Kiwi Mobile Deals

LG GW620 InTouch Max

admin — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 21:16:42 +0000

The LG GW620 InTouch Max is the first Android phone from LG. You can customize your phone with a series of apps to suit your personal needs, ranging from news and weather apps, to games, and your favorite social networking apps including Facebook and Twitter. It is equipped with a slide out 5-line QWERTY keypad just like a pocket PC and a decent array of buttons as well.
The handset is slightly thicker than most of the touch screen devices, measuring 109 x 54.5 x 15.9mm, it features a 3-inch HVGA resistive touch screen display on the top, with three buttons across the bottom (home, back and menu).
The is a power and lock button on the top next to the 3.5mm headphone jack which is very uncommon in most of LG phones. On the sides of the phone there are dedicated camera and media buttons and a volume control. MicroSD card and Micro-USB slots lie under plastic flaps which have a neat and tidy finishing. But with the frequent need of recharging perhaps this was not the best choice.
Although it provides a choice for buyers of Android phones it runs an old version 1.5 of the Android which is pretty much outdated. There is an option to engage a touch of LG with a bar of icons on the homepage, and a grouped menu, but as you get three customizable homepages to litter with shortcuts and widgets, you probably don’t need to go there. A sweet feature that LG have included is the ability to tag the pictures of people once face recognition kicks in you can simply contact a person by touching their picture. The GW620 is very much user friendly when it comes to emailing and supports for push email. In the category of media, the dedicated music button will run the music player so you get fast access to your music. The formats supported are mainly MP3, AMR, AAC, AAC+, WAV, and WMA. The music widget will rest on your homepage and let you control the player giving the option to pause or skip tracks. The built in speaker is small and so the music does not plays that loud.
Video playback supports MPEG4, DivX, and WMV. The video capture offered by the 5-megapixel camera on the rear is just satisfactory. It comes with a flash and under suitable conditions it can provide some nice pictures.
This phone has its ups and downs like the resistive screen is poor, the phone is chunky and while the keyboard is good, the on-screen option isn’t in the same league, and that’s a real deal breaker for some buyers.

HTC Tattoo

admin — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 21:15:40 +0000

After the success of the Hero, HTC’s latest Android phone is considered an affordable option for people on a tight budget. HTC Tattoo comes with a ton of options to customize the look of the phone as you like it. You can also design new appearances for the phone according to your personality and design it online.
HTC Tattoo is a compact Smartphone so you may think that the smaller size would have made the handset easier to use with one hand. To be completely honest this scenario is not applicable in reality. Due to the rounded lower part of the body there is no possibility for a firm grip on the handset. Combined with the slithery plastic it’s made of it’s very much likely to accidently drop the phone. The upside on the body is that it has a firm build and even removing the back panel is a hard task.
To keep the price low HTC has made some sacrifices when it comes to this handset. The screen of the phone is 2.8 inches as compared with most Android phones having 3.2 inches and it also comes with a lower native resolution i.e. QVGA instead of HVGA. On top of that the touch input technology introduced here is resistive and not capacitive. This definitely messes up the whole users’ experience.
The call quality is good but the battery life is disappointing even with a smaller screen. The Tattoo’s contacts application called ‘People’ is quite impressive. Users can add multiple phone numbers and email addresses, as well as multiple different instant messaging (IM) accounts and postal addresses. Even birthday and anniversary information can be included. Another nice feature in this application is the option to send all calls from a particular contact directly to voicemail.
HTC Tattoo on the whole is a great little device if compared with its price. It comes with endless customization options and widgets/apps that can be downloaded from Android market. In their efforts to create a more affordable Android handset HTC have had to take some shortcuts. Surprisingly, Wi-Fi, GPS, and HSDPA are all still on-board, despite the cost-cutting. The area where the cost cutting had some effect was the screen of the phone and text addicts may hay a lot of complaints due to this. The camera result is just average and not much was expected here in the first place. It’s a good opportunity for people who want a low priced Android phone and I would recommend them to put in some effort to discover about HTC Tattoo.

