Nokia Lumia 925

This incremental update from the 920 is less bulky than its predecessor, offers impeccable low-light shots and has an incredibly responsive user interface – is it the perfect Windows Phone experience?


The Nokia Lumia 925 is by no means a revolutionary phone, bringing more evolution than revolution to the table, but this should not fool you because this is a phone which has built on the great work of its predecessors.
With the Lumia 925 being an increment change from the 920, you shouldn’t be at all surprised that the phones are quite similar, although we think Nokia has made enough changes to ensure the 925 remains in a category all on its own.
While the 920 was big and bulky, the 925 is a lot slimmer and lighter, thanks to the aluminium design – which is a first for the Lumia range.
Despite all the chopping down, Nokia refused to take out any of the insides of the 920, with the same innards as its predecessor, plus a few notable upgrades.
When picking up the 925, you straight away notice the difference in both size and weight compared to its predecessor. We have to say that this is the first Lumia we have seen that compares to the lightness and thinness of other phones on the market.
While it’s still thicker than a Samsung Galaxy S4, HTC One and even a Sony Xperia Z, it wasn’t all that noticeable.
In fact, when compared to an Xperia Z, we’d even argue that it felt less bulky, with the device weighing slightly less in our hands.
When compared to the 920, which came in at 10.7mm, it’s no contest, with this just being 8.5mm thick, which makes it a lot more usable in one hand, as well as a lot less noticeable while in your pocket.
The screen isn’t the largest we’ve seen, at just 4.5 inches, and it isn’t HD, but this is a very different screen from the 920’s, with Nokia opting for an AMOLED panel rather than the IPS LCD we saw on the 920.
We think that this is around the perfect size for a phone screen, not too big yet not too small. It would be nice to have an HD screen, but as it stands it’s still a vivid display – just like the one we saw on the 920.
It also has the same PureMotionHD+ technology that Nokia claims reduces latency on animations – something we noticed on the 925, as well as the 920, with the Windows Phone UI being very responsive to touch and incredibly fast.
One issue we had with the screen is the fact that it simply didn’t replicate colours in the same way as the IPS LCD, despite having excellent colour replication, although we have to say they definitely felt brighter as the AMOLED screen really helped the blacks blend into the bezel, meaning the colourful UI of Windows Phone looked a lot more vibrant.
True colours
Nokia has also included a setting where you can change your colour profile, just as you would your ringtone. This enables you to change both the temperature of the colours as well as the saturation, with many pre-installed options available to you, as well as the ability to tweak it manually.
One issue I find with most smartphones is the inability to read the screen in the sunlight, something that was very much present on other flagships such as the Samsung Galaxy S4. With the 925 I was surprised by how easy it was to see everything on the screen even in incredibly bright direct sunlight.
If you loved the ability to use gloves in the 920, then that is back with the 925, and yes you can even use your keys, although it isn’t advised.
Under the screen are the same three soft buttons we’ve come to expect from all Windows Phones, although we did notice that when our phone had run out of charge, the Windows start button would flash after you plugged it in. This flashing logo is something we want to see used more, with it flashing for other events such as notifications – something common with Android phones.
People have reported that the 925 has a notification light, as many have noticed that there is a red light in the top right corner, but Nokia has clarified that this is not a light and is simply the proximity sensor.
The soft buttons have seen an improvement over the 920 though, with the lights being a lot brighter when illuminated – we did have some issues with this however, as the lights did not always show up, even when in a completely dark room.
Turn the device around and you’ll notice a familiar material, something Nokia hasn’t abandoned on the 925 – despite encasing it in aluminium. We had the white 925 which looked a lot better, but also picked up dirt a lot more, a possible downside to choosing polycarbonate for the rear panel.
Issues of dirt aside, the 925 looks very nice from behind, with everything seemingly well thought out, from the speaker grill to the slight bump on the camera.
The camera is definitely an important feature of the 925, with Nokia claiming that it can capture “more than your eyes can see”, something you’ll hear a lot more about later.
Also on the back you’ll notice three small dots just above the speaker grill.  This is where one of the differences between the 920 and 925 really stands out – with the 925 losing its wireless charging capabilities as a standalone device. Now if you want to wirelessly charge your 925 you’ll have to buy a separate case which connects to these three dots – something we’ve seen on similar flagships such as the Samsung Galaxy S4.
Bumpy ride
As far as design goes, it isn’t challenged aesthetically by those three dots, but one place it is challenged is the inclusion of two bumps on the speaker grill – which were noticeable at first, but as we got used to the device, we didn’t even acknowledge their existence.
That said, unlike other flagship devices, the 925 is nowhere near as flat on its rear.
As for the edges of device, they are all nice and smooth, making it feel a lot nicer to hold, although we thought that Nokia felt a little too passionately about putting all the ports in one place, with them all being on the top rather than spread out.
The ports you do get are standard slots for both micro SIM and Micro USB as well as a 3.5mm headphone jack.
We do have to applaud Nokia for moving the micro USB slot to the top, as it makes the device a lot more accessible whilst charging, although it was annoyingly positioned being slightly left of centre.
There is no microSD card slot on the 925, with the only remaining features on the side of the device being the buttons for the volume, power and camera functions – something which is also present on every Windows Phone device.
As Nokia has chosen to keep both the left side and bottom of the device free, 920 users may find the 925 a bit of a culture shock, as Nokia has even chosen to put the speakers on the back of the device. This didn’t affect sound too much, although we had to be careful not to cover the grill.
As far as sound quality goes, we were incredibly impressed by the clarity of the sound, although we felt that it could have been slightly louder – especially given the 920’s booming speakers.
It doesn’t have a quad-core processor, nor does it have eye tracking, but the 925 is by no means an unimpressive device when it comes to its ability to perform.
In fact, it performs incredibly well, even in benchmark tests, with the 925 even coping with some intensive 3D games, such as N.O.V.A.
Battery life was also not that terrible – although the 925 didn’t manage to last a full day, it was a notable step up from the 920.
With a 1.5GHz Snapdragon S4 processor, the Windows Phone UI didn’t struggle at all, switching between apps incredibly quickly with no latency whatsoever – which was also helped by the 1GB of RAM on board.
It wasn’t all coming up roses for the 925, however, with our review unit crashing to the lock screen on occasions. While this wasn’t the biggest issue in the world, as all apps we were running were still going, it often became frustrating and on very rare occasions the phone even restarted itself.

