Nokia proved it was back in the smartphone game when it launched the Lumia 800 last year. But can its Lumia 710 gain the attention of U.S. consumers? Many would argue that Nokia should have decided to launch the Lumia 800 to make a bigger splash in a market that has long forgotten the Finnish smartphone maker. But the Lumia 710 is affordable — it only costs $50 with a new two-year contract — and it’s also powerful. It’s not as feature-rich as the Lumia 800, but can it still compete with other smartphones in its price range? My full review follows after the break.

Hardware

The Lumia 710 looks and feels like a decent device. The back cover is plastic but it has a nice soft-touch rubber feel and the entire face is glossy black, although a white version is also available from T-Mobile. There are three hardware buttons below the phone’s 3.7-inch display, which actually isn’t that impressive. While the curved glass AMOLED ClearBlack display on the Lumia 800 was very impressive, the standard ClearBlack display on T-Mobile’s Lumia 710 is not. Colors are washed out and the brightness is not where it needs to be, but this was likely required in order to keep the cost of the phone down.

The volume controls and a camera quick-launch key are in easy reach on the right side of the phone and there is a power button, a microUSB port and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top of the device. The back is home to a 5-megapixel camera and a single LED flash.

Under its hood, the Lumia 710 is powered by a 1.4GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and is equipped with 512MB of RAM, a 1,300 mAh battery and 8GB of storage. As is typical with other Windows Phone 7.5 devices, you can’t add more storage using a microSD card, which is unfortunate if you’re like me and prefer a phone with a bit more memory.

Like the iPhone 4S and the Lumia 800, the Lumia 710 uses a microSIM card that pops in under the battery as opposed to on the top of the device, as it does on the Lumia 800.

While it’s far from a deal-breaker, the most upsetting point about the hardware is that T-Mobile decided not to offer the device in the various colors that are available on international carriers. I think Nokia really could have turned heads if it launched a yellow, pink, green or blue Lumia 710 in the United States, but instead the Lumia 710 will sit camouflaged on store shelves next to other black and white smartphones.

Software

The Lumia 710 runs Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango), Microsoft’s latest mobile operating system. I wrote about Windows Phone 7.5 in great detail in September when it launched, so we’ll stick to discussing what Nokia has done to the phone.

Nokia, unlike other manufacturers, has an agreement with Microsoft that allows it to customize the phone in a number of ways. You won’t find anything intrusive, but Nokia did add its own free GPS navigation software and its own Nokia Maps application, which I like better than Bing Maps. It’s not incredibly accurate, however. A search by name for a bar a block away from me didn’t turn up any results, for example.

As I said in my aforementioned overview of Windows Phone 7.5, I really, really love the Windows Phone 7.5 operating system. It’s one of the cleanest and most intuitive mobile operating systems on the market today, and for that reason it should be a top choice for first-time smartphone buyers or anyone who wants the functionality of a smartphone without complicated menus or settings.

I love the live tiles on the home screen as well, specifically how foursquare shows the leaderboard and how my avatar jumps around the Xbox Live tile. I also enjoy the fluidity and speed of the entire OS. My biggest gripe overall is that there’s a lack of applications for Windows Phone right now, but the Windows Phone Marketplace is growing every day and recently just surpassed the 50,000-app milestone.

Camera

The Lumia 710 packs a 5-megapixel camera and it’s not the greatest sensor I’ve used. The pictures were mediocre at best and not near as good as the shots we snapped with the Lumia 800, which has an 8-megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics. The camera is capable of recording 720p HD video and it was satisfactory. There was a bit of blurriness from time to time, but otherwise it was OK. The device also lacks a front-facing camera for video chat, which is supported on other Windows Phone 7.5 phones such as the Samsung Focus S, Samsung Focus Flash and HTC Titan.

Call Quality / Data

The Lumia 710 supports T-Mobile’s 14.4Mbps HSPA+ “4G” network in the United States. Data speeds were decent in New York City, but they were nothing compared to AT&T or Verizon’s 4G LTE networks. Using the http://dslreports.com/mspeed speed test, my download speeds averaged between 1.1 Mbps and 1.26 Mbps with the device reporting a full signal. That’s on a par with most 3G networks.

Calls placed on the Lumia 710 were pretty solid in New York City. I wasn’t blown away by the call quality, but I didn’t have any real problems with it either. The speakers were satisfactory during a phone call with the speakerphone turned on, but my caller could easily tell when I was using speakerphone.

Battery

Windows Phone 7.5 has been praised for its solid battery life in the past and the Lumia 710 wasn’t an exception. It’s equipped with a 1,300 mAh battery, which is a bit smaller than the 1,450 mAh battery inside the Lumia 800, but it lasted two full days with moderate usage and was able to idle for many more. Overall, I’m impressed with the battery life and think it’s better than most smartphones on the market today.

Conclusion

The Lumia 710 isn’t as exciting as its big brother, the Lumia 800. Nokia announced a flagship device that is, in many ways, a game changer for the company moving forward. And yet even still, T-Mobile decided to launch the company’s lower end device, which surely won’t turn as many heads. Worse, it decided to launch the phone without a wide color selection that could have made the device stand out more in public. It just seems like Nokia and T-Mobile missed an opportunity to really hit the U.S. market with a bang, but perhaps Verizon Wireless or AT&T will do that with Nokia’s expected 4G LTE device.

No, there’s nothing inherently wrong with the Lumia 710. It offers decent battery life, fair data speeds and a really solid hardware design. In fact, even its letdowns are justified by its affordable $50 price point, and the Lumia 710 is absolutely not aimed at seasoned smartphone users. Instead, this phone is aimed squarely at feature phone users that T-Mobile hopes to turn into smartphone owners. The handset is reliable and easy-to-use, and I highly recommend the Lumia 710 to first-time smartphone buyers.

Amazon has been a leader in the eBook reader space since it first introduced the Kindle eReader in November 2007. At that point in time, the Kindle had a 6-inch E Ink display that supported just four shades of gray, it included 250MB of storage that could accommodate about 200 eBooks, and it retailed for $399. For the first six months or so, Amazon couldn’t keep the device in stock — it was a smash hit.

Since then, Kindles have gotten thinner and lighter, and the current-generation model features a dramatically improved E Ink Pearl display and 2GB of storage. Amazon’s Kindle can now be had for as little as $79. A second model with a touchscreen display and twice the memory starts at just $99, and its battery lasts for up to two months on a single charge. Amazon doesn’t share sales volumes of its Kindle devices but the company is widely believed to be among the top eReader vendors in the world as it teeters between the No.1 and No.2 spots alongside Barnes & Noble.

But eReaders will only take Amazon so far.

Amazon has been a leader in the online retail space for quite some time, and its line of Kindle eReaders represents its first foray into the hardware game. EBooks are big business for Amazon, but its more recent service additions have also been gaining traction. With new options for purchasing and streaming music and movies, customers had to rely on third party devices — computers, connected TVs, set top boxes and smartphones — to consume this new wave of Amazon content. But why not make it all available on a single Amazon-branded device that picks up where the Kindle left off?

The tablet market posed an amazing opportunity for Amazon. I can’t even recall the last time a market segment saw so much hype and so few success stories, and Amazon identified an opportunity to succeed where others were failing. Instead of building hardware that merely acted as a platter on which to serve the same software countless other vendors were unsuccessfully banking on, Amazon would build an end-to-end experience that covered hardware, software and content. After all, the only other vendor whose tablet offering addresses all three of these crucial areas of the user experience seems to be doing pretty well in the tablet space it redefined in early 2010.

Instead of setting out to build an iPad killer, Amazon set out to build a Kindle Fire.

The term “iPad killer” seems to describe any tablet launched by a popular vendor that cannot draw traffic to a news site unless said site includes a mention of Apple’s iPad in the headlines of stories written about said tablet. That’s really the only discernable link I’ve found between all of the slates that have been deemed iPad killers thus far. Another attribute most of them share, unfortunate though it may be, is that they don’t sell particularly well. There have been a few notable exceptions but in general, it seems these tablets are not well received by consumers or by enterprise customers.

If an iPad killer is a tablet that doesn’t grab people’s attention and often doesn’t sell particularly well, then the Kindle Fire is most certainly not an iPad killer.

Leading up to Amazon’s Kindle Fire, media tablets had for the most part been ill-conceived devices that were seemingly rushed out the door in an effort to capitalize on the hype surrounding the iPad. This strategy is not uncommon in business but in this particular case, companies forgot a key ingredient that drives competition: differentiation. With high price points, similar hardware and lackluster first-generation software (Honeycomb was Google’s first attempt at a tablet OS), the bulk of the iPad’s competition had very little to offer the common consumer that might distinguish it from the iPad in a positive way.

The Kindle Fire is a different beast.

Amazon attacked the tablet market on two fronts. First, it offered differentiation. Google’s Android operating system powers the Fire, but one wouldn’t know it to look at the device. Amazon used the open source Android OS as the framework on which it built its own unique user experience. It will continue its own development of the platform independent of Google’s future builds, and it maintains its own ecosystem outside of Google’s. Amazon has its own app store and its own suite of services.

The other piece to the Kindle Fire puzzle is pricing. At $199, Amazon’s tablet is $300 cheaper than the entry-level iPad and $630 less expensive than the 64GB model with embedded 3G. This was a very smart move by Amazon. The company will release more expensive models in the future — BGR exclusively reported preliminary details surrounding a 10-inch model due to be released next year — but Amazon’s first effort hits an amazing price point that creates a new space in the tablet market. It doesn’t compete with the iPad any more than a 32-inch flat panel Vizio TV competes with a 60-inch Samsung model. It’s a completely different animal.

I have read a number of Kindle Fire reviews — and there were plenty to choose from — that went to great lengths to compare Amazon’s tablet to the iPad. While these comparisons sometimes made for compelling reads and even more compelling headlines, they were not very useful. These devices are both tablets, yes, but to liken one to the other is as useful as likening a Mercedes S Class to a Hyundai Sonata. Both vehicles will get you from A to B, but in reality they serve very different purposes.

The S Class is designed to attract a certain type of customer. It offers utility, luxury and a driving experience that is the result of decades of evolution and many tens of millions of dollars in research and development. The S Class is designed to be seen. It outclasses and outperforms much of the competition, but it is about form as much as it is function. It is also assembled from high-end parts and materials, and it carries a relatively steep price tag to match. You see hundreds of them everywhere you go in metropolitan areas, but unless you have expendable income to throw around, you probably won’t buy one yourself.

The Sonata is designed to make a well-styled, capable sedan accessible to the masses. It looks more refined and performs better than other cars in its price range, and it also offers standard features that competing models do not. Even still, it doesn’t pretend to be an S Class and it most certainly doesn’t set out to kill the S Class.

The Sonata’s body isn’t quite as sleek and sophisticated as the Mercedes sedan, and it doesn’t come with nearly as many standard features. Its interior is also much more modest, forgoing supple leather and expensive woods in favor of more pedestrian materials. It won’t accelerate as quickly, it won’t corner as surely and it probably won’t turn any heads. It is a phenomenal value, however, and it touts a build quality and features that are anything but common on such an affordable car.

After using the device for about a week and a half now, I believe Amazon’s Kindle Fire will succeed where others have failed. The hardware is good but not great. The soft-touch materials are comfortable in the hand but the 4,400 mAh battery that hides within the device makes it a bit too heavy for prolonged reading without resting the tablet on a table or leg. The software is good but not great. It has a nice, simple interface that a wide range of users will be able to navigate easily, but it is not refined. The performance is good but not great. Many functions are fluid, as is game play and video playback, but there are often of hiccups and stutters while opening certain apps and performing other functions.

What did you expect? It’s a Sonata.

At $200, the Kindle Fire is a fantastic buy. It is intuitive and capable, and the integration with Amazon services is well-done. The home screen is divided into four sections: first is a status pane across the top that displays notifications, the time, Wi-Fi status and battery charge, and it provides access to settings. A menu section follows beneath, allowing users to navigation between different core features such as the book reader, music player, apps menu and video player. Next is a large area that lists all recent apps and books in a cover flow-like stream. Finally, there is a favorites section near the bottom where users can pin their most frequently accessed apps and books.

Each integrated app — Books, Music, Video and so on — is split into two sections that can be toggled at the top of the screen. The first is “Cloud,” which displays a list of icons on the shelves beneath it that represent all of the user’s content stored on Amazon’s servers. The second is “Device,” which lists locally stored content. There is also a link to Amazon’s store in the top right corner of each page. While it is all too easy to spend money on the Kindle Fire, I love how well Amazon’s services are integrated into each app.

While on the front page of the Books app, a single tap on an icon opens the book of my choice while a tap on the always-visible store link lets me search, browse and purchase books with ease. The Music app lists all of my content available for playback, and then another Store link takes me to Amazon’s music shop where I can purchase albums or individual tracks. The Video app offers a similar experience, but it also offers integration with Amazon Prime video streaming, Amazon’s Netflix-like service that provides unlimited access to streaming movies and TV shows. Don’t expect to find many new blockbuster movies in there, but the catalog is deep enough to provide a decent range of content.

Amazon’s apps page adheres to the same intuitive format. Apps are organized across wood shelves and a link to the Amazon Appstore can be found in the top right corner. Users won’t have access to all of the content found in Google’s Android Marketplace, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Like Apple’s iOS App Store, the Marketplace is packed with garbage. Amazon’s curated approach is appreciated and there is more than enough great content available. I also love that Amazon offers one new paid app for free each day. It makes checking the app store on a daily basis habitual, thus encouraging browsing and ultimately benefiting developers.

The web browser is another bright spot for the Kindle Fire. Amazon’s Silk browser is impressively quick thanks to technology that offloads much of the grunt work to remote servers. Heavy pages seem to take a moment to begin loading as a result, but once the cloud-based portion begins pushing content to the tablet, I find pages load faster than they do on other comparable devices.

The Kindle Fire is not an iPad killer. It doesn’t kill anything, in fact. What it does, however, is offer users a solid experience and a comprehensive catalog of services that make it easy to access existing content and to find new content. It is very, very easy to use, which is something that cannot be said of some other tablets. A young child will be flying around the UI in no time, and his or her grandparents likely won’t take long to figure it out either. Operation is relatively smooth for the most part, but prospective buyers should expect the occasional hiccup from first-generation software running on $200 hardware. Every computer, smartphone and tablet on the planet stutters from time to time, so this is hardly a big deal.

Amazon took its time with the Kindle Fire and it shows. There is plenty of room for improvement, but this first-generation tablet is an intuitive, functional tablet that is as cohesive as it is affordable. It was built as a gateway into the many web-based services Amazon now offers and it succeeds in its mission. It might not kill any Apple products on its way to your door, but I’m sure the media will find plenty more Apple killers in the new year to draw your clicks. In the meantime, the Kindle Fire is a clear winner that will likely find itself atop Amazon’s list of best-sellers for quite some time.

