Motorola launched the original Motorola Pro in February of this year. It wasn’t hugely successful. Specs were not great, the screen was simply HVGA and the keyboard lacked the finesse of it’s Blackberry rivals.
Perhaps it’s no surprise, then, that Motorola should come up with the successor to the Pro, the Pro+, so quickly after the release of it’s predecessor. The Pro+ has a similar form factor but a more refined design that the Pro, sleeker lines and more curves. The CPU clocks at 1Ghz and it benchmarks favourably against other handsets with the same CPU. The screen size has increased and fortunately so has the resolution which is now up to 480×640 or portrait VGA.
Check out the video I have for you below, it’s covers the hardware as well as some of the key parts of the OS. I’ll have a full review for you over the next week or so.
James gets a decent internet connection this week for a wickedly exciting tech fest. This week is review central with the boys looking at the Motorola Defy+, the Sony Ericsson Xperia Ray, the Samsung Galaxy Note, the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 and the Sony Ericsson Xperia Pro. That should make up for last week!
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From 7 November to 24 December 2011, Orange is rewarding new and upgrading Pay As You Go customers who purchase a new phone for £30 or over with a free Christmas gift box. Filled with free festive treats, the offer is available to customers who buy directly with Orange in-store, online or via telesales.
The Christmas gift box offers customers a selection of seasonal goodies including stylish Angle & Curve headphones (RRP £60). Offering superior sound quality and sophisticated design, these new headphones are perfect for listening to music or playing games on a new Christmas handset – all with crystal clear sound.
The box also includes some fun festive treats:
· A headphone splitter to share the Christmas entertainment with friends and family
· An Orange piggy bank to keep your Christmas shopping kitty in check
· A screen cloth to keep your phone screen pristine while sharing Yuletide photos and videos
Pippa Dunn, Chief Marketing Officer, Consumer, at Orange UK said: “This year’s Christmas gift box is our best yet – offering Orange Pay As You Go customers a top quality pair of Angle & Curve headphones, as well as some other brilliant added extras, all of which will no doubt add to the excitement of the festive season”.
Pay As You Go devices available to customers include the Orange RIO, Orange San Francisco, Orange Stockholm and Samsung Galaxy Mini.
Posted by: James
As from the 24th November giffgaff will offer Blackberry services, which have not been possible on the MVNO previously. These include Blackberry Messenger, Blackberry (push) e-mails and Blackberry Internet.
So you will soon all be able to purchase a Blackberry Add on when purchasing a goodybag.
As giffgaff aim to provide fantastic value for money the BlackBerry add on will only cost £3 (in addition to the cost of the goodybag).
In the same way as current goodybags, the Blackberry add on will last for a month. As the goodybag and Blackberry add will have to be bought at the same time, they will expire on the same date as well.
Bad news I am afraid if you were waiting to pick up the Nokia Lumia 800 sim free. Clove have today confirmed that the device will now be available in January and not November 16th as expected.
I’m pretty sure this news will not affect new contracts that you may take out from the high street stores. It is however bitterly disappointing if you were holding out for the Lumia 800 sim free.
Roll on the New Year.
Posted by: James
Samsung recently released the Samsung Galaxy S II which is arguably the best Android smartphone out at the moment (even possibly the best phone in any OS category) but they felt that having this title wasn’t enough, they wanted to own the title of biggest Android Smartphone in the world too. Introducing the Samsung Galaxy Note’s 5.3″ monster of a screen. The screen is a SuperAMOLED HD screen with 1280×800 pixels producing a PPI of 285 which is quite stunning considering the screen’s size. Behind the hood are an 8mp camera, a 1.4 Ghz Dual Core processor, the ability to record in 1080p and 1GB RAM, so this is definitely one of the leading phones in the market specifications-wise.
However, the big question is: with the 5.3″ screen giving the phone the dimensions of 146.9 x 83mm, is the Samsung Galaxy Note too big to use for daily use, is it too big to be considered a proper phone or should it be considered a tablet with an in-built phone? Well read on to find out my opinion on this quite marvellous handset.
Carphone Warehouse has confirmed plans to close its eleven Best Buy stores here in the UK due to a lack of profit. Carphone Warehouse and Best Buy initially planned to open 200 Best Buy stores across the UK and continental Europe. Sadly that will not now happen.
Carphone Warehouse said the focus would now be on selling more electronics goods from Best Buy Europe’s 805 Carphone Warehouse stores in the UK, and 1,648 Phone House shops in continental Europe.
“Best Buy believes that there is a significant untapped opportunity as connections migrate from phones to other connectable devices such as tablets, laptops, TVs and eReaders. This transaction will enable Best Buy Mobile to accelerate the deployment of operational and connectivity expertise to these devices and for Best Buy to fully capture the profit potential of these opportunities” Best Buy
Posted by: James
I found this article over on The Smartphone Centre blog and it looks pretty interesting for all you HTC Android owners.
HTC Sync has always, up until now, been a PC only application. However that could be about to change. Pre-loaded on the brand new HTC Sensation XL with Beats Audio is a version of HTC Sync especially for Mac OSX.
The file, ‘HTC Sync of MacOS-3.0.mpkg’ can be found once you mount your HTC Sensation XL. Simply double-click to install HTC Sync to your MAC. Once installed, a new icon will be added to your menu bar, click this and select ‘Open’. This will load the main interface window. The first time you launch this, your device will be identified. Simply click ‘Save’ to continue. From the main window you will be able to install applications as well as rename your device. The ‘Music’ tab will allow you to sync all of your music found within iTunes. You can also select which Play Lists you wish to sync. The ‘Gallery’ tab will allow you to sync specific folders from your Mac. The ‘Calendar’ tab will allow you to sync your iCal calendars and of course, the ‘People’ tab will allow you to sync with your Macs Address Book. Using the ‘Bookmarks’ tab, you will be able to sync you Safari, Chrome and FireFox bookmarks. And finally the ‘Documents’ tab will allow you to sync and chosen folder.
Whilst there is no official download available form HTC for this version of HTC Sync, we expect HTC to roll this out across all Android devices.
Posted by: James
The Motorola Defy returns with a with a + stuck on the end but that is not the only new thing about it as it now features Android 2.3 Gingerbread, the brand new version of Motoblur and a 1 GHz Ti OMAP processor yet it is still comes to IP67 standards: the benchmark of all phones that claim to be tough.
The “tough phone” market may be a small one but for those who need a phone that they can “accidentally” drop into a cup of tea, use in a sandstorm or survive when it falls out of your pocket along with having all of the expected traits of a smartphone, the Defy+ might be perfect.
So is this a worthy successor to the Defy? Are the improvements good enough to make you want upgrade? Or would you just wish it wasn’t water-resistant so you could break it? Read on to find out!
Sony Ericsson appear to be on a roll at the moment and releasing new handsets at the rate of a couple a month. Recently we’ve had the XPERIA Active, XPERIA ray and Mini Pro to review and this weeks it’s the turn of the bigger Sony Ericsson XPERIA Pro.
Like the X10 models of last year the XPERIA Pro features a large sliding qwerty keyboard hidden away under the 3.7″ 480×854 LCD display. It also features the Mobile BRAVIA engine to really push the video playback to a new level.
As always, our full review will be up in a few weeks once we’ve really had chance to use the XPERIA Pro properly. For now I have a hands-on video for you below. This is of an un-boxed pre-retail unit so I’ll also have a proper unboxing video for you once I get my hands on a retail unit.
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