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Sony Xperia Z – big can be beautiful

Sony’s latest is a powerhouse phone which runs like a breeze and has a great screen and good battery life – but it does have design niggles, including a mammoth screen that looks strange on calls

The Xperia Z looks both great and bizarre at the same time. The exterior is a slim, black (or white or purple) tablet vaguely resembling Space Odyssey markers, with no physical buttons on its five-inch screen and measuring 139mm x 71mm.
It does help the phone differentiate itself from other black monoliths, but the device is just too big to hold comfortably when making a call.
Calls and Skype conversations can also come across muffled due to a speaker’s apparent location at the bottom right side of the phone – just where you hold it to take a call if you’re right-handed.
The power button is an odd protruding circle – odd because the rest of the phone is so sleek and the power button just looks ugly. A hard casing (the front and back are tempered glass) which makes it scratch and shatter proof – which our testing also backs up. It stood up to the general wear and tear of life, although it wasn’t immune to a scuff here or there.
The Xperia is a sleek-looking phone, despite these niggles. It’s very thin (7.9mm) and light (146g) and, along with its cover colour detail, helps differentiate it somewhat.
Water, water everywhere
As it is water and dust resistant, each plug has a protective tab you have to remove. These worked fine and slotted into place pretty seamlessly but still felt a bit fragile – could be a problem with wearing out and ripping off for more rugged users.
Dunking the Xperia into a jug of water worked a charm and the phone came out as good as new.
Where the phone really looks good, though, is on its screen. Sony has, quite rightly, emphasised the screen quality, describing it as razor-sharp. For once, this is not marketing hyperbole – this is a fantastic screen.
The Xperia boasts 1,920×1,080 pixels resolution, for a whopping great 443 pixels per inch density – far above rivals. Colours pop, fine detail is superfine and in all, viewing things on the Xperia is a joy. On a test run of movies, colours were clear, detail was particularly fine and the phone handled black reasonably well – a problem the Xperia T used to have.
Hard-wearing hardware
The Xperia Z runs the latest Android, 4.1.2 Jelly Bean. It runs a grunty Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Pro, quad core Krait at 1.5GHz, with a healthy 2GB RAM. Needless to say, this phone is oozing raw power – what you need done gets done. It has 16GB on-board storage (expandable to 32GB with a microSD card).
The phone handled any tasks thrown at it, although playing movies saw it heat up slightly around the back. Aside from that, it didn’t have any troubles.
The Xperia Z is also 4G LTE-enabled so if you’re running 4G on EE (or the other networks later in the year), you will be able to get high-speed data and browsing. Sony have also made a big deal about its NFC capabilities, which will allow you to interact with any other Sony product – such as speaker systems, TVs and the soon-to–be-launched Xperia Tablet Z. You can throw music with a tap, clone your phone screen on your TV and even use it as a remote (it has infrared built in).

