Sony Ericsson always remains a highlight when it releases any new member of XPERIA series smartphones. Now, here is another luxury smartphone for you – Sony Ericsson XPERIA Pureness. It features transparent greyscale display with scratch resistant surface, quad-band GSM support, perfect audio quality, smart dialing and 3G support with HSUPA as well as HSDPA. Its display does not give some unique feature with its low-resolution, but limits other highlights of the XPERIA Pureness. It not only limits the available physical space inside the cell phone, but makes Web browsing a bit useless. It is important to mention here that the XPERIA Pureness runs with the pureness concept and leaves all the distracting features behind. The perfect metaphor for the Pureness is its transparent screen. We want to appreciate the Swedish-Japanese company for such a great engineering in the Pureness. 1.8 inches greyscale (monochrome) transparent display of Sony  [...]

Motorola Backflip comes with a 3.1 inch HVGA display and gives a resolution of 320x480 pixels. The display isn’t sharp or vibrant as compared to other phones like Nexus One or Motorola Droid. The screen is also a bit small which makes a difficult to view Web pages and e-mails. You cannot ‘pinch’ the screen to zoom in and out of photos but you can double tap to zoom in at a point. The built in accelerometer doesn’t work in all applications but its there when you need it for apps like maps and browser. You get a better picture in the landscape mode. It is good to have an accelerometer but the lag is frustrating. Behind the display, you get a Backtrack navigation pad which is used to scroll through your photos, home screens and applications. All you need to do is scroll your finger through the pad. Motorola said that this hardware is put there in order to give you an unobstructed view of the screen. We can’t say swiping finger on the screen  [...]

Nokia E55 has a 2.4 inch display which supports 16 million colors. It is both colorful as well as vibrant. The screen comes with light sensing feature which automatically adjusts the brightness display according to the ambience light. Adjustable features on the Home screen include theme, background image, backlight timer, font size and menu layout. The E55, just like most E series phones comes with Personal and Business mode which you can use to switch according to the situation. The latter gives you work related tools on the and the former is relates to multimedia applications. This is a bit superfluous, because you can always get access to the apps regardless of the mode but some people might like it. Below the display, you get a navigation array which is made up of Talk/End keys, Back key, shortcut buttons for Calendar, Home, and E-mail, and finally the four way toggle with OK button in the center. Below this series of buttons there is the semi  [...]

Sony Ericsson Naite has a 2.2 inches display that gives a resolution of 240x320 pixels along with support for 262,144 colors. We were impressed with the improved saturation and sharpness of the screen. You can easily read the screen even in 70 brightness. You cannot alter the size of the font but animated themes and wallpapers can be changed.  The navigation pad is made up of two soft keys and a four way navigation button with OK key in the center. Apart from that, there are dedicated keys for locking the dial pad, silencing the phone, and popping up shortcuts. Navigation is responsive and quick. The keyboard has spacious buttons and the backlighting too is good but we found the keys were bit tiny even for the modest size fingers. Sony Ericsson Naite’s address book can hold 1000 contacts and a single entry can hold seven numbers and an email ID. There is no feature of grouping your callers but you can make a call conference with up to 5 people  [...]

Samsung Propel SGH-A767 is the latest offering by AT&T after Pantech Matrix and both are by products of the text messaging craze that are taking over the entire world. It has a slide out full size QWERTY keyboard but this handset is not a smartphone. Samsung Propel SGH-A767 is yours for $79.95 and comes with a two year contract and after a mail-in rebate. The display is 2.2 inches big and supports only 65k colors which is short of what other competitors are offering. The screen is decent but the colors are dull and look muted. Menu interface is the standard one which we are used to seeing on Samsung phones and you can adjust menu style, brightness, dialing font (background color, size, color and type) and the backlight time. Below the display, there is the navigation array which consists of End/Power and Talk keys, Clear key, dedicated text message key, two soft keys and a round toggle with OK button in the middle. You can press the round button  [...]

Nokia continues its tradition of offering good quality basic and simple phone centered towards simple communication by launching new – Nokia 2660. Like previous Nokia 2320, the 2660 does not have latest features for messages and calls, and a camera. Despite of its basic design, the 2660 phone features Bluetooth and voice recorder. The overall call quality is passable, but phone is slow. Nokia 2660 comes in free with two-year contract from AT&T. Moreover, you can also buy the 2660 unlocked for $149 and use AT&T GoPhone prepaid service. 2.5mm headset jack and propriety charger jack are located on the top of Nokia 2660. Again, we prefer to have standard 3.5mm headset jack and a combined micro-USB charger/PC jack. The 2660 also does not have dedicated volume rocker, but you can use navigation toggle for adjusting the volume on call. Small external monochrome display sits on the lid and has blue and white resolution of 96×68 pixels. It shows  [...]

Motorola had announced to launch its Cliq XT – smartphone at Mobile World Congress 2010. This smartphone will be the fifth Android phone in the U.S. for both Motorola and T-Mobile. At first look, the XT looks revamped Motorola Cliq. However, it offers sleeker design, improved onscreen keyboard by Swype, connected and full-featured media player and much better performance than Backflip. Motorola Cliq XT has two drawbacks: one is small screen size and next it runs on Google Android 1.5. Obviously, the Cliq XT is better alternative for users who can manage working on onscreen keyboard and need much sleeker smartphone than others. T-Mobile has not yet released any pricing information, but supposed to show off the pricing details in this month. 3.1 inches capacitive touch-screen LCD display of Motorola Cliq XT has HVGA resolution of 320×480 pixels. It is quite similar to that of the Backflip and the Cliq. The LCD is clear and bright sufficiently,  [...]

>Thumbs Up: Beyond E-Tech Duet W002 offers dual SIM card slots and average features. Thumbs Down: It is still ill-conceived and depicts little concern about usability and originality. It features sluggish performance and average call quality. Inside the Trunk: Technology: GSM Band: Quad-band of GSM 850/900/1800/1900 Phone Design: Candy Bar Caller ID: Yes Other Features: T-flash card slot, Dual SIM, touch-screen, EDGE The Whiz Kid Speaks: Beyond E-Tech Duet W002 offers dual SIM card. It has 71MB internal memory and micro-SD expansion slots that accepts up to 8GB cards. 2.8 inches resistive touch-screen LCD display has a resolution of QVGA resolution of 320×240 pixels. Beyond E-Tech Duet W002 offers 1.3-megapixel camera that features video recording. Supported wireless interfaces are Bluetooth and IEEE 802.11 b/g. The basic feature set of Beyond E-Tech Duet W002 includes 12 polyphonic  [...]