your data for contacts, calendar, app downloads and anything else stored on the cloud is pulled down to the unit. Apple’s Mobile Me is £59.99, Google do this for free. Strike one Google. I also think the Google method of having the cloud is better than plugging in to sync all the time. Apple is way off the pace there and wired sync only is, in 2010, not acceptable to my mind. Once accounts are done you can then sign in with other accounts like Facebook and Twitter, although multiple Google accounts only works on 2.1. That isn’t a big deal, but it is for me personally as I use a Google Apps account for my company, and the Google Market has some apps that need a personal account to work, one notable one being Google’s podcast client, Listen. I made do with Acast until I got 2.1, but no other client comes close to Listen so that irked me a bit.

Dell bundles a few apps with the Streak. Documents To Go comes with it, although editing needs a paid upgrade. With Google Docs I don’t see the point personally, but there we go. Also bundled is Touchdown, a business calendar app. Again, with Google Calendar it seems pointless. The only thing I can think is that 1.6 only allows one calendar, but multiple accounts on 2.1 allows as many as you like, and the beauty is that the data streams stay separate, but show up on the same screen, meaning that you can schedule your life properly but still not mix the two. I think this is a real bonus, especially if your boss is a dick, as they so often are. There is the usual music player, gallery, mail, basically all the things that make smartphones smart.

So on to the performance. This has a 1 Ghz processor, and boy do you feel it. Heavy use, multitasking, application switching. None of these fazed it. It st smiled and asked for more. I frequently have music playing, six screens full of widgets, live wallpaper, 10 or 11 applications running in the background. This unit did it with ease, No lag, no delay in functions, nothing. Everything is snappy, smooth and it NEVER crashes. The screen is very sensitive. It requires the gentlest of taps to function but seems to ignore brushes from cuffs etc. Very good indeed. The keyboard is great and I recommend you go one better and install either Swift Key or Swype. They improve the device significantly. There are three soft keys for back, menu and home.

Check out the voice controls here:

MOV02469

Pretty good eh? Also here, I picked the two silliest words I can think of:

MOV02470

I can’t even fool Google’s neural algorithms with ‘transubstantiation discombobulation’! It struggles a little with proper names, but that is not  a surprise to me. As you can see, commands to navigate go immediately to the (excellent) navigation application. Nice touches there include street view when you arrive so you can see what you need to find, and it also automatically switches to night mode in darkness. Slick touches. Google Maps looks amazing on the 5 inch screen too.

The unit has 2GB onboard for applications. That is a hell of a lot – I haven’t come anywhere near it. It came with a 16 GB memory card and supports up to 32 GB. Since I use Spotify I don’t use the card to store music so 16 GB is plenty. Right now I have 4 films and the series’ Wonder of the Solar System, BBC Space and Space Odyssey: Voyage to the Planets loaded on the card so the storage is pretty big. Android only supports MP4, however, Rockplayer is an app that plays all the regular codecs, it’s free with ads or paid. The speaker is okay on the Streak and the bundled headphones are okay unless you’re a purist. The phones are also a hands free kit. The answer button also pauses and restarts playback. A simple addition that makes such a pleasing difference.

Live wallpapers look great on the display. I switch between the aquarium you can see above, and galactic core. Both are free in the Market, along with loads more.

Web browsing on the Streak is brilliant. The standard browser is great and the screen is large enough for full site browsing. With 2.1 you get tap and pinch zooming and the websites look great, colourful and vibrant. Panning and zooming are smooth and navigation is easy to the point of being addictive.

Despite Twitter and Facebook being in the Android build, I don’t use them as I I have discovered Tweetdeck beta. This is a brilliant app that combines your Facebook, Twitter, Buzz and Foursquare feeds in to one timeline. It makes using all four a breeze and they can be used together and updates sent to one, several or all of them as you see fit. As it is stil in beta you’ll have to get it from their site and install it manually, but it won’t be long before it appears in the market. Perfect.