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Samsung Galaxy Camera – future flash

The future of all cameras: a compact running on a smartphone operating system with a fantastic feature set plus excellent integration with services such as Dropbox and Facebook – it’s just not quite there yet

When Samsung unveiled this camera just before Christmas, many were a bit confused. Why on earth is it putting a smartphone operating system on a camera? Smartphones with cameras have already become advanced enough now to start killing off the cheap compact camera market – why go there?
Samsung has done something ingenious here and presented us with an effective prototype of how all consumer-grade cameras will one day operate. This camera is essentially a Samsung Galaxy S III (quad-core processor and all) stuck on the back of a 21x zoom, 16.3MP camera.
It borrows a lot of ideas from the Nokia PureView 808 cameraphone, but the Galaxy Camera runs the full Android 4.2 OS (rather than the dead-and-buried Symbian). This means it works as well as any smartphone in the market, running all your favourite apps, games and, of course, photo-editing software.

Best camera OS

For this reason alone it is incredibly flexible – instead of being stuck in Nikon or Canon’s locked-down operating systems, this means your Galaxy Camera already has access to your GPS (and Google Maps), Dropbox (for automatic file storage), Facebook and Instagram (for sharing photos).
No more pulling the memory card out of your compact camera, plugging it into your computer, loading up your graphics editing program, resizing and cropping your images, uploading to Facebook, tagging your friends and pressing save.
The Galaxy Camera (GC) lets you do everything, automatically, as soon as you’ve taken the picture. You can do all the editing you like with on-board photo software (or download your own).
The GC has a built in Micro-SD – so the internal memory of 8GB is expandable to 64GB. It also supports 2G, 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi. While it doesn’t have a built-in cellular radio (so no mobile network calls), its connectivity options mean you can use Skype, Viber and WhatsApp to call and text friends and family.
Sounds good so far? Unfortunately, I call this a prototype because I feel it is exactly that – the processor is powerful, but the glasswork isn’t. But Samsung’s effort here definitely points a very clear arrow about where the camera market is going.
Samsung’s camera-focused rivals better sit up and pay attention, or they risk going the way of the Nintendo and Sony handheld gaming machines – killed off by tablets, phone-tablets and smartphones
 running mobile operating systems.

Hardware a mixed bag

The trade-off for this impressive piece of hardware is its usability. Cramming a 1.4GHz quad-core processor (as mentioned earlier, basically a Samsung Galaxy S III minus the cell radio) into a compact camera size doesn’t really work. It is heavy and unwieldy.
Most of this processing power is being used on the smartphone features (and whether you need all those features is debatable). Cameras themselves are actually pretty simple devices, requiring little more than a light sensor to record the world, and then a mechanism for processing and recording it to an SD card.
As a result, the Galaxy Camera is much bigger than a lot of compact cameras, and is much heavier than most smartphones at 300g – the Nokia Lumia 920 (a heavy boy itself) is only 185g. Everyone who picked it up for a play was shocked at how heavy it was.
This is because it is pretty well designed on the outside – it is quite attractive, a high-quality build and made out of a hard, cool plastic that feels metallic.
Unfortunately, corners have been cut – the Xenon flash that pops up is very rinky-dink, and when the lenses are fully extended the camera falls over.


The camera falls over

You didn’t misread that – the camera falls over. The body isn’t balanced against the extended lenses, so anyone who wants to set it up on a table or on a timer will need to use a tripod – it simply falls forwards. This is a pretty appalling design failing – a trade-off for getting that 21x zoom.
The entirety of the back of the camera is taken up with a very clear 4.8-inch, 1,280 x 720 screen. While well illuminated and fairly high resolution, the colours represented are a bit dull.
It is great for playing back photos and videos though – superior to most DSLR camera screens. Unfortunately, there is no viewfinder, so the screen is all you have to shoot with and mostly follows smartphone mechanics (touch the screen to focus). The shutter button on the top of the device zooms.
While so far this seems excellent for casual snappers and travellers, the screen itself is among the worst muck magnets I’ve ever seen. Whereas most smartphones are used in a single- or dual-finger prodding motion, the Camera’s screen means that holding it like a camera often means your hands will smear the screen, and I regularly bumped the settings button with my thumb while trying to line up a shot.
As a smartphone, running apps and the like, the power inside the Camera means it never misses a beat in games or any other app. Photo editing is a breeze with minimal delays. If anything, most delays will come from upload/download times on your internet connection.