The Samsung Galaxy Nexus isn’t just another Android phone, this is the standard by which all Ice Cream Sandwich phones will be judged. An example to every Android manufacturer out there, and every Android fan, this is the basic foundation of what you should expect in an Android smartphone. Is that setting the bar too high, though? The Samsung Galaxy Nexus is the third addition to Google’s Nexus family, and second built by Samsung. It offers competitive specifications, innovative hardware, and it is the first phone to show off Google’s brand new OS, Android 4.0. Can Google and Samsung make the best Android device in the world together? Is Android 4.0 just another dessert-themed mess? I break it down like Jet Li in Chinatown after the break.

Hardware/Design/Display

The Samsung Galaxy Nexus absolutely feels like the evolution of the Google Nexus family. In fact, the phone’s identity is almost a perfect mashup of the original Nexus One and the Nexus S. It’s flattened, a mix of black and medium gray, has a slight curved display, feels sturdy and strong, and even features the charging and syncing contact points that the original Nexus One touted.

While the phone’s exterior is made entirely out of plastic, what seems like the only material Samsung will ever use in its smartphone cases, there’s a metal chassis inside giving the device strength and a creak-free build. Looking at the Galaxy Nexus from an angle, you’ll see a symmetrical curves that taper down to incredibly thin edges on the top and bottom. The phone follows these lines until around three quarters of the way down, then the infamous reverse chin rears its ugly head — the Galaxy Nexus is thinnest at the top and thickest at the bottom, much like the Samsung Nexus S or a giraffe.

Google’s latest reference handset introduces one of the first 720p HD displays ever to hit a smartphone, coming just after the HTC Rezound became the first smartphone in the United States with a 720p screen. In addition to the super high resolution 4.65-inch display, the Galaxy Nexus also features a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, a 5-megapixel camera with no shutter lag, a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, 16GB of storage, Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, Bluetooth 3.0, NFC and a 1,750 mAh battery.

While I’m used to carrying an iPhone 4S, I’ve also used countless larger displayed devices on and off for the last year or so, and even still, the display here is a bit too large for my liking. It’s not the case of the bezel being too thick like on the Motorola DROID RAZR — in fact, with the 720p resolution, the display is much taller and less wide than the DROID RAZR — but it’s still impossible to comfortably use the phone with one hand without constantly repositioning it.

I’m not someone with small hands either, so I have no doubt that this device is simply too big to be used comfortably by a pretty large segment of the population. The phone’s thin fram and nice tapered edges help the situation slightly, but its footprint is almost unforgivably large because of the massive display. My sweet spot for screen size is probably about 4-inches, and this is out of bounds to me. The Galaxy Nexus feels very well manufactured, but the plastic case and terrible, terrible cheap plastic battery cover really take away from a lot of the phone’s hardware advantages. I’m used to precision laser-cut stainless steel and glass like the materials used on Apple’s iPhone and HTC’s unibody devices, so Samsung’s plastics just can’t cut it.

The personality the Galaxy Nexus has is quite interesting. The design of the front of the phone is incredibly symmetrical its face gives you a window into the app or experience you’re engaging with. Especially with the navigational keys now being soft keys on the display rather than separate buttons beneath it, the phone itself just seems to melt away and serve up Android. In the past this might not have been that smart, but Android 4.0 is a huge step forward that I’ll go into in more depth in a little bit.

The power/unlock button is located on the right side with volume rocker key positioned on the left, and you’ll find the phone’s microUSB port and 3.5mm headset jack located on the bottom of the phone. Around back there is a second microphone for noise cancellation, the 5-megapixel camera, an LED flash and a speaker towards the bottom of the device.

While a 720p HD display might not make sense to some people, it’s absolutely beautiful on the Galaxy Nexus. The 1280 x 720-pixel resolution on Samsung’s 4.65-inch Super AMOLED screen is the most beautiful display I have seen on a mobile device besides the panel on the iPhone 4S. The whites are white, the blacks are black, and colors pop. The viewing angle is amazing, giving you superior viewing from any angle on the phone until it’s practically turned around. The panel is extremely bright, though I was annoyed at how aggressive the auto-brightness worked in Android. In a dark setting it was fine, but in bright areas the screen was always too dim for my taste. Once I manually set the brightness, however, I was in love.

Android 4.0

Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich finally bridges the gap between a tablet OS and smartphone OS, and it absolutely looks a marriage Honeycomb and Gingerbread, with a few dashes of TRON and Daft Punk. It’s a much more cohesive OS and it’s the first release from Google that feels like it’s actually one thought-out product.

One of the immediately noticeable updates are the navigation buttons. No longer physical keys that sit beneath the display, these soft keys have been reduced from four to three, though two buttons disappeared. How is this possible? Gone are the search button and menu button, and what’s left is the home button, back button, and and recent apps button. Android 3.0 Honeycomb users will be used to this layout for the most part, and the recent apps button is a dedicated app switcher that lets you easily bounce between your recent apps. It even shows you a visual preview of the last app you were looking at instead of giving you a list of eight icons that didn’t tell you much.

Ice Cream Sandwich is a drastic departure from Android versions past, and every app, widget and graphic seems to have been redone to fit a single unified identity. Super smooth transitions and scrolling, multi-dimensional interface elements, and of course, heavy black and neon blue make up the Ice Cream Sandwich user interface. I love the new typeface, Roboto, on the Galaxy Nexus in most apps, though in some apps like email it appears bold for unread messages, and this contrasts with the delicate base font that I like so much.

While most of the OS is one piece, I do find it odd that something like a menu option isn’t uniform across every app, including Google’s own apps. For instance, the menu key (overflow button) is now contextual, but it sits in the top navigation bar at times, and at others it’s buried at the bottom of an app.

The notification drawer has been refreshed to show thumbnails of different activities like the contact image of the person who is emailing you. It’s a small change but it really gives you the feeling this isn’t just another robotic OS from Google. It’s something more. Instead of only having the option to clear all your notifications, you’re now able to swipe away individual notifications, in addition to hitting an X at the top to clear all of them.

Android 4.0 is fast. Extremely fast. Scrolling between the five home screens (please, please let me customize the number of home screens) was silky smooth with practically no lag whatsoever. I love how the same animation when you get to the end of the home screens has carried over from Honeycomb, too. Google’s search box is now not a widget but it’s baked right into your home screens, and sitting on the opposite end of that search box is your collection of four customizable app icons and your apps drawer button. You can now also make app folders very easily, and while this feature existed previously in Android, it plays to the entire theme of Android 4.0 — we finally know what we’re doing, and we’re making something that’s worth using.

Bouncing into the app drawer, you’ll find the insanely frustrating app library of Android 2.3 Gingerbread completely revamped to now appear as sliding horizontal panels that stack over each other. If you keep swiping, you’ll get into the widgets section which is now seamlessly integrated into this one location.

A feature we exclusive reported on, in addition to full specifications of the Galaxy Nexus, of course, was that Android 4.0 will give users complete control over their data usage, at both the phone and app level. This includes going as far as blocking background data on specific apps, setting a warning level to let you know when you’re approaching your monthly data plan limit, and also the option of completely disabling data when you get to that point. While some might think this relates to how much of a bandwidth hog Android is (it is), I’d look at this more as a feature that will let Android start to move into more emerging markets, in addition to possibly swaying some parents to upgrade their kids’ phones to a smartphone from a feature phone. There should be a parental restriction option on data limits, though (through the whole phone, too), so you can set it to disable data when a cap has been reached.

Keyboard input has been dramatically improved. While I never got used to the default Android Gingerbread keyboard, Ice Cream Sandwich makes me love it. It seems as if the keys are the same size, or maybe just a tiny, tiny bit larger, but text input is a completely different world. I’d say it’s almost, if not on par with iOS right now. Microsoft’s Windows Phone keyboard still schools both OSes like a 3PM playground meetup, though. Voice input has also improved greatly, with words being recognized and displayed on the screen much faster than ever before.

I love Android’s People app, a new take on how to look at and keep up with your contacts. It’s very similar in concept to Window Phone’s People hub in that you can see updates from your friends on their social networks like Twitter and of course, Google+. By tapping on a photo of your contact from anywhere in the OS (wherever there is an email address or notification from a friend, you’ll see their thumbnail), a People view will pop up and give you access to their contact information in addition to social statuses. Facebook is the big glaring omission here, but we know that’s not an omission, rather a strategic move on Google’s end. There is a third party API here, however, so developers will be able to link into the experience.

While Android 4.0 feels like the most amazing OS release from Google yet in practically every way — speed, personality, cohesiveness and fluidity — it doesn’t do much to make the experience less intimidating for potential customers, and that’s sadly one of the reason’s we’re still going to have third party manufacturer skins on Android (obviously not the main reason). In fact, I’d say that Android 4.0 is actually more confusing at first than previous versions of the OS. I found myself diving through so many different menus, trying to remember where different options were, how to get to this app, how to remember to navigate the app drawer, where the menu key was in this app… you just find yourself under an avalanche of crap sometimes, and it’s frustrating.

If I chose to use the Galaxy Nexus as my main phone for weeks, would I get used to it? Of course, and a big part of me really loves the amount of control you have in Android. From the home screen to apps, you can adjust your phone to the point where it almost seems like it was made just for you. I love having my calendar, Gmail, and Exchange widgets on the home screen. I love how I organize apps on the home screen, how my folders are constructed, and so on. But, I found myself jumping through so many panels, screens, pages, widgets and menus that I literally put the phone down and laughed. Add that to the very heavy Armin van Buren playground-like user interface, and it’s almost overwhelming at times.

Browser

The entire browser has been redone for Android 4.0 and it shows. There’s finally hardware acceleration that gives you much faster page loads, chrome bookmark sync, the ability to request the desktop version of a site. Although there’s no Adobe Flash support at the moment, but that should be available before the end of the year.

Browsing various sites with the Galaxy Nexus was almost effortless as I zipped around the web hopping from one image and javascript heavy site to the next. Android is Google’s OS play for the next generation of computing, not their Chrome OS, and you can start to see the pieces come together, especially in the browser. With support for up to 16 open tabs, this is starting to be positioned as a desktop-class browser that happens to be available on smartphones and tablets. Other little enhancements are the ability to save a page for offline reading (why does everyone want to hurt Marco Arment?) in addition to setting your homepage to your most visited sites.

I did notice some software glitches in the browser, mainly in how the OS handles animations into and out of the browser, and sometimes on first load of a webpage, but since this phone isn’t running final software, I’ll throw that into the probably-getting-fixed-before-release hat.

Camera

I usually don’t review the cameras on many smartphones. Why? Because they are usually the same, terrible camera optics that I come across weekly on every phone that crosses my desk. Sure, they can take 8-megapixel photos and 1080p HD video, but the fact is that very few cameras are worth even talking about. The camera on the Samsung Galaxy Nexus does offer a few unique features, though.

First off, even though this is a 5-megapixel camera, it takes insanely fast photos with what Google and Samsung are calling zero shutter lag. As soon as you press the capture button, the photo is taken, assuming the photo is focused first. This is a great compromise between something like an EDoF lens that Nokia has used in the past which give you an instant photo, but no auto-focus, and a traditional camera sensor which can take quite a few seconds to snap the picture. In daily use, this worked very well and taking photos one after another was incredibly speedy and impressive.

The actual photos the phone takes are decent. With great lighting, especially outside with the sun out, photos are great. In decently-lit lighting environments, or low light situations, the camera is not so great. Add flash into the mix, and it’s not really worth talking about.

Video performance was the same, with great lighting offering up awesome results and moderate or low light situations affecting both frame rate, quality, and noise. Google’s real-time video effects are fun, though. They use face tracking to adjust different elements of your face, just like how Apple uses tracking to pull off these effects in Photo Booth. Apple stole the notifications drawer from Android, so it’s only right Google stole something as important as face tracking with real-time image manipulation from Apple.

Gmail

Another app that has received a complete overhaul is Gmail, giving you the best Gmail experience on the planet on a mobile device, and it looks better than it ever has before. It feels like Gmail was designed for this phone, and you finally have quick and responsive access to your email, in addition to managing your messages with labels and organization.

Google has introduced offline search as well, so you’re able to search your email even if you’re not connected to the network. Here is one of the apps where most commonly accessed options aren’t hidden behind layers of menus; almost everything you need is present on one screen. You can delete messages, mark messages as read or unread, swipe back and forth through emails and more without leaving the regular app view. Unfortunately however, you still can’t pinch to zoom.

Phone/Speakerphone

Voice calling on the Galaxy Nexus was decent. The actual phone performed well, with calls being generally clear most of the time, but occasionally the caller on the other end said I sounded very… robotic. Surely not an intended effect, right? Reception was on par with other top smartphones, though AT&T in midtown New York City at 4:47 p.m. is still AT&T in midtown New York City at 4:47 p.m. One issue I had with the phone is that the ear speaker has to be positioned just right for you to hear the call clearly. Just picking up the phone and putting it to my ear wasn’t enough, but it’s a minor annoyance that you’ll most likely get used to.

The speakerphone on the Galaxy Nexus wasn’t all that great. It didn’t get nearly as loud as I needed it to on various occasions in different noise settings, and it distorted audio past a certain volume level. Playback for music and audio was more of the same, with volume, projection and distortion all a minor concern.

Battery

I have been using the Samsung Galaxy Nexus for around a week, and I have a very good feel for the battery life on the HSPA+ version of the phone. Standby time has been excellent, and with Gmail and Exchange accounts running Twitter in the background along with other background apps, the phone has lasted for days. Under heavy usage, like Google Navigation, the phone starts to show a little weakness, even with a 1,750 mAh battery.

Using the phone as my primary device and leaving the house with a full charge in the morning, I got a little more than halfway through the day before the phone started to warn me that the battery life was getting low after heavy emailing, browsing and using Google Navigation for around an hour. While the LTE version of the device will offer up an 1,850 mAh battery, LTE might take a toll, so we’ll have to see if battery life is better or worse once I get an LTE version in my pocket.

Conclusion

This is almost comical at this point, but the Samsung Galaxy Nexus is my favorite Android device in the world. Easily replacing the HTC Rezound, the Motorola DROID RAZR, and Samsung Galaxy S II, the Galaxy Nexus champions in a brand new version of Android that pushes itself further than almost any other mobile OS in the industry.

While there were some hardware complaints, and even though Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich isn’t the most intuitive or user friendly operating system, it’s absolutely one of the most powerful. Android 4.0 is coupled with the best smartphone Samsung has ever produced and easily leapfrogs any other competitor’s device.

Unfortunately in the Android world, this hardly lasts a long time, and as we have started to see in various leaks, there’s going to be some serious competition for the best Android smartphone in the world over the next few months. For now, though, this marriage of hardware and software, under Google and Samsung’s direction, is an absolute winner.

