Stock Expected week commencing 1st March 2010 

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The Sony Ericsson Vivaz mobile phone is here to deliver high performance, responsive touch control, multimedia, entertainment and connectivity just how you want it.

Open the window to your mobile world with a stunning 3.2 inch TFT touchscreen, with a huge 720MHz processor powering everything you do.  Don’t let the moments fade with the impressive 8.0-megapixel camera with everything from Touch focus, to smile detection and image stabilisation.  Get connected wherever you are with Wi-Fi, ultra fast 3G HSDPA, Push email and Bluetooth. The Sony Ericsson Vivaz is ready to deliver and go beyond your expectations of a mobile phone!

• Incredible control and navigation with a stunning 3.2 inch touchscreen

• Get more out of your mobile with the Vivaz’ powerful 720MHz processor

• Capture premium quality picture’s with the 8.0-megapixel camera with amazing Touch Focus feature

• Browse the internet at broadband speeds with Wi-Fi connectivity

• When Wi-Fi is unavailable, access lightening fast HSDPA 3G internet

• Receive real time notifications with Push email

Key Features

Camera Features

Music Features

Standard Features

Connectivity

Display & User Interface

Applications

Memory

Messages

Technical

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As well as providing a great music experience, the Nokia X3 contains a whole host of features such as a 3.2-megapixel camera with video record, Nokia Maps, Email and instant messenger support and web browsing. Customise your Nokia X3 with access to the amazing Nokia Ovi application store, who said great phones couldn’t be affordable?

• Get the most out of your tunes with a high quality music player
• Expand your memory up to 16GB with MicroSD support
• Portable photography with a built-in 3.2-megapixel camera
• Choose from thousands of applications on the Nokia Ovi store
• No need to ask for directions with the handy Nokia Maps application!
• Use your favourite headphones with the handy 3.5mm audio jack

Key Features

Camera Features

Music Features

Standard Features

Connectivity

Display & User Interface

Applications

Memory

Messages

Technical

Summary:

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The Nokia X6-00 is the first Xseries phone from Nokia. It’s a touchscreen smartphone running the Symbian operating system, but it’s not based on the Nseries phones. Instead, the X series is an evolution of Nokia’s XpressMusic range, and this a welcome relief, as the XpressMusic phones seem to have been much more robust than the bug-ridden Nseries.

The Xseries moves the range substantially upmarket, and the X6 doesn’t come cheap. Nokia have taken the hugely popular mid-range 5800 and pimped it to the max. It’s physically almost the same size as the 5800, although a few millimetres have been shaved off, making it nice and slim to hold. At the same time the weight has increased slightly, lending it a purposeful and solid feel. It’s a good phone to hold, and certainly a lot less bulky than most touchscreens. In fact it’s one of the few touchscreen phones that you can easily operate single-handedly.

The display is a capacitative touchscreen, and is very responsive. It’s the same size and resolution as the 5800: 3.2 inches across and with 640×360 pixels. This gives it one of the smaller screen sizes amongst the high-end touchscreen phones, but that’s the price you pay for having a compact form factor. The screen isn’t the biggest, but it’s big enough to do the job. It offers a choice of virtual alphanumeric and QWERTY keypads with automatic display rotation. The user interface is nice, sharing much with the 5800, including the contacts bar which lets you easily access friends on your home screen. The contacts bar gives you access to dialling, call records and texts for up to 20 friends. The capacitative touchscreen is very responsive and we think that this is a very easy phone to use.

X stands for XpressMusic, so you’d expect the X6 to be pretty good in the music arena. And it is! The X6 comes with an Nseries music player and an FM radio. The music player handles most digital music formats, including MP3, WMA and AAC, and supports selection of songs by artist, composer, album and genre, with album graphics displayed. A dedicated audio chip and 3D surround sound from stereo speakers delivers excellent performance, especially when the bass booster, stereo widening and loudness effects are added. There’s also an 8-band graphic equaliser for additional control. Naturally a 3.5mm audio jack is included, so you can plug in your own headphones, and perhaps best of all is the massive 32GB of built-in memory. The optional Comes With Music feature gives you free unlimited music downloads for a whole year!