Streak has two cameras. One five megapixel snapper with a twin LED flash and a front facing VGA for video calling. As yet it’s no use as Skype or Vonage haven’t got their finger out and built a video chat client. You can’t blame Dell. The hype surrounding the release of Streak has been substantial, so why the VOIP companies haven’t got an app ready to go is beyond me. With the arrival of more Android tablets imminent it’s hardly a risk to release software for Streak so I can only assume they don’t want to capitalise on the most profitable and fastest growing telecoms market, mobile tech.

The 2.1 update brought 720 pi HD video recording so the camcorder is top notch, and pictures from the camera look good, although it is very easy to blur them. Here is a Picase stream I snapped at the Edinburgh Fringe recently:

Edinburgh Fringe

Pretty good I’d say.

Dell give you 6 screens to customise. I have one screen full of buttons for my frequent use apps. Two full of photo widgets so I can always be close to my family, and three with application widgets, with things like calendar, weather, tasks list, Spotify, Last FM, power control, Scoreboard, YouTube, Engadget, Taskiller and more. Sorry iFanboys, having used both iPhone and Android, I prefer widgets and customisation all day long.

Media sharing is pretty extensive. Photos can be sent to Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Buzz and Mail. Add to that any media app you install, just tap menu in the photo and you get your sharing option. Videos go to YouTube, although installing the free Qik app lets you share videos to the usual sites, Facebook, Twitter etc and Pixelpipe, also free, lets you share any media with just about every social network known to man, over 350 listed in the application. 2.1 brings a much improved gallery function to Streak too, smooth and easy to use rather than the raw functionality of 1.6. The navbar at the top consists of buttons rather than pull down menus. Left to right: applications, network status which doubles as recently used apps, notifications, then phone status which lets you switch flight mode and various connections on and off and gives battery status and the time and date too.

Battery lasts easily all day provided you have a task manager installed and use it to kill apps you’re not using. This is highly recommended as you can lose hours running programs you aren’t using – I am not exaggerating. Notifications can be customised not only phone-wide, but for each app, meaning you can have emails only vibrate, or just texts etc. Very useful.

There are also several e-book apps available, including Kindle. Naturally the screen is no match for e-ink, but it is good enough and sufficiently sized to make reading pleasurable. The Flixster application delivers movie trailers that look great, as does YouTube. YouTube allows you to turn high quality on or off. Unless you’re very worried about your data limit then go hi-def as lo-def looks truly atrocious. Blogging is a breeze with the keyboard size and sharing options, although epic posts such as this one are still best done on a PC. I have never found a phone that is up to that.

If you fancy gaming on this it will work very well, but you’ll need to learn a soft touch as it is easy to overload the screen – a sign of which is the colour blur on LCD screens. It’s easily done on the Streak.

The one thing people have been trying to do is decide what Streak is. I think that’s a bad idea. Just use it. It comes in to it’s own when the user is allowed to define it. I have used it heavily, and as soon as my contract on my other phone is up I’ll likely use it as my phone too. I have used it for media, films and music etc, social networking, emailing, navigation (an absolute life saver at the Edinburgh Fringe), blogging tool, camera, web browser, for shopping, eBaying, light gaming. It’s location awareness will become more and more useful. Location aware software will come of age over the next couple of years. The potential is obvious to current users. Maps, Navigation and suchlike are the beginning. Apps like Foursquare let you ‘check in’ at places and gie you discounts at places you regularly go to. Your favourite Costa Coffee or cinema probably does this now. Apps like Locale, which set your phone settings and state based on time and location are really useful and Google places, Flixster, Whereto and similar apps expose you to a world of places you never knew were there. I’ve already eaten great food and listened to great music and comedy as a direct result of using these apps, and the Gigbox app has sent me to various gigs by using my Last FM history to tell me when my favourite bands are in town.

