Author Archive: Matt

HTC Desire S unboxing video

Announced just last month at MWC in Barcelona, the HTC Desire S is a continuation of the Desire bloodline that started just last year. During that year we’ve seen the Desire Z and Desire HD join the ranks and each has seen a fair degree of interest.

So what’s different about the Desire S? Well it’s pretty similar to the Desire, similar size and same 3.7″ screen. However the Desire S has a forward facing camera and better main camera and more memory. The main difference though is the aluminium unibody design. This is something we first saw on the HTC Legend last year. The whole of the Desire S body, excluding the screen and battery door, is made from a single machined piece of aluminium.

You can see the unboxing video below followed by the full specification. One thing to note though, the at MWC the Desire S was said to be coming with Android 2.4 gingerbread, however, our review sample has 2.3. Not it could be that the final retail will have 2.4 but we’ll be reviewing on 2.3

Apple iPad 2 unboxing video

Unless you have been living in a cave for the past week you’ll know that the iPad 2 went on sale in another 25 countries yesterday, including the UK. It you’ve been following us on twitter you may have seen our tweets from yesterday where Tracy and I were waiting in line for just over 4 hours to collect our iPad 2’s from the Cambridge Apple shop.

I have to say that the staff at the shop were absolutely amazing. Apple have done a few of these events now and know ho to look after the crowds so a big thanks to everyone from the Cambridge Apple shop for looking after us.

So we returned home last night and I decided to record a quick iPad 2 unboxing video for you. I appreciate that there will be dozens of these videos heading to YouTube but as we unbox almost everything else I figured it would be rude to ignore the iPad 2!

Huawei U8800 (IDEOS X5) unboxed again

Late last year I managed to get my hands on a pre-release version of the Huawei U8800 aka IDEOS X5. As is often the case with these early or pre-release handsets the U8800 we looked at in November had a few software issues which you may have noticed in the original unboxing video I recorded. In fact this is one of the reasons why we very rarely do a full review of pre-release hardware as they sometimes exhibit these oddities.

So a few months on I’ve now been able to get hold of the retail version of the U8800. The official name has now changed to IDEOS X5, probably to capitalise on using the name of the earlier IDEOS released last year.

There seems to be no change in the hardware but software changes are certainly evident and the problems I had with WiFi are certainly long gone.

We’ll have a full review for you soon but for now you can see the retail unboxing video below.

Samsung Galaxy Ace unboxing video

Samsung are certainly making the Galaxy brand name work hard for them and here we have another Android powered handset from them baring the Galaxy name, this time it’s the Galaxy Ace aka GT- S5830.

Despite it’s mid-range price the Ace offers quite a lot for the money. A 3.5″ HVGA display dominates the front while on the inside you’ll find an 800MHz CPU, 512MB RAM and WiFi supporting wireless n. What sets it apart from the likes of the HTC Wildfire is that the Ace ships with Android 2.2 Froyo. All-in-all a decent little handset when you consider the £199 price tag.

In the video below you’ll see me unbox and take you on a tour of the hardware before taking a brief look at the OS and UI. We’ll have the full review for you soon.

Sony Ericsson XPERIA Arc feature demo video

Just the other week I managed to get my hands on the Sony Ericsson XPERIA Arc (aka XPERIA X12) and recorded a video tour and demo of some of the features of the handset. There were a few things that I didn’t manage to cram in to the original 20-minute-long video so I decided to record another here for your viewing pleasure.

In this video I quickly recap the hardware spec and then look at customising/moving icons in the program menu before showing off the email view with preview pane, a feature unique to the Arc.

We shall have a proper unboxing video and full review of the Arc just as soon as we can get our hands on the final retail hardware. Remember that we are still looking at a prototype in the video below.