The budget smartphone sector is one of the biggest growth areas in the mobile market, so it’s no surprise to see Samsung plastering adverts for its latest budget model, the Samsung Galaxy Ace, all over the place. Sporting a 3.5in screen, 800MHz CPU and a fully-fledged version of Android, it has all the essentials but can it trump all before it?
The phone’s design certainly doesn’t betray its budget leanings. It’s nothing particularly new or innovative but the glossy front, silver sides and textured back are smart enough. In terms of build quality, there’s a certain plasticky feel to it but when some high-end smartphones like Samsung’s own Galaxy S II also have a rather lightweight plastic build, the difference isn’t glaringly obvious.
Speaking of the screen, it’s probably the first place this phone really starts to show its budget origins. The 3.5in size isn’t quite on the level of the 4in models sported by many of the most powerful smartphones but it’s perfectly adequate, indeed it’s the same size as the iPhone 4. However, it certainly isn’t the same when it comes to sharpness. With a resolution of just 320 x 480 pixels, it has a pixel density of just 164 pixels per inch compared to the iPhone’s 320ppi and the Galaxy S II’s 220ppi. The upshot is the Ace does look rather blocky. You can still read most text messages and emails easily enough but browsing the web can be a bit more tricky as you have to zoom in and out that much more.
Interface And Softwares
The Samsung Galaxy Ace runs Android 2.2, which is one version behind the latest of Google’s mobile phone operating system (OS) so misses out on a few small interface tweaks, but nothing that you should worry about.
As we’ve come to expect, Samsung has given the interface a bit of a tweak, with its customary TouchWiz stylings. Thankfully, though, the changes aren’t too drastic.
Samsung has also split the main menu, which is normally presented as one long vertical list, into pages that you scroll through horizontally. This is more annoying as the company has also made it so that the icons can be rearranged as you please. This is good for the fact it gives you even more customisability but the whole point of the homescreens is to arrange and organise the phone’s apps into clusters and folders according to your preference. Having to do this for the main menu as well just means you have more stuff to keep on top of.
Gaming is a bit limited by the slower processor but most of the best fun physics games are playable. It’s only really the fancy-looking 3D shooters and driving games that suffer.
Video, though, isn’t this devices forte. Playback quality is fine but format support is very limited and higher quality videos will generally fail to playback. It doesn’t help that the headphone socket has a bit of background noise, either. It’s okay for casual listening but discerning listeners will not be pleased.
When it comes to the core smartphone tasks, the Ace holds up well, though. The onscreen keyboard is well laid-out and thanks to the responsive touchscreen, it keeps up with speedy typing (assuming you turn the predictive text on). In fact, it’s one of the best typing experiences we’ve encountered on a budget smartphone.
Camera Shots
The Samsung Galaxy Ace isn’t as spectacular as its name suggests but it is a competent budget smartphone. As ever, the Orange San Francisco makes for a compelling alternative thanks to its larger, higher resolution screen, but the Ace has a nicer design, faster processor and better camera.
LG Optimus Black is light. Weighing a featherweight 109g, it even reaches a skinny 6mm side edge curvature, and 9.2mm thickness at its deepest point, besting the Apple iPhone 4 by a millimetre. Some may feel the lightness cheapens the feel of this handset somewhat, but our jeans pockets were thankful and it was nice to tote around something that didn’t weigh us down.
The slightly metallic back cover is smooth, and the phone’s few soft keys are well-blended into the chassis, giving it a minimalist aesthetic. We have to say, however, that a few of the edges felt a little too rough, detracting from the overall feel of the phone.
Yet where it’s light and thin and joyous, it’s also somewhat long. This makes the LG Optimus Black a little uncomfortable for small hands to hold it portrait, although curved corners help it sit nicely in the paws in landscape orientation.
Features
The LG Optimus Black P970 is an Android 2.2.2 (Froyo) smartphone with a custom skinned UI. It is powered by a 1GHz processor and a PowerVR SGX530 GPU and has 512MB of RAM along with 2GB of internal memory expandable up to 32GB through microSD.
At 4-inches, the Optimus Black has one of the largest displays you will find on a phone that costs less than £300. Not only is the display large, but it also offers IPS technology which means better viewing angles and colour reproduction over standard LCD displays. The screen has a resolution of 480×800 pixels.
