Thumbs up: Sleek design, brilliant camera, impressive battery life.

Thumbs down: Lack of  3G and Wi-fi, no GPS.

Inside the trunk: Price at launch :£120.00 Connectivity :3.5mm Headphone Jack, USB 2.0 Dimensions: 46.2 x 108.8 x 11.7 Weight (g): 96 Bluetooth :Ys Built-In Camera: Yes Camera Resolution :3.2 Digital Zoom; 8 Display Size: 2.2 Display Type; TFT E-mail Client: Yes EDGE :Yes FM Radio :Yes Flash :Yes GPRS :Yes Handsfree Speakerphone :Yes Internet Browser :Yes Max No of Colours (million) :16.7 Memory Card Compatibility :MicroSD Mobile Phone Frequencies :GSM900/GSM1800/GSM1900 Playable Formats :AAC, AAC Plus, eAAC Plus, H.263, H.264, MP3, MP4

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS: This one isn’t a high end  dainty phone but can be very well be called the successor of the 6300. In short this  one could be just like the girl next door, simple yet adorable. Anyways all my superfluous metaphors aside, this one has a lot to offer if your looking forward to a no-nonsense, highly functional phone. The Nokia 6303 weighs a decent 95g making it quite lightweight and at 08.8(h) x 46.2(w) x 11.7(d)mm its quite lightweight which makes it easy to slip it into the pocket. This one is available in two colours black and silver, though I personally liked the look of the black one. The curves give it a nice quality touch. This one resembles a slider phone as the navigation keys and the display are raised above the keyboard. The navigation array has a OK button in the centre surrounded by the talk and end buttons. The numberpad beneath the navigation array has well placed keys. They provide sufficient room for a comfortable typing experience. Its got a 2.2-inch, QVGA (320×240 pixels) resolution, with support for around 16.7 million colours. The display is bright and the images on the display add a touch of life to the display. On the curved edges of the phone, there is the volume rocker key and the on/off keys. At the base of the phone there is a charger jack, a 3.5mm  headphone jack and a separate MicroUSB port. The back of the phone houses the loudspeaker, the camera and the dual-LED flash. Being a basic phone this one doesn’t offer any of the touchscreen high jinks. It uses the Korean manufacturer’s tried and tested Series 40 user interface. When in the standby mode this one has two softkey options i.e. Go To and Names along with D-pad shortcuts.  The menus have been conventionally design and as always I guess Nokia decides too keep it clean and simple with easily scrollable lists. This one provided a lot of options as far a s the phonebook is concerned. It can store phone number, postal address and email details through to birthday, nickname and web addresses. Also it can store images and video clips for the caller ID. In the contacts menu if you open the Windows Live messenger, you could easily see your friends online status. Its pretty much simple and at the same time offers more than just the basics. Making calls from this one is just an incredible experience. Absolutely no static, interference, background noises just plain brilliant voice quality. The sound quality of this one is good enough. Also the callers had no complaints as well with most of them not able too make out that I was using a cell phone. The 6303 supports text messaging, Multimedia messaging, instant messaging and email. It automatically converts a text message into a multimedia message whenever any media is added to the message. Since this one supports Email, the user can easily use regular web-based email or internet service provider accounts on the phone. It supports POP3, IMAP4 and SMTP. This one doesn’t support 3G or Wi-Fi and solely relies on GPRS and EDGE for connectivity. It has a full Nokia browser and a Opera Mini mobile browser. It’s got a 3.2-megapixel camera along with autofocus and an LED flash. Images taken in bright light are pretty crisp and vibrant with hardly any kind of noise. The images were were well balanced and even toned. It deals well with colour rendition and details. However in the dark the images appear to be a bit blurred and murky. The music and the video player supports the MP3, AAC, MP4, AAC+, eAAC+, H.263, and H.264 formats. Content streaming can be done easily otherwise data can be easily transferred using the USB cable. Its got 17MB of inbuilt memory and there is a 1GB memory card which comes along with it. the memory can be extended upto 4GB. It supports FM radio as well. I was pretty much impressed with the amazing battery life that this one has under its hood. Nokia estimates optimum battery life between charges of up to 450 hours standby or 7 hours talktime.

Nitty- gritty: This one is definitely a reliable performer and functions really well as a basic phone with a few extra goodies added here and the. And at  £120.00 this one is a pretty good bargain.

Sum n substance:

Thumbs up: Vibrant display, 8GB storage, nice set of features, 5MP camera.

Thumbs down: Funny headphones, disappointing battery life.