Battery life issues

Another trade-off is that the camera needs to boot up like a smartphone or computer, which takes a huge 25 seconds. This makes it useless for a camera as any ‘magic moment’ is lost in that time.
However, if you go into settings and use ‘fast power on’ (which lasts for 24 hours), the turn-on time is instant.
However, much like tablets and smartphones’ ‘always on’ usage – this means your camera is continuously burning through your battery charge. If you plan to take this backpacking or into the jungle for multiple days, tough – either turn it off fully each time (and potentially miss the photo of a lifetime) or have it in ‘always on’ mode and potentially have the charge run out before you get back to civilisation.
Given the point of these smartphone-style features is to enhance photography’s mobility and connectivity, this is a pretty tough call for buyers to make.
During testing of ‘always on’ the camera lasted around 24 hours before needing another charge (combination Wi-Fi and 3G). Powering off and on lasted 2-3 days with sporadic usage. This simply does not match up to any dedicated camera of any kind unfortunately.

Photo customer confusion

The Galaxy Camera’s size suggests that it’s a high-end compact camera, similar to a Canon G1X. It isn’t unfortunately, and is probably more akin to the lowest levels of cheap £100-£200 compacts.
If you want to compare it to smartphone cameras – not terribly fair since it has a full optical set and zoom – it thrashes pretty much all of them in day-to-day situations. But then this is a £400 device that can’t make cellphone calls.
It does have two great features for casual snappers. Firstly, it has an incredibly wide field of view at 4.1mm. This is more than almost every other camera out there (professional or not), and means that everything fits in frame – about as much as your eyesight. The 21x optical zoom is also very useful for
the opposite reason. Again, the trade-off for these two feature sets is the image quality.

Replacement for compacts?

The Galaxy Camera does offer more options than most low-end compacts. If you keep your camera stuck on auto mode, you may never notice. But the Galaxy becomes very useful once you put it on manual and fiddle with the exposure, shutter speed, aperture and the ISO (digital ‘film speed’).
However, while these attributes hurt it as a still camera, it remains a very good video camera. It takes a good 1080p video, plus its size and weight makes it much easier to lug around and shoot decent video. The huge back screen helps immensely for shooting home videos – and this is where I predict the Galaxy Camera could become a sleeper hit. It is streets ahead of most smartphones when it comes to video quality – but again suffers graininess in low light. In moving images, however, this is less noticeable.
It also has a screw mount on its base, so can easily be attached to a dolly or tripod.
In summary, no£400 seems expensive compared to the compact cameras you can get for the same price from Canon, Nikon and Sony.
You can do almost everything you can on your Android smartphone here except cellphone calling (although you can make voice calls through Skype and Viber) – but you get a pop-up flash, 21x zoom and a huge field of view.
Unfortunately, ramming phone components into a camera has left the device a bit bulkier – and the camera components still aren’t as good as dedicated cameras. Until the price comes down, and the bulkiness is shed, normal users will probably be best sticking to their existing compacts and uploading manually. Nikon and Canon beware.

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Vodafone Smart 3 Review

Vodafone Smart 3 - Design

The Vodafone Smart 3's design brings a certain old-school variety to the budget smartphone scene. Its semi-transparent plastic can be decorated with paper inserts – you can even print your own designs to make the phone your own. It’s a neat trick and one reminiscent of the classic Nokia 3310, may it rest in peace.

The Smart 3 is manufactured on Vodafone’s behalf by French budget phone specialist Alcatel. As such there is more than a hint of Alcatel themed design to it, with the phone’s soft curved edges and a flat back giving a nod to the likes of the Alcatel One Touch Idol X. A slight kick to the base of the phone gives it a striking finish, too.

The Vodafone Smart 3 is by no means slight, measuring in at 10.9mm thick and 136g in weight. Compared with its closest rivals, it is the dessert lover of the budget scene. Although 1.6mm slimmer than the comparatively priced Samsung Galaxy Young, it is 24g heavier. Fortunately, this considerable weight is carried evenly across its 4-inch body, creating a comfortable, reassuring balance in the hand.

The matt finish to the Smart 3’s bumper style plastic edge makes it comfortable and easy to grip, and even helps elevate the otherwise cheap, plastic build of the sub-£100 phone.