Connectivity needs are well taken care of by the Optimus Black with support for Wi-Fi and GPS. The LG also supports 3G with maximum theoretical download speeds of 7.2Mbps and maximum theoretical upload speeds of 5.76Mbps. Being an Android phone allows the Optimus Black to make use of Google Mobile Services apps and a whole host of apps downloadable from the Android Market. The phone also comes pre-installed with apps that take care of media sharing, social networking, viewing documents etc.
Design & Usability
LG has clearly put in a lot of work to make the Optimus Black’s UI look good and perform well. However, the experience is underwhelming since there is a degree of sluggishness that’s present throughout the phone. Menus open slightly slower than expected, apps launch after a pause and the touch input is short of being perfect.
LG has tweaked the default Android UI and has added plenty of extras and customisation options letting you change the layout of menus and add various additional widgets to the home-screens.
Thankfully, the touch input works well when it comes to typing in both portrait and landscape modes. The placement of hardware buttons felt a little strange to me as a right-hander. The volume control buttons are placed on the left side of the phone with a Google Voice Search button below. LG has given the Optimus Black a row of touch sensitive buttons below the screen which work nicely and also light up when in use. A neat design element is that the buttons glow blue as an indicator that they have been pressed.
Browsing & Multimedia
Looking at its 4-inch display you would think that Web browsing would be one of the LG Optimus Black’s strong features and you would be right. The large screen lets you see more real estate on websites. The browser supports Flash although browsing does become a bit sluggish when a Flash video is loading.
While the pictures shot with the Optimus Black will satisfy casual photographers, they do look dull. Also, contrast levels appeared off with shadows and darker areas looking very dark. Indoor images looked much better and the autofocus works quite well in helping you shoot subjects close to the lens and capture details. The Optimus Black’s flash is not all that powerful and the camera had focusing issues when shooting in dark environments.
The camera can also record 720p videos but the videos I shot looked terribly stretched. The problem doesn’t occur when you shoot in non-HD resolutions but I really hope LG takes care of this problem through a software update.
If you don’t have a dedicated MP3 player, the Optimus Black does more than enough to make sure you don’t miss one. Audio quality is loud, clear and most importantly, powerful. LG has also added plenty of EQ presets to let you tweak the way your music sounds. The external speaker is also surprisingly loud and clear and the FM radio app works really well. The Optimus Black maintains LG’s reputation as manufacturers of phones with the best music playback in the market.??The Optimus Black wasn’t able to play our 1080p test videos but it managed to play the 720p videos just fine. Videos look good on the Optimus’ screen but playback is a little choppy. The Optimus Black is able to play DivX/XviD files out of the box which is a bonus.
Camera
With only 5MP, the LG Optimus Black’s camera is about on a par with the Apple iPhone 4 but doesn’t reach the 8MP spec of the Samsung Galaxy S2. Yet somehow, that doesn’t seem to matter for daytime shots, as the images produced look gorgeous on the NOVA screen.
You can’t zoom in particularly far before the picture becomes pixelated, but looking at them as-taken they’re good enough for a 5MP phone camera. The colours are mainly true to life, except for a little washing out of the sky on an overcast day, and there are several shooting modes to play around with.
There are five different focus modes on the LG Optimus Black, including Auto, Macro and Face Tracking. You can steadily decrease the MP size, plus choose from several scene modes such as Landscape, Sports, Sunset and Night.
If you prefer fiddling with the manual settings, the camera allows you to change the White Balance (within reason) and the ISO (to 800). Then there are the shot modes (Shallow Focus, Beauty, Panorama and so on), geolocation and the volume rocker doubles as a zoom key. It’s more than enough for the amateur photographer to play around with.
APPLICATIONS
There are few pre-loaded apps on the LG Optimus Black that really stand out from the norm of Google apps and social networks on this handset – the only one really being the SmartShare DLNA streaming app mentioned in the Media section of this review.
We will say, though, that the pre-downloaded LG Social Networking apps aren’t worth it – download Twitter and Facebook for Android instead to get the full range of usability.
The LG Twitter app feels particularly dire if you’re used to the functions of Twitter’s official app. It’s slow to load and opens to your Twitter stream, which then counter-intuitively requires the use of the back button to get to your @ mentions. Nah, download the actual app instead. Much better.