To appreciate Streak you have to see it. On paper it’s odd and people don’t know what to do with it. Go and hold one, see the screen. It sits seemingly awkwardly between smartphones and iPad, and I confess I will be  buying a full sized tablet running either Android or Chrome for home. That way I can keep my netbook for work. I think Streak is a surprise package. I love it and it’s easily the most useful phone I have used, ironically I don’t have a voice tariff either. It won’t convert iFanboys, but nothing would. If a person is willing to pay Apple’s price for a tablet lacking a camera, GPS, phone capability, which is locked, aggressively closed source and which is basically a massive iPhone that doesn’t phone then nothing will win them over. There is a reason that Android recently usurped Apple at number 2 in the smartphone OS market. Despite the hype, it’s better. It’s faster, cheaper, more suable, more customisable and the hardware is better. Apple likes to portray itself as the conquering hero of the market but it really isn’t, and picking up the Streak was the perfect antidote to my irritation at the iPad and it’s crap spec sheet and absurd price. I’m a mac user, and I like Apple, but I don’t like them that much. Streak is a winner. Plug in the hands free and you’re on the phone as usual. Hold it and the world comes to life.

The Nokia N97 Mini is like the beta release of the N97 – with the N97 being the alpha version, perhaps the N8 will be the release candidate or perhaps even the final product? (I am using the software release life cycle terms used for Windows and other apps as an attempt at humour – however some people who have used the N97 would probably find the terms relevant.) Click below to read the full review…

What does it have?

• 3.2″ screen – 16:9 resistive touch 640×360
• Qwerty keyboard
• 5mp autofocus camera – no lens cover
• Carl zeiss branded lens
• Twin led flash
• GPS with satnav – Ovi Map – can be used Online or Offline (preload with maps on PC or through Wifi etc)
• Own voice – out of interest anyone else let you record your own voice for satnav?
• Adobe flash support
• 3.5 headphone jack
• 8gb memory – microsd slot for additional expansion
• 1200mah battery (vs 1500mah on the N97)
• VGA 30fps video or 16:9 640×360 mpeg4 with video light
• Firmware update over the air
• Stereo FM radio (but no transmitter – N97 and N86 feature this)

On first impressions the phone feels like it has a slightly complicated and clunky operating system. Do you press something once to open it or twice? It mostly seems that you have to press it twice, once to highlight something, and then again to open it. Some sections – email, license / about this phone don’t let you scroll with the screen / with your finger, and instead you have to use the right hand side scoll bar (which can be a bit tricky without a stylus – the larger screened N97 comes with a stylus, with the N97 Mini it’s an optional extra).

The phone occassionally* crashes due to an overly complicted and under tested operating system? Or memory problems? The N97 Mini has 512mb ram, twice what the N97 has, and even though the Mini often has 140+ mb free, apps still fail to load due to “lack of memory”**, the Photos app is a particular app that will not load when memory gets too restrained.

* occasionally - define occasionally? once every couple of days would be a rough estimate on how often it crashes? ** The 140mb free is actually free on the phone’s C: drive and not actually free memory that you can run apps in – to view available memory for apps you need a third party app such as RamBlow – this lets me know that running 4 apps, I have 19mb ram free (after cleanup).

This is where I go off on a random tangent (skip if you want): Perhaps Nokia will get symbian right with ^3 and 4. Perhaps maemo / meego is the answer – start from the ground up. But why not allow the consumer the choice? Develop the best, most versatile, appealing hardware, and offer it with a choice of Symbian, Maemo / Meego or Android? (see the Nokia N900 if you want to install anything…) But then you would have to support 3 operating systems when they are already developing and supporting 2. (Which Nokia don’t want to do, as they are discontinuing support for the N900 Maemo OS [citation needed])

Heres the weird thing – Do phones really need touch screens – I mean if you think about it – do you really want to be spending every day cleaning finger smudges off the screen? Apple seem to think you do – not only the screen – but now with the new iPhone 4 you can spend all your life cleaning the back as well, and hoping you never drop it – and the front and now back are both made out of glass. /random tangent end

Liverpool Cathedral taken with the Nokia N97 Mini - Click to Embiggen

Compared to the Sony Satio – the home screen widgets seems like a much better way to get updates from social sites like facebook, twitter, email etc compared to the tabs and non-existant social apps on the Sony Satio. However the Satio does have a good on screen keyboard whereas the N97 doesnt – it would be nice to have the choice on the N97 / Mini just in case you dont get on with the real keyboard. Opera mini has one so its definitely possible. And typing too much on the keyboard reminds me a lot of the ZX81 (not that anyone even knows what an Atari ST is anymore, let alone the ZX81) – or perhaps the Psion 3 (although nothings as good as the Psion5 yet, one can always live in hope).

