GSM Skills

In a nutshell: The stunning touchscreen user-interface of the iPhone is one of the seven wonders of the modern world. Combining a phone, music player, camera and web browser, the iPhone is a stunning device. However its high cost and many limitations mean that it is a flawed beauty. The iPhone 3G is better and costs less.

Best buy: The iPhone 3G is available for £96.89 on contract from the Carphone Warehouse (8GB) or £155.62 from the Carphone Warehouse (16GB).

Ah! The iPhone. Never in seven years of reviewing mobile phones have we encountered a phone that has been so controversial. We’ve even been personally abused by reviewers who disagreed with our opinions. This review is an attempt to find balance between the conflicting opinions (something we always strive for at Mobile Phones UK, but which has been hard to achieve with the iPhone). Regular readers of Mobile Phones UK will know that we wrote an article back in June 2007 which cast doubt on whether the iPhone would live up to the hype. We hadn’t seen the iPhone at that time, but when it finally arrived here in the UK, we were blown away by the user interface and gave it a 5 star review (although we did point out its numerous limitations). With hindsight, 5 stars was wrong, and having taken on board all of the feedback from users, we’ve arrived at a 3 star rating.

The thing is that the iPhone is in some ways so good, and in other ways so bad. Let’s be generous and start with the good.

The iPhone is the first of a new generation of phones: it’s a touchscreen smartphone running Apple’s OS X operating system. Instead of using buttons, joysticks, etc, the iPhone has icons that appear on the huge touch-sensitive screen. The screen is enormous, and the user interface is simply breathtaking. Apple claim that the iPhone is five years ahead of the competition, and playing with the user interface you can begin to believe the hype. Touch the Phone icon on the screen and the address book appears; tap on a name and the iPhone makes a call. Touch the Photos icon and your photo album glides onto the screen. The responsiveness of the user interface and the wealth of effects makes using the phone an absolute joy.

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In a nutshell: The Sony Ericsson X1 Xperia is a blockbuster mobile. It’s a touchscreen phone with the highest resolution display available, plus an optical joystick and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. It runs Windows Mobile, making it a powerful platform for all sorts of applications, especially email and web browsing. With a 3.2 megapixel camera, Windows Media Player, assisted-GPS, 400 MB memory plus a memory card slot, quadband GSM plus HSDPA and WiFi, it’s got the lot when it comes to functionality. Not cheap, not small, but very, very powerful indeed.

Best buy: *Free* from Mobiles.co.uk or Dialaphone.

Sony Ericsson have been slow to bring out an iPhone basher, but here it is: the Sony Ericsson X1 or Xperia.

The X1 is a touchscreen phone, and it’s got one of the biggest and best screens ever seen on a mobile phone. At 3 inches across, it’s almost as big as the iPhone 3G’s 3.5 inch screen, but here’s the thing: whereas the iPhone 3G has 480 x 320 pixels, the Xperia has a massive 800 x 480 pixel resolution: that’s 2.5 times as many pixels. Big isn’t always better, but when it comes to touchscreen phones, it definitely is. As well as providing a brilliant platform for the touch-operated user interface, the display also offers a superb environment for web browsing, video streaming, photo viewing, etc, etc.

A lot of thought has gone into the user interface design of the Xperia. As well as the finger-operated touchscreen, there’s an optical joystick and a navigation key. To use the optical joystick you brush your finger over the touch-sensitive key to move the mouse pointer on the screen. The navigation key is a conventional 4-way key that can be pressed to select an option. Handwriting recognition with a stylus is available as an additional text-input method. But the X1 holds another secret within: a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard. With the keyboard in position and the display in widescreen landscape mode, the phone resembles a mini-laptop and offers a lot of the functionality of a real laptop - but more of this later. For the moment, we’ll just say that with all the

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In a nutshell: If email on the go is your top priority, and you don’t like the size and weight of the big BlackBerries, then the 8100 could be a good choice. However, the 8100 lags behind other smartphones when it comes to most features, and it isn’t the easiest phone to use either.

Best buy: *Free* from the Carphone Warehouse.

You might think that BlackBerry’s mission statement for the 8100 Pearl series sets up expectations that are impossible to meet: “BlackBerry Pearl 8100 Series smartphones are designed to help you do everything you want with your life.” As the baby in the BlackBerry range, the 8100 Pearl is a much more compact device than the 8300 or 8800 series phones. In fact, with a weight of just 89g, the 8100 is very light compared with other smartphones. But it still offers nearly all of the functionality of the big Blackberries. BlackBerry have achieved this by the Pearl’s distinctive SureType® keypad, which is a compromise between a full QWERTY keypad and a conventional numeric keypad. The SureType keypad can be used to enter text more rapidly than a conventional phone keypad, and the trackball is used to navigate around the screen and select options.

Now, the BlackBerry may look like a normal mobile phone, and BlackBerry’s marketing guys are clearly trying to present it as such, but really it’s a much more sophisticated type of device. At its heart it’s more like a mini laptop, equipped for emailing, messaging, browsing and organising. It’s a corporate kind of device that has more in common with the enterprise IT function than with consumer mobile phones.

The key feature that sets the BlackBerry apart is its ability to manage email on the move. That’s why most people choose to buy a BlackBerry, and that’s why it needs a special keypad. And the BlackBerry 8100 has all the wireless email features of the bigger 8300 and 8800 series devices. It supports up to 10 different email accounts. It’s a push-email device, which means that each mailbox is automatically updated whenever you send, delete, file or read messages. Messages are delivered automatically to the phone and you can be notified as soon as they arrive. The BlackBerry

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In a nutshell: What girl could resist a cute clamshell phone that looks like an enormous jewel? The Motorola Jewel has a bevelled shiny surface with an invisible mirror display and animated screensavers that appear to move over the phone’s surface. Inside you’ll find a 2 megapixel camera, a music player, MP3 ringtones, Bluetooth wireless connectivity, a memory card slot and good battery life.£97.82 on Pay as you Go from the Carphone Warehouse.

Best buy:

The Motorola Jewel is a phone that looks like a jewel, and a whopping-sized jewel at that! What girl wouldn’t want to carry this in her handbag?

The Jewel is not expensive, but looks a million dollars! It’s a cute clamshell, petite in size, with a shiny metallic reflective finish. The external display uses a mirror effect that blends the display into the shiny surface of the phone so that’s its invisible when turned off. When in use, specially designed animated screensavers move over the phone’s surface, appearing to float in and out of view. The display also shows information such as caller ID or music track / artist, and when music is playing, touch-sensitive controls appear. It’s definitely a very sensual phone.

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The Global Positioning System (GPS) was funded, developed and controlled by the US Department of Defense. Since the late seventies, GPS has become an important aid to navigation around the world. Initially designed for the US military, GPS became publicly available years later and it is now considered an important feature in lots of consumer products.

How does GPS work? Well, basically there are three elements that make everything work: satellites, earth monitoring stations and receivers (ex: cell phone, telefone celular). GPS provides specially coded satellite signals that can be processed in a GPS receiver, enabling the receiver to compute position, velocity and time.

Today, most cell phones (telefone celular) are not limited to carry on just a conversation. Features like mp3 player, digital camera and video camera have all become standards in the latest cell phone models. It is expected that the GPS feature will soon be added to this list, and it will offer the capability of tracking any cell phone user.

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