Touch screen is basically a high end or smart phone phenomenon but that doesn’t mean it cannot be offered on midrange phones. Samsung Sleek is an excellent example of this. It is more of a messaging phone made for social networking freaks. You have a full sized QWERTY keyboard for typing out those lengthy messages and the touch screen display too is good. The handset gives basic multimedia features like music player and 1.3 mega pixel camera. Apart from that, there are no advanced features on this cell phone. If you are looking for a mid range multimedia phone, this device will fit the bill perfectly. This gadget is yours for $79.99 and Sprint asks you to sign a two year contract. The 2.6 inch QVG display of the phone has a resolution of 240x320 pixels with 262k color support. You can adjust the screen’s touch sensitivity, brightness, and backlight time. This is not a capacitive display so you will need to press a bit harder. But the experience was still good and there  [...]

Palm Pixi Plus is a toned down sibling to the powerful and bigger Palm Pre Plus. It is from AT&T and will be available in the market from June 6. The manufacturer gave us this phone in our labs for review just days before its release. This phone is also available from Verizon Wireless and the handset is not powerful. The cost of this phone is $49.99 and you have to sign a two year contract with the service provider. For this price, we liked the feature set that I had to offer and we would recommend this phone to people who are purchasing a smartphone for the first time. This is an entry level smartphone and it has all the goodies that you’d expect in such a device like GPS, Bluetooth, 3G and Wi-Fi. Don’t forget the benefits that you are going to get from the great Palm WebOS. The camera is now equipped with video recording capabilities and you can also edit them easily. There are a few downsides though. For instance, the phone is sluggish sometimes. The keyboard and display is quite  [...]

Samsung has made lots of touch screen phones featuring full sized QWERTY keyboards and not all of them have been successful in the market. Before this, we got the Samsung Glyde (also by Verizon) and it came with lots of drawbacks. We also got the Samsung Impression from AT&T in our labs for review and that phone was a bit better. Samsung Rogue SCH-U960 is better than the two aforementioned devices. It has a touch screen along with QWERTY keyboard but apart from that, you will love the gorgeous AMOLED touch screen. There are other goodies in the phone like voice dialing and 3.5 mm headphones jack. It also has lots of high end features like EV-DO Rev. A, full HTML browser along with Flash Lite support, GPS, etc. This phone costs $99.99 and you have to sign a two year contract after $100 mail in rebate. This means the phone is quite affordable. But this phone needs a data plan and you need to play separately for that, 75MB/month plan costs $19.99 and 25 MB/month plan costs $9.99.

Microsoft has already announced the release of Windows 7 but it is still manufacturing Windows 6.5 phones aggressively. The latest example of this is LG Fathom. It run on Windows 6.5.3 and is one of the few smartphones from Verizon Wireless to have CDMA/GSM dual chipsets. You can put in an international SIM card when you are traveling out of US. We weren’t that impressed with the resistive touch screen but the slide out QWERTY keyboard is quite good. The phone has some good features and we are really tempted by this phone even though there is Windows 7 lurking around. This handset is available for $149.99 and you have to sign a two year contract after $100 mail in rebate. We also liked the solid construction of the handset. The QWERTY keyboard is quite roomy and the display too is bright. Other goodies on the device include Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth. On the flipside, performance of the phone was a bit sluggish, especially with the accelerometer. The handset, as a whole, is quite bulky  [...]

Last summer, RIM and Sprint promised us Wi-Fi enabled BlackBerry Tour and here they are with RIM BlackBerry Bold 9650. The Tour has been dropped from the name but this phone still is a better device than Tour, it now has Wi-Fi and the onboard memory is also doubled. You favorites like compact QWERTY design and world roaming capabilities are still there. This is definitely not the most cutting edge or exciting smartphone that is out there in the market but it is definitely a good choice especially for globetrotters. This phone will put you back with $199.99 and you have to sign a two year contract with the service provider after $100 mail in rebate.  This phone has a lot in common with Tour and we are not just talking about the looks or design. The internal features too are a lot similar. One thing that we would like the change here is the Web browser. It is very clunky. BlackBerry’s biggest weak point is its browser. There might have been changes done to over the years but it is still  [...]

There are tons of smartphones out there in the market right now and we as tech enthusiasts drool on all of them. But if you are not tech savy, purchasing a high end smartphone will mean nothing for you. All you need is a handset to make a few calls, click some snaps and maybe listen to music sometimes. It makes no sense to buy a high end smartphone for this. We conducted a survey for this and found that most of the people who own a smartphone don’t use all the features that it has to offer. Some are not even aware that the gadget has specific features. There are lots of varieties when it comes to step down phones. Some come with pretty basic features while some give you a few features like music player and camera put in. Motorola VE440 belongs to this category; it has a different body design. We have never seen this design before in a cell phone. On the body, dedicated buttons for camera and music. All these keys are pretty easy to access. Display The  [...]

We first saw the HTC Evo 4G at CTIA 2010 and since then we were waiting in anticipation for this phone to arrive at our labs since there was so much hype surrounding it. This handset will be available for purchase from June 4th and will be America’s first 4G smartphone. We have high expectations from this phone and it deliver to the promises. This is a good handset but we have a couple of complaints too. Overall, we think that this is the best Smartphone seen to date and is also one of the finest Android phones right now. It is very powerful and is packed with features. 4G promises are delivered quite well. We expected better speeds from 4G but still it lives up to the claim that this technology is better than 3G. Sprint hasn’t rolled out the 4G carpet all over yet, so only a limited number of people will be able to exploit all the features of this phone when it launches in the market. You also have to shell out $10 extra for the mandatory Premium Data add-on. We are not complaining  [...]

This is the first Android phone by LG to hit the American shores. Previous Android devices by the manufacturer came out only in the Asian and European markets. We really liked this phone even though there is nothing spectacular about the feature set. This is because everything has been kept neat and tidy in the phone. The display is pretty good, the slide out keyboard too is good and the performance too lived up to our expectations. The phone comes with Android 2.1, the latest version of the OS. The price is the phone is $99.99 and it comes with two year contract obligation. The phone has a 3.2 megapixel camera along with flash but the quality of images wasn’t as good as we’d expected. There are other features on the phone that will be of great use like stereo Bluetooth, EV-DO Rev. A. and Wi-Fi. Apart from that, we liked the solid design of the phone; the weight contributes a lot to make the phone durable. The phone has a rated battery life of seven and half hours.

Palm Pre Plus is from AT&T and we first saw it in CES 2010. It will be available from May 16 and it doesn’t have tons of surprises inside since this phone is quite similar to the one we had to Verizon model. The software and hardware is pretty much the same and the only difference is that this phone supports services of AT&T. We would have loved if this phone came with some new hardware but AT&T customers here can use the WebOS’s great capabilities. The multitasking abilities too are impressive. The feature set is well rounded and the interface is easy to use. We will call this one of the better phones from AT&T in recent times. Before this, we had Motorola Backflip which didn’t do too well in the market. HTC Tilt2 and LG Expo were also there but those two were targeted at business men. We think this is a great alternative to the iPhone but it is priced a bit high. Cost of this phone is $149.99 and you have to sign a two year contract with the service provider. AT&T  [...]