HTC Legend

admin — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 21:14:44 +0000

It may be an over statement, but its true that the new HTC Legend is the best Android handset to date is not just a simple upgrade of the previous HTC Hero. This statement is backed up by the immense features and the stylish design of this phone. The device is crafted from a single piece of aluminum, making it super light and perfectly formed to fit in your hand. The feel of the phone gives a royal feeling. The battery cover is manufactured from soft touch plastic, and also accommodates the antenna. The problem faced because of the battery cover is that inserting the SIM card and the Micro SD card has become bit of a challenge.
At the face of the HTC Legend is a 320×480 pixels, 3.2-inch AMOLED capacitive touch screen. The one thing that is annoying is that once you run camera it prompts you to insert Micro SD card and would not let you take a picture unless you do so. HTC has implemented Android 2.1 in the Legend which benefits from Android’s multi touch functionality switched on. It’s fun to pinch to zoom in the browser and pinch on the home screen to bring up the handy page that displays your entire home screens in miniature and a single tap on one to bring the page up.
It offers a social networking app named FriendStream which is same as Motorola’s MotoBlur that allows access to all of the common social networking platforms like Twitter and Facebook. Even though it’s a brilliant concept, it is very slow, especially when scrolling through the widget. This is mainly due to the fact that it’s permanently trying to update, so your internet connection may have a huge impact on this.
Instead of a trackball which was installed on Hero, Legend comes with an optical track button which makes things easier and makes most of the scrolling error free. Other buttons on the front of the screen include a home key, menu button that changes according to the accessed application, a back key and search button. The search button searches unlike iphone OS searches across the phone and online as well. The 5-megapixel camera on the HTC Legend takes highly saturated shots. There’s also an issue with photos taken in direct sunlight.
One minor bump with Legend is that like every other Smartphone it provides a short battery life. It has even beaten iphone in the poor battery life. Improvement is noticeable one 3g is turned off but that would stop the updating of the widgets.

HTC Desire

admin — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 21:13:57 +0000

HTC Desire is the next step for the Google Nexus One phone. Although they both look the same but then first thing you would notice is the optical track pad that replaced the trackball. As observed on HTC Legend it is a much more efficient way to scroll through the handset. A fundamental addition to the HTC Desire is HTC Sense which offers complete the extra widgets, Helicopter View that allows you to view mini versions of all your home screens in one place, a single tap on anyone would bring it up to full size.
The exact HTC Desire release should be on 1st of April in Europe. It has a 1 GHz processor by Snapdragon and a 3.7 inch AMOLED touch screen capacitive with multi-touch support. The handset has 480 x 800 WVGA resolution and runs on Android 2.1 with HTC Sense. It has 512MB ROM + 576MB RAM and Micro SD expandable memory up to 32 GB. It comes with all of the basic connectivity features like Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, 3G, GPRS and EDGE.
HTC Desire has 5.0 megapixel camera with auto-focus, LED flash and face recognition and a 3.5 mm stereo audio jack. GPS is also available along FM Radio, G-Sensor, Digital compass, Proximity Sensor and an Ambient Light Sensor.
The display is quite a bit higher in terms of quality than that of the previous ‘standard’ displays. Due to the fact that it runs on Android OS version 2.1 it is therefore an up-to-date Smartphone and of course the Desire Smartphone also uses the HTC Sense technology. It is neatly finished at a high level. The AMOLED multi-touch screen brings in extensive possibilities such as zooming in on certain parts. On top of that various sensors ensure that the screen display can automatically switch to landscape or portrait mode. The menu is kept simple and provides fast access to desired applications. The agility with which the HTC Desire Smartphone performs certain tasks is unbelievable. Heavier apps run smoothly and no delays are witnessed.
The very first impression this phone gives is positive. It is simply an Android Smartphone to consider. Anyone looking for a new Android phone should put in the effort to learn about HTC Desire