Internet: As an excercise in futility thoroughly testing the device I attempted to edit and post this entirely using the N97 Mini: After a while Opera Mini / Blogger stopped saving changes made – so I ended up having to revert to using a full browser on a PC. It has already wiped out and lost about an hours worth of work and crashed twice three times since i started this – seeming to coincide with losing the WLAN connection. (The built in browser fails to work with blogger)

Opera App settings managed to set itself to have the internet connection as none. And since I’d told it to always connect it was always trying to connect to no internet – not even sure why this is possible? The built in phone connection manager often caused annoying problems like this, where you’ve lost the WLAN connection, yet it will still try and connect to it, even though it’s now miles away. Occasionally you’ll need to completely exit the browser and close all data connections before it will connect properly again.

The phone’s home screen widgets are worth exploring in more detail. They let you choose what you want to be displayed and (theoretically) auto updated on your home screen. You can choose from your Apps assuming the App supports it – so unfortunately some things aren’t supported. RSS feeds aren’t supported for example – they’re barely supported on the phone anyway – you have to view them inside the built in Nokia web browser. If you get a Vodafone branded phone they have provided an RSS Reader app – but for some reason you can’t select this as one of the home screen widgets – and it appears to simply be a shortcut to RSS within the web browser.

The home screen can show 6 different widgets – and is perhaps one of the best features of the phone – providing quick access to some of your favourite things, such as time / date, calendar, email, gravity (twitter), facebook, the weather and shortcuts to apps / programs. The Nokia N86 8mp as a comparison can show only a few items and the choice is much more limited: 6 shortcuts, Ovi Chat, Calendar, Email, and “Share your photos” (limited by only supporting uploads to Ovi,Flickr and Vox).

You can get extra apps from the Nokia Ovi store – such as “Communities” (in Beta) – you can put this on the home screen as a widget – but then it regularly logs you out and then you need to re-enter your password before you get anything displayed on your home page (Communities lets you link to your twitter and facebook accounts). The standard facebook app seems to work more reliably and works well on the homescreen as a widget. Another worth trying from Nokia’s beta labs is Nokia Bots – it’s meant to improve battery life, and learn some of your favourite apps, and automate actions for you.

Ovi Maps 3.04*** / Ovi Voice*** – Ovi Voice (now updated v1.1 includes 2 extra voice commands that were missing from the original version) lets you record your own voice for directions, although before you start, you need to choose between imperial or metric (kilometres vs miles), and can’t record both for easier switching in Ovi Maps. Ovi Voice only works with Ovi Maps v3.04 or higher. To use your “own voice” in Ovi Maps you need to open Ovi maps go to the navigation settings and select “Own Voice” in the Drive guidance settings (you also need to be signed in to Ovi Maps prior to selecting “Own Voice”).

The process for making you own voice is a little more complicated than I think it could be, particularly after you have recorded your “voice pack”, it goes like this:

1. Before recording, make sure keypad tones are switched OFF otherwise the mic will pickup the sound
2. Start Ovi Voice
3. Click Record voice pack
4. Click Start – or click Units to change between Kilometers or Miles (assuming you remember)
5. Record each word or instruction one by one, by pressing the record and stop button.
6. Go through each one using << or >> and using the playback button until you’re happy, recording things like “Turn Left”, and “Safety Camera Ahead” (although I’ve never heard this when actually using Ovi Maps, instead it seems to just make a “bip bip” sound), and you can record anything you want instead if you feel it would be funnier to say “Computer says no” instead of “Route recalculation”, or you could use some amusing accent…
7. When you have finished, you need to record a brief description / preview of the voice pack, and then
8. You need to enter the name, description, of the voice pack and your name, and have the option of sharing it with the internet (which could be useful if you ever wipe your phone and want to try and re-find it again from the internet, although whether you actually will be able to or not is an ENTIRELY different matter!)
9. It then UPLOADs the entire voice pack to Nokia (whether you want to share it or not)
10. Then you need to DOWNLOAD it, before you can use it! (Surely it should already be on the phone! But I digress, I guess you need to have it “processed” or made compatible with Ovi Maps by Nokia)

