Samsung The Tocco Lite offers all the multimedia features consumers would expect from a Samsung full touch device.

The slim body incorporates a 3 Megapixel camera designed to capture spontaneous moments with family and friends, using enhanced features such as smile and face detection.

Featuring an FM radio, high quality 3.0 WQVGA touch screen, music recognition and Samsung DNSe 2.0 (Digital Natural Sound engine) which ensures natural, high quality sound, the Tocco Lite is a multimedia phone that keeps users entertained wherever and whenever.

Technical Details

* Full Touchscreen — Versatile, intuitive and easy-to-use navigation on large 3.0 touchscreen with personalised mobile and online widgets for home screen.

* 3.2 megapixel camera — with Smile Shot application that only takes a photo when the subject is smiling

* Music player — with Music Recognition application, FM Radio with RDS and enhanced acoustics that includes virtual 3Dsound effects.

* Great Internet experience — Full browser support, vertical and horizontal views, easy access to Google Mail, Google Search and Google Maps.RSS Reader automatically streams news and entertainment directly to your mobile.

* Sleek Design — Minimal and contemporary design that measures a palm-friendly 104×53x11.9mm

The Samsung Jet is compact, pocket friendly with well defined buttons.

Unacceptably, it invites fingerprint stains too easily. The side profile looks like a compacted speeding bullet, perhaps a fitting look for the speedy 800MHz processor inside.
It has a hexagonal button below the screen, which looks a lot like a 3D cube rather than a regular flat key.

It has a lucid plastic layer on top accompanied by reflective mirror acting as the base. When phone is at an angle a hologram of red railings is visible on the back.

Samsung Jet mobile phone is a device that is distinguished by its exclusive and advanced technological performance. It offers novel interface and Widge2.0 TouchWiz customizable.

It has a 3.1 inch AMOLED touchscreen display, 16 million colors and a resolution of 480×800 pixels, DVD playback, 3.5mm jack, WiFi connectivity, HSDPA, 2GB internal memory, expandable microSD (expandable upto 16GB), integrated GPS receiver, FM radio ,video calling and recording function Motion Gate. The motion recognition engine i.e. Motion Gate is more interactive.

We can wobble the device to close applications and double tap to take pictures and play music. Samsung jet has a 5 megapixel camera which had a shutter lag of only 0.2 second and it also has a LED flash.

The battery of Samsung jet has a rated talk time of 8.2 hours and approximately 17.5 days of standby talktime. A problem with its battery is that it dies out without any warning. It also does not feature a call on voice command.

The volume of ring tones, sensitivity of the antenna and the volume of listening are one of the best. The QWERTY keypad in landscape is nicely laid out and user-friendly.

Handwriting recognition is also maintained in full screen and in two other options. Samsung Jet is trouble-free and very hard to make an error.

The BlackBerry 8520 fits in you palm in a prefect manner. You can access each and every part of phone without adjusting the position of phone, repeatedly.

QWERTY keypad makes typing more comfortable and also improves the efficiency of sending messages. The display has more then 65,000 color that gives bright viewing experience.

BlackBerry Curve 8250 smart-phone has dedicated media keys at the top of the phone to control multimedia and music. Your one touch on the key can skip song you hate and play the good ones. Pause music; put phone calls on mute with one touch easy-access to mute button.

You would never want to waste time getting through loads of folders and icons to reach the main application. In Blackberry 8520, you have track pad navigation, which lets you scroll through complete menus and icons by just gliding finger on it.

You need to press/tap on the menu and select the item you want to enter. It is a smart-phone with smart navigation.

Take pictures or shoot videos and you can upload it to photo sharing applications such as Facebook, Myspace or any social networking site. Share the pictures with your friends by sending pictures through MMS.

This phone also has BlackBerry Messenger and some other instant messaging applications to share pictures and videos.

The phone is Wi-Fi enable so you can watch news and favorite video clips anytime you want.

More feature of BlackBerry 8520 smart phone:

• 256MB Flash Memory
• Bluetooth enabled
• Wireless Email
• Multimedia Player
• Organizer
• Browser
• SMS/MMS

BlackBerry Curve 8520 phones are available in 1.5, 2.0 and 3 mega pixel camera format. The phone has a built-in player that renders the video files in vivid imagery and converts all music files into robust sound. Roxio Media Manger is the inbuilt music player that converts and transfers the music and videos in your phone.