The Optimus Black feels like a phone that has missed its window of opportunity. Had it been immediately available upon its announcement at CES in January, its omission of Gingerbread may have been considered forgivable, its unimpressive performance would have been less harshly judged in the light of what else was on the market at the time, and its thinness would have actually been a unique feature to promulgate. Now? Now we have phones with qHD resolution, multiple processing cores, and slim profiles to match and even better the Optimus Black. So why would you want to buy the Optimus Black with all the other options crowding the Android smartphone marketplace?
Nokia certainly knows how to impress its customers by introducing a social networking phone with a ‘message’. The Finnish company not only provides simple, easy-to-use features in its vibrant gadget but also plays it cards cleverly by tagging the phone in the inexpensive phones quota. It is a known fact that these days’ desktops are for the rural community whilst social messaging phones/high-end smartphones adorn their role as the latest device to poke the internet. The Nokia C3 plays this role well, with good screen coverage, QWERTY keyboard and a S40 interface to keep you well connected to your social networking circle. It is not a business phone, though it is somewhat a Blackberry copy in its design, yet it is meant to hit the target with its balanced scorecard of price and features. Whether it passes with excellence or misses the target depends on the user’s verdict and the sales are a proof of that.
Despite running on Nokia’s Series 40 platform, the C3 is unusually blessed with WiFi and Bluetooth. In addition to that it has a decent 2MP camera which is fine for taking web-destined pictures. If you expect anything more then you will be disappointed.
It also has a 3.5mm headphone slot for music listening on the top, a standard Nokia charger port, micro USB port and micro SDHC. It is bundled with a 2GB microSDHC card. The C3 has no support for 3G, but GPRS is fine with Opera Mini. It is powered by a Nokia BL-5J battery (1320mAh) which is fine for up to 800 hours of standby time, according to Nokia anyway.
The display is a standard 2.4″ screen with QVGA resolution, and performs well outdoors. Mind, we haven’t been getting plenty of sunshine lately so I was unable to test the display under full sunlight glare – but will update when and if we ever get our summer back.
Below the screen resides two soft keys, two applications keys and a call and disconnect (which also doubles as power on/off) buttons. Below those is the QWERTY keypad. The keypad is similar in feel to the more expensive E72, though the space bar is also far larger (like the E71). Commonly used punctuations are easily accessible.
Series 40 is a rather dated platform and a step down the ladder from the more versatile and mainstream Symbian Series 60 smartphone platform. It does not support multi-tasking, but it works well despite its rather dated look and use of large fonts. Opening applications can be a very slow process. The problem is Nokia should be pushing the ‘smarter’ S60 onto lower end phones like this.
Nokia markets the C3 as a messaging phone for youngsters. With the QWERTY keypad, typing messages is a breeze. It has support for the most popular messaging platforms such as SMS, email and popular instant messaging platforms such as Yahoo! Messenger, MSN via Ovi Chat. There is also Opera Mini 4 installed for all your web browsing need.
As social networking booms, Nokia has included a Communities application for Twitter and Facebook. It is a J2MEapplication, so loading or starting it up can take a while and it does not run in the background. It does integrate itself neatly on the homescreen though, but you will have to launch the app in order to reply.
As a Twitter client, Communities has some good features, but personally I feel that the C3 is too slow to be of any use. It takes a long time to scroll through messages and replies. Anyone who follows more than 50 twitter users will likely find it a chore and would be better off downloading Twibble or using dabr.co.uk instead.
Kalli Purie has struggled with her weight since childhood and has finally found a weight she is happy with. Mostly. The diets featured here are structured rather like episodes in her life, full of characters, anecdotes and juicy nuggets of weight wisdom – from surya namaskars set to Bollywood beats to drastic coconut water diets, from a dark experiment with bulimia to a love affair with the self-concocted champagne diet.
In this candid tell-all, Kalli looks at weight related complexes, myths and dilemmas straight in the eye and tells us not just what to do but how to do it. Kilo by kilo.
The story of weight lost and a life gained, Confessionsof a SerialDieter will make you believe you can do it, whether it’s losing those stubborn last three kilos or chasing your dream!
‘Kalli has demystified the process of living a healthy, fit and
life. People’s lifestyles have changed, dramatically
associated health challenges. This book is a candid
of surmounting weightloss challenges, lucidly
illustrated through Kalli’s own experiments and experiences.