Google Android Phones

admin — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 21:13:07 +0000

Android operating system by Google is a mobile phone platform that is currently available on a wide variety of mobile handsets. It uses a modified version of the Linux Kernel and all of its applications would be written using java. The operating system is resting upon three main pillars that makes Android phones what they currently are. They are the operating system, the middleware and the applications. Operating system is the basic platform on which everything runs, the middleware acts as a chain of communication between application and network allowing them to communicate with one another and finally the applications are the different programs that the phone will actually run. It is basically an open source platform which means anyone can write an application for Android. The fact that it is an open source platform invites plenty of developers towards it and just like Apple’s app store there would be a ton of applications for the Android handset users. Unlike the Apple’s iphone an Android phone can run on any network without the complicated process of jail-breaking and retaining the warranty of the handset.
The Android platform is adaptable to larger, VGA, 2D graphics library, 3D graphics library based on OpenGL ES 1.0 specifications, and traditional Smartphone layouts. SQlite database software is used for the storage purposes. Connectivity technologies supported by Android are GSM/EDGE, CDMA, EV-DO, UMTS, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and Wimax. Web browser available is based on the open-source Web Kit application framework. Android phones can support almost all of the media formats which are supported by other handsets. All Android smartphones are touch-screen devices but some not all have hardware keyboards, too. The desktop is made of certain number of screens which vary among different models which are further customizable according to the users’ specific liking. Apps and widgets can be dragged to the home screen that may provide news updates and/or search boxes. Users can access menus in different ways among different handsets. Although the software varies from mobile to mobile but it fails to provide a sleek interface unlike its rivals iPhone Os and Palm’s webOS. Still an effort is being done to improve that and a lot has changed since the release of the first version of the platform.
Not all of the available applications are compatible with all versions of Android platform which creates a little confusion and secondly different versions of the platform offer different features. The bottom line is the although Android phones lack the elegance its rival provide it has the advantage as it comes in various handsets and offers customization that its rivals cannot compete with.

Acer Liquid

admin — Fri, 17 Sep 2010 21:11:39 +0000

One feature of Acer Liquid that some users might not be pleased with is that it’s fully a touch screen and has no keyboard or actual buttons. But once compared with the Apple iphone it does not seems that bad. Acer being the market leader in the fields of laptop and computer manufacturing it comes with no surprise that this phone has a powerful hardware installed.
The 3.5-inch display means the dimensions of the handset come in at 115 x 64 x 12.75mm, which is close to the dimensions of the Apple iPhone and the weight of 135g is actually a plus point for it as it feels like holding a premium device in your hand.
At the back of the phone is a 5-megapixel camera without a built in flash. The device has internal memory of just 256MB which arouses the need for a spacious Micro SD card. The homepage is a simple 3-pager, offering left and right swipes from the centre and a few widgets just to get you started. Not everything is perfect some delays were witnessed in the running of the applications and on many occasions it is observed that the blank screen stays on for too long of a period.
Acer Social Networking lets you to add social network information to your contacts: Flickr, Facebook, YouTube, Picasa and Twitter. The integration provide by HTC and Motorola is much more user friendly than that provided by Acer. Although you can still download apps from the Android market according to your networking needs but there is no default app to do so.
The keyboard has not been changed too much and is still basically the as found on rest of the droid phones. The predictive text option has a bug a does not works that well. The browser got the same level of attention and not much has been added instead of fast browsing speed. Camera performance is up to the expectations you should have from a 5 megapixel phone and the auto focus works fine enough.
The picture of Acer Liquid, Acer Liquid features, and the inclusion of the Snapdragon and Google Android 1.6 donut technology along with the other Acer Liquid info will have you excited for this great phone. It covers the essentials like HSDPA, GPS, Wi-Fi, and Bluetooth. But still not a lot of new features have been brought to market by Acer.