Overall, the Vodafone Smart 3 feels safe and secure in the hand. Build quality is not the most reassuring with a lot of creaking and moaning accompanying every use, and we would be concerned about how the phone fared against drops to concrete. But it looks more exciting than its £90 price tag suggests.

Vodafone Smart 3 Screen Quality

The Vodafone Smart 3’s screen is hardly a standout feature, but it’s good enough for a £90 phone. Indeed, the 800 x 480 resolution is a step up on the 480 x 320-pixel screen found on the more expensive Samsung Galaxy Fame, but it’s not the brightest. The screen is meek and washed out in bright, direct sunlight and still feels a little diluted indoors. Colours constantly look pale, too, which means photos, videos and even web pages look pallid and dull. Viewing angles are dire, too. Tilt the phone out of anything but a direct line of sight and the backlighting on the capacitive LCD panel causes shadows and bright haloing.

The responsiveness of the Vodafone Smart 3’s screen is acceptable, however, with swipe and selection gestures responding relatively promptly and with little fuss. Things start to fall apart with multi-finger gestures, however. Attempting usually simple tasks, such as pinch-to-zoom, results in a bitty, laggy experience that lacks the fluidity of even cheaper phones.

For all its faults, though, the Vodafone Smart 3’s 233 pixels-per-inch image density stands out from the crowd. Text and graphics are still noticeably hazy at their edges and images are far from pin-sharp, but the improvement over the likes of the Samsung Galaxy Young (176 PPI) is noticeable from the off.

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Sony Xperia Z Ultra

Key Features: 6.44 inch Full-HD screen; Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 2.2GHz processor; MicroSD card slot Manufacturer: Sony

Sony Xperia Z Ultra hands-on review

Sony Xperia Z Ultra

Following on the heels of the Xperia Z smartphone and Xperia Tablet Z is Sony’s foray into the world of the giant phone or ‘phablet’, the Sony Xperia Z Ultra. Weighing in with a Galaxy Note 2 busting 6.44-inch full HD screen, the Xperia Ultra Z is an incredibly slim, waterproof phone and is the first to use the fastest smartphone processor in the world, Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 800.

Sony Xperia Z Ultra - Design

The Sony Xperia Z Ultra retains the ‘OmniBalance’ design principles that provide the Xperia Z line with its distinctive angular looks, and it squeeze and impressively large screen into a 6.5mm thick body. This is thinner than any other Full HD smartphone, and you can really tell when holding it. Surprisingly for such a large phone (179.4 x 92.2 x 6.5 mm) the Z Ultra is reasonably easy to use one-handed and fits in a back pocket, widthways at least. The top pokes out of the top of anything but the largest pockets, not that you’ll want to keep where you’re likely to sit on it.

It’s made from metal frame sandwiched between two panes of tempered glass and weighs 212g, making it slightly heavier than the competition. The Samsung Galaxy Note 2 weighs 183g including stylus, while the Huawei Ascend Mate is also lighter at 198g. Not that you particularly feel the extra weight in your hand. With such a large phone the thinness is more important, and Sony has done a good job keeping the Xperia Z Ultra as slim as possible – with the thin side bezel showing of the screen at its best.

Sony has kept faith with the round power button seen on other Xperia models. This sits in the middle of the right hand side of the phone, making it easily accessible during one-handed use. The volume rocker can be found just underneath, again easy to get to without needing both hands.

Unlike most phones, the 3.5mm headphone jack is on the side of the Xperia Z Ultra. This is exposed, enabling you to plug headphones in without messing about with fiddly flaps. Even though there’s no plug or cover the headphone jack is water-resistant and therefore does not affect the water proofing of the phone.

Other aspects of the design include a contact for wireless charging - a special dock can be purchased separately for this purpose – while flaps cover the microSD and SIM slots, just like the Xperia Z phone and tablet.   

Sony Xperia Z Ultra – Screen

One of the most impressive aspects of the Xperia Z Ultra is its screen. The 6.44-inch full HD screen has great viewing angles and deep, accurate colour reproduction. The dark surroundings in which we were testing made the screen look its best , but also meant we were not able tell how well it performs in sunlight.

Sony has added its Triluminos display technology, previously only available on its Bravia TVs, to the Xperia Z Ultra. This allows the screen to display a wider palette of colours. In our testing the Xperia Z Ultra replicated colour well, particularly reds and skin tones.