Nokia once had a big stake in the U.S. smartphone market. I remember being jealous in high school that I couldn’t tell anyone my Snake high score because I carried a Motorola phone. I seemed to be the only kid without a Nokia device so, when I went to college, I picked up the Nokia 6010. I was drawn to the color screen and interchangeable face plates, and I carried it through all four years of college, preferring its durability to the Motorola RAZR that all of my friends had bought. The iPhone was announced in 2007 and, seemingly almost overnight, Nokia was completely gone from the hands of U.S. wireless subscribers. Sure, there were a few flip phones from Verizon Wireless over the years and a handful of Symbian devices from AT&T and T-Mobile, but none of those phones had the power to bring Nokia back into the spotlight. The Lumia 800 does. It isn’t just a phone, it symbolizes Nokia’s efforts to re-enter the global wireless market with a unique point of view and a fresh portfolio. It’s not available here in the U.S. yet, but a variant almost certainly will be early next year. Does the Lumia 800 push boundaries? Is it the best Windows Phone out there? Are the hardware and software married so perfectly that the competition might be looking on with envy? My full review follows below.

Hardware

Not since the Galaxy S II have I been so excited for the FedEx person to buzz my apartment and drop off a new review unit. There was a ton of hype coming out of Nokia World surrounding the Nokia Lumia 800; it is Nokia’s flagship Windows Phone for 2011 and we loved it during our initial hands-on. Plus, I was secretly hoping that I’d receive a cyan-colored review unit. As luck would have it though, I received a matte black one.

The Lumia 800 has a beautiful face, just like the N9, and it feels heavy and solid in the hand. I love its contoured screen, which looks almost like lacquer was poured into a basin and left to harden with a nice, curved, top. The ClearBlack AMOLED screen is bright and colorful, but side by side with the Samsung Focus Flash I found myself preferring Samsung’s more vibrant Super AMOLED screen, which also had brighter whites.

The buttons on the right side of the phone for volume up/down, power and the camera appear to be faux chrome plastic and, while I like the soft finish, the back is simple and a bit boring save for its 8-megapixel camera. There’s a small metal piece surrounding the camera that identifies the Carl Zeiss lens, but I wish the back had etching, more accents or anything that really screamed “I’m a Nokia flagship phone!” Plus, it really attracts fingerprints and my Lumia 800 often looked grimy.

Nokia included a plastic hatch for the microUSB port and a second hatch for a microSIM card slot. You have to open the microUSB port to access the microSIM and if you close the microSIM before the microUSB, the two get caught and you’ll need a paper clip to re-open them. I like that the hatch hides the ugly ports, but it was also a bit annoying considering that I frequently hook my phones up to a computer for charging or file transfers.

I usually keep all of my videos and photos on a single microSD card that I move from phone to phone. Most of the latest Windows Phone 7.5 devices lack a microSD port though, which is frustrating. It’s not the Lumia 800’s fault, though, so I won’t harp on it too much.

Software

Nokia recently adopted Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) operating system just like a number of other manufacturers, including LG, HTC and Samsung to name a few. However, it differentiates itself by adding a few of its own applications that truly add value to the phone. There’s Nokia Maps, Nokia Music and Nokia Drive for turn-by-turn directions installed out of the box.

First, a bit of background: If you’re unfamiliar with Windows Phone, it offers one of the most intuitive user interfaces available on a mobile phone today. The home screen is populated with a number of tiles that can be customized and that can present “live” information, if a developer so pleases. A swipe to the left reveals a full menu of all the applications installed on your phone.

Microsoft maintains a tight ship when it comes to customizations, so there aren’t different user interfaces to get used to, as is the case with Android. Microsoft does allow Nokia certain liberties with its devices, but the Finnish vendor has not strayed strayed much thus far. So in terms of software, the only differentiation on the Lumia 800 is the free navigation, music store and mapping applications.

A few years back before we all had Google Maps or Bing or any other mapping software on our smartphones, there was Nokia Maps. OK, there was BlackBerry Maps, too, but it wasn’t nearly as powerful. Nokia Maps was beautiful and it worked well. Today, it still works quite well, although I prefer the cleaner user interface in Google Maps. A search for “bar” near my apartment in New York revealed several nearby pubs, but failed to locate a bar just a block away that has existed for the past several years. Zooming is fluid, however, and there are several views available including a satellite image option. Overall, I preferred to use it over Bing, which never seems to find what I’m looking for.

Unlike most Windows Phones, the Lumia 800 provides two options for purchasing new music out of the box: Microsoft’s default Zune Marketplace and its own Nokia Music store. Nokia Music allows you to access your music, purchase songs, find local “gigs” and more. The shop also lists top songs, a welcome feature that is lacking in Microsoft’s own Marketplace.

I loved the Gigs feature of Nokia Music. It brings up a list of local concerts by date and provides the addresses. Nokia could have built on this feature by allowing users to purchase tickets directly, or allowing users to tap the address for driving directions using Nokia Drive.

I live in New York City and don’t own a car, but I enjoyed Nokia Drive for what it’s worth. The software provides free turn-by-turn directions and allows you to download street maps by continent, country and state. I downloaded a 102MB New York map in a few minutes and it’s just as easy to add more, should you be preparing for a trip. There are also tons of different voice options. The UI isn’t too crowded and there are both 2D and 3D map modes. I won’t know how well Nokia Drive stacks up to Google Navigation, my current favorite GPS client, until I have to drive out of the city but it’s definitely a solid free application that other Windows Phone devices don’t have right now.

Call Quality / Data

Call quality with the Lumia 800 was pretty run of the mill; the audio quality hardly knocked my socks off, but I didn’t experience any major issues, either. The Lumia 800 supports AT&T’s 3G network in the United States and, using http://dslreports.com/mspeed as a speed test benchmark, I averaged around 700Kbps using an AT&T SIM card. That’s pretty awful, considering most of AT&T’s own 3G smartphones easily exceed 1Mbps.

The phone comes with its own headset with a built-in microphone. It works perfectly fine during phone calls, but the team here at BGR discovered a weird issue thanks to a tip from a friend of the site: if you connect the original Nokia headset and place a call, it works just fine. You can then use any third-party headset with a microphone as you wish. However, if you try to use a third-party headset from the get-go, or before you use Nokia’s headset, it won’t work. So basically, as it stands, you can really only use Nokia’s headset unless you opt for a Bluetooth headset.

Camera

I’ve always looked forward to using the Carl Zeiss cameras on high-end Nokia phones, but I wasn’t blown away by the quality of the pictures taken with the Lumia 800. They offered a sharper picture, had a warmer white balance and were more colorful than those shot with my iPhone 4, but not by much. As I’ve said in other recent reviews, I recently bought a relatively budget-friendly point and shoot and it still blows away any smartphone I’ve used. While other reviewers may make arguments that it’s time to leave the point and shoot at home, I disagree.

The Nokia Lumia 800 video automatically defaults to shooting in a VGA resolution, but there’s also a 720p HD video option. 720p HD video shot in my apartment wasn’t that amazing. The camera is slow at adjusting to to new lighting and its auto-focus is just as sluggish. Unlike many Android smartphones, the Lumia 800 doesn’t offer an HDMI port, so you can’t hook it up to your HDTV to watch videos. The only way to get content off of the phone is to either send it over a Wi-Fi or 3G network, which isn’t really optimal with a large HD video, or connect it up to a computer with Microsoft’s Zune client installed. I really, really, wish it had a microSD card for this purpose.

Battery

Windows Phone devices typically offer above-average battery life and the Lumia 800 proved no different. I was easily able to milk a full day’s worth of battery life from the Nokia Lumia 800′s 1,450 mAh battery. Users can’t access the battery, however, so you might run into some issues if you ever run have a problem that would normally require a battery pull. The first review unit I got was a bit buggy and a battery pull might have helped in a few cases, but I had to perform a hard reset on the phone instead and eventually I had to request a new unit from Nokia. This was apparently an isolated software issue though, and I don’t think it will impact launch units.

Conclusion

As I said at the beginning of this review, I couldn’t wait for the Lumia 800 to arrive so that I could finally see just how well Nokia was able to marry Windows Phone 7.5, an operating system I already love, with the Finnish phone maker’s incredible hardware. I like the AMOLED display, but it doesn’t blow me away like the Super AMOLED Plus screens on Samsung’s devices. I’m not a huge fan of the polycorbonate build (it feels like any other plastic to me) and think there are definitely some weak hardware design points, such as the microUSB and miniSIM card hatch. I know I’m alone here, though, as there are tons of people who love the hardware design.

On the software side, the phone is fantastic. I prefer Nokia Maps to Bing, which I’ve personally told Microsoft just never works well for what I need a mapping app for. Windows Phone 7.5 is beautiful and efficient, it just needs more great apps. And while the Lumia 800 camera didn’t blow me away like I was hoping it would, it was satisfactory and better than the camera my iPhone 4.

The Lumia 800 left a lot to be desired in the data throughput department, but rumor has it Nokia is working with AT&T on a 4G LTE device that could be unveiled during CES in January. For now, I think most U.S. Windows Phone lovers should check out the HTC Titan, the Samsung Focus S or the Samsung Focus Flash, which will be much more affordable with a subsidy. If price doesn’t concern you, however, the Lumia 800 should be at the top of that list. The day Nokia launches a Windows Phone on a U.S. carrier with faster data, an aluminum body, and perhaps a few color choices, I’ll no doubt be impatiently waiting for my FedEx delivery person all over again.

Late last month, AT&T unveiled the first two smartphones that would launch with the ability to access its brand new 4G network (not to be confused with its old 4G network). The Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket was a mouthful and a pocketful, identical to T-Mobile’s Galaxy S II save for the addition of an LTE radio. The other device was a brand new handset from HTC dubbed “Vivid.” In terms of hardware, the Vivid is a fairly substantial departure from other recent HTC phones. It is built with different materials and its shape is unlike any other handset from the vendor. Are its unique design, high-end specs and 4G LTE compatibility enough to make this smartphone worthy of your consideration? My full review follows below.

The Inside

Like every high-end smartphone released these days, the Vivid is packed to the brim with cutting-edge technology. At the heart of the handset is a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon chipset that powers Android 2.3.4 and HTC Sense 3.0. The Vivid touts 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage, microSDHC support up to an additional 32GB, a 1,620 mAh battery and all the trimmings.

More important than the specs is the device’s performance, of course, and the Vivid most certainly performs. Gingerbread is as smooth as I have even seen it on the Vivid. HTC’s Sense UI is very heavy when it comes to animations, and the Vivid displays them all in stride. Multitasking is a breeze for this phone and I had a tremendous amount of trouble trying to trip it up. In fact, it’s easily one of the smoothest Android phones I’ve used.

Couple the Vivid’s silky smooth performance with well-made apps, and you’ve got yourself one of the most enjoyable smartphone experiences on the planet. The Android Market is rife with garbage, as are all mobile app stores, but the gems buried within the Market shine even brighter on the Vivid. One example is Seesmic.

I’m not a big fan of Seesmic in my browser or on my iPhone, but I’m a huge fan of the company’s Android app. It is well designed and on most Android smartphones, it’s among the fastest Twitter clients available. On the Vivid, Seesmic is a scorcher. Android is typically not thought of as the quickest platform on the market, but even the fastest Twitter apps I’ve tested on iOS seem slow compared to Seesmic on the Vivid. And forget about Windows Phone; while the OS itself is smooth and fluid, apps take forever to refresh with new data. And again, Seesmic is just one example. All well-made apps seem to fly faster on HTC’s Vivid.

Also inside the Vivid is an 8-megapixel camera with auto focus, a dual-LED flash and an f/2.2, 28mm lens. It’s capable of recording full HD 1080p videos, and those 1080p HD videos are made infinitely more accessible than they are on some other modern smartphones thanks to the Vivid’s HDMI-out and integrated DLNA support, which allows users to display content from the phone wirelessly on compatible TV sets and other devices.

There’s support for AT&T’s 4G networks buried in there as well. That’s plural, by the way — “4G networks” — so the Vivid features support for AT&T’s next-generation 4G network based on LTE technology, and the carrier’s previous-generation next-generation 4G network based on HSPA+ technology.

The Outside

HTC’s Vivid is a very solid smartphone. Less so than some of the vendor’s other phones like the Titan and Legend, but it is without question a sturdy handset. The face of this full touch smartphone is glass that offers very little in the way of resistance to oils. This is very annoying. There are simply no excuses in this day and age for omitting an effective oil-resistant coating on a touchscreen smartphone. Especially one that costs up to $200 on contract.

A thick plastic surrounds the sides of the Vivid and continues to the back of the device, sloping as it moves toward the center of the case. On the top of the phone lies a lock button and a 3.5-millimeter audio jack, and the bottom is home to a lone microphone. A chrome-look plastic volume rocker sits on the right side of the phone and a microUSB port is included on the left. Beyond the plastic on the back of the device is a solid metal plate that covers the battery, a SIM card slot and a microSD card slot. The camera lens and dual-LED flash sit near the top of the metal plate, and above the plate lies a narrow opening for the speaker.

Circling back to the front of the phone, HTC included a terrific display panel on the Vivid. The 4.5-inch super LCD display features qHD resolution, or 540 pixels by 960 pixels, and it reproduces colors very well. Picky people with 20/20 vision may complain that some edges can appear jagged on the Vivid thanks to the display’s PenTile sub-pixel arrangement, but it really didn’t bother me at all. Images are crisp, colors are vivid — no pun intended — and the display gets remarkably bright.

Worth noting is the fact that HTC managed to keep the Vivid at a fairly reasonable size for a phone with such a large display. While the 4.5-inch panel is among the largest available on supersized smartphones, the footprint is significantly smaller than the Samsung Galaxy S II or the HTC Titan. In fact, when using the phone with one hand I can almost reach every corner of the display and all four of the capacitive Android buttons without striking a yoga pose. Almost.

The Upside

People seem to be less enthusiastic these days when it comes to HTC’s Sense UI, but I am still a big fan. It is my clear favorite among Android skins, though it is becoming increasingly complex. I carry an Android phone with me most days, and I switch phones on a near-weekly basis. Every time I get a new Sense-equipped phone to test and I begin configuring it to my liking, I find new settings, widgets or other features that I didn’t know about before. While this makes HTC’s Sense phones remarkably customizable, it also brings a seemingly endless number of variables that will be appealing to some users but overwhelming to others. The majority of users, however, will probably never explore all of Sense’s capabilities.

Sense’s transition animations, 3D effects and other visual elements are terrific. There are dozens of gorgeous and functional home screen widgets to choose from, and seven home screens to spread them out across. Seven home screens is a bit excessive, but tapping the home button on any one of them will take the user straight back to the middle home screen. Tapping the home button while on the middle home screen will then spread out thumbnails of all seven, and tapping on any thumbnail will take you right to that home screen.

I also like the look of apps skinned to match the Sense UI. In particular, the email app on HTC’s Sense phones is one element that I have always loved. HTC has added much more than just graphical elements to the app, allowing users to drill down to unread items, flagged items and more by sliding a selector across the bottom of the screen. It makes it all too easy to be productive and next to Windows Phone’s email client, HTC’s is likely my favorite.

Another bright spot on the Vivid is the camera. We don’t need to dig up the past, but cameras have historically been a very weak area for HTC. This is clearly not the case any more. The past few HTC smartphones BGR reviewed have been equipped with fantastic cameras that can go head to head with the Nokias and Apples of the world. The Vivid is no exception. The camera takes very impressive images in adequate lighting, but I did find low-light performance to be a bit lacking compared to other phones I have tested recently. I’m not sure if this is a software issue, but images often appear excessively grainy in dim lighting.