Life is indeed about choices and decisions and Kalli gracefully
us to some of the most important ones. This book will
inspire anyone who is in the pursuit of change!’ Nita Ambani
‘My weight has always been a battle. It’s something that is
very close to my heart. Being thin is about so much more
than just your weight. For no matter how thin I get, inside I’ll
always be a fat girl. Only a fellow dieter can understand that.’ Sonam Kapoor
Weight loss is not just about shedding kilos, it’s an emotional
journey. Dieticians don’t get that, Serial Dieter does.’ Sonakshi Sinha
‘Reading Serial Dieter was like reading my own life story.
This is the first diet book that gives tips that may not be
approved by dieticians but are real. Tried and tested. It takes
one dieter to know another. And she is one helluva dieter.
She has done 43 diets, I have done 40, so the coffee hamper
for now goes to her.’ Karan Johar
7 Secrets from Hindu Calendar by Devdutt Pattanaik
Hindu Calendar Art may be gaudy and kitsch, but it is the most modern and democratic expression of a mythic imagery that once adorned temple walls and palm leaf manuscripts. They speak a language that is indifferent to rationality. It is the language of a people’s faith. In this book, Dr. Devdutt Pattanaik, India’s renowned mythologist, translates this language and reveals an ancient Indian truth that will certainly impact your life.
7 Secrets from Hindu Calendar Art is perhaps the first organised attempt to catalogue this art form and to decipher an extremely popular expression that is indifferent to rationality. Thus the book is not just about the visual expression – it is much beyond. It uses the art as a metaphor to unveil myths, tales, logic and the irrational.
Divinity is formless but we require forms to comprehend it. The author argues that though every form is incomplete and no single form is capable of encompassing totality – through these several incomplete forms of Gods and Goddesses we at least get a sense of the entire notion of divine. The book features many or most of such forms. For instance, the book is not just about the ‘usual suspects’ — Shiva, Ganesha, Vishnu or Shakti in the book. You will also find vivid description of lesser known deities such as Khandoba, the turmeric loving multi-faceted God much revered in Maharashtra or of Bahuchara whose devotees not only include men and women but eunuchs too.
The book has little gems scattered all over within its narrative. At one place it comments on the hierarchy of Gods and at another it goes on to offer logic on why Brahma, the creator, is not mass worshiped. It explains how Brahma forgot the reason of his creation and that made him unworthy of worship in relative context to the other two Gods in the Trinity – Shiva and Vishnu. The book is full of tales within tales. Sample this: Vishnu is in debt and he can not return to his heavenly abode till he is debt free. And why did Vishnu need to borrow? He, in his earthly avatar, was wooing Padmavati who asked for a huge bridal price that led Vishnu to take a huge loan from Kubera, the treasurer of Goddess Shri. Devotees offer him wealth to help him repay his debt in the serene setting atop the seven hills where he stays in the form of Tirupati Balaji.
The explanation of each element of the visuals – and book has a picture plate on every even-numbered page – is another high point of the book. Some of these pictures are the ones that most Hindus have grown with and to discover so much more about the same pictures gives one a feeling which is a strange mix of nostalgia, intrigue and bewilderment. The author first states the obvious as to who is who in the picture and then goes about expanding the symbolism. This is the high-point of this truly amazing book. It is here one gets Hindu mythology insights in a manner that is enchanting and the experience is truly enriching. The author calls these insights as ‘secrets’ and classifies them in seven chapters as secrets of the more popular or one should say ‘lead-Gods’. You have chapters such as Ganesha’s Secrets where all his family members and their avatars are dealt with. Then there is Devi’s Secrets, Narayan’s Secrets and so on. So the next time you want to know why Goddess Kamakshi is surrounded by sugarcane or why Hindus believe that the human society is an artificial construct – refer to this book.
Devdutt Pattanaik has been writing on mythology for a while now. Other than his regular newspaper columns he has penned books such as The Pregnant King, The Book of Ram and The Book of Kali among others.7 Secrets from Hindu Calendar Art is arguably the most well-researched book of this medico. The book has a user-friendly layout and Pattanaik consciously uses black and white renditions of calendar art for he is apprehensive that the colours may distract the reader. This is a debatable claim for by the time you finish reading the book you realize that the narrative is so over-powering that it could have easily withstood the threat from the use of colour.