Another benefit Triluminos brings to the Z Ultra is X-Reality. X-Reality takes lo-res images and video and optimises it to improve its quality – think up-scaling SD content to HD on a TV. While this wasn’t available to test during our hand-ons it does offer the intriguing potential to sharpen up lower resolution YouTube video and web images. This type of up-scaling requires plenty of power, which leads us nicely into the beast of a processor on the Xperia Z Ultra. 

Sony Xperia Z Ultra – Performance

Touted as the fastest mobile processor ever, the Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 that powers the Xperia Z Ultra is a quad-core processor running at 2.2GHz. As expected with sort of power behind it, the Z Ultra zips through the Android 4.2 Jelly Bean menus and we found no hint of lag when opening or running apps. Full HD video content also ran very smoothly.

A quick test using the 3D Mark benchmark test, Ice Storm Extreme, saw it score an incredible 11,896. What does that mean in real terms? Well the Galaxy S4 is certainly no slouch, but it can only get to around 6,700 in the same test.

Sony Xperia Z Ultra – Features

The Xperia Z Ultra ups the ante on the water-proofing stakes and is IP55 and IP58 rated. This means that the Ultra can withstand dust and submersion under water. Where it beats the Xperia Z is that the Ultra can go deeper than the 1m limit of its little brother.

The rear camera is an 8-megapixel affair while the front facing camera is 2 megapixel, perfect for video calling but not much else. We’ll be bringing you more about how these perform when we fully review the phone.

 

The Xperia Z family

While the Xperia Z Ultra doesn’t come with a stylus it does allow any pen or pencil to be used as one, impressive considering all other phones require a capacitive stylus to be used. Of course this is a far cry from the pressure sensitive digitisers we are used to on the likes of the Samsung’s Galaxy Note series, but we found writing notes on the Xperia Z Ultra works well. Handwriting recognitions is intelligent, it managed to comprehend even our scrawls with good accuracy.

As a sweetener Sony will offer a £21 voucher plus 30 days free access to Music Unlimited with every purchase of the Z Ultra when it launches later this year.

Sony also announced the SBH52 with the Xperia Z Ultra. This is a 'Smart Bluetooth Handset' that lets you answer calls and view text messages while your phone is in your bag. It is splash proof and also has a built in FM radio with RDS. 

Sony Xperia Z Ultra - Battery Life

The main concern we have with the Xperia Z Ultra is battery life. The 6.44-inch HD screen will doubtless be thirsty and we hope the 3,000mAh battery can cope. The smaller and lower resolution Galaxy Note 2 packs a 3,100mAh battery and has great battery life so we hope the Z Ultra can compare. As with the rest of the Xperia range it will come with Sony’s Battery Stamina Mode to make the most out of battery life.

First Impressions

Sony has entered the large smartphone market with a bang. The Xperia Z Ultra is good-looking, has a great screen and is incredibly slim. We’ll have to see how the Galaxy Note 3 stacks up to it when Samsung finally show it off in Autumn

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Samsung Galaxy Young Review

Key Features: 3.2-inch 320 x 480 pixel screen; 4GB internal memory, microSD slot; 1GHz CPU; Android 4.1 Jelly Bean Manufacturer: Samsung

Samsung Galaxy Young review

What is the Samsung Galaxy Young?

The Samsung Galaxy Young is a compact 3.27-inch Android phone that, at a smidge less than £90 on a SIM-free basis, is a true budget phone. It's the smaller sibling to the Samsung Galaxy Fame and the Samsung Galaxy Ace 2.

As its name suggests, it is aimed at the pre-teen, first-time smartphone user who has few demands that will trouble the 1GHz single-core processor. The Young is a very basic phone with a 3-megapixel camera and just 4GB of internal storage.

Having risen to dominate the high-end smartphone sector with the Samsung Galaxy S4, the question now is can Samsung hit similar heights on a budget front? Read on to find out.

Samsung Galaxy Young - Design

The Samsung Galaxy Young has a design similar to a scaled down Samsung Galaxy S3. It is a squat, bulbous little phone that felt dwarfed by our hand compared to huge smartphones that are so common now.

While its 3.27-inch size is small by modern standards, at 12.5mm thick the Young is a bit of a chunker. Weighing in at 112g, it weighs the same as the far superior iPhone 5 but confines this heft to a much smaller space, giving the impression of being considerably heavier than the Apple offering as a result.

The Young’s slightly curved rear makes it fit marginally more comfortably within the hand than the boxy form of the similarly priced LG Optimus L3, with its rounded edges easier and less invasive to hold. Pleasingly, the Samsung Galaxy Young’s plastic build does not make the phone feel particularly fragile either.

