Reviews

Sony Ericsson Aspen review

In comes the phone call from Matt as usual, “I’ve done the unboxing, (which can be seen here) want to play with the Aspen?”, so I had a look around to make sure it wasn’t just another Sony Ericsson release, and I was pleasantly surprised to find a full fixed QWERTY phone that had passed me by. Being a fan of the HTC Snap, it looked interesting enough to have a play.

Will it shape up? From the off, it has to be mentioned that this is a prototype model and comes with no bells and whistles, not even any cables (I had to scrounge a microUSB off Matt), manuals, CD’s or anything, so forgive me if I miss any benefits that could be hidden as my usual trawl through the user guide is not possible at this moment.

I also would imagine that the final could well be tweaked and updated as time goes on towards the actual release date, which according to the Sony Ericsson website states that “You’ll be able to get your hands on the Sony Ericsson Aspen within 6 months”.

Vlingo Mini Review

I have been using Vlingo for just over a week now and boy, has it made my life easier. If you have not heard of Vlingo then to summarise it, its an application that will allow you to convert speech to text.

I spend anything from two to five hours a day in my car which means if i want to email or instant message people I need to either pull over or wait until I have stopped. Not any more!

With the touch of a button Vlingo records your voice and converts it into text in pretty much any application on your phone.

Interested? Read more after the break.

Samsung B3410 review

Here we have the Samsung B3410 or Delphi as it is otherwise known. This is a very different attempt at mobile phone technology from Samsung as they have chosen to join in with other manufacturers such as Nokia by integrating a full slide out QWERTY keyboard for ease of use; Samsung as a company have been manufacturing mobile phones for many years now and every year have impressed us more and more with their unique looks and little quirks that make Samsung mobiles so intriguing on the eye.

Does the all new approach by Samsung appeal to you? And will it live up to expectation? Let’s find out…

TweetDeck for iPhone Mini Review

With so many different applications for twitter it’s hard to decide which one is best and to be honest which one is best for me may not be best for you.

If you use TweetDeck on your desktop computer then the mobile version may be right up your street, as long as you have an iPhone or iPod Touch of course!

The mobile version of the app is pretty much identical to the desktop version and will allow you to perform the same functions.

And the good news is it’s free!

Acer beTouch E101 Review

Announced back in October last year the Acer beTouch E101 is one of those handsets which I’m not really sure where it sits compared to the competition. It’s clearly a smartphone as it’s running Windows Mobile 6.5 however it seems to be lacking a few features which you would come to expect with any smartphone these days.

I will be basing this review on the fact that the beTouch E101 is a budget handset so will not be comparing it to the high end Windows Phones out there at the moment. At only £176.25 the beTouch E101 certainly has an attractive price tag but the question is, do we think it is worth the money and will users gets frustrated at the lack of high end features?

Read on to find out!

Sony Ericsson Vivaz review

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz is the first of five new Sony Ericsson devices that will be available here in the UK over the coming month or so. To follow we have the Vivaz Pro, X10, X10 Mini and X10 Pro.

Not being a huge fan of the Symbian OS, the Vivaz brings a new lease of life to it as Sony Ericsson have created there own overlay to sit on top of the traditional one. This was one of the reasons I chose to review the device. Although I’m not a massive follower of Symbian we at tracyandmatt believe in giving all handsets a fair and unbiased review and that’s what the Vivaz will get. The other reason I wanted to get my hands on it was the fact that it records video in HD as well as having a 8.1mp camera.

Will the camera be as good as I think it will and has the new overlay disguised the OS enough? Only one way to find out and that’s to read on.

Nokia N97 Mini Review

James reviewed the original N97 back in July last year (you can view the review here). It seemed in general to be quite a nice phone, Nokia’s best so far. I read a few other reviews of the N97 and I was surprised to see that the opinions were very mixed.

It has been pretty difficult to get our hands on this little(ish) handset. Over the past few months there have been many rumours about its withdrawal from sale by some carriers (Orange?) which has, perhaps, only fuelled many peoples desire to own one.

So at last I’ve been given the Nokia N97 Mini to review. It will be interesting to see if this scaled down version has any improvements over its bigger brother and if any of the early reports of stability and performance issues have been ironed out.

Let’s find out…