Voice calling is crystal clear on the Vivid, but beyond all else, performance is the star of the show. It is absolutely among the most responsive Android phones I’ve used, and I’ve used plenty. Even scrolling in apps that have been nightmarish for me on lesser phones is almost always smooth and free of stutters. I can’t emphasize it enough: this is how Android should work on a smartphone.

The Downside

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. This is fortunate in the case of the HTC Vivid, because I am not a fan of the handset’s look at all. The face is fine; it looks just like every other full touch smartphone on the planet. Issues arise when the phone is turned around, however, and I personally couldn’t get past the design.

HTC used a thick glossy plastic for much of this smartphone’s case and I don’t care for it at all. First, it somehow collects oil and dust even more aggressively than the phone’s glass screen, which is quite a site to behold. As a matter of fact, the Vivid might pick up dust better than a Swiffer. You can see it in the images peppered throughout this review. As a borderline mysophobe, my hands are always dry from being washed 20 times each day and Purelled even more frequently. And yet after just a few minutes of using the Vivid, there are finger prints, dust and oil smudges all over it. It’s very unbecoming.

The plastic also feels quite cheap. It’s not light or flimsy like the plastic is on so many Samsung phones, but it falls well below the standard HTC has set with other devices like the Titan, with its unibody aluminum construction, or even the soft-touch plastic material it uses on many of the vendor’s phones. This plastic is also incredibly slippery, no doubt helped by the oils it collects, and I’ve had a number of close calls and bobbles while handling the Vivid. It comes close to feeling like a toy instead of a high-end smartphone, but its weight is likely its saving grace in this department.

The first thing I noticed about this phone beyond its physical appearance, in fact, was how unbelievably heavy it is. The larger Galaxy S II version (T-Mobile) weighs 4.77 ounces, the metal and glass iPhone 4S weighs 4.9 ounces and the massive HTC Titan — with its 4.7-inch display and aluminum case — weighs 5.6 ounces. Despite being shorter and narrower than the Titan, the Vivid weighs in at a hefty 6.24 ounces. I can’t think of a heavier smartphone I have held in recent history. I do like a smartphone with a bit of heft to it, but the Vivid tips the scales a bit too far for my taste.

Finally, battery life is not great on the Vivid. Less is the new more, and the phrase “it should last a day on a full charge with moderate usage” is anything but obligatory now that 4G radios and gigantic displays are making their way into many smartphones. The Vivid is not among the worst smartphones I’ve tested recently, but users should expect to charge the phone more frequently than once every 24 hours. It also seems to shed a charge faster than most phones while sitting idle, so definitely purchase an extra wall charger and maybe even a car charger if you plan on buying a Vivid.

The Bottom Line

If I didn’t mind the look of the Vivid, it would be a phone I could carry regularly. As it stands, unfortunately, HTC designed this phone right out of the running for me.

The HTC Vivid is a remarkable, modern smartphone with performance that matches or bests any Android phone I’ve used. It’s fast, it’s smooth, it’s capable and HTC’s Sense UI wraps it all in a gorgeous package. Battery life is a sore spot but smartphones across several platforms seem to be headed south in that area. Users who take particular care may be able to get from one day to the next on a single charge, but I wasn’t able to with regular usage.

Since I work in Manhattan and live just outside the city, I was not able to test the Vivid on AT&T’s young LTE network. On HSPA+, I regularly saw speeds between 2Mbps and 3Mbps down, and 1Mbps up. The Vivid won’t be setting any speed records on AT&T’s previous-generation 4G network, but it’s plenty fast enough to suit the needs of most users. And circling back to battery life, I should note that the phone does not allow users to disable LTE out of the box. Third party switches I’ve tested are not yet compatible with the Vivid but once they are, users unhappy with the phone’s battery performance will likely see the situation improved by disabling LTE when the added speed isn’t a necessity.

I highly recommend that prospective smartphone buyers on AT&T head to a local store to check out the Vivid before buying another phone. The look and feel of the phone were issues for me but they certainly won’t be for everyone. Those who enjoy the Vivid’s style will find themselves with a future-proofed 4G phone that performs as well as any other Android phone on the market.

The HTC Vivid is available immediately from AT&T starting at $99.99 in select markets when purchased online.

Verizon Wireless has not one but three powerhouse 4G LTE smartphones lined up for the holidays, and the HTC Rezound is one of them. Launching right after the Motorola DROID RAZR, the HTC Rezound takes things to another dimension, both visually and sonically. With an amazing 4.3-inch 720p HD display, a fast 1.5GHz dual-core processor, Beats-enhanced audio and other competitive specs in a solid package, is the HTC Rezound the 4G smartphone to beat this holiday season? Read on to find out how this phone shapes up against the DROID RAZR and Galaxy Nexus.

Hardware / Design / Display

The HTC Rezound features all the latest lust-worthy pieces that fit together to make up any smartphone-lover’s ideal puzzle: specs include one of the first 720p HD displays, a fantastic 8-megapixel backside-illuminated camera complete with support for full 1080p HD video capture, a 720p HD front facing camera, an incredibly powerful 1.5GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor, and of course, support for Verizon’s 4G LTE network.

I love the HTC Rezound’s identity and personality. It’s a perfect complement to the red and black branding shared by both Verizon Wireless and Beats. Underneath the battery cover, the phone’s internals are displayed in, you guessed it, a translucent red plastic case, giving the phone an extra detail that only HTC devices have.

Let’s focus on the central feature of the HTC Rezound, and as much as Jimmy or Andre would want you to believe it’s the Beats audio processing features, it’s actually the display. The 4.3-inch 720p display on the Rezound is nothing short of stunning. It’s easily the best display I have ever seen on a mobile device besides the iPhone 4/4S. The screen on the HTC Rezound is the best screen on any current Android device, and completely annihilates the Motorola DROID RAZR’s PenTile display, though I’m interested to see how the Rezound lines up against the Galaxy Nexus.

Looking at the phone, you’ll see the sinister red-tinted Android menu keys sitting right below that gorgeous display. While it’s a bit unsettling at first, that vivid red color shining through the buttons lets you know that this isn’t just a Verizon device, but a Beats device as well.

There’s a gun metal polished bezel around the entire phone that’s cradled in a soft-touch rubber back casing. On the right side you’ll find a volume rocker button, and on the left side you’ll find the phone’s MHL port that lets you use a microUSB connector or mini-HDMI out cable, along with a secondary microphone for noise cancellation. On top is a 3.5mm headset jack and a power/lock/unlock button. Around back is a dual-LED flash, the 8-megapixel camera sensor and a speaker etched out perfectly amid the ridged design of the back battery cover.

As far as the feel of the device goes, it’s much more thoughtfully designed than the Motorola DROID RAZR. The phone fits very well in the hand, and even though it’s almost twice as thick as the RAZR, it’s still infinitely more comfortable to hold and use thanks to the tapered edges and narrower case.

Software

The HTC Rezound runs HTC’s latest Sense 3.5 user interface, layered on top of Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread. While HTC announced that the Rezound would be getting an upgrade to Android 4.0, it’s a pretty tough sell thrown up against the Samsung Galaxy Nexus that should launch within a week or so.

HTC Sense 3.5 is almost identical to HTC Sense 3.0, adding minor enhancements to the interface like the addition of an “All apps” label now included on the home screen at the bottom of the display as part of the arc. I go back and forth on HTC Sense and for the most part, and I appreciate a lot of the innovation from HTC in the early days of Android, especially starting with the HTC Hero. Sense now introduces more problems that it solves for me, though. While it is cohesive and very well designed, it almost offers too much customization now — so much so that the user may not even discover much of its capabilities because it takes so long to dig through everything. I’d run with a stock Android interface any day of the week.

I have also noticed many, many icons, and images that haven’t been updated to support the new HD resolution of the display. That’s an attention to detail that shouldn’t have been skipped over. If you’re going to customize the Android interface and modify stock elements of the operating system, it’s only right that you do this throughout the entire phone, and HTC didn’t do that. The status bar, for instance, is a mashup of high resolution and low resolution graphics. The battery icon is crisp but the signal bars aren’t. The silent ringer icon looks great but the GPS icon does not. Also, due to the fact that almost no app developers planned on a display of this resolution being released at this time, most app icons from apps you download look pixelated and blurry.

Another irritating thing about HTC’s Sense interface is the 3D carousel of app home screens. The phone comes with seven home screens, way more than I’d like. While HTC finally includes the ability to delete and reorder them, when you flick through your homescreens, the phone still displays them in a carousel as if there were seven. So, if you have two or three home screens, the phone will spin in a circle that’s only 25% full. It’s just odd, and it wasn’t well thought out at all.

Beats Audio / Headphones

The Beats headphones that the HTC Rezound ships with are very good. In fact, they are probably the best bundled headphones I’ve ever used. Music sounds full, heavy on the low end, and clear on the top end even when disabling the Beats audio mode on the handset or using the headphones with other devices.

I’m just not sold on this Beats thing, in terms of the software. If Beats as a product existed solely as hardware, and now is coupled with software processing (EQ) as a selling point, well, I’m not sure I see the advantage of a small increase in audio reproduction. If anything, the Beats software processing amplifies audio, and adds a present equalization that’s meant to make the track sound louder, knockier and fuller. This is artificial, though, and something audio purists won’t appreciate.

Another issue? Beats audio just flat out doesn’t work with many third party music apps, so it becomes a non-factor in many cases.

Phone / Battery / Speaker

Voice calling on the HTC Rezound is reasonably good. Callers sounded a little robotic to me, and would sometimes cut in and out. Noise cancellation worked very well though, with background noise almost completely eliminated and unnoticeable to callers on the other end of the line. The speaker on the Rezound projects nicely, especially when on a flat surface like a desk or coffee table. I’m still not a fan of the actual phone app on HTC Sense devices, however.

As far as the battery, standby mode has been excellent. With normal usage on and off throughout the day, the phone and its 1,620 mAh battery seemed to make it just fine as long as I remembered to recharge when I got home. Even when putting the phone under pressure with constant 4G LTE web browsing, email, video playback and continuous music in the background, the Rezound held up very well.

Conclusion

I feel like I’m taking crazy pills. On one hand, this is practically the same phone I’ve reviewed countless times, in a different shell, with slightly improved specs. On the other, it feels like a completely different animal.

The red and black color scheme, an amazing 720p HD display, Beats audio and extremely fast performance come together in an ergonomic design to create a fantastic finished product. While almost comical at this point, the HTC Rezound is now my favorite Android device in the world, besting the Motorola DROID RAZR, which bested the Galaxy S II. That might be short lived, though, as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus — the first Android 4.0 smartphone — is slated to hit shelves in the next week or two. In the meantime, the HTC Rezound offers up some of the best specs and one of the most complete smartphone packages I have ever seen.

I haven’t turned on my Xbox 360 in almost a year. I did to play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, though.

Modern Warfare 3 doesn’t differ greatly from previous editions of the game, though that’s not always a bad thing. The story events pick up right where Modern Warfare 2’s storyboard ended and you’re plopped right in the middle of downtown New York City, which is under siege and swarming with Ruskies. The storyline itself doesn’t have much depth, but for something you can get through in around five to six hours, it doesn’t exactly need to. Besides, the gameplay and graphics surely pull the weight here.

As far as multiplayer mode, it’s more focused than ever before but there are a few additions to multiplayer like Team Defender and Kill Confirmed. Team Defender is a version of capture the flag, except, you know, with grenades going off and buildings crumbling around you. Kill Confirmed is based around a quest to retrieve dog tags of your friends and enemies, and just as you can collect them from fallen players around you, your opponents can try to grab them before you can. There are other new additions like killstreak rewards that are now baked into Strike Packages, allowing you to customize them, and there are new customizable weapons as well.

I didn’t play co-op mode that much, though, but the new survival mode was insanely difficult. You basically stand there while an endless surge of enemies come at you, but each wave gets harder and harder for you and the other players.

Infinity Ward and Activision’s Call of Duty and Modern Warfare titles have consistently pushed the boundaries of what a first-person shooter can be, and I don’t think Modern Warfare 3 is any different. I’m not a serious gamer, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to pick up a copy and review this game. Multiplayer mode is obviously the big draw here, and for good reason — it’s excellent. While single-player mode is fun, the story definitely isn’t going to win any Oscars. But the gameplay and the graphics are incredible, and this is probably my favorite first-person shooter ever.

The Motorola DROID RAZR is arguably the most exciting Android device to come across my desk in some time, but all the hype in the world doesn’t necessarily mean it deserves to carry the iconic RAZR name. It’s a 4G LTE device that packs in a powerful processor, high resolution display, 16GB of built-in storage, 1080p HD video capture capability and plenty more. But is this Motorola’s best phone since the original RAZR? I have spent the past few days with the Motorola DROID RAZR, so hit the break for my full review.

Hardware / Display / Design

The Motorola DROID RAZR features top-of-the-line specs, and it somehow stuffs it all into one of the thinnest and lightest smartphone cases on the planet. At only 7.1 millimeters thin, this isn’t only the thinnest 4G LTE device in the world, it’s one of the thinnest smartphones period. With a 1.2GHz dual-core TI OMAP processor, a 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED display, 1GB of RAM, an 8-megapixel camera with 1080p HD video capture, an LED flash, an HDMI-out port, noise cancellation capabilities, 16GB of built-in storage and a 16GB microSD card pre-installed, this phone is isn’t just competing with other Android devices, it’s crushing them.

As far as the design of the handset, the DROID RAZR looks like the perfect evolution of the DROID family with a beautiful display sandwiched in between tough Gorilla Glass and a metal chassis with Kevlar backing. The edges of the RAZR are angular yet still soft, and the phone blends high gloss finishes with a matte case-back perfectly.

On top of the phone is an HDMI-out port, a microUSB charging and data port, and a 3.5-millimeter headset jack. On the right side is a power on/off/unlock button next to a volume up/down rocker key. On the left side is a small cover that flips down to give you access to the phone’s LTE microSIM card and microSD card. Around back is the 8-megapixel camera, an LED flash and a speaker.

While the display on the DROID RAZR is a 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED screen, it still isn’t perfect. It does look better to me than the displays used on the Motorola DROID BIONIC and Motorola DROID 3, but it’s still a PenTile display, and that means that it still has a grainy look no matter how high the resolution is. Colors look very good and are reasonably bright and vivid, though the screen doesn’t compare to the likes of Samsung’s Super AMOLED Plus displays. Touch sensitivity was excellent and incredibly responsive, with the device instantly reacting to every touch event, swipe and drag. On top of the display is Gorilla Glass, so in addition to the phone performing extremely well in the display department, it should be able to hold up to your use and abuse pretty well.

Now, while I love most of the hardware on the Motorola DROID RAZR, there are bound to be some negatives, right?

The smartphone is incredibly thin, but all that technology has to be stuffed in there somehow. How did Motorola fit it all, you ask? This phone incredibly thin but it’s also extremely wide. In addition to a 4.3-inch display, on the upper end of the comfortable spectrum as far as normal non-ape humans are concerned, the RAZR has a lot of empty space on both sides of the screen. That doesn’t count the phone’s actual frame either.