The X6 isn’t just a phone with a music player attached though. It’s also got an impressive camera. With 5 megapixels, Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus and dual LED flash, this is an excellent camera, and it punches above its 5 megapixel weight too. It’s the optics that matter most, and the X6 has quality, so don’t worry too much that there are cameras with more megapixels available. The X6 has a really excellent still camera. The video recording capability is good too, with recording at up to 640 x 480 pixels and 30 frames per second, which is standard definition TV quality. A second front-mounted video camera enables video calls to be made too.

A-GPS is included, which works with the new Ovi Maps. The phone has outstanding connectivity, with quadband GSM and triband 3G, so your phone will work wherever you take it on your travels. You should always have the fastest data connection too, with HSDPA giving downloads of up to 3.6 Mbps and WLAN available too for even faster data transfer in a WiFi zone. You can connect wirelessly via Bluetooth, or via USB cable, 3.5mm audio connection and a TV-Out socket.

Web browsing on the X6 is quite satisfactory. As mentioned, the screen isn’t the biggest available, but 3.2 inches is a respectable size, and the responsive touchscreen and fast data speeds make for a good mobile browsing experience overall. The X6 runs the same Series 60 5th Edition Symbian version 9.4 OS/interface as the 5800, so there are already a good number of apps available to download from the Ovi store.

The X6 comes with a massive 1320 mAh Li-Ion battery which gives very impressive performance. Theoretically the X6 is capable of 8.5 hours of talktime or 35 hours of music playback between charges. Although real world performance will never match this, it still means that you’ll be able to use the phone for several days between charges in most cases.

Overall, the X6 is a star performer. It’s a very high powered smartphone in a compact form, with a feeling of quality and durability. It may not have the biggest screen around, but the screen is by no means small, and is superbly responsive. The music player and camera are superb. The X6 ticks all the connectivity boxes and has outstanding memory and battery life to boot. And perhaps the best thing is that it’s built on a stable operating system that has been tested in the Nokia 5800, further refined and polished in the 5530 and now seems to be very robust and stable. Revolutionary it is not, but it is exactly what we’ve been wanting Nokia to do for such a long time: take an existing proven product and just make it better. With the X6, this is exactly what they have done. This will be mobile-phones-uk.org.uk’s last review before Christmas 2009, and we’re delighted to award the Nokia X6 a full 5 stars!

Features of the Nokia X6 include:

• Series 60 5th Edition Symbian version 9.4 3G Smartphone
• 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics, autofocus, 4x digital zoom and double LED flash
• Video recording (up to 640 x 480 pixels and up to 30 fps), 4x digital video zoom, front camera for 3G video calling
• Display: Touchscreen, 16.7 million colours, 640 x 360 pixels (3.2 inches) with automatic display rotation
• NSeries music player (MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+, WMA formats) with 8-band graphical equaliser
• FM radio with Visual Radio
• Stereo loudspeakers with 3D effect
• Ringtones: MP3 & video ringtones, 64-voice polyphonic ringtones, vibration alert
• Voice commands: speaker independent dialling and voice commands
• Voice recorder (digital stereo microphone)
• Integrated handsfree speaker
• Messaging: SMS, MMS, email (support for IMAP, POP, SMTP) plus attachments, Audio messaging
• Advanced Series 60 personal organiser functions, Flash Lite 3.0
• Integrated A-GPS with Ovi Maps 3.0
• Internet: HSCSD, GPRS, EDGE, 3G HSDPA (3.6 Mbps), XHTML web browser
• Connectivity: WiFi, Bluetooth 2.0, USB 2.0, 3.5 mm audio jack, TV-Out
• Memory: 32 GB
• Flight mode
• Quadband (GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz) plus 3G (WCDMA 900/1900/2100 MHz)
• Size: 111 x 51 x 13.8 mm
• Weight: 122g
• Talktime: 6 hours (3G) – 8.5 hours (2G)
• Battery standby: 420 hours
• Music playback: up to 35 hours

In a nutshell:

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The Palm Pre is a newcomer to the world of mobile phones. The Pre is the first smartphone to run the Palm webOS operating system. The first of anything often turns out to be lacking in a few ways (remember the first iPhone, the first Android phone, etc.) So we’ll be sniffing around to see if there are any “beta-testing areas” of the Pre.

