Cell Phones

Good news for UK mobile addicts: HD Voice service has officially made it to the Land of Hope and Glory. Starting today, British customers can pick up a HD Voice-enabled handset — including the Nokia 5230, X6, E5 and Samsung Omnia Pro at launch — from Orange, and start buttering their ears with “crystal clear” phone calls while within the carrier’s 3G coverage. Prior to the launch, we were fortunate enough to try out the new service on a couple of Nokia E5 prototypes, and boy, that was some pretty impressive stuff there — the wider speech bandwidth really added a lot of clarity to the caller’s voice, and additionally, the noisy traffic from the caller’s end was well suppressed at where it’d otherwise crackle over a normal call. Perhaps the easiest way to put it is that this is much like jumping from a bad FM radio broadcast to some sweet CD audio, thus making conversations a lot easier to interpret, even if the recipient is in a noisy environment or has hearing problem (as proven by Orange’s public trial). As always, hearing is believing, so do check out our sample audio clips after the break.

While Orange remains a dominant driving force behind this mobile revolution, the carrier assured us that it expects other companies to pick up this open standard. That said, it’s rather disappointing that current owners of the aforementioned handsets won’t be getitng a software patch for the HD upgrade (we were told that no extra hardware is involved), but we can understand — the manufacturers do need to sell new phones to stay alive in this rapidly changing market. Anyhow, here’s hoping that the forthcoming flagship Android and Windows Phone 7 devices will also get a taste of this crystal clear call quality.

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CRYSTAL CLEAR CALLING AS ORANGE REVOLUTIONISES MOBILE PHONE CALLS IN THE UK WITH THE LAUNCH OF HIGH DEFINITION VOICE

· Orange becomes first operator to launch mobile HD Voice in the UK, signalling the dawn of a new era in mobile communications for customers

· HD Voice reduces background noise and decreases perceived distance between callers by providing crystal clear calls

· HD Voice is available from today nationwide at no extra cost for all Orange customers with an HD voice enabled handset

London, 1st September, 2010: Orange today announced the first major advancement in UK mobile voice calling for 20 years with the launch of mobile High Definition (HD) Voice. Providing crystal clear sound quality for calls, mobile users will see the service set a new consumer benchmark, with today’s move testament to Orange’s continuing focus on innovation.

HD Voice offers a proven improvement in the sound quality of traditional mobile voice calls. The service eliminates the distance between friends, relatives and colleagues to make callers voices sound like they do when communicating face to face. Reducing the background noise, hisses and crackles of normal mobile calls, HD Voice also excels in noisy environments, so whether you’re at a football match or concert, on a building site or next to heavy traffic – HD Voice gives louder, clearer, sharper mobile calls. This will come as a relief for a third (32%) of Brits who blame background noise including road works or noisy chatty friends as the biggest disturbance in conversations*.

Orange HD Voice is available at no extra cost to all Orange mobile customers who take a HD Voice enabled handset. From launch, the Nokia 5230, Nokia X6, Nokia E5 and Samsung Omnia Pro will be HD Voice enabled with further manufactures expected to offer HD handsets in the coming months. All HD Voice enabled handsets will be labelled with the Orange HD Voice logo, helping customers to easily recognise those devices that support the new Orange HD Voice service. HD Voice demonstration units will also be available in Orange shops.

Tom Alexander, Chief Executive of Everything Everywhere, the company which runs Orange UK, said: “Although what we use our mobile handsets for has evolved significantly in the past few years – the way we make mobile calls hasn’t changed a great deal since the 1990s. So we’re proud to be the first telecommunications brand in the UK to change this and offer customers a revolutionary new calling experience. With mobile HD Voice – hearing really is believing”.

HD Voice also opens up new opportunities for better ways of working in business. The arrival of HD Voice is hotly anticipated by the broadcasting industry, which believes that the service could reduce its reliance on expensive ISDN lines and the need to ferry guests to studios for interviews. Other industries that will benefit significantly from HD Voice include those with significant background noise like the construction and manufacturing industries.

For more information on HD Voice from Orange, please visit: www.orange.co.uk/HDVoice.