Without measuring, it looks like there’s almost a half inch of space on both sides of the display. This might not sound like a lot, but piled on top of an already huge screen, this makes one-handed use nearly impossible. I can’t even delete an icon off the home screen using one hand since Motorola made the delete area at the top of the display.

When going into the phone app, I can’t even dial a phone number with one hand since the dialer tab is, again, on top of the display and my thumb can’t come close to reaching it. Want to browse the Web? Well, you can’t do it one-handed because your thumb won’t be able to touch the URL entry bar. I can’t even swipe down to bring up the notification drawer using one hand to check unread messages, alerts and other information.

Software

The software running on the Motorola DROID RAZR is almost identical to the last flagship Android device from Verizon Wireless that shipped only seven weeks ago, the Motorola DROID BIONIC. One new feature that is actually very handy is Motorola’s Smart Actions app.

Smart Actions lets you specify different actions for your phone to automatically perform based on locations. I wish my iPhone had this. For instance, I don’t use Bluetooth at all when I’m at home, and I’d love it if my iPhone would turn Bluetooth off to save battery whenever I pulled into the driveway. Well, this works flawlessly on the Motorola DROID RAZR with Smart Actions. In addition to being able to set a wide range of different settings for locations, you can also base these actions on other parameters, like when the phone reaches a certain battery percentage. One of the suggested configurations is to have your display dim, turn off GPS, and turn of background syncing when your phone’s battery is at 20% or lower. Motorola says that with Smart Actions configured, you can extend your RAZR’s battery by up to 30%.

Besides Smart Actions, the DROID RAZR offers FIPS 140-2 validation for email, contacts and calendar giving the RAZR government-grade encryption for those apps in addition to voice and video conferencing. Beyond these few things, the OS and UI on the Motorola DROID RAZR are basically identical to the device before it, and the one before that.

Phone / Speakerphone

Voice calling on this phone is excellent, with calls coming through loud with good low end and clarity. Signal reception was also excellent and I almost always got 4G LTE signal in my home or around town in New York City and parts of Connecticut. Callers could hear me loud and clear.

As far as the speakerphone performance, it was sometimes hard to hear the other party in a conversation. Audio was choppy and I wish the speaker could get louder. Music playback on the speaker was hollow, tinny and distorted, but oddly, it seemed to get louder than it could during a voice call.

All in all, the DROID RAZR is a solid phone for voice calling, though the speakerphone performance fell short.

Battery

The battery on the Motorola DROID RAZR has really impressed me. After using the phone for a few days, I completely forgot about the fact that this a 4G LTE device (in terms of battery performance, not data speeds). For the first time ever, I believe that Verizon’s 4G LTE devices have finally reached the point of being powerful enough in the battery department, and thin enough, to not offer any drawbacks related to 4G compatibility.

The RAZR lasted days as far as standby time is concerned, and even with moderate use, the phone went for almost two days. While the battery isn’t removable, that’s a small price to pay for a device that’s able to run with the best of them.

Accessories

Motorola sent me a boatload of accessories for the DROID RAZR including an external battery (just plug it in and you have an external power supply), a car dock, a multimedia dock and the company’s updated Lapdock 100. The new laptop dock improves upon the original, though it still has issues. For example, Motorola has wisely allowed this new Lapdock to work with a wide variety of Motorola smartphones by having a universal connector that plugs into more than one device. Unfortunately, this design doesn’t actually let you dock the phone. Instead, you can only rest the phone in a cut out in the Lapdock.

For a phone like the RAZR with the ports on the top of the case, you can’t even rest the handset in the Lapdock, so you’re forced to leave it plugged in on the table.

The new laptop dock has two-finger scrolling, a welcome change, though its performance it still pretty terrible and it makes navigation a maddening experience. The keyboard is improved, though key layout and size isn’t optimal, either.

All in all, in my limited usage, Motorola’s webtop concept is still very much a concept and not something I’d ever consider using regularly. It’s easier to just use the phone itself than the clunky laptop-like accessory.

Conclusion

The Motorola DROID RAZR has replaced Samsung’s Galaxy S II as the best Android device I’ve ever used. It’s ridiculously fast, incredibly thin and it runs on the fastest network in the country. It is also the first 4G device to finally show the world that it doesn’t have to be as thick as a brick or have battery life that forces you to invest in 12 chargers.

With a beautiful design, an amazing display and a thin profile that’s packed to the brim with the latest and greatest specs, the Motorola DROID RAZR is absolutely worthy of being Verizon’s flagship device for the holidays. While the physical size of the device is larger than I’d have liked, and one-handed usage can be tricky if you’re not used to the crop of large display’d devices of late, there are way more positives than negatives with the DROID RAZR.

Is it a device worthy of being the new Motorola RAZR? For the most part, I’d say so.

The Motorola DROID RAZR will become available on November 11th at 11:11 a.m. for $299.99 on contract. Verizon is also offering a limited time promotion as far as 4G smartphone data plans are concerned, so a customer who signs up for the 2GB monthly plan for $30 will receive the 4GB data plan, and someone who wants something smaller will be able to add a 300MB data plan to any Verizon Wireless phone for $20 a month.

Brookstone announced a new device Monday morning that allows you to project images up to 50 inches diagonally onto any surface using your iPhone. It is called the Brookstone Pocket Projector for iPhone 4/4S by Texas Instruments DLP and I’ve spent the last week using it. I’m definitely impressed by the product, which slides onto an iPhone much like any other case, but is it worth the hefty $230 price Brookstone is asking? Read on for my review.

Hardware

The Brookstone Pocket Projector is bulky but it serves two purposes. It can project an image onto any surface, or its 2,100 mAh battery can be used to charge your iPhone. The size of the device reminds me a lot of a Mophie Juice Pack for the iPhone. It’s just skinny enough to squeeze in a pocket, but for $229.99, I wish it came with its own protective carrying case to be used when the projector isn’t connected to the iPhone.

The actual 15-lumen LED-lit projector lens is on the top of the case near the iPhone’s headphone jack. It is capable of projecting a 640 x 360-pixel resolution image up to 50-inches in size. The case easily slid onto my iPhone 4S, and I liked that it had its own 0.5 watt speaker on the outside. The unit can be turned on by holding a small button to the on/off position for about three seconds. If you move the same button to the “Charge” position, it will charge your iPhone and turn off the projector.

The Good

The Brookstone Pocket Projector is amazing. You may remember when AT&T and LG launched the eXpo projector phone a few years ago. It didn’t take off because there wasn’t a whole lot that you could project and it didn’t really make sense at the time. The iPhone, however, has access to tons of video content, which means you can use the Pocket Projector to display Netflix, YouTube videos, rented or purchased movies, recorded home videos and more. If you happen to own an iPhone 4S, the projector can mirror everything that you do on your iPhone. You can use it, for example, to show off photos, browse the web and more.

The projector is very easy to use. All you have to to do is plug your iPhone into the device and turn on the projector. That’s it. An iPhone 4S will begin mirroring and an iPhone 4 will automatically start projecting whenever you open a video application. When I opened Netflix, the screen was already visible on my wall and the same went with my videos. Anyone can use the device without an instruction manual.

I loved watching Woody Allen movies with the Pocket Projector on my bedside table. It was even fun playing quick YouTube videos on my ceiling. I was able to get through a full movie just fine, and there’s small dial on the top of the unit for adjusting the focus on the fly. It’s a bit hard to do with one hand and without fumbling, so the dial could be a bit looser, but it worked.

Your friends, family and co-workers will definitely get a kick out of the projector. Everyone I showed the device to was blown away by the picture and how such a big image could be projected from such a small device.

The Bad

I don’t have a ton of complaints about the Pocket Projector. My biggest is that 15-lumens actually isn’t that bright, so I couldn’t display videos clearly with even a modest amount of light in a room. I had to close every curtain and turn off every light just to be able to see the picture. At night, however, the Pocket Projector worked great and video was clear from across the room.

I do wish it was possible to project HD video instead of a 640 x 360-pixel image, but really I found that resolution to be satisfactory. It’s incredible how powerful the Pocket Projector is for its size.

I was also frustrated by the miniUSB charging port. Most gadgets take advantage of the microUSB standard, and the miniUSB port meant I had to keep an extra charger around.

Conclusion

If you’re a business traveler with an iPhone 4S looking for an accessory that will let you display presentations in meetings or videos in empty hotel rooms, the Brookstone Pocket Projector should be a no-brainer. At $229 it’s a bit of an expensive accessory for just keeping around your house for entertainment purposes, but if you have the extra cash to spend and want to show-off the latest mobile DLP tech from Texas Instruments to friends, it’s definitely a fun and unique purchase.

TI told me that we can expect a smartphone with its DLP technology built-in sometime in early 2012, and I can’t wait to see what that’s like. It may seem that a smartphone with a projector in it is a gimmick, but now that our smartphones have access to tons of media, not to mention our entire lives, products like the Pocket Projector are more compelling than ever.

Brookstone’s Pocket Projector will be available for purchase in Brookstone stores around the country beginning later this week for $229.99.

Samsung’s Focus Flash will soon join the Samsung Focus S on AT&T’s shelves as the South Korea-based company’s second and third Windows Phone devices in the United States. The Focus Flash is a budget-friendly $50 handset and, despite its low price point, it offers a number of enhancements over the original Focus. Is the Focus Flash a worthy successor to the Focus? Can Mango tango with other entry-level handsets in the sub-$50 smartphone space? Hit the break for my full Focus Flash review to find out.

Hardware

The Focus Flash is smaller and more compact than the original Focus. The phone’s corners also are sharper, and it offers a physical button for returning to the home screen. The overall size of the phone is very similar to the iPhone 4S. I really like the sharp black accents on the back of the phone and the faux-metal battery cover. I would prefer real metal, of course, but for $49.99 I can’t really complain. There’s also a 5-megapixel camera and flash on the rear of the device. The power button is in easy reach on the right-hand side of the phone, just above a camera quick launch key. The volume controls are opposite the power button on the left side of the phone.

For the time being, the Samsung Focus Flash is the only phone you can currently buy at such a budget-friendly price point with a 1.4GHz processor. That’s a decent bump over the 1GHz chip in the original Focus and the performance boost is noticeable. I opened up and closed a number of applications with the Focus and Focus Flash side by side, and the Focus Flash almost always won the race. You’re also likely future-proofing yourself a bit with the 1.4GHz processor. I wouldn’t be surprised to see Microsoft deploy its next Windows Phone update (code-named Windows Phone Apollo) to the current batch of new Windows Phone Mango handsets, given their high specs.

My biggest gripe with the hardware of the Focus Flash is that it doesn’t offer a microSD card slot. I have a 32GB microSD card loaded with videos, photos and music that I like to move from device to device, and I was upset to learn I had to stick with the roughly 6GB of available internal storage on the Focus Flash.

Software

As I noted earlier, the Focus Flash runs Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7.5 (Mango) operating system. I enjoyed using Windows Phone 7 but Mango has really boosted my excitement for the platform. I had originally used the Focus with Mango and the Focus Flash’s better hardware makes it that much more enjoyable. Everything was very quick and I never found myself waiting for a command to be executed.

My biggest gripe, just like BGR’s Zach Epstein noticed with the HTC Titan in his review, is that applications can take a while to load new data. For example, foursquare takes about 7-9 seconds from the second I tap the icon to the time it has fully loaded all of the places nearby that I can check into. It’s a bit frustrating and it’s one of my only real issues with Mango.

Mango introduces tons of new features and we’ve already covered a number of them so I won’t go into too much detail. I love that developers can build their own live tiles, which bring the home screen to life. When I put three phones on my desk, one Android phone, one iPhone and the Focus Flash, the Windows Phone feels and looks so much more inviting. I love that foursquare presents a tile that shows the current leaderboard in real time, that my Groups icon (another new feature in Mango) constantly circulates pictures of my closest friends and family, and that I can see my Xbox Live Avatar jumping around in a little square Window. I can also get weather forecasts, unread message counts and so much more without having to open a single app.

I’m falling for the Windows Phone platform as a whole, both on the Focus Flash and on other phones, and if you haven’t given it a shot recently you really owe it to yourself to check it out on the new batch of devices.

Call Quality /  Data

Call quality on the Focus Flash was just fine. I wasn’t blown away by the clarity but I was able to hear callers just fine during a few test calls in New York City, either. The speakerphone was loud enough though, as with most phones, the person on the other end of my call could clearly tell I was using speakerphone.

I tested the data using http://dslreports.com/mspeed and received my download speed hovered around 1Mbps, which isn’t great considering AT&T bills this as a “4G” phone. In general use, however, data seemed to move pretty quickly over AT&T’s network. My biggest gripe was with the mobile hotspot feature. Even though the phone was reporting thee bars of signal strength, I wasn’t able to connect to the Internet at all. Using the ATRIX 2 in the same spot, also on AT&T, I connected without an issue.

Camera

The 5-megapixel camera on the Focus Flash was a bit of a letdown. Shots looked nearly identical to those taken with the original Focus, but I noticed that many of them were actually blurrier. I found the culprit to be the camera quick-launch key, which also doubles as a shutter button. It requires a bit more force than the one on the Focus and, as such, it shakes the phone a bit when you take a photo. If I was deliberate and stood very, very still I could pull off a clear shot, but otherwise they were blurry. The on-screen shutter button eliminates this issue, but it’s less comfortable to use.

The Focus Flash can record 720p HD video but it defaults to a VGA resolution. That’s probably good, given its relatively low amount of storage. Videos captured with the phone were reasonably good given its low price tag.

Finally, there’s a 1.3-megapixel camera for video chats on the front of the phone. Windows Phone still doesn’t ship with a video chat client pre-installed, and Samsung’s third-party option isn’t really worth looking at. I’m looking forward to Skype integration on future builds of Microsoft’s mobile OS.

Battery Life

The battery life on the Focus Flash was very solid. I was easily able to get through a full day using the phone as my primary device with moderate to heavy usage. Most people should have no problem getting through a full day and I wouldn’t be surprised at all if light users are able to get a day and a half or even two days out of the battery on a single charge.

Conclusion

I’m very impressed with Windows Phone 7.5, and the Focus Flash is a great, affordable vessel for the new OS. Everything is fluid, the experience is unique and alive, and I never really found myself complaining about any aspect of the user interface. Windows Phone aside, the Focus Flash is a great device at the $49.99 price point.

There are plenty of phones to choose from at AT&T for $50 or less, including the iPhone 3GS and a variety of Android handsets. As a result, you may have overlooked the Windows Phone in the corner of your local AT&T store in the past. Now that devices like the Samsung Flash are hitting store shelves, however, it’s time to think twice before passing up Microsoft’s mobile OS for Android or iOS.

When BGR Editor-in-chief Jonathan Geller first reviewed the original Motorola ATRIX 4G in February, he called it “one of the best smartphones to ever be available from AT&T.” Now I have that phone’s successor, the Motorola ATRIX 2. It offers a few improvements over the original, including support for faster data speeds, a slightly larger display and a beefier camera. I’ve been using the ATRIX 2 and a number of its new accessories for a while now; is it as big of a deal as the original was? Can it compete with higher-end devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S II? Those questions and more are answered in my full review, which follows after the break.