The first thing to say is that the Pre is exclusive to O2 and it’s expensive. This definitely isn’t going to be a mainstream phone. It’s intended as a snazzy business phone with knobs on. The webOS was designed from the bottom up as a multitasking interface, and the Pre just positively oozes with the desire for you to multi-task. Go on, it dares you, open up yet another application. I can handle it. And what’s more I can make all those apps talk to each other too. So its various calendars talk to each other, the calendars talk to your contacts database, and the whole lot (Palm calls them “activity cards”, which sounds a bit pre-school) constantly interact, update and send you notifications. There’s a whole social whirl out there on your Palm even when you’re not using it! The Pre is a phone designed for the social network age. It integrates Facebook, Twitter, email, texts and all your Google stuff, and lets you keep track of everything in an easy to use and responsive fashion. It works best if you have plenty of contacts and an active online social life; otherwise you’re missing out on what the Pre has to offer. The user interface is very responsive, and you’ve no doubt seen the pretty TV ads with stuff zooming all over the Pre’s screen at breakneck speed. It’s fast, it’s intuitive and it gets the job done. And with a choice of a virtual touchscreen keypad or a slide-out real QWERTY keyboard, you can talk to your Pre just as rapidly as it talks back to you.

The Palm comes with a media player that supports most common formats, including MP3 and AAC audio, and MPEG4 video. The camera is rather poor though. It’s just a basic 3 megapixel camera that would be fine on an entry-level phone, but not on a device that costs this sort of money. The Pre has good connectivity, including USB, Bluetooth and WiFi, and comes with a GPS receiver too. It’s quite chunky in size and fairly heavy, but not too big for a smartphone. The disappointing factor is the smallness of the screen. At just 3.1 inches across, it could really do with being larger.

We can’t really find any areas where the new webOS platform falls over. It seems to be as well designed and capable as say, Android or OS X. The range of apps is limited at present, but that’s to be expected for a new OS. Where the Pre does fall down is in the hardware that supports the OS. It doesn’t offer the best value for money, in our opinion. The QWERTY keyboard, though welcome, is a bit small and plasticky, and in fact the whole phone construction is a little on the flimsy side. We don’t like the camera one bit, and the battery life isn’t impressive either. The pre certainly isn’t an iPhone killer, or anything like it. It’s the first of a kind and is best suited to technologically-minded early adopters who like the touchscreen gizmos, the multitasking and the social networking features, or who just fancy a change. mainstream users should approach the Palm Pre with caution. It will be interesting to see whether Palm can do what Apple managed, and release a mature product with a wealth of third-party apps. At the moment, this is not it.

Features of the Palm Pre include:

• 3 megapixel camera with LED flash
• Display: Touchscreen with 320 x 480 pixels (3.1 inches)
• Music player (MP3, AAC, AAC+, AMR, QCELP, WAV formats supported)
• Stereo FM radio RDS with Visual Radio support
• Built-in GPS
• Messaging: SMS, MMS, IM, Email (support for Microsoft Exchange)
• Memory: 8GB
• Connectivity: Bluetooth, USB, WiFi
• Web browser, EDGE/WCDMA/HSDPA
• Quadband plus 3G
• Size: 60 x 100 x 17 mm
• Weight: 135g

Summary:

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The Sony Ericsson Satio has enjoyed something of a rollercoaster ride. Released just in time for Christmas 2009, the initial batch was so appallingly bad that it was withdrawn from sale by all of the main UK retailers. Sony Ericsson worked hard to fix the bugs, and it seems that the latest version does what it says on the tin. We’ve modified our review to reflect the ups and downs of the Satio, but we’re now confident that the phone works.