Although the considerable thickness can make the handset feel a little clunky and dense, it also ensures the Young does not bend or flex when put under considerable amounts of pressure. This cannot be said about all budget phones. Still, we wouldn’t fancy its chances against a couple of drops to the pavement.

The design of the Samsung Galaxy Young is by no means the most stylish to on a smartphone, but neither is it particularly abrasive on the eye. Its faux metal band, which is actually silver plastic and encompasses the outer edge of the phone, brings an air of elegance and higher-end appeal to the phone.

The Samsung Galaxy Young is available in white, blue, grey and ‘wine red’ colour schemes, which gives it a bit more character than certain budget phones, including the bland, lifeless black slab that is the Huawei Ascend G510.

Samsung Galaxy Young - Screen Quality

The Samsung Galaxy Young’s screen is far from the handset’s standout feature. Indeed, it’s the same disappointing 480 x 320 pixel LCD screen found on the Samsung Galaxy Fame. Unlike most smartphone screens, which can display 16.7million colours or more, the Young’s screen is limited to just 256,000 colours. That means photos and videos look dull in comparison to even mid-range smartphones – even web pages don’t look good.

The Young’s screen has a slightly improved sharpness (176 pixels-per-inch to 165) than the Fame, thanks to being marginally smaller (3.27-inches to 3.5-inches). But this minor improvement is barely noticeable to the naked eye and, like its more expensive sibling, the Young provides far from defined and sharp content. App icons and text have blocky, pixelated edges and word heavy web pages have a smeared effect.

For the price, however, the Samsung Galaxy Young’s screen is passable. Where the same screen on the £150 Samsung Galaxy Fame felt like a pitiful offering, on a £90 phone it is just about acceptable. It is a fairly middling offering for the budget smartphone market – it’s a small improvement over the LG Optimus L3’s display, but it’s considerably weaker than the 800 x 480 pixel WVGA screen found on the £90 Vodafone Smart 3.

Brightness is a little lacking and viewing angles are pretty poor but, for the large part, responsiveness to touch is satisfactory. The Young’s screen does, however, feature one touch-based irritation. Its antireflective coating makes the screen feel almost greasy. This is a fairly common issue with budget phones and a sign of cheaper components. Not a total deal breaker, it simply creates a sluggish swipe motion on occasion.

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Acer Liquid E2 Review

Key Features: MediaTek 1.2GHz quad-core CPU; 1GB RAM; Android 4.2.1 OS; 4.5-inch IPS 960 x 540 pixel screen; 8-megapixel camera with LED flash Manufacturer: Acer

Acer Liquid E2 - Design, Connectivity and Screen

What is the Acer Liquid E2?

Acer is a phone-maker whose mobiles aren’t commonly seen on the shelves of the local mobile shop. However, its phones tend to be a bit cheaper than the top names, they barely fiddle with the Android OS at all these days and the Acer Liquid E2 in particular has a solid mid-range feature list. It’s not pretty and its price isn’t quite as aggressive as alternatives from ZTE and Huawei, but the quad-core Acer Liquid E2 is a sound buy if you care more about value than style

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Acer Liquid E2 – Design

This is a phone that does try to separate itself from the pack looks-wise, but its don't work particularly well.

Rather than using an eye-catching finish or a metal body, the Acer Liquid E2’s look is defined by the two speaker grilles on its rear. They're the first thing you notice, as they are the most brazen we’ve ever seen on a phone.

We get it, Acer, you’re trying to tell us the phone has above-average speakers. However, they do not look good

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The one other bit of design trim is a spot of red up by where your ear sits when taking calls. Thankfully, it’s much subtler than the grilles, but still looks like a bit of a Franken-phone. It looks... incoherent.

From a more practical perspective, the Acer Liquid E2’s dodgy design doesn’t matter a great deal. The speakers don’t spoil the phone’s ergonomics, and handling is perfectly fine. At 10mm thick it's no supermodel slim, but the soft touch plastic battery cover feels nice and smooth on the fingers. It’s not too heavy either, at 140g.

Average height, average weight, ill-advised looks – the Acer Liquid E2 is no beauty. But with a mid-size 4.5-inch screen, its power and volume rocker buttons are small enough to reach comfortably one-handed and – front-on at least – its looks are inoffensively drab. It also has a neat little green/red notification light in the screen surround and light-up soft keys.

