Tag: Pricing

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Hands on with the Dell Streak 5 inch hybrid

Guess what? I’m doing my very first hands on without actual photos. That’s because I came by the unit through means which I cannot disclose in public. No worries. I didn’t crash an event. I was quite surprised though to have met someone who actually had a unit on him. Old news na pala ito. So without “in the wild” pics, I’m going to give you my first impression of this new device. Trust me I’m a blogger.

The Dell Streak, although labeled as a Tablet by Dell, sits in between the 3 and 4 inch screen Android phones common to HTC, Samsung and Sony Ericsson and the 7 inch Android tablets and iPads. The Dell Streak is at the golden mean of 5 inches.

I was floored with the form factor. A 5 inch device CAN be a sweet spot between a regular phone and a tablet as I was able to hold the Streak up to my ear without looking silly and still have a tablet-like feel for browsing sites and playing games. It holds well on both hands — and even with one hand and provides, IMHO the best touch screen SMS-keyboard experience I have yet seen without sacrificing portability. Sure you can do the same thing on a Galaxy Tab or an iPad but you won’t have the gift of being able to slide the phone into your pocket. Because the Streak has a pretty huge screen, Dell bundles the device with its own neoprene carrying pouch.

The Dell Streak runs on Android 2.2 with support for a front face camera. In terms of performance, I found the UI to be a step less than fast but I’m, not sure if this has anything to do with the fact that the screen is huge. It is, at the end of the day, workable. I didn’t have time to run apps. Neither did I have time to road test the battery.

Pros: Great screen, best form factor, fits in your pocket, “5 inch sweet spot”
Cons: Battery cover is hard to snap on and off

I’m not sure if the Dell Streak will be launched officially but if it does, the sweet spot form factor and screen size is sure to win the hearts of many LOLZ. I definitely would not mind owning one.

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Nokia E6 in the wild running on Symbian Anna

Had lunch with Nikka Abes of Nokia Philippines and she showed me a prototype Nokia E6. Imagine the best selling E72 with a touch screen integrated into its system and refurbished with stainless steel and glass: voila, Nokia E6! This phone is due in the second quarter of 2011 with no pricing as of late. However, if we are to look at trends, it should roughly be the same price as the Nokia E71 and E72 when they made their respective debut. These phones went for an average of PHP 20,000 so it should be somewhere in that line, even cheaper.

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Unboxing the Nokia E7 smartphone … and wow! Nice box!

The E7, you could say is the “E” successor to the N97. What this means is that they took the first iteration N97, which many people loved and converted it into a business phone.

Wow. No wonder it costs PHP32,000. The box is something you wouldn’t want to throw away. Pop it open and it’s almost like a box for your jewelry. it’s covered in felt.

To hold, the E7 feels very much like the N8 combined with the slider mechanism of the N97. The slider itself is a bit slippery to push out but well, this may be due to the fact that I haven’t spent a lot of time with it yet. The keypad is amazing though, almost like the felt finish of the box.

The Nokia E7 retails for P32,000.00. I asked their PR for information about current promos and what they told me is that this phone comes free with Plan 3000 on SMART.

Full review soon.

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A look into SMART’s prototype LTE Dongle by HUAWEI and my first speed test

Greetings from Boracay! I was able to borrow a special LTE USB dongle from HUAWEI. There are only 5 of these in the world made especially for the event and from what I heard HUAWEI really had to rush these to SMART. I have one of the four (oh wait I think Jen Juan also has one). The others are being used in stations around Boracay, shared over WiFi. You may wonder why we’re on the island. It’s because ever since before, Boracay has become a test bed for new technology. I was here in ’07 for their Mobile TV launch and now I’m back for their LTE deployment.

The USB dongle is in no way a representation of the final product. LTE will launch soon and will be deployed across the country. A bit of a technical info here: current SMART cell towers running 3G can easily be upgraded to accommodate LTE and later on, LTE Advanced. You will need “4G” enabled phones to access the higher data network so in the meantime, while the phones are not yet here, let’s be content with the dongle.

I will be doing a series of speed tests throughout my stay. This is the first.

From my hotel which is in a more remote location (and indoors) I am getting 15Mbps. This afternoon, the LTE booth was pushing 69Mbps (LTE promises 50Mbps) and while everyone was sharing over WiFi and stressing the network with HD video streaming, they did a decent ~ 30Mbps, which is still very fast.

Let me put into context what “fast” means. At my current speed I am downloading a 7GB game from the Steam Store at 290-400kbps, streaming the 720p HD version of George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead without buffering (full screen) and uploading a couple of files (over 4GB) using my FTP to my server. Plus Facebook, Twitter and Reddit.


So funny! It says “faster than 99% of the Philippines!”

By the way guys, Mbps is not MEGABYTES PER SECOND but MEGABITS. Here’s an explanation. It is confusing so if you still can’t tell the difference I would really just use real world examples which everyone can understand (like the actions I just made above).

I’ll be doing more tests tomorrow as I would like the “real world” challenges such as being indoors / outdoors to affect the performance of speeds. So far I am very content.

LTE dongles will have a separate price compared to the 3G / HSPA ones currently available in the market. LTE is backwards compatible but not vice versa. The name of the LTE service is SMART Evolution.

Oh, just one more thing. The LTE dongle runs on Snow Leopard as well. Here’s a shot of my MenuMeters upload/download:

Wow.

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Mostly Everything

Two weeks with the HTC Desire S

About two weeks ago I was able to nab the HTC Desire S running on Android 2.3 more popularly called Gingerbread. As far as I know, this and the Sony Ericsson Arc are the first two Gingerbread devices that are available in the Philippines running on the latest version of the Android OS. What’s the main difference between this version of Android and the previous? Well, not much really: they cleaned up the UI performance, they added a feature called Near Field Communication (like how in some countries you simply need to tap a commuter card onto a sensor to let you pass) and correct me if I’m wrong, real support for a front facing camera out of the box. Hence, the HTC Desire S comes with a front and back camera.

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