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In a battlefield now abundant with Android handsets, there’s only one easy way for a young smartphone brand to grab our attention: make a seriously dirt cheap handset. And we’re not just talking about a free phone chained to a pricey 18-month contract (like the Vodafone 845); we’re looking for a Pay & Go smartphone tagged with a standalone dumbphone price, so even the £200+ ($316+) “budget” HTC Wildfire and Sony Ericsson X10 Mini / Mini Pro are out of the question.

This is where Three UK’s ZTE Racer comes in: priced at just £99.99 ($158) or for free on various contracts, this Android 2.1 handset has quite rightly stolen the paper crown from the 845. But don’t let that price tag fool you — this 14.5mm-thick device still comes with a fairly modern 600MHz Qualcomm MSM7227 chipset (as featured on the Aria and X10 Mini / Mini Pro), garnished with a 3.2 megapixel camera (sans flash), HSDPA 7.2Mbps connectivity, 2GB microSD card, FM radio, GPS, Bluetooth, WiFi, and a Skype app for free Skype calls within the UK. There is just one caveat: you’ll have to live with a 2.8-inch QVGA resistive touchscreen. So, is this an immediate deal-breaker? Can the other features make up for this flaw? Read on to find out.ZTE Racer review
So, let’s get to the touchy subject (pun intended): resistive touchscreen. We’ve already heard HTC’s highly-dubious excuse for packing that old-school technology into the now-discontinued played with the even smaller, capacitive touchscreen-donning X10 Mini, it’s safe to say that HTC wasn’t entirely correct, and it’s even adopted the better touchscreen option for its latest budget phone, the Wildfire. On the other hand, ZTE has no choice but to opt for the presumably much cheaper resistive technology. Man, these guys didn’t even allocate a budget for moulding a stylus for each phone, so we really had a hard time — and we do mean hard — tapping the right letters on the virtual keyboard.

The actual display underneath won’t win any extra points for the phone, either — QVGA resolution at 2.8 inches, bad vertical viewing angle, and inaccurate colors aren’t exactly great features. By this stage, we started wondering if it’s really worth going through such torment just to potentially save £100 ($160), but on the other hand, we should keep an open mind about this budget device — after all, its target audience probably isn’t as fussy as we are, and most importantly, it does work as a phone. By that we mean the call quality is good through the earpiece, handsfree kit (but not the noise isolation bud type) and loudspeaker, although it only performed averagely in our usual noise test.

Software

As you’d expect from the small price tag, the Racer’s OS doesn’t come with many additional goodies — no fancy skin or social networking integration, although you do get a few notable freebies. First, we have the Skype for Three app (much like the Verizon flavor we played with back in March) that provides free Skype-to-Skype voice calls — even over 3G — within the UK. Next on the list is the Windows Live Messenger app that’s rather self-explanatory, but man, it’s got more bugs than a wild shrub in Madagascar — for example, the search box gets stuck in the middle of the screen when you hide the keyboard, and in general the app’s just not very responsive. Moving on to the third app: we have a basic version of Documents To Go for viewing Word, Excel, PowerPoint plus PDF files, and you can pay for an upgrade to unlock various functionalities like zooming and editing. Well, not that you’d want to do much editing work on this resistive touchscreen, mind you, plus we were put off by the slightly larger text rendered in our test files. As for the other apps (like, Alarms, Gallery, Maps, Music Player, etc.), they’re just the same as what you’d get on any vanilla Android build, but with the exception of 720p+ videos not playable in Gallery.

Back to the OS: the lack of “enhancements” isn’t necessarily a disadvantage, considering how often we moan about delayed updates (if any for the Racer) due to the manufacturers and carriers having to test compatibility. And as a side effect, the menu animations in this vanilla Eclair are surprisingly smooth, with the Fps2D app reporting an average of 72fps rendering — pretty good for what the phone costs, even though it’s running on a lower resolution. Speaking of which, you should also bear in mind that due to the minimum resolution requirement for some apps (including our own), you’ll be missing out on a small chunk of the Android Market experience.