Inside the trunk:
Price at launch £499.99
Bluetooth Yes
WiFi Yes
Ringtones MP3, WAV
HSUPA Yes
Internet Browser Yes
Vibrating Alert Yes
Memory (GB) 8
Built-In Camera Yes
SMS Yes
Display Size 3.2
HSDPA Yes
Memory Card Compatibility MicroSD/TransFlash
EDGE Yes
Playable Formats eAAC Plus, H.263, H.264, MP3, MPEG-4, RA, WMA, WMV
MMS Yes
E-mail Client Yes
Camera Resolution 5 Dimensions 56 x 11.9 x 115

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS: With the Galaxy, Samsung has finally joined the league of  Android phones. The Galaxy comes in with a brilliant feature set and is being offered by O2 in the U.K. Anyways lets go ahead with the review see if this could truly survive in the android game.

This one truly fits into the sleek phone category at a thickness of  11.9mm thick and it is quite light at 116g and easily fits in the pocket. The screen of this one is around 3.2-inch and it supports the OLED technology. Thanks to the OLED technology the display of this looks absolutely stupendous with bright and vibrant images.

This one could definitely remind a few of the Samsung Jet with its kind of similar layout on the back.  Below the screen we have the search button and the home key which is conveniently placed between the terminate and the back buttons. However most of the space below the screen is eaten up by the OK button, which in all honesty doesn’t require that much of footage plus the home button could have surely used up some of this place.

On the left side of the phone we have the up/down keys to control the volume, adjust the brightness of the screen without actually having to use the touchscreen  slide bar. The top of the phone houses a 3.5 headphone jack along with a micro USB port. The right side has a small button for the lock key and the camera shutter button. At times however the small button could get a bit irritating.

O2 offers this one along with a nice case for the Galaxy. Other than that there’s a 3.5mm headset inside the box along with a Samsung New PC Studio CD for connecting it to the PC and a micro USB charger. Obviously when Your paying £240 for a phone on contract, you expect it to be packaged well.

Coming to the interface, let me warn you beforehand itself that this one does not offer much in terms of customization. Its got the standard 1.5 OS platform ahich kind of loses it charm when compared to the HTC Sense UI and Motorola’s MotoBlur. The look of the homescreen can be easily changed with the help of the three swipeable options, which means that the user just has to drag the widgets he wants on the Homescreen and simply drop it on the screen. The built in Google Gadgets for the home screen are pretty decent as well. Though this one cant match upto the Sense UI, its got some really nice options to fiddle around with. However I was a bit disappointed by the responsiveness of the screen. There was quite a lag at most of the times and it really took some efforts to get this one working.

Well there is definitely something weird about the 3.5mm headphones because whenever I tried to plug it in it made a beep sound which was halfway played through the sspeaker and then through the headphones. Also as soon as you plug it in, it initiates the music player. Possibly it kind of mimics the handsfree functionality. Anyways I hope the makers fix it up soon.

Its got a nice huge contacts list and the contacts interface is really simple which makes it a delight to use this one. The contacts application handles all the aspects  of the calling system including the dialing, call history, contact list and favourites.

Coming to the call quality, this one offers a decent call making experience for sure. There was no static or interference for the most part of it. in crowded areas however the volume was a bit low. On the callers side too, they were pretty much satisfied and hardly had any complaints. The size of the phone is pretty much adequate for the face size which makes it really comfortable to use the handset for talking.

It supports text messaging and the messages are displayed in the threaded form which makes it easier to view the conversations with different people.

Browsing using the Android browser has always been a pleasant experience and thankfully the browsing on Galaxy is also satisfactory. The internet on the i7500 Galaxy will give easy access to full HTML options, and the phone has a similar smart-fit ability to the HTC Hero, with text being shown in the correct column even after zooming in to a massive size.

The music player sorts songs according to the artists, albums and tracks. The music player interface is pretty nice. The sound through the speaker is not al that great but anyways since it comes  equipped with a 3.5mm headphone jack the user can easily plug in his favourite pair of headphones.

However the major disappointing point about the Galaxy is the battery life. This one could easily win the Worst Battery life title easily. This 1500mAh battery could hardly 3 hours of life even when it was hardly being used.

Nitty- gritty: The design of this one is really nice and probably one of the best designs in the Android market, accompanied with a brilliant screen and awesome set of features. However the battery life is what hits this one hard. I would say that Samsung really hasn’t done much to the Android OS in a way that anyone could probably go gaga over it. Plus for the price at which this one is being offered I would surely expect much more. Though this is just the start of the android journey for Samsung I sincerely wish that this one had something more to offer.

Thumbs up: Brilliant Sense UI, good call quality, well designed.