Hardware

I was not a fan of the ATRIX 2 hardware design when I first took it out of the box, but the build has actually grown on me a bit. It is bulkier and heavier than the original ATRIX, but also feels more sturdy. The back is covered with a soft-touch rubber coating that looks cheap though, just like the back of the CLIQ XT did. The display measures 4.3-inches diagonally, which is larger than the original 4-inch screen on the first ATRIX, and it maintains the same ultra sharp 960 x 540-pixel qHD resolution.

Motorola decided to ditch the fingerprint reader on the original ATRIX and instead added a useful quick-launch camera key on the side of the phone. The back of the ATRIX 2 is home to an 8-megapixel camera capable of recording 1080p video, a step up from the 5-megapixel camera on the ATRIX 4G. The power button is in easy reach on the top right of the phone and is flanked to its lower-right by volume keys. The left side of the device is home to a microUSB port and a mini-HDMI port, and both are used to connect the phone to an optional media dock or lapdock. More on those later.

Under the hood the ATRIX 2 is powered by a 1GHz dual-core processor, not unlike the chip found in the original. There’s also a 2GB microSD card, 4GB of internal storage and 1GB of RAM. The 1GHz processor was beefy enough for moving around the operating system, but I wonder how much faster the phone could have been if Motorola had added a more modern 1.2GHz or 1.4GHz chipset.

Software

The ATRIX 2 runs Android 2.3.5 (Gingerbread) and the dual-core 1GHz processor had no issue taking most tasks I threw at it. Generally, every movement was fluid and quick, and I rarely saw any lag on the phone. Motorola has ditched its traditional MOTOBLUR user interface, thankfully, and instead offers a number of custom widgets and icons that aren’t as in-your-face.

I absolutely cannot stand the browser icon, which is represented by an AT&T logo. It’s a small annoyance I suppose, but I can’t figure out why Motorola would branch away from a globe icon, which is a fairly universal browser logo. Good thing there are great third-party browser options like Dolphin Browser and Firefox to replace it.

There is plenty of AT&T bloatware installed, but a lot of it is easily removable. I love how I can just long-press any application in the main menu for a quick option to uninstall it from the phone — more Android devices need to follow suit. Motorola also added a DLNA app for sharing media with an HDTV or another DLNA-certified device. In addition, there’s a Phone Portal application for keeping data in sync with your PC via Wi-Fi or USB and a few other apps.

Call Quality / Data

Motorola gave the ATRIX 2 support for 21.1Mbps HSPA+ networks, an improvement over the 14.4Mbps support on the original ATRIX. In New York City, however, I couldn’t see a difference. AT&T’s HSPA+ “4G” speeds were mediocre on the upper east side and I averaged 1.53Mbps down and 1.51Mbps up. The ATRIX 2 also supports hotspot sharing option, which allows it to share its data connection with other Wi-Fi-enabled devices; it worked quite well for me when I used it to connect my laptop to the internet.

Calls placed on the ATRIX 2 were really, really crisp. I didn’t have any complaints from the few people I called and voices were fantastically clear on my end. When I switched to speakerphone the speaker was nice and loud as well, without much distortion, but my caller said she could tell I was using speakerphone and that I wasn’t speaking directly into the handset.

Camera

The ATRIX 2 camera took several solid photos, but the shots didn’t come out as well as they did on the Galaxy S II, which remains one of my favorite cell phone cameras to date. It takes a few seconds to auto-focus onto a subject and photos are usually washed out, lacking the eye-popping colors that better camera sensors offer. When I tried to take a picture of a car driving down the street, for example, the tail lights were the only part that ended up in my picture. Having just bought a new point and shoot camera, I can say I’d definitely still keep it around instead of relying on the ATRIX 2.

While I love the addition of a quick-launch camera key, the button on the ATRIX 2 is so stiff that when I pressed it to take a photo it often caused me to move the phone and blur the shot. In the end, I found myself using the camera key to launch the camera app and I used the on-screen shutter button to snap photos. 1080p videos taken with the ATRIX 2 looked fine when I played them back on my HDTV although, again, the colors looked a bit washed out.

Webtop

Motorola’s Webtop application separates Motorola’s ATRIX 2 and other Motorola smartphones apart from the competition. While most devices may provide an HDMI-out port, there isn’t much you can actually do with it. Sure, you can connect it to a TV to show off pictures or video from a recent vacation, but the experience is often lackluster.

Motorola’s Linux-based Webtop environment, however, allows you to plug the phone into a TV or a Lapdock accessory and actually surf the web in a full browser, access your applications and view them full-screen, manage your address book, send or receive/texts and emails and more. I loved sitting back and playing X-Construct on the ATRIX 2 with a Bluetooth keyboard and mouse while sitting on my living room couch. Additionally, I enjoyed being able to stream my favorite television shows using Flash or Netflix on my big screen. It’s pretty incredible knowing that the ATRIX 2 is powering it all. The interface is still a bit sluggish, but I hope Motorola continues to build on the idea. I don’t think a new application store is necessary, I just wonder how much more powerful and useful Webtop could be with a few additional applications.

Accessories

There are a ton of accessories available for the ATRIX 2, and Motorola sent us most of them. The most noteworthy of the bunch is its new Lapdock 100 device, which serves as a netbook-style device that can be fully powered by the ATRIX 2. If you want a bigger screen, there’s also a Lapdock 500 accessory.

I understand the attraction to to these accessories but I haven’t found a viable use for them yet. Certainly a road warrior might like the option to draw up a presentation using the power of the ATRIX 2 and then pack the dock away and have everything readily available on the phone. Personally, I need a full powered notebook or at the very least a netbook.

In any case, the Lapdock 100 feels much more sturdy than the original, is a bit lighter and has a revamped touchpad with support for two-finger scrolling. The dock replaces the original phone dock with a stowaway wire that can plug into the back of any Webtop-enabled smartphone from Motorola. There’s a small area for tucking the phone into as well, so that it doesn’t fall if you get up and walk around with the accessory.

Motorola also passed along a new Media Dock, which is nearly identical to the original ATRIX dock, but it fits the larger form factor of the ATRIX 2. It easily connected to my television for displaying HD content or accessing the Webtop environment, although I preferred keeping it on my desk in its Desk Mode for easily viewing calendar events, the weather and more.

Battery Life

The ATRIX 2 has a 1,735 mAh battery, which is quite large. I was able to get through the better part of a day with a full charge using the ATRIX 2 as my primary phone. However, I left it on my bedside table with about a 50% charge when I went to sleep one night and woke up to find it completely dead. Most of the phones I’ve tested recently are quite good at idling, but that doesn’t appear to be the case with the ATRIX 2. Perhaps further testing will yield better results, but for now the battery life is somewhat unimpressive.

Final thoughts

The ATRIX 2 is a no brainer for $99 with a new AT&T contract. That said, it isn’t nearly as revolutionary or as exciting as the ATRIX 4G, which launched as one of the first dual-core smartphones and introduced Motorola’s unique Webtop experience.

The camera on the ATRIX 2, though updated, still leaves a lot to be desired. But otherwise, the hardware is solid, the call quality was excellent and the data speeds were satisfactory. I find the Lapdock accessy unnecessary but would probably splurge for the media center dock. And even though I didn’t find much use for the Lapdock, it’s still a good sign to see that Motorola is improving the accessory to address the shortcomings of the original model.

If you want to spend a bit more cash with AT&T, I would suggest buying either the Samsung Galaxy S II for $199.99 or the iPhone 4S, which starts at $199.99 as well. At its $99 price point, though, the ATRIX 2 is a fantastic phone.

Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform is in a peculiar place right now. Those who use the year-old mobile operating system typically offer glowing accounts of their experiences, but adoption has been anything but brisk. Carriers aren’t pushing Windows Phones with any effort worth noting — in fact, retail staffers at U.S. carrier shops have been known to steer customers away from the platform according to various reports — and in the second quarter of 2011, Microsoft’s share of the mobile market may have hit an all-time low. Microsoft’s deal with Nokia finally bore fruit this week however, and the second wave of Windows Phones has begun trickling out into the market. Among the Windows Phone 7.5 “Mango” devices that have been announced to date, one in particular stands taller than the rest, both literally and figuratively. In this review, we take a look at the AT&T-bound HTC Titan to see if this phone is worthy of its titanic moniker.

The Inside

Ever since Microsoft first took the wraps off its next-generation mobile platform “Windows Phone Series 7″ in early 2010, I’ve been intrigued. Like webOS, Microsoft’s operating system appeared to offer a fresh take on the smartphone user experience. When handsets finally started shipping ahead of the holidays last year, Windows Phone delivered. It was fresh, it was unique and it was a pleasure to use. Unfortunately for Microsoft and its partners, however, consumers didn’t seem to care.

Windows Phone was truly a pleasure to use, but it was also quite clearly rushed. I can’t really blame Microsoft for rushing its new mobile platform out the door, of course, as Windows Mobile had effectively been dead for some time already. Android and iOS were crushing the market and Microsoft needed something to lure its vendor partners away from Android. And so Windows Phone 7 was born, but almost immediately dropped off at the orphanage. Vendors didn’t bother promoting the devices, carriers didn’t bother promoting the devices… even Microsoft fell oddly silent as its new platform was cast aside.

Enter Windows Phone 7.5, code-named “Mango” after a fruit so sweet when it’s ripe, it is almost impossible to resist. This was to be the company’s opportunity to regroup and deliver a series of blistering fastballs after a bases-loaded balk saw its opponents’ lead grow wider. All eyes were on London this week as Nokia unveiled its first two Windows Phones, but HTC’s Titan is already upon us, carrying Microsoft’s latest mobile OS on what is likely the largest display it will ever see.

The HTC Titan is a beast. Its 4.7-inch display gives Windows Phone a canvas that is nearly tablet-like, and the 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor driving the device makes one of the world’s smoothest operating system even smoother. In the two weeks I have been carrying the Titan, I have yet to see a crash, bogging, lag, or anything else of the sort. I can’t even say that about iOS.

Animations flutter about on the Titan, and native apps open into a usable state in the blink of an eye. The user interface is unbelievably smooth, and the UI “sticks” to one’s finger during navigation just as well as iOS. Scrolling in apps is also lag-free, though inertia scrolling is still a bit off. When the user releases a finger following a flick, the scroll seems to accelerate at the same rate regardless of how hard the user flicks. It’s awkward but hardly a major problem.

My biggest performance-related issue is the amount of time it takes most apps to refresh with new data. On AT&T’s HSPA network, data speeds are fast and latency is quite low. I regularly saw download speeds of between 2Mbps and 4Mbps during my tests in and around New York City, and upload speeds hovered between 1Mbps and 1.5Mbps while connected to HSPA. Even still, it can take 5, 6 or even 10 seconds or more for an app to refresh with even the smallest amount of new data. I haven’t quite pinpointed the culprit yet — different developers tell me different things, though everyone I’ve spoken with recognizes the issue — but I suspect that it’s often a combination of the OS and developers’ inexperience with coding apps for it.

Beyond that, I can’t stress enough how much I’m enjoying Mango. The “tombstoning” feature akin to application state-saving in iOS is implemented quite well, and apps that take advantage of it load from the background almost instantly. Enhanced multitasking features in the next major Windows Phone release will bring even more capabilities to developers and users alike, but the current solution is fast and elegant.

The Outside

The Titan is huge. There’s no reason to beat around the bush.

Supersized smartphones are becoming more popular each month — probably due in large part to the fact that vendors are flooding the market — and there are definitely advantages and disadvantages to carrying a phone this massive.

At 5.18-inches tall by 2.78-inches wide by 0.39-inches thick, the Titan is even bigger than the Samsung Galaxy S II. At 160 grams, it’s also more than 20 grams heavier. I like a heavy phone, and the Titan’s solid build and high-quality materials are more than worth the added heft to me. The majority of the smartphone’s case is comprised of beautiful brushed aluminum, save for a small rubber-feel area near the top of the rear case and a larger one at the bottom where the antenna sits.

Across the top of the phone sits a power/lock/unlock button, a small hole for the noise-canceling mic and a 3.5-millimeter audio jack. The right edge of the device is home to a slim two-stage camera button that sits beneath an equally slim volume rocker, and the left edge sports a lone micro-USB port. The bottom houses only the phone’s main microphone and a battery door release button.

On the rear of the device is a sizable camera lens flanked by a dual-LED flash and a speaker. I’ll discuss the camera more extensively a bit later. The face of the phone is made up almost entirely of smooth, oil-resistant glass. Three customary capacitive Windows Phones buttons sit across the bottom, and a front-facing camera is positioned near the top below the phone’s ear speaker. Voice calling is quite clear on the Titan, and the speaker gets loud enough to be used comfortably in noisy environments.

One thing that should not be overlooked about the exterior of the Titan is the design. Like the Sensation, HTC’s Titan features a unique unibody design that has the rear case of the device wrap around the side and top. The “guts” of the phone then sit inside the case, creating a design that positions all seams directly around the display. The result is not only gorgeous, it also means there are no uncomfortable seams to be felt by the user’s hands.

The Upside

As a complete package, the Titan is easily one of my favorite Windows Phone to date. The build is phenomenal and the Windows Phone 7.5 operating system is like greased lightning. I’m also a huge fan of live tiles.

Microsoft’s home screen UI, for those unfamiliar with Windows Phone, is tile-based. It is comprised of a grid of square and rectangular tiles that cascade endlessly. The result is a tidy home base that provides a welcome alternative to static icons. These tiles, if enabled, provide the user with information dynamically and can be updated frequently.

For example, my favorite simple weather app WeatherLive displays the current temperature, the temperature range for the day, and a graphical representation of the current weather conditions. When it rains, I see a storm cloud and rain drops. When it’s sunny, a big sharp sun covers the bulk of the tile. Another example is my favorite Google Reader-compatible RSS Reader, Wonder Reader. When enabled, the app periodically flashes headlines across the tile to let me know I have new articles waiting to be read. Messaging apps display unread counts, the Photo Hub cycles through images stored on the device, my Xbox Live avatar dances around the Games tile, and so on.

Beyond the tiles, there are a few other new features in Mango that I really enjoy. First and foremost, tombstoning and basic multitasking support are implemented quite well. Enabled apps close in a frozen state and holding down the back button for a second quickly brings up the task switcher UI. Transition animations are subtle but appreciated, and jumping between apps is lightning fast.

I also like that Mango brings Wi-Fi tethering to Windows Phones. The Internet Sharing service on the Titan is buried in the system settings in Windows Phone rather than being granted a dedicated app that I might be able to pin to the home screen, but I still appreciated having one less device to carry while testing the Titan. Wi-Fi tethering is available on a number of smartphones these days, but I typically find it unusable due to the inevitable battery drain. The Titan’s 1,600 mAh battery held up nicely even after about 30 minutes of Internet Sharing, however, and Mango includes a nifty feature: if no devices connect to the phone after a few minutes, tethering is automatically turned off. Also, if you’re tethered and then you disconnect all devices from the phone, Internet Sharing will automatically turn off after a few idle minutes. It’s one less thing to worry about.

