Nokia has given us good music phones, basic handsets and offbeat square models. Now, the manufacturer has launched the new Nokia Mural 6750 phone. Shiny and the slim handset is equipped with 3G support and PTT (Push-To-Talk). It feels solid in hand with the metal skin. The Nokia 6750 Mural phone comes with two-year AT&T service has a price of $49.99, which includes $50 for (mail-in) rebate. The Mural 6750 has inbuilt AT&T Navigator and a Where application for local search, which are based on integrated Assisted-GPS. Nokia representatives told us that the handset is made from 80 percent recycled plastic. The box packing has 25 percent recycled material and the user manual has 10 percent recycled paper. The handset is free from materials like CFCs, benzene and asbestos. Slim design of the Nokia Mural 6750 phone gives a bit of a dated look to the product. This is not a familiar territory for Nokia, its handset have been bulky in the past but were not much of a problem while carrying  [...]

Google Android is a good mobile operating system and gaining success in the market. Now, Motorola has launched new handset Motorola Cliq MB200 for T-Mobile with Google Android operating system. The Cliq smartphone is a powerful device with action-packed features, spacious keyboard and easy-to-use design. Motorola has added a new MotoBlur user-interface to the Cliq, which synchronizes all e-mails and social-media contacts to one unique place. With some good features, Google Android OS has also some limitations. Motorola Cliq costs $199 with service contract from T-Mobile. The smartphone has broadened the hardware horizons available to the Android Mobile OS. It has comfortable keyboard layout and improved slider mechanism as compared to the 3G1. The Cliq is the first Android’s device to use full QWERTY keyboard since MyTouch 3G1. It will give tough competition to T-Mobile MyTouch 3G, 3G1 and Sprint’s HTC Hero. Let us take you to the feature set and drawbacks of Motorola Cliq.

Motorola is not new in cell phone market and it has made a lot of rugged handsets too like Motorola Tundra (for AT&T) and Motorola Brute i680 (for Nextel). Now, the company is here with Motorola Quantico for U.S. Cellular. The Quantico is military-specified to withstand extreme and harsh conditions. The design is not attractive, however, the Quantico handset has midrange feature set, which include 1.3-megapixels camera and GPS. The battery cover at the back and sides of the phone are clad in textured rubber. In addition, both charger and headset jacks have tight rubber-plugs to prevent the water from seeping in. The battery cover is secure with rotating lock-mechanism. Motorola claims that its Quantico is durable and it can resist rain, shock, extreme temperatures and pressures, dust, and vibration. We did throw the Quantico on ground and dipped it in water few times, but there was no effect on the phone. Let us have a look what Motorola has provided in its Quantico handset.

Nokia phones are not that much of a hot property when it comes to smartphones in the US. The company launched Nokia Twist last month, which did not do too well. The new Nokia 2705 shade is the same handset that centrally features on basic communication and it supports the CDMA2000 1X 1900/800 band. The Shade is a folder type phone and costs around $29.99 with service. The performance is satisfactory and Shade 2705 has a thin design that does not draw attention. It feels a bit too fragile in our hands. You can change the covers; you get options of blue, red and green colors. The Shade is portable and gives a wispy almost toy like feel in the hand. You have to be careful with this phone as the plastic skin may not stand much of rough treatment. It has a 1.3 mega pixel digital camera. Keyboard buttons are more spacious and the navigation is easy. We really like the simple design of the Nokia 2705. It does not try to do anything wild out of the box. Call quality is very important in a cell  [...]

RIM’s first touch-screen smartphone was not a great success. RIM BlackBerry Storm had various performance issues and bugs, which were resolved later by installing latest software updates. However, the original Storm still had numerous issues which remain unattended. Research in Motion (RIM) has launched the successor to Storm, which is RIM BlackBerry Storm 2. We agree that the BlackBerry has made a lot of changes to make it a better phone than the previous Storm. It offers a SurePress touch-screen with inbuilt BlackBerry OS 5.0 to provide better user experience. The additional features include Wi-Fi, more memory, enhanced core functions and a more stable system. RIM still falls behind in the areas of internet browsing and usability. Storm 2 has to face tough competition from Verizon’s other touch-screen phones including Motorola Droid and Samsung Omnia 2. The RIM BlackBerry Storm 2 is available for $179.99 with a two-year contract and after a $100 mail-in rebate. The Storm 2 is the  [...]