Before you download it, you can play it back, share it over text, facebook or twitter, and emailing the link to yourself would probably be a good idea just as a backup to make sure you can (try to) get it back at a later date should it disappear off your phone when you need to reset it for some reason…

*** I would recommend trying to get Ovi Voice and Ovi Maps to work using a wifi connection at home as this can all fail horribly when out and about trying to use a poor mobile phone signal, as successful uploading and downloading of data is needed before it will work as a voice navigation system.

Music playback: MP3 playback is good, as with the Nokia N86, it is very good.

Camera and Photo quality: Photos are quite good considering this isn’t a “Camera-centric” mobile phone such as the Nokia N8, Sony Satio, and Nokia N86, etc. Colours are bright and saturated, macro focus is very good with a closer focusing distance than the N86.

The photo software works quite well, and lets you customise the photo before shooting, and also provides a number of fairly useful editing tools for use in playback mode / photo viewer (brightness, contrast, sharpness, crop, resize, posterise, sepia, black and white, negative, red eye reduction, etc) although a few more, such as saturation and some more “artistic” effects would be nice. It also successfully fills the whole screen when you are viewing zoomed photos (for some reason the Satio didn’t).

Email on the Nokia N97 – the default version looks the best, updating it, turns it into a more unpleasant looking black and white text affair, and I struggled to get push email working on it initially until I realised you had to link it with your Nokia Ovi account. The phone can notify you to email with a beep or be silenced. 3rd party apps such as gravity can have the same notification settings as email / text so can also beep when you get new messages. Its just a shame it doesnt appear in the notifications area at the top like the twitter and faxcebook apps on the blackberry.

Conclusions? Over the course of using the phone for nearly a month as my main phone, I’ve found the Nokia N97 Mini to be a generally pleasing phone to use, excellent at phone calls, a mixed bag for email (the latest Nokia messaging for email seems worse on the Mini, than the N86), great for twitter (thanks to gravity), and good for facebook. Photos can be very pleasing, especially in bright sunny conditions, and the touchscreen and keyboard seem reasonably responsive, with a fairly low level of user frustration… the physical keyboard and home screen widgets make this a much more useful phone than any other phone I’ve ever used, and for that reason I like it a lot! The updated (latest 3.04) Nokia Maps and OVI voice make it suitable as a real replacement for sat nav devices (provided you have a suitable car holder and charger), and I’ve used it for several 400 miles round trips without any major problems (apart from it ignoring some mini roundabouts). MP3 playback is excellent, and sound quality and volume is better than expected.

The build quality is also good, with a nice metal surround on the front, and a solid metal battery cover on the back. The nice thing about Nokia phones seems to be that, even with camera-centric models, such as the N86, is that they do everything well, for example MP3 playback is excellent on both the N86 and N97 Mini, and the camera is very good on the N97 Mini, even though it’s not a camera-centric model. Whereas with other phones, such as the Satio, it’s a camera-centric model and MP3 playback seems to be poor, and if you buy a “Sony Walkman” phone, then most likely the camera will not be as good as other models. The Nokia N97 Mini is an enjoyable phone to use, and worth considering, even if it might appear a little dated compared to the newest Android and Apple phones.

+ Good earphones provided with remote control
+ Very good quality MP3 playback, loud without distortion
+ Metal battery cover
+ Photo quality and macro focus can be very good in bright sunlight, see examples.
+ Good home screen widgets
+ Free sat nav – mostly very reliable but you will need an in car charger (not provided) – can be used offline
+ Own voice lets you record your own voice(s) for satnav voice guidance

- Base of keyboard is wobbly unless you hold it (when resting the phone on a desk for example)
- Phone rests on camera lens / pop out area.
- Feels like you have to press too hard to press the keys
- 13 hour battery life
- Random “system error” on startup (sporadic)
- Wobbly micro usb socket
- Email not autoupdating (was using old email app, updating and reconfiguring resolved this – needs to be linked to nokia ovi account)
- No stylus provided
- Seems to have a faint whistle (may be mine that is “faulty”)