The camera on the Titan shocked me. This has traditionally been a very weak point for HTC phones — very, very weak — but the 8-megapixel camera on the Titan captures terrific still images. The color and clarity in photos taken by the Titan is on par with the likes of Zeiss-equipped Nokia handsets and the iPhone 4S, and future Titan owners can certainly plan to ditch their point-and-shoot cameras. It also captures high-quality 720p HD video content, though the lack of an HDMI-out port or even an adapter is something of a disappointment.

Finally, Windows Phone still provides what, in my opinion, is the hands-down best email experience on any mobile platform. The UI in the email app is gorgeous and lightning fast, and it’s simple to drill down to unread items, urgent items or flagged items with a quick flick. On the Titan, the humongous display only makes things better. Productivity is the same story. Microsoft’s mobile Office suite is a joy to use for creating and editing Word documents or Excel spreadsheets, and the SkyDrive integration provides easy access to remote files to ensure that the same documents are available on your phone and your computer.

The Downside

Again, the Titan is huge. While I have gotten somewhat used to the mammoth device over the course of the past two weeks, it’s still just too big for me.

Consumers love giant smartphones. Vendors keep cranking them out and people keep buying them. While there are numerous and obvious advantages to big smartphone displays, there are also several drawbacks and the negative outweighs the positive for me.

On the one hand, the huge screen affords a great canvas for emails, web pages, images and video. On the other hand, stretching 480 x 800-pixel resolution over a panel that measures 4.7-inches diagonally means clarity and sharpness suffer. Usability suffers as well, and a perfect example is the back button. On Windows Phone devices, the back button is extremely important. There is often no way to navigate back one screen from within the UI, and holding down the capacitive back key also brings up the application switcher. While holding the device in my right hand, however, I cannot reach the back button at all. Not even close.

I also can’t reach the lock/unlock button without repositioning the device in my hand, though this is infinitely less important than the back key. This button is crucial to the operation of the device, and one-handed use is often my preferred method of operation. It just doesn’t work. Samsung solved the problem by repositioning the back button on its giant Galaxy S II smartphone to make it accessible during one-handed use. This of course left the menu key just out of reach, but better that than the back button.

Somewhere around 4-inches lies the sweet spot for me, and a scaled down device like the Titan with a display around that size would likely be my ideal Windows Phone.

My only other serious complaint about the Titan applies to Windows Phone in general rather than to this particular smartphone, and that is the third-party app situation. It’s improving every day, and Nokia’s arrival on the scene will only help accelerate developer adoption. Today, however, things are not where they need to be.

I cannot for the life of me find a decent Twitter app, for example. There are a handful of usable options — I’ve landed on Seesmic for the time being — but they’re all slow and clunky. This goes back to my earlier note that data calls take entirely too long. Microsoft needs to fix this problem because it can be quite off-putting, especially in areas with sparse cellular coverage. The Metro interface is beautiful, but it loses its allure quickly when a data refresh takes 10 seconds.

Today, Windows Phone is often an afterthought for developers and the selection in the Windows Marketplace reflects that. This will change, and Mango introduced new APIs and capabilities that afford developers more flexibility. Right now however, there are many go-to apps that I simply can’t find in the Marketplace, and I suspect many users coming from more established platforms will make the same claim.

The Bottom Line

HTC’s Titan is a smartphone worthy of its name. More importantly, it is also worthy of consumers’ consideration because it really is a fantastic device. The hardware and build are class-leading, the display is bright and clear, the 8-megapixel camera captures gorgeous images, and the Windows Phone 7.5 operating system is a breath of fresh air.

Size matters. For me, bigger isn’t always better and the Titan’s towering stature is a turn off. Many smartphone buyers enjoy large handsets however, and if you fall into that category I sincerely doubt you’ll be able to find a better Windows Phone anywhere in the world right now.

AT&T will launch the HTC Titan some time this fall.

Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 8.9 made its retail debut in September and it is nearly identical to its larger predecessor, the Galaxy Tab 10.1. It mostly packs the same hardware but, as its name suggests, has a smaller screen. I enjoyed the original Galaxy Tab 10.1 when it launched earlier this year: it was thin, powerful and it offered a brand new tablet experience. Unfortunately, though, I couldn’t get on board with Android Honeycomb and I’ve since stopped using the tablet, and the operating system, altogether. Can the Galaxy 8.9′s smaller size and TouchWiz user interface rekindle my love for Android tablets? Read my full review to find out.

Hardware

Before I get started I should note that this is something of a lightning round review. As I mentioned above, the Tab 8.9 is nearly identical to the Tab 10.1 beyond display size, so there are plenty of things that simply don’t need to be rehashed. With that behind us, there isn’t a single part of the Galaxy Tab 8.9 hardware that blows me away.

The Galaxy Tab 8.9 is sized perfectly for fitting in a backpack or small shoulder bag, but I wish Samsung used more premium materials. At its $469.99 price point I expect uni-body aluminum or at least a nice sturdy plastic instead of cheap-feeling plastic. The Galaxy Tab 8.9 also has an awkward button layout. Its 3.5mm headphone jack and power button are on the top of the tablet when held in landscape mode, but so are the volume controls. Since I usually consume media holding the tablet lengthwise, it would make more sense if the volume buttons were in easy reach on the left or right side of the tablet.

The 8.9-inch display has a fairly sharp 1280 x 800-pixel resolution and is nice and bright, although it’s not terribly impressive. I’m definitely looking forward to Samsung’s 7-inch Galaxy Tab with a Super AMOLED display.

There’s a fairly snappy dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2 processor under the hood, which makes the navigating the UI as good an experience as I’ve seen on a Honeycomb tablet. In terms of ports, the Galaxy Tab 8.9 has an audio jack and the Apple-like 30-pin port, but it doesn’t offer an HDMI-out solution out of the box. This means you can’t take advantage of the processor’s ability to display games and media on an HDTV.

Overall the hardware is just satisfactory. I wish Samsung added an HDMI-out port, or at least included an accessory in the box, and I also would’ve liked to see sturdier materials to help justify the high price point.

Software

Samsung has added its TouchWiz UX on top of Android Honeycomb, which improves the stock user interface in a number of ways. The Tron-like blue accents are gone and the icons are much cleaner. Additionally, Samsung provides a number of useful and good-looking widgets that can be applied to the home screen.

There’s a small area with a few useful shortcuts to your calendar, the task manager, a world clock, a notepad, a calculator and the music player that’s easy to lift up from the bottom of the screen, which I appreciated. Also, the browser is much cleaner and feels faster than the stock Android option.

While I love what Samsung has done, it still isn’t enough to mask Honeycomb’s weaknesses. The OS is still sluggish at times, scrolling and animations are often choppy, and it’s really lacking in terms of compelling features. The quality of tablet apps has definitely improved over recent months, and that helps a lot, but it’s still a tough sell.

Thankfully, Google recently announced its latest Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS during an event in Hong Kong, and it should be available on tablets in the coming months. It remains unclear if Samsung will update the Galaxy Tab 8.9 to Android 4.0.

As I mentioned earlier, the operating system still feels sluggish, even on powerful hardware, and it’s terribly unintuitive. And while the app situation is getting better, there still aren’t enough high-quality applications available to provide variety and flexibility. The Galaxy Tab 8.9 has spent plenty of time sitting on my coffee table because I can’t bring myself to want to interact with Honeycomb.

Camera

The 3-megapixel camera on the Galaxy Tab 8.9 is the same found on its larger cousin. Pictures turned out OK, but they obviously aren’t as good as what you can expect from Samsung’s Galaxy family of smartphones. In addition, the Tab 8.9 records 720p video but the camera zooms in incredibly far, which means you have to step back a bit while recording. It is definitely very annoying and made recording video more of a pain than it was worth.

Battery

The Galaxy Tab 8.9 is equipped with a 6,100 mAh battery that affords users “hours of entertainment.” I was able to get through about three days using the tablet to surf the web, play with apps and listen to music, and your mileage will vary depending on your usage.

I also found that the tablet idles very well. After three days of idle time the battery meter had dropped only a few percent. There is one drawback, however: just like the Galaxy Tab 10.1, the Galaxy Tab 8.9 seems to take an eternity to fully charge.

Conclusion

I was a big fan of the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet when it made its debut because it was the thinnest tablet on the market and one of the first Honeycomb tablets. Unfortunately, my joy for Honeycomb has long since diminished. That isn’t Samsung’s fault, it’s Google’s.

The tablet itself packs decent hardware and my biggest complaint is that it feels a bit cheap. Overall, I’d choose the Galaxy Tab 8.9 over the Galaxy Tab 10.1 because it’s more portable and because of Samsung’s improvements to the software. In that sense, I suppose it would be one of my favorite Honeycomb tablets yet. That really isn’t saying much, though. Even my favorite Honeycomb tablet is going to collect dust on the coffee table.

This is a tough break. Just a day after Motorola unveiled the revival of its iconic RAZR brand, and just hours after Samsung and Google took the wraps off Android 4.0 and the Galaxy Nexus, I decided to finally put my thoughts together on the Galaxy S II review unit Samsung sent me a few weeks ago. Samsung’s Galaxy S II might be the fastest-selling smartphone the vendor has ever released, but it doesn’t have a 7.1-millimeter-thin Kevlar case or a sleek curved glass screen. It doesn’t have 4G LTE speed or a qHD display, and it probably won’t be updated with Google’s Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich OS in the immediate future. But does that mean the millions of consumers who have purchased the device over the past few months should feel that their smartphone of choice has just been outclassed? My thoughts follow below.

It’s a scenario that has become all too familiar: Android smartphone X is unveiled and it has a gorgeous case, specs to die for, a brand new multi-core processor and an ultra-slim case that makes its predecessors look like a DynaTAC. Smartphone fans drool and rush out to buy the new device as soon as it hits store shelves. A few months or even weeks later, Android smartphone Y is unveiled, rendering Android phone X nearly obsolete in enthusiasts’ eyes.

Apropos, recent Galaxy S II buyers around the world were undoubtedly sweating on Tuesday morning as we prepared to see Motorola’s latest and greatest followed by the next-generation Google flagship phone, Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus. Here in the U.S., the Galaxy S II launched just last month so Americans in particular were surely feeling the heat.

When the dust finally settled after the DROID RAZR and Galaxy Nexus had been announced, we were left with two amazing smartphones. They were slim, they were sleek and they left Android fans ready to bite. Unlike product cycles in the past, however, these new flagship phones were hardly a quantum leap past the current crop of Android-powered smartphones. In fact, the cycle of buyer’s remorse may very well have just been broken.

I’m a huge fan of HTC’s Sense UI and I typically gravitate toward the Taiwan-based vendor’s impressive lineup of Android phones as a result. Until recently, my weapon of choice was the Sensation 4G and I’m still a big fan of the device. The build is phenomenal, the display is big and bright but not too big for one-handed use, and the latest version of Sense is flat out beautiful. Then, several weeks ago, I reluctantly put my trusty Sensation in a drawer to begin testing T-Mobile’s Galaxy S II. I haven’t touched it since.

I’ll just come right out with it: the Galaxy S II is my favorite Android phone to date.

When it comes to Samsung’s smartphones, I hold a similar opinion of most devices the vendor has launched in recent years. I call them diamonds in the rough.

To put it bluntly, mounting Samsung displays in the cases that often surround them is akin to mounting a flawless 4-carat diamond on the base of a ring pop. Owners of a Galaxy S, a Focus or any number of other Samsung smartphones will know exactly what I mean. The AMOLED displays on these smartphones are some of the best screens I have ever seen on mobile devices. The vibrant colors put competitors’ smartphone displays to shame, the brightness is beyond impressive and the clarity is phenomenal.

The cheap plastics Samsung uses to encase these gorgeous displays, however, might even make Hasbro’s Playskool division blush.

With the Galaxy S II, Samsung has improved the hardware side of the equation dramatically. Granted, there was so much room for improvement that this dramatic change still leaves the device lagging behind some competitive offerings, but the hardware is finally at a point where it is solid enough to pass as a high-end device. In other words, it no longer draws attention away from Samsung’s beautiful Super AMOLED Plus displays.

The face of the Galaxy S II is flat glass, and I might add that it resists oil from the hands quite well. The back of the phone, at least where T-Mobile’s version is concerned, is a nice textured plastic with a slight rubbery feel. It’s not ultra high-end but it is infinitely better than the cheap plastic back on the Nexus S, for example. The bezel around the edges of the phone is still a bit cheap feeling compared to materials you might find on an HTC device, however, and the Galaxy S II does feel a tad light for its size. All things considered though, 99 out of 100 consumers will be beyond happy with this hardware — and as soon as that magnificent display is lit up, the remaining 1% will likely forget all about any inadequacies where the case is concerned.

BGR has already reviewed the Galaxy S II, twice, so I won’t bother pick the phone apart again. Instead, a few observations beyond the build as noted above:

Samsung’s TouchWiz UI layer is much improved on the Galaxy S II. It is a touch more refined and less cartoon-like, and there are some new widgets as well. Samsung’s widgets can’t even come close to touching HTC’s Sense widgets, but they get the job done and there are plenty of third-party options to fill in the blanks.

This phone is fast. Forget the specs — which are very impressive, mind you — what matters is a device’s performance and the Galaxy S II performs quite well. Moving around the OS still isn’t as smooth as it is with Windows Phone or iOS, but this is an Android issue that not even Qualcomm’s 1.5GHz dual-core chipset can resolve. Among its peers, however, the S II is much more responsive than other high-end Android phones I’ve tested. Apps open and close instantly, bogging is extremely rare, animations are nice and smooth, and data moves over T-Mobile’s HSPA+ 42 very quickly. In and around New York City, I typically saw download speeds between 2 and 4Mbps and upload speeds around 1Mbps.

My only real complaint regarding this phone is the fact that it’s gigantic. T-Mobile’s Galaxy S II is equipped with a 4.52-inch Super AMOLED Plus display and while it is smaller than the screen on some other devices like the Galaxy Nexus or HTC Titan, it’s still too big for my taste. Smartphones are becoming caricatures of themselves, but smartphone buyers seem to love these mega-screens so onward and upward we go. For me personally, 4-inches is the sweet spot. The entire display can be reached with one-handed use and it’s still big enough to provide a spacious canvass.

With displays bigger than 4 inches, one-handed use is no longer comfortable for me. Holding the Galaxy S II in one hand, for example, I cannot tap the menu button without releasing the phone almost entirely from my grip, balancing it on my pinky and hoping it doesn’t drop as I extend my thumb across the device. It’s ridiculous. But luckily for me, I have two hands.

I am most certainly looking forward to spending some time with both the Motorola DROID RAZR and Google’s new Galaxy Nexus because they really do look like gorgeous smartphones. The RAZR is slim and sleek, truly deserving of its iconic moniker. The Galaxy Nexus is a beast and it will be the first smartphone to launch with Android 4.0. If I was to be denied the opportunity to handle either of these phones, however, I have to be honest — I wouldn’t be the least bit upset. They look incredible, that much is certain, but neither phone brings with it a unique feature set that is compelling enough to draw me away from the Galaxy S II.