Sony Ericsson have been slow on the touchscreen front, dipping their toe in gently with the Xperia X1 and some limited touchscreen functionality on other phones. Meanwhile the rest of the world has charged down the touchscreen road at breakneck speed. Sony are now playing catch up with the release of the Aino (still only partially touchscreen) and the Satio. Still, they’ve gone in all guns blazing with the Satio – not only is it a full touchscreen media phone, but it runs the Symbian operating system and has a 12 megapixel camera and just about every feature that you could think of putting into a mobile phone.

The Satio is a fantastic phone to look at. A bit plasticky perhaps, but solidly built with a good weighty feel. It’s narrower than an iPhone and slimmer than an N97, and is a good size to hold. The widescreen display is a good size too, measuring 3.5 inches diagonally. That’s the same size as the iPhone, but with more pixels, so no complaints there. The touchscreen feels reasonably responsive, despite being of resistive type (unlike the iPhone’s capacitative touchscreen) but doesn’t have the speed of an iPhone or Samsung Jet. Behind the scenes lies the Symbian operating system, a powerful beast but with sluggish tendencies.

The camera is perhaps the headline feature of the Satio. It’s a 12 megapixel monster with a xenon flash for extra brightness in low lighting. The camera is an outstandingly good one, and the Satio is arguably the best camera phone released to date. It’s packed with features such as touch autofocus and face detection autofocus, as well as smile detection and BestPic, so there’s no excuse for getting an out of focus picture or missing the best shot. We like the way that Sony have integrated touchscreen functionality into the camera interface, making the Satio feel very much like a real Sony digital camera. The Satio isn’t a slouch when it comes to video either, using a LED video light to capture video after dark.

The Satio is an all-rounder, with full music support in addition to the outstanding camera. With a built-in FM radio, plus all the usual Sony gadgets like TrackID and album art, this has the potential to replace your MP3 player, although we’re disappointed to see that once again Sony have missed off a 3.5mm headphone jack, so you’re stuck with the supplied headphones or a Bluetooth headset. We’re also a bit miffed that the memory is limited to 128 MB, which is peanuts for a phone of this calibre. Of course you can use the microSD card slot to store your photos and music, but rival smartphones commonly have gigabytes of memory built in nowadays. I guess that we should be grateful that Sony Ericsson has bowed to pressure and made the Satio microSD compatible, instead of forcing their own proprietary Memory Sticks on us.

The Satio is packed with all kinds of other goodies, such as aGPS with Google Maps, a good web browser with fast HSDPA downloading, email support with Exchange ActiveSync and WiFi support. The battery power is not so great. With a huge TFT screen, GPS, WiFi and Bluetooth in action this shouldn’t be a surprise. Turn off the features that you don’t need to save juice.

So, it should be clear that the Satio is Sony Ericsson’s blockbuster phone. It’s got the lot, and now that the bugs have been fixed, it can rightly take its place as one of the best mobile phones currently available. We’re not giving it 5 stars just yet though. Just in case. One final note: most of the user reviews below were written in the days of the “old” Satio. You can read more recent Sony Ericsson Satio reviews at our partner website, RecommendedBuys UK.

Features of the Sony Ericsson Satio include:

• 12.1 megapixel camera with xenon flash, touch autofocus, face detection, smile detection, 16x digital zoom, BestPic, image stabiliser, geo-tagging, photo fix and red eye reduction
• Video camera with video light / video calling
• Touchscreen display: TFT, 16 million colours, 640 x 360 pixels (3.5 inches) with auto rotation
• Media player with PlayNow and TrackID support
• FM radio
• MP3/AAC ringtones
• Speakerphone
• aGPS with Google Maps
• Messaging: SMS, MMS, Email with Exchange ActiveSync
• 3D Java games
• Picture wallpaper
• Symbian OS
• Memory: 256 MB RAM plus 128MB flash memory plus microSD memory card
• Connectivity: Bluetooth, USB mass storage, WiFi, modem
• Internet: EDGE, 3G HSDPA, web browser, RSS feeds, YouTube support
• Flight mode
• Vibration alert
• Quadband GSM plus dual band 3G HSDPA
• Size: 112 x 55 x 13 mm
• Weight: 126g
• Talktime: 5 hours (3G) – 11 hours (2G)
• Battery standby: 340 – 360 hours