Nokia E72 is based on WCDMA (UMTS)/GSM. It has a candy bar design and supports the band: WCDMA (UMTS)/GSM 850/900/1800/1900. The basic features include vibrating alert, polyphonic ringer, speed dial, voice dialing, call timer, voice recorder and speakerphone. Nokia E72 offers conference calling up to six participants, quad-band world roaming and VoIP calls. Nokia E72 is powered by 600MHz processor and inbuilt 250 MB memory. The operating system is Symbian OS 9.3 Series 60 3rd Edition Feature Pack 2. The phone offers synchronization with PC through MS Outlook and SyncML. The phone has a microSD card slot that supports up to 16GB. 2.36-inch LCD display has 320×240 pixels resolution that supports 24-bit (16.7 million) colors. Nokia E72 also has multi-language menu. The smartphone supports the wireless interface of IEEE 802.11 b/g and Bluetooth 2.0 EDR. The speech codecs are FF, HR, EFR and AMR. 5-mega pixel built-in camera has a 5x digital zoom and focal length of 4.7 mm. The camera’s  [...]

Huawei is not so famous in the United States and Europe because the company is basically into just basic entry level phones like this one. However, Huawei has attracted the market slowly in past year. It has built the T-Mobile Tap last year and now it is launching M750, which costs around $159 without a contract. CDMA2000 1x technology based M750 uses Metro PCS as its service provider. It supports the CDMA 2000 1X 1900X800 / AWS 1700/1200 band. The phone has additional features like 1.3 mega pixel camera, Web browser, Bluetooth and touch screen with some basic features to attract the market. The call quality was good and impressive. However, M750 didn’t impress us much because it lacked features like video player, video recorder and Wi-Fi etc. 2.8-inch size is a bit small for touch screens, but the display has vibrant colors. The phone does not have internal accelerometer to rotate the display, which is quite annoying for typing text messages.

Whenever we see a water and shock resistant phone, we automatically assume that it is going to be ugly. And most of the times, this is true because there is a lot of padding on the handset for standing through shocks and water. Brute i680 meets military specifications for elements like salt fog, low and high temperature, vibration and shock and dust. Though it is a water resistant phone you can’t take it with you for swimming with you underwater. But you can use it while talking in the rains. We held the phone under running tap in our labs and the device wasn’t damaged at all. For testing the shock resistance, we put threw the phone around on concrete floor as well as carpet. There wasn’t a single scratch on the device and it was working well too. The Brute i680 is made for Nextel, you can get it for $119 with service. Other features on the phone include a music player, camera which though not the best, are still nice to have on a phone. The call quality is also good, overall we didn’t  [...]

LG is a big player in the touch screen phone market. A lot of its products go to big carriers like AT&T Wireless (LG Xenon and LG enV Touch) and Verizon Wireless. A few of its phones make to U.S. cellular which is a regional carrier. This handset is a lot like LG Tritan but the Bliss doesn’t have a low resolution camera or physical keyboard. This product is quite slim and is packed with features, which is what you look to in a phone. The Bliss has built-in accelerometer which gives you a full size QWERTY keyboard when you turn the phone. The buttons on it are spacious and easy to type. It has a 2.0 mega pixel, something that we were disappointed with. Usually you’d expect a 3.2 mega pixel camera but this low resolution camera was surprisingly good in photos.  We had very little to complain about the phone, it had pretty good features. Our only complaint was the feel of the device which feels cheap plasticky in the hand. The handset is yours for $99 along with a 2 year contract  [...]

We all know what HTC is capable of when it comes to smart phones. They have given us plenty of them and very rarely have they failed to make an impact in the market with their handsets. They along with Samsung have been really good in smart phone sales. Such is their impact that Nokia recently announced that they will be cutting down on smart phone production and will be instead concentrating more on mid range handsets because they are unable compete with these two big players. We have always had a soft spot for HTC phones because they never fail to deliver with their devices and hence we pounced on the Tilt2 when it landed in our test centers. This is officially the successor to HTC Tilt but looks more like HTC Touch Pro2 which is available on Verizon, Sprint and T-Mobile. The design of the two phones is the same, it has the same speaker layout and the chrome edges which we saw in the unlocked Touch Pro2. One big difference in this handset is the inclusion of Windows Mobile 6.5 so you  [...]