If you live in area where the mobile phone signal is very weak then you’ll be all too aware of the problem this causes when trying to send and receive calls in the home.  It’s a while now since mobiles became commonplace but the prospect of doing away with your existing fixed-line phone seems a long way off?

The problem is that the walls of your house absorb most of the energy in the mobile signal, so if the signal is less than perfect to start with then you are going to have problems. Many people have gotten around this annoyance in various ways - from standing at the end of the garden to leaning out of an upstairs window. While these methods can be effective, they are hardly convenient or practical?

Well now, thanks to Vodafone, this problem could be solved with a simple device that cleverly routes calls through your existing home broadband connection. The Access Gateway simply plugs into your internet connection and acts as your very own personal mobile base station, redirecting calls via the internet resulting in near perfect call quality even if where there is no mobile signal at all.

To start using the service which begins in July you’ll need a 3G enabled mobile handset and an Access Gateway device, which will be available to buy outright, to rent for a small monthly fee or as part of a new mobile usage tariff.

The Vodafone Access Gateway (VAG) use a femtocel device developed by technology company picoChip and it’s anticipated that around 40% of customers will opt to have the device in their homes.

Further plans are afoot also to provide mobile broadband access wherever you are in the home which would dispense with the need for complicated Wi-Fi devices. The Access Gateway can easily handle up to 4 calls at a time and can also be used to send and receive data as well as text messages.

So maybe you’ll be able to dispense with the fixed line phone after all?

Available to buy on-line or in stores from 1 July 2009. Read more about the Vodafone Access Gateway here

It’s a while now since Google made their first foray into the Smartphone market and most commentators we in agreement that the fist Google phone, or first phone using Google’s Android operating system, was something of a disappointment. Clunky and unwieldy to use, a lack of any innovative features the G1 didn’t quite live up to the hype.

So now the second incarnation has arrived, in the form of the Vodafone HTC Magic, is it just an upgrade or a major re-working of an ambitious project?

Well, the answer is neither; the new phone is a radical departure from the first conception but anyone expecting anything radical might be further disappointed.

What’s New Then?

The QWERTY keyboard has gone and been replaced with a touch-screen version which works in both portrait and landscape formats. Tapping a key on the screen brings-up a preview of the letter which can be changed by simply dragging to another key and there is a quite efficient predictive text feature which seems to make a decent job of guessing the word to be typed. After a bit of practice you can easily type with one hand which will be welcomed by most critics who found the lack of this to be a major drawback with the G1?

The Features

The camera is still 3.2 megapixels with autofocus although it now supports video which was another omission and major gripe with the G1. The quality of images captured is fair to good, but not outstanding; although for most users it should be acceptable.

The web browser, which has to be said, was quite good on the G1 has been improved further with a new Javascript engine which makes page load speeds impressively fast. The search bar has also been merged with the address bar which seems more logical and incorporates a text search function which suggests potential matches as you type.

Call quality seems to be quite reasonable and the phone seems to find and hold the 3G signal fairly consistently and battery life has been improved dramatically. They quote around 400 minutes of talk-time between charges and this seems to be accurate. Although how fast this deteriorates as the battery gets older remains to be seen?

Another popular complaint with the original phone was a lack of standard headphone jack - employing instead a non-standard connector. Unfortunately this remains but whether it’s a major drawback depends how you listen to your music really?

Of course the real selling point of the HTC Magic is not the phone but the Android operating system. The number of applications available is growing steadily and this is, perhaps, this phone’s strongest point. Because Android is ‘open source’ there are new apps being developed everyday and existing ones are constantly being updated.

The Verdict

So overall, the HTC Magic will not set the world on fire, the Google phone project is beginning to look like a process of evolution rather than revolution?
However, it does everything it’s supposed to reasonably well and it’s a lot more user friendly and better looking than the G1. If you are happy with your existing smart phone then hang on to it for now, but if you are in the market anyway, you could do a lot worse than the HTC Magic.

The HTC Magic is available free on contract from Vodafone