Summary: The Nokia N900 features the new Linux-based Maemo operating system and is more of an internet tablet than a phone. Its outstanding features are its QWERTY keyboard, hi-res touchscreen, web browser and multitasking ability. Downsides are poor user-friendliness, size, weight and the very high price.

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Nokia’s N900 looks like a souped-up version of the flagship N97 smartphone. In a way it is, but in fact, under the bonnet lurks something new to the word of mobile phones. It’s Nokia’s new Linux-based Maemo operating system.

But the first thing you notice about the N900 isn’t the operating system. It’s the price. Wow, that’s a lot of money! The second thing you notice is the size. Wow, it’s huge! The third thing you notice is the weight. Wow, this is the heaviest phone on the market!

Haven’t put the phone back on the shelf yet? That’s good, because then you start to notice some good things. First the slide-out QWERTY keyboard. You begin to realise why the phone is heavy. It’s because a keyboard this big weighs a ton. But that means that it’s easy to use, and you can out-type even those BlackBerry guys. We think that the keyboard isn’t actually as good as the one on the N97, but that’s just a quibble. You’ll also notice the screen, and once again appreciate why the N900 is so big. This is a fantastic screen – Nokia’s best so far – measuring 3.5 inches across and with an incredible 800 x 480 pixel resolution. It’s a touchscreen of course. Shame that it’s resistive though, not capacitative, so you sometimes have to press it a couple of times before it responds, unless you use a stylus.

Features of the Nokia N900 include:

• 5 megapixel camera (2592 x 1944 pixels) with Carl Zeiss optics, Tessar lens, autofocus, dual LED flash, photo editor and geo-tagging
• Video camera: MPEG4 video capture at 800 x 480 pixels
• Front camera: VGA web camera
• Display: Resistive touchscreen, 16 million colours, 800 x 480 pixels (3.5 inches) with orientation sensor, proximity sensor and light sensor
• Digital music player (supports MP3/AAC/eAAC/WMA formats)
• Integrated stereo speakers
• FM transmitter
• A-GPS with Ovi Maps
• Speed dialing
• Messaging: SMS, Email (SMTP, IMAP4, POP3, Mail for Exchange)
• Viewing of email attachments – .doc, .xls, .ppt, .pdf
• Memory: 256 MB RAM, 32 GB plus microSD memory card slot (up to 16GB)
• Connectivity: Bluetooth 2.1, USB 2.0, TV-Out, WLAN 802.11 b/g, 3.5 mm stereo headphone plug
• Internet: Maemo Browser with Flash video support, RSS reader, HSPA (10Mbps download, 2 Mbps upload), WLAN (up to 11Mbps/54Mbps)
• Quadband plus 3G
• Size: 111 x 60 x 20 mm
• Weight: 181g

The N900 also has a great camera. It’s essentially the same camera as the one on the N97 and N97 Mini, with 5 megapixels, Carl Zeiss optics, Tessar lens, autofocus, dual LED flash and geo-tagging. The video camera is outstanding, recording at an incredible 800 x 480 pixels. There’s also a front-mounted VGA web camera, though at the time of this review we weren’t able to establish whether this can be used for video calling. There’s a digital media player, with all the features that you’d expect, and an FM transmitter. Bizarrely, there’s no FM radio, although it is possible to install one using a third-party download. We know that a lot of people like their apps, but really some things should come as standard. Since when have phone manufacturers started treating their devices like flat-packed furniture? A-GPS with Ovi Maps is included, though.