The iPhone 4S is Apple’s top of the line smartphone, but is it just a small upgrade over the iPhone 4 or something entirely different? It looks the same, but does it act the same? New in the iPhone 4S is Siri, Apple’s virtual personal assistant, along with an upgraded camera, twice the speed as far as processing and downloads are concerned, and a redesigned antenna system that also supports global roaming for Verizon and Sprint users. Are these new features enough to upgrade your iPhone 4, though? What about iPhone 3GS owners or maybe even those of you who are stuck using some other smartphone you bought because the salesperson said it was just good as that iPhone your carrier didn’t offer at the time? Read on to find out.

Hardware / Design

The iPhone 4S combines some of the best materials with what is arguably the finest smartphone design on the planet — you don’t even need to see or hold one to know that. Why? Because it’s basically identical to the original iPhone 4 that launched last year in June.

While the iPhone 4S external hardware doesn’t greatly differ from the iPhone 4, there are some subtle and welcome changes. For starters, the iPhone 4S incorporates the updated external antenna design found on the Verizon iPhone 4. Instead of three breaks in the stainless steel middle band that surrounds the handset, there are now four symmetrically placed breaks.

I like this layout better because while Apple’s “Antennagate” issues were exaggerated, it was still a problem at times if you happened to hold the phone in a way that completely smothered the bottom-left corner of the phone. After over a year of consciously and then subconsciously avoiding that spot with my grip, this new antenna design makes me feel a bit more at ease. In fact, I haven’t noticed an issue at all even when purposely applying the death grip across one, two or even all four seams this time around.

There are also a few physical hardware changes like a redesigned home button (mostly from the inside) that should fix reliability issues. While not touted by Apple, I can also tell that there has been a big change with the microphone and speakerphone, but I’ll go into that a little bit later.

The big upgrades with the iPhone 4S are internal. The iPhone 4 wasn’t a slow device by any means; in fact, it performed and felt faster than most other smartphones that had much faster processors thanks to Apple’s complete control over the OS from top to bottom, including the user interface. The iPhone 4S though, is much faster than the iPhone 4 with most tasks, and it offers up seven times the graphics performance of the iPhone 4. Apps open instantly now, there’s no lag whatsoever, web browsing (which was already arguably better than it is on any other mobile device) is even faster now, and gaming on the 4S most certainly has a notable performance increase.

This device, Apple touts, is the first smartphone to incorporate two antennas that is able to switch between them even while on a phone call, offering a superior phone calling experience. This is in addition to being a true world phone for Verizon and newcomer Sprint, who for the first time is offering the iPhone 4S and the previous-generation iPhone 4. In short: Apple made the best smartphone, from a hardware and design perspective, even better.

iOS 5

Apple released iOS 5 as a free upgrade for all iPhone 3GS, iPhone 4, iPad, iPad 2, and third and fourth-generation iPod touch owners. It also ships with the iPhone 4S. The new operating system brings some much needed features and enhancements to the iOS platform to play catch up with competitors, while also leaping beyond other platforms in other areas.

A major pain point in previous versions of iOS, for example, was the notifications system. They were obtrusive, they we’re obstructive, they were so old school. Thankfully iOS 5 brings Notification Center, a new pull-down drawer that features all of your notifications from each and every app you’d like in addition the local weather and stocks courtesy of Apple widgets. Instead of a pop-up making you either dismiss it or read the message, new alerts simply drop down at the very top of your screen, allowing you to continue going about your business while of course letting you go into that specific alert if you’d like. It’s a system we’ve seen before, of course, but it’s better in a lot of ways.

Also new in iOS 5 is iMessage. Apple has finally introduced a messaging service that not only eliminates the need for many text messaging packages and saves you money, but also lets you communicate with any other iOS 5 device including iPad and iPod touch devices without a cellular connection. It’s Apple’s version of BlackBerry Messenger, and while it doesn’t offer the ability to request / deny buddies, or offer advanced features like group calendar sharing, it’s an excellent alternative that seamlessly integrates into the Messages app. By default, Apple will use iMessage, signified by a blue chat bubble as opposed to a green one, allowing you to bypass your carrier’s text message service in order to use Apple’s free one instead. Messages also show if they were delivered or read by the recipient, and you can share photos, videos, your location, contacts, and more over iMessage.

Another big addition to the iOS experience that comes alongside iOS 5 is iCloud, which works hand in hand with the brand new iPhone 4S.

With iCloud, you’re able to stop worrying about syncing your content and let Apple push it instantly to all of your computers and mobile devices. For instance, you can start working on a document in iWork on your computer, pick up your iPad when you’re on the sofa and pick up right where you left off, all without saving, emailing, uploading, or anything. The same thing goes with your media and content. Purchase a song from iTunes or download an app from the App Store and it’s immediately available on your other iOS devices and even in your iTunes library on your computer. iCloud works across third party apps as well so you can put down a game you’re playing on your iPhone, pick up your iPad and resume from the level or place you paused at.

Another major iCloud feature is called Photo Stream. After testing this feature for the last few months, I’m completely in love with it. If you have more than one computer, it used to be difficult to manage an iOS device as data including photos could only be synced with one computer. With Photo Stream, Apple automatically pushes your photos to all of your computers and other iOS devices, and it stores up to 1,000 photos for 30 days. Just grab the photos you want, and drag them to an album on any computer or even make one right from the iPhone 4S itself, and you don’t ever have to worry about syncing your photos again.

Other notable iOS 5 additions include the ability to sync your device to iTunes over Wi-Fi instead of plugging it in, wireless nightly backups to iCloud, and important enhancements to the Mail app like the ability to flag your emails, search all content, mark all as read, and more. Lastly, iOS 5 enables you to use your smartphone or device completely PC-free. This means you don’t need to plug it into a computer to set it up — in fact, you don’t have to use a computer for anything if you don’t want. You can make email boxes on the fly, make photo albums, and even set up and manage your Apple wireless network right from your iOS device.

All in all, iOS 5 brings over 200 new features and changes to the iOS platform and they add up to a dramatic improvement over a user experience that was already phenomenal.

Siri

There are a few words I can think of that can accurately describe Siri: game-changing, mind-blowing, revolutionary, empowering. Is Siri really that big a deal? Yes, and here’s why:

In it’s current iteration as a sassy voice-driven personal assistant, Siri is incredible. It’s by far the best artificial intelligence solution that’s ever been offered to consumers (and I’m sure even to most non-consumers as well). Siri not only can respond to ordinary tasks but it also has the ability to extend beyond the device and pull in information from many sources of information like Wolfram Alpha, Yelp, Wikipedia, and more.

There are many people who won’t understand the fawning over Siri, and following the Apple event earlier this month, a part of me was initially skeptical of Siri’s usefulness beyond the initial novelty when I would play around with it and show it off to friends and family. Then I got in my car and drove somewhere. Texting and driving is terrible, but let’s be honest, most of us glance at our phones or worse when we’re in the car. Siri enabled me to get all of my new text messages and emails, reply to my text messages, check my calendar, move an appointment, create an appointment including inviting someone to the meeting, check the weather, play a specific song, find where a specific friend was in the world (using Apple’s Find My Friends app), and make a few phone calls. I didn’t look at my phone once. Now that’s a game changer.

Siri allows you to have a normal conversation with your phone, and it actually is a tad bit… unsettling at first. Asking your phone to move your 1:00 p.m. calendar appointment to 3:00 p.m., call your mother back, text your friend and tell him that the movie he recommended you see was horrendous, how much 1912 times 451 is, how do I get home, remind me to grab my sunglasses when I leave the office, and how the markets are doing is just ridiculous. I’ve asked Siri her age, what her favorite color is, where she is from, and other personal questions, and each time there’s a personal response, most of the time with slight snark.

Now, Siri does have a few hiccups. It relies on the network, so if you’re using something like Optimum’s Wi-Fi hotspots when you’re out and about, this can cause a little bit of an issue as you switch on and off of Wi-Fi access points since Siri won’t be able to connect to the server when you’re disconnecting. And the few times you’re on an EDGE or 1x network, Siri can take a while instead of coming back with a response almost instantly. There are also some times when Siri will mess up, but I have found that even if you don’t say a few words clearly enough, or Siri doesn’t detect them clearly enough, that most of the time the response will still turn out alright. When Siri misunderstands a word, you can also edit it with a simple tap to ensure an accurate response. Then of course there are the comical times Siri doesn’t get what you’re saying at all, but those luckily don’t happen too much.

In addition to Siri, the personal assistant that lives on your iPhone 4S, you’re also able to dictate text in any text field on the iPhone using the new microphone button on the virtual keyboard. This is very similar to a feature Android has had for years. Fortunately, this works way, way better.

It was rumored that Nuance is powering this feature (and parts of Siri), and I’d believe it as this performs just like the Dragon Dictation iPhone app, but being built-in changes everything. Even with background noise, Siri and voice dictation normally worked flawlessly thanks to the iPhone’s second microphone for noise cancellation. Again, while driving, I didn’t have to check my phone once and I could carry on a perfectly accurate text conversation with someone. It’s incredible. When you think that Apple has labeled this as a beta, and that the system will improve over time, this is going to be the next big revolution as far as computer and device input is concerned. We’re actually starting to live in a world where you can speak naturally to your device and it won’t only understand you, but it will give you a little bit of attitude as well. Imagine something like this in different aspects of technology… what about in your TV? Instead of fumbling for the remote and navigating through those terrible, terrible, cable box interfaces, just tell your TV to tune to ESPN, or record a specific show at a certain time, and it’s done. Think about how bad car navigation and voice control is, even in the best automobiles. This is the start of the next revolution in terms of interacting with a computer, just as a mouse was, just as touch was.

Siri works internationally with five languages and a few localizations, though there are some features that are limited to the U.S. for now. Apple will expand Siri to more regions and languages in 2012.

Camera / Video capture

The camera on the iPhone 4S is the best camera I have ever used on a mobile device.

I remember years ago buying a Sharp GX22 and then GX30 camera phone and being impressed at the quality of photos that the phones could take. The first was a VGA camera phone, but it had a better lens than any other phone on the market, and the second featured a 1-megapixel camera. It was the first time I realized that megapixels weren’t the only thing that mattered as far as photos were concerned.

That’s not to say 8-megapixels isn’t impressive on a smartphone, but it’s what those 8-megapixels can serve up that matters, and on the iPhone 4S, they are the best photos I have seen taken on a non-camera. In fact, the camera is good enough to where I have no longer need to bring an actual camera anywhere I go outside of a dSLR for specific purposes. With face detection (it supports up to 10 people in the same photo) exposure is properly set, with the ability to use the volume up button as a shutter button, you no longer have to go hunting around for the on-screen shutter button, and with new features like grid lines that help you compose a shot even better, the camera on the iPhone 4S is a winner.

That’s not even considering how amazing the iPhone 4s is in low-light situations, or how with the new camera button on the lock screen combined with the speed of the 4S and optics, you can take a photo in under 4 seconds from getting your phone out of your pocket — you won’t ever miss a shot again. Photos can now be taken in rapid succession, and with the ability to edit photos right on the device itself, including red eye removal, cropping, and an auto-enhance feature, the iPhone 4S offers the most compelling camera package on any smartphone or mobile device.

As far as the video camera goes on the iPhone 4S, it’s almost equally as impressive. Finally you’re able to capture full 1080p HD video right from your iPhone, and in addition to crystal clear, full-frame 1080p video, the iPhone 4S offers up something even better: brilliantly, using the gyro built into the device (it can sense the device’s orientation and position on three different axes), video captured with the iPhone 4S is automatically stabilized as it’s taken, eliminating almost all shakes and jagged video. Additionally, using the same noise cancellation techniques that the phone uses for voice calling and for interacting with Siri, audio taken with videos is almost always crisp and clear.

Phone / Speaker

Apple’s iPhones have not ever been excellent phones for voice calling. Blame the networks, blame the radios or blame whatever else you want — voice calls were almost never a good experience. I’m extremely happy that the iPhone 4S finally starts to break that mold.

In terms of radio performance, speed and call quality, I am incredibly impressed. I have more service in more places, fewer dropped calls (just about on par with a phone like a BlackBerry 9700, which runs very well on AT&T’s network) and better call quality. The reason for the change? Well, Apple’s new antenna system is surely a part of it as is the updated software on the device, but I think we have to give some credit to the Qualcomm radio that Apple has finally migrated to. Qualcomm is known for making class-topping chips, and this is a welcome change.

Finally, the speakerphone on the iPhone 4S improves on an already solid experience. It’s not only louder than it was on previous models, but it’s clearer as well, offering call and music audio that’s not distorted or choppy. This improvement most likely has to do with Siri in order to ensure the experience with Apple’s new personal assistant is top-notch and crystal clear, but the improvements trickle down into other areas of the device as well.

Battery

Apple notes that battery life on the iPhone 4S should be comparable to the iPhone 4 even though the smartphone features a dual-core processor with two times the speed and seven times the graphics performance over the previous model. The company also notes that the iPhone 4S will perform better in some key areas, like delivering an extra hour of talk time over 3G than its predecessor. It comes at the cost of one less hour of internet usage over Wi-Fi (10% less), and 33% less standby time. At first these sound like big changes, especially in standby time, but over the last few days I didn’t notice much of a difference in battery performance compared to the iPhone 4.

Conclusion

Apple didn’t introduce a brand new iPhone with a radical new case design, larger display, 4G, or the ability to make you a cup of espresso. What Apple did do is drastically improve upon the company’s most successful smartphone ever — and the most popular smartphone in the world — the iPhone 4.

The iPhone 4S is better in every way possible, including being up to two times faster as far as regular use is concerned. It also features the best camera and video camera on a smartphone ever, drastically improved voice calling performance, global support, downloads up to twice as fast, and Siri, a game-changing virtual personal assistant that is the start of a shift in how we interact with computers and mobile devices.

The iPhone 4S comes at a time when most iPhone 3GS users are coming up for their wireless service renewal. The iPhone 4S isn’t just impressive to an iPhone 3GS owner, it blows the doors off almost any Android alternative (I’d say all, but then I’d fear for my survival), and if you’re big on photography, an on-the-go person who might need an extra hand from your phone, or even require the ability to use your phone internationally if you’re on Verizon or Sprint, the iPhone 4S is a worthy upgrade from any smartphone. Whether it’s an iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4, a feature phone or a BlackBerry, this is the best phone Apple has ever made, and there isn’t another company in the world that could deliver all of these features in such a beautifully designed, tightly integrated, and enjoyable packages.

With the iPhone 4S starting at $199 from each of the three largest carriers in the U.S. (finally), Apple is also making the original iPhone 4 available at only $99 for the 8GB model. Make no mistake, this is the most formidable smartphone tag team that exists on the planet, and while you can’t go wrong with either device, the iPhone 4S really pushes what we can do with mobile devices even further into the future.