As always HTC put on a great show at their press event today. I managed to shoot a few minutes of video of the HTC Sensation. It’s only a brief demo but does cover some of the best features of the flagship superphone.
Obviously we hope to get a review unit soon and we’ll have more video as soon as possible. I’ve also got a video of the press announcement uploading at the moment too and will have that live for you later today.
Acer have done quite well with their Android powered handsets that they sell under the liquid brand. Starting with the Acer Liquid itself about 18 months ago then moving to the Liquid E and then a special edition Liquid E Ferrari model.
Overall we’ve been rather impress with the Liquid handsets, they offer great features whilst not breaking the bank. The other great thing about them is that Acer are pretty quick to release updates for their handsets, the Liquid started life as Android 1.6 but soon went to 2.1
This latest Liquid Metal model comes with Android 2.2 Froyo (and update will be available soon), 800MHz CPU and 512MB RAM. What I like most about the Liquid Metal is that you get a 3.6″ capacitive screen that’s 480×800 pixels where other handsets at this price point have HVGA displays.
Check out the unboxing video below, Patrick’s full review is just a few days away.
Since the iPad 2 was announced a little over a month ago one of the things I was most looking forward to using was iMovie for iPad 2. iMovie was demonstrated at the iPad 2 press event and it looked like it would be an ideal way for me to do video editing while out ‘on the road’ as I’m frequently at various product launches recording video but to get the video edited while away from home requires me to take along my Macbook a well as my camera and cables etc. iMovie on the iPad looked like it might be a great way to bridge the gap while still enabling me to travel light.
So I started to play with iMovie last weekend and frankly I was instantly disappointed! I record almost all of my videos on a Sanyo XACTI camcorder, the video quality is good, the cameras are nice and small and recording to SD card makes life easy. So I put the SD card in to the camera connection kit for the iPad and plugged it in.
It takes only a few seconds for the thumbnails of the recorded videos to appear and just a little longer to import the video in to the iPad. Once the videos are imported I can see them in the recent imports and they playback quite happily on the iPad itself. The frustration starts when you launch iMovie and cant see the videos you’ve just imported!
I’ve recorded a few videos of the XPERIA Arc already but previously I’ve only been able to look at a prototype build. I few days ago though I was lucky enough to get my hands on the final retail version of the handset and as promised I’ve recorded an unboxing video which you can find below.
Hardware-wise there’s no difference between this and the earlier version that I looked at but the retail version does have the latest ROM build which is a bit more fluid than the prototype, probably because it’s no longer set up for debugging.
We’ll be reviewing this XPERIA Arc over the next few weeks, as I said before, we really prefer to review final hardware.
One thing to note from the video below, the Micro HDMI cable was not included in my box but it will be bundled with the Arc when it goes on sale later this week.
Rumours of a Playstation phone have been circulating for months so it wasn’t too much of a surprise when Sony Ericsson officially announced the XPERIA Play last month at MWC.
The Android-powered Play has a large capacitive touchscreen display which, at 4″, is going to be great for both gaming and video play back. There’s also a 1GHz Snapdragon to keep the game play fluid.
Of course the real trick up the sleeve is the sliding screen. Whereas on other handsets you might expect to see a hardware QWERTY keyboard under the display, the XPERIA Play as a Playstation-style control pad complete with two analogue controls.
In the video below you can see my unbox the play before taking a tour around a few bits of the OS and UI and then having a stab at a couple of the pre-installed Playstation games. I think we are the first to have our hands on a fully boxed XPERIA Play too!
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
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!
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 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.
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.
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