Under its removable battery cover is a full-size SIM slot and the microSD memory card slot. With only 4GB of internal memory, a memory card is a must if you want to store music or videos. There’s also a dual-SIM version of the E2, although we’re yet to see whether it’ll be widely distributed in the UK.

 

Acer Liquid E2 – Connectivity

Aside from these slots under the hood, and the headphone jack/microUSB on the phone’s outside, all the Liquid E2’s connections are wireless. And, as you might guess, there’s nothing too advanced going on.

The Acer Liquid E2 does not have 4G or NFC, the two most important recent-ish additions to the roster of mobile phone connections. It does have everything else, though: Bluetooth, GPS, HSPA 3G and Wi-Fi.

Acer Liquid E2 – Screen

The Acer Liquid E2 has a 4.5-inch screen, a step or two below the 5-inch and near-5-inch top-end mobiles of the year, such as the HTC One and Samsung Galaxy S4.

Although not hugely dissimilar in size, there is quite a gap in screen quality. The Acer Liquid E2 uses an IPS panel, the type of screen used in most higher-end tablets and phones.

Its viewing angles are great – the main design goal behind this type of screen – and image quality is decent. However, there are compromises.

The screen doesn’t have the advanced anti-reflective coating seen in pricier phones, and as such the base ‘black’ of the screen is grey-ish in normal indoors lighting, spoiling the contrast of images. Resolution is fairly low, too.

The Acer Liquid E2’s display is 960 x 540 pixels, resulting in pixel density of 245ppi. That’s a respectable low-to-mid range figure, and it doesn’t leave normal-sized text looking blocky, but it lacks the pristine zingy clarity you’d get with a 720p or 1080p display.

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Camera Comparison: Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom vs Galaxy S4, HTC One, iPhone 5

Introduction 

Is it a smartphone? Is it a camera? Actually, it is an amalgamation of both, and it is known as the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom. This peculiar device has the guts of a modern-day smartphone, and as a matter of fact, it packs enough punch to be anyone's daily driver. But at the same time, it also offers camera features rarely seen on something that can make phone calls – 10x optical zoom, optical image stabilization, xenon flash, and tons of manual camera adjustments are all in its arsenal.

So why are we even bothering to compare its photographic capabilities with those of other smartphones, as high-end as they may be? Well, because putting the latest smartphones through their paces is our job, for starters. Also, we have a strange feeling that the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom, despite having a 16MP camera sensor, may not be that radically superior to the handsets it will be competing against on the market. Our intuition could be wrong, of course, but whether that's the case or not will become clear once we're through with this extensive smartphone camera comparison.

The smartphones we've chosen to run against the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom are the Samsung Galaxy S4, equipped with a 13MP camera, the HTC One and its 4-megapixel “UltraPixel” camera, and the iPhone 5 with its 8MP snapper. All three contenders are known to be very capable in the camera department and they will surely give the S4 Zoom some heated competition. A dedicated digital camera is also in play – a Panasonic Lumix GH2 with its kit 14-42mm lens, serving the purpose of a reference device.

To keep things fair, all photos you're about to see have been snapped on automatic settings, unless noted otherwise. In other words, no special shooting modes or scenes have been applied in order to let each camera decide for itself what settings it should use, depending on the scene being captured. All pictures have been taken using nothing but a pair of steady hands, with the exception of indoor photos, for which we used a tripod.

Overall Presentation:

So without any further ado, let's take a look at what these four smartphones are capable of. Here we have a handful of photos that we took with them in a variety of lighting conditions. All images have been scaled down to a resolution of about 2.7MP (with a width of 1920px) as that size should suit the majority of consumers' needs. The goal of this is to present the photographs from a typical user'’s point of view. That'’s how the average Joe would view and use them – posted on a social network or a photo sharing web site, for example. And by the way, a digital photo of this size is perfectly suitable for making 6”” by 4”” hard copies.

As expected, the Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom produces great results. Its images are very detailed, with well-balanced colors and accurate exposure. Besides, the Zoom handles dynamics really well, which makes its photos more lifelike. But interestingly, the Samsung Galaxy S4 does not lag behind the Galaxy S4 Zoom in terms of image quality at this resolution. In fact, some of the S4's photos pack slightly more detail. Close behind these two is the iPhone 5 with its detailed, but a bit noisy images. The HTC One is an average performer and its images would have looked better if its camera didn't sharpen them as much as it did. Also, it has a hard time capturing bright or white objects. This can be seen well in its night photos where well-lit areas appear much brighter than they should be. But that aside, the One's photos are still pretty usable.

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