But of course, what really matters is the actual performance. Clocking at a maximum of just 600MHz, users accustomed to 1GHz Snapdragon devices will definitely notice the difference in, say, website and app loading times on the Racer. But like we said before, potential Racer owners probably won’t mind this slight performance reduction, plus they’d benefit from better battery life — we managed to squeeze out about ten hours of usage from our usual test (involving plenty of music playback, some web browsing, some twittering, the occasional camera usage, and auto-update switched on for Twitter and Google apps). See? There’s always a brighter side of things.

Camera

Overall, the Racer’s 3.2 megapixel still camera performed better than we expected, but it’s not without flaws — even though the outdoor shots came out to be the best of the bunch, many were slightly underexposed due to the cloudy sky, and you’d have to crank up the exposure level using the top left bar rather than tapping the darker areas to compensate. There’s not much you can do about using the camera indoors other than to switch on as many lights as possible, especially since there’s no camera flash to assist you. Another problem we had was the slow capture speed, which meant that we had to stand absolutely still in other to avoid Mr. Blurry or even Mr. Jello — we have a good example for the latter, which was taken while we were walking at normal pace.ZTE Racer sample camera shots
You can probably live with the aforementioned problems on the Racer’s still camera, but its camcorder mode is guaranteed to be an instant turn-off for most. How so? Just look at the video resolution: 352 x 288. And yes, video quality is just as low — turn away now unless you’re seeking for some diet aid.

Wrap-up

We’ve tried really, really hard to like the ZTE Racer, but at the end of the day, we simply couldn’t cope with using it as our everyday phone — typing’s horribly inaccurate on the resistive touchscreen, and that subpar camcorder quality just doesn’t do it for us. But for this price point, the Racer’s exceeded our expectation in other ways — decent appearance (despite the glossy screen), good still camera quality, great battery life, and the full wireless package (WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, HSDPA 7.2Mbps, and even FM radio). Now, ZTE’s representatives have told us they know of no current plans for a Froyo upgrade, but we can imagine the hacking community getting all giddy at the thought of stuffing WiFi hotspot functionality into the Racer — this would totally make the phone worth considering.

If ZTE’s offering is a total no-go for you, there’s always the T-Mobile Pulse Mini that’s also conveniently priced at £99, or you can add another £50 for the Pulse with capacitive touchscreen (both phones shipped with 2.1); otherwise, you’ll have to fork out at least £200 for the other “budget” off-contract Android handsets.

Fast food connoisseurs should pay special attention here — according to a recent paper by the University of Pennsylvania, Android users are inadvertently leaving their nine-dot lock patterns in the open, courtesy of their fingers’ oily smear on the screen. Specifically, the study on potential “smudge attacks” found that partial or complete patterns could be easily retrieved — even with added noise on the display or after incidental clothing contact — by using various lighting and camera orientation settings for the smear analysis. Should we be surprised? No. But should our phones be getting Froyo sooner for the extra PIN and QWERTY password options? Hell yeah.

What is there to do on a cloudy Friday in Britain? Why, scouring the web for your phone’s firmware update, of course. That’s probably how a Modaco member unearthed the Dell Streak’s latest Android 2.1 build (apparently just for locked O2 devices), anyway. Sure, the link’s quirky domain name and sluggish speed may arouse some suspicion, but our sources have confirmed that this non-final update is indeed coming from Dell (and you can expect the link to be killed soon). Many users — including ourselves — are reporting a successful update and enjoying the same goodies we spotted in our promised, Dell’s AT&T Streak ordering page went live today, and yes, it’ll still be shipped with Android 1.6. Looks like xda-developers and Modaco are well on course to beat Dell on releasing a 2.1 or even a 2.2 update.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Update: Looks like someone’s managed to get this firmware working on an officially unlocked Streak. Again, do it at your own risk. And if all fails, you can try going back to the 1.6 firmware.

Looks like there are at least two things that the Danes can get right: butter cookies, and hyping it up for a delayed Android handset. According to Lumigon’s Facebook page, what we’re looking at here is the first official rendering of the T1′s redesign — quite a radical change here, especially with the new navigation pad and the now externally-accessible microSD slot. Apart from an earlier statement confirming Froyo for said device, this picture alone is literally all we’re being teased with right now, so feel free to “like” the Danish company’s Facebook page for some more forthcoming gadget porn.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]