Best Phone Blog

The great marketing maxim that you shouldn’t be tinkering with a successful product goes out the window with the HTC Desire Z. The Taiwan-based leader in smartphones HTC did just that. It took its highly successfully HTC Desire released this March and decided it can reach more markets by adding a full QWERTY keyboard in a slider form factor.

HTC didn’t sacrifice much of the slim profile of the Desire as its QWERTY version has a 14.2mm profile making it one of the slimmest QWERTY sliders on the market.

Feature Desirability

Apart from that, HTC traded the beefy muscles of the older Desire’s 1GHz Snapdragon for a less endowed by just as capable 800 MHz Qualcomm MSM7230 under the hood. At least you now get the latest Android v2.2 to run the HTC Desire Z. You give some, you lose some, right?

But for all intents and purposes, the two are almost identical, with the same 3.7-inch capacitive touchscreen display all the bells like proximity and accelerometer sensors, Swipe and multitouch input technologies, 480 x 800 resolution and 16 million colors. The display is S-LCD which is no less as good as the AMOLED in the first early batches of the Desire which now uses the same screens, thanks to Samsung’s inability to meet the HTC needs.

The new Desires features quad band GSM on 2G with class 32 GPRS/EDGE connectivity speeds and a dual band UMTS on 3G with HSDPA at 14.14 Mbps and HSUPA at 5.7 Mbps data speeds. Local data transfers get WiFi 802.11 b/g/n for hotspot surfing, Bluetooth v2.1 with A2DP, microUSB v2.0 and an in-built GPS receiver with A-GPS.

Imaging gets a 5-megapixel shooter with autofocus, LED flash, face detection, geo tagging and video recording at 720p high definition. Mobile entertainment starts with its Stereo FM receiver with RDS, a 3.5mm audio jack and wireless A2DP stereo listening option.

HTC puts in a generous 1.5 GB of user memory coupled with a 512 MB RAM for its OS files. You also get a 32GB microSD support. A 1300 mAh Li-ion battery delivers up to 9.8 hours of call time on 2G, 6.6 hours on 3G with a standby time of 430 hours.

Vodafone UK and O2 UK have announced that the Nokia C6 Symbian smart phone is now available on their official sites. The device is free on 25 Pound monthly tariffs, making it one of our most recommended budget handsets. Finnish manufacturer Nokia is also offering the device on their main UK online store; the C6 is available SIM free at a retail price of 289 Pounds.

The Nokia C6 is a practical smart phone. While it is not the handset of choice for users who are more interested in experiencing the complete modern operating system with Android handsets and next generation platforms –like the Symbian^3 and the MeeGo OS, this device is meant to serve users who need a decent reliable smart phone that has more features than the average low end handset.

In terms of overall performance, the C6 is decent. It is good enough to run a vast range of apps and features, but it will definitely bog down when faced with huge file loads and successive command inputs. At 434 MHz, the ARM 11 CPU’s speed is nowhere as near as high end devices –but for the average smart phone user, this is usually more than enough.

The slide out QWERTY keyboard feels a lot like the 4 row layouts that Nokia uses for their N series devices. The top row tends to sneak just a little under the upper face, but it is not that hard to use when held properly. The buttons are responsive and provide a resounding feedback that allows users to type fast on this device. Expect to see happy grins on text messaging and email heavy users on this device.

The phone also comes with a 3.2 inch TFT resistive touch screen display (with an accelerometer and a scratch resistant surface), a 5 mega pixel snapper (with autofocus, geotagging and face detection) and the Symbian S60 OS.