Thumbs down: Poor camera, bad media support.

Inside the trunk:

• Bluetooth: Yes
• Stereo Bluetooth: Yes
• WiFi: Yes
• Processor Speed (MHz): 528
• Playable Formats : AAC Plus, H.263, H.264, MP3, MPEG-4, WAV, WMA, WMV9
• MMS: Yes
• GPS Receiver Details: A-GPS
• GPRS: Yes
• Android OS v1.5 / 320 x 480 pixels capacitive touchscreen

THE WHIZ-KID SPEAKS: Well though the wait wasn’t long, the Hero has finally arrived. What is left to be seen is whether this one can live upto what it claims to be. This one doesn’t have the big G branding but it comes with all the android hallmarks.

Razzle-dazzle: Though this one wouldn’t be like the on the numero uno position on the style check list, this one with the bulging lip surely will stand out in the crowd. Like the other android phones from HTC this one also has seven buttons on the lip. The glitch here is that the power key is the same as the application terminate key. It took me some time to get used to this set up so that I don’t switch the phone off whenever I had to end an app.
Going in with the recent fad where in video calling is no longer the ‘IT’ thing, this one has eliminated the front facing camera. To click a picture one has to click the trackball because the camera key is absent in this one. It comes along with an USB cable, a U.K adaptor, and headphones.

Inside dope: The thing that HTC is bragging about with the launch of this one is the Sense UI, and it has enough reason to do so I feel, because its just brilliant. This one is like the fourth android phone from HTC and starting from three home screens, with this one it has moved up to seven home screens including the main home screen which can be accessed from anywhere by just hitting on the home button and with three to the left and the right of the screen respectively. HTC has also taken the TouchFlo3D interface and based its new Sense UI into it. This means that not only does thee user get different home screens there also a slider bar below a few applications to scroll through the pages.

This one comes with a 528mhz processor, which isn’t exactly fit for the kind of multitasking that the HTC hero is expected too provide the user with. I also noticed some lag at different intervals and I guess this has to do with the underpowered processor. I just hope that HTC looks into this soon. Switching the screen from the landscape mode to the portrait mode can be done by simply rotating the phone and then the inbuilt accelerometer does the rest.

For the social networking fans, the Sense UI brings in a lot of relief as it is well integrated with sites like facebook and twitter. You can easily scroll through your contact list and get a record of all the status updates and also when you call the person, his display pic on facebook pops up on the screen. Downloading the pictures through a 3G connection may take some time but then again once the downloading is done browsing through it is almost a breeze.

Though HTC had promised 211 contact imports at a time, it could hardly import 6 names at a time, and this was damn annoying.

Call quality as expected was brilliant. Though nowadays not much attention is paid to the styling of the phone because of high end microphone features like noise cancellation, the jutting lip provided a highly pleasant call experience. There was hardly any static or interference. Also the callers on the other end hardly has any complaints about the voice quality.

Sending messages using the phone is quite an easy task, plus it also provides with something called XT9 dictionary which means that when you have just started hitting the keys, the dictionary will spell the right word for you. Also when adding pictures to the message the pictures get automatically resized.

I was simply blown away by the internet browsing speed that this one had to offer, its second to none in the market. I would also advise watching youtube videos on it rather than actually watching the other flash videos, because whenever I tried playing flash videos it hung up invariably.

Its got a 5 megapixel camera as compared to the 3 megapixel one that the HTC magic had to offer. It goes without saying that more megapixels doesn’t mean a better camera. And this definitely stands true in the case of the hero. The pictures aren’t  sharp with very less brightness and low sharpness. Comparing the video camera and the camera I must say that the video camera fares better and is better than the one offered by the iPhone but is still not all that great.

The music player is not like really well integrated into the phone and just cannot be compared to the iPhone. The sound quality is definitely better using the 3.5mm headphone jack as compared to the speaker. If the disappointing music player was not enough, then let me add that the video player is bad as well. It doesn’t support AVI formats.

Apart from the other inbuilt applications, there are a few applications which can be downloaded for free like the beebPlayer, light racer, file browser, super Mario sounds and ringtones.

It comes loaded with a pretty impressive 1350mAh battery but with al the application running happening on the HERO this one could be expected to last for like 1.5 day.

Nitty-gritty: Its absolutely unfair when every other phone launched gets compared to the iPhone but this one surely was launched to give the iPhone some competition but again the Hero failed to do so. For sure this one tried hard, and still there are many Android phones being launched and I guess there are many from the HTC stable itself. And probably one of them could be the iPhone killer. And on that note I d like to add this one with a some firmware upgrades should solve most of its problems.