(Mostly) Edited in Opera Mini. The nokia browser has a tendancy to crash whenever I try and edit a blogger post. (Started in blogger, and then transfered to wordpress, and finished editing on a PC)

In the olden days (you know when people used film cameras) no matter what camera you had, whether it was a cheap piece of plastic crap or the best SLR in the world, it all had one thing in common: 35mm film*. And the one thing 35mm film did well, was take photos no matter what the lighting conditions. Even in dark situations, without flash, you’d still be able to get some kind of photo from it. * assuming you weren’t using a 110 or APS camera. An example on flickr, and another example above with flash (I assume the flickr link is using 35mm film which measures 24x36mm).

With a digital camera – nearly all of them have flash (I’d estimate 99%) – so in dark conditions you can use the flash and get a half decent photo (generally speaking). Some of the time you can switch the flash off, setup the self-timer, put it on a wall or a tripod and take a half-decent night shot. Which is fairly impressive considering how small the sensor is in relation to 35mm film. (The average compact digital camera sensor size is 7.2mm x 5.3mm (1/1.8 sensor), this is roughly 5x smaller than 35mm film, with an average Pixel area(µm²) of 2.6 – 3.8µm²) (Using a 12mp example: Canon Powershot G9 with a 1/1.7″ sensor, the pixel area is 3.8µm²). Example above taken with the Casio Exilim Z120.

On a side note: Do you remember when Digital Cameras were still new? Like in 2002 or 2003 when digital cameras were still so new that they had to write “Digital Camera” on the front of it somewhere so that you knew it was a digital camera? Simply being a digital camera in 2001 was so exciting and new that they simply used those two words together as a marketing tool / selling point for the camera. Now you’re lucky if you even have the model number written on it, and rarely do you find the manufacturer name on the back these days. (They used to always put the manufacturers name underneath the screen – like this). Now it’s more likely the be the huge number of megapixels or optical zoom or screen size that’s plastered all over the camera.

With a camera phone – most of them don’t have a real flash (maybe 1% has a real xenon flash (the Sony Satio is the only recent one) that is equivalent to the flash you find in a Digital Camera) – and the rest – if you’re lucky (or unlucky depending how you feel about it) – has an LED or a “twin” LED flash. The problem is that even with (or without) the LED flash, the camera’s just don’t cope with low-light situations. You can put the phone on night mode (if you’re lucky), put it somewhere steady^ and switch on the self-timer, and hope it takes a successful shot. The problem is that the sensors in camera phones are even smaller than compact digital cameras. They just can’t get enough light into the sensor, and that means in low light situations they produce crap noisy images that are over-processed so much that you’re lucky there’s any image left to view. Further problems are caused due to the small sensors lacking the ability to capture dynamic range, so dark areas are underexposed, and bright areas are overexposed, further reducing detail in images (the example above taken with the Nokia N86 – where’s the detail in the steps?). The latest 12 megapixel camera phone sensors made by Sony have a 1.4µm pixel size – which is again 2.7x smaller than compact digital camera sensors. (2.6mm x 1.96mm estimation). This is roughly 13.8x smaller than 35mm film.

In a nutshell – it’s all about the light – 35mm film cameras can absorb lots of light, and therefore take photos in dark conditions and get as much colour and detail as possible. Digital Cameras, more so compact cameras, have much smaller sensors and struggle in low light, but don’t do too bad a job of it thanks to having a flash, however, they are very much on the limit of acceptable image quality (that’s why Digital SLRs get better image quality – they have larger sensors). Camera phones on the other hand have had to miniaturize to the point where image quality is badly affected, and the only way to get good photos from them is to use them in ideal light, or have a real xenon flash for times when lighting is poor.

^ Options are limited as I don’t know of any camera phones with tripod mount, and you’re generally lucky if the phone will stand on it’s side without falling over. Even on the “Photo-centric” Nokia N86 8mp you can’t stand the camera on it’s side without it falling over!