Is there any reason so far why you should choose the N900 over the N97? We think not. The only reason then would be the Maemo operating system. We’re going to stick our necks out here and say something really unpopular. Whenever we say this kind of thing, we always get hate mail, so it would be nice if the haters just gave it a rest this time OK, here goes: if you buy a phone with an untested operating system, you had better be prepared to roll your sleeves up and do some really hard work making your phone operational. It’s always the same. If you buy the N900 you’ll be a beta-tester for Nokia. Lots of stuff won’t work at first. Perhaps some things will never work. If you can live with that and like a challenge, go ahead. Otherwise avoid. We’ve already mentioned the lack of an FM radio and video calling. Other things that are missing include MMS, and there are few apps currently available from the Ovi store, although this will no doubt improve as time goes by.

But there are good things too. The Maemo OS is very fast, and is supported by fast hardware too, enabling it to deliver on its promise of genuine multi-tasking. The Mozilla-based web browser is superb, and as a mobile web browser the N900 is hard to beat, with its lightning-fast HSPA and WiFi support. Build quality is solid, there’s bags of memory (up to 48GB), and audio quality is excellent.

So, the N900 isn’t really an ideal mobile phone for many users, but for someone who really wants an internet tablet with calling features added, it could be just the thing.

The long list of features on this fabulous handset include:

* 3.2 inch TFT Touchscreen display!
* Handwriting recognition and Accelerometer!
* 8GB memory card included in the box – store over 1000 music tracks!
* HSDPA mobile broadband and Wi-Fi – fast internet on the go!
* Built in GPS SatNav with Nokia Maps!
* 3.2 Megapixel camera with Autofocus and Carl Zeiss Lens!
* Powerful Symbian Series 60 Smartphone!

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The BlackBerry 8900 Curve smartphone helps with a bigger more well-rounded mobile life!

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If your always on the go and want to make life easier the BlackBerry Curve will help keep you connected to the people and information that matter! The impressive 2.4″ display screen opens up a captivating window and the full QWERTY keyboard makes communicating easy with one or two-thumb typing. Built for business capabilities like email conference calling and internet access youll have all you need to keep on top at work.

Keep the balance between work and play – stay in touch in real time with Windows Live Messenger. Equipped with Wi-Fi connectivity for high speed browsing and download ‘the curve allows you to search through Google or access social networking sites such as facebook anytime. When words arent enough take a picture via the 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus. You can even listen to your favorite music tracks with the MP3 player. With built-in GPS capabilities and BlackBerry Maps you get text-based turn-by-turn directions to help you figure out where you are and how to get where you need to be.

Youll have all the features you need and want at your fingertips with the flexibility and freedom to manage your busy life and even have some fun along the way. Keep your finger on the pulse of whats important to you! Admire the stylish and classy BlackBerry 8900 Curve smartphone which is easy-to-use

• Use the full onscreen QWERTY keyboard to type messages easily and quickly
• Access your emails on the go with fast Wi-Fi connectivity
• Keep up to date with friends and family on your favorite social networking site
• Captivate all your moments on the 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus
• Never get lost with the built-in GPS for pre-installed BlackBerry maps

The W902 Switches seamlessly from music to media to experience crystal clear video capabilities compromise is now a thing of the past! Thats not all your Sony Ericsson has a scratch resistant screen and is coated in a retro-styled case that will impress! Oh did I mention the Geo-tagging facility that allows you to take a photo and will then automatically add the local information to your picture.

• Admire the top of the range Walkman music player – no need for an iPod when you own one of these.
  
• Find out what any song is called with the TrackID music recognition
• Choose your tracks or play songs randomly and create your own playlists
• Listen to the latest tracks with the built-in FM Radio with RDS
• No need to compromise take great pictures with the built-in 5.0-megapixel camera
• Extra protection is what its all about with the scratch resistant screen
• Use ‘Geo tagging for adding automatic local information to pictures

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