Nokia N79 Review

Introduction:

The Nokia N79 is another featured packed device in Nokia’s N-Range branded handsets.
At a glace physically, there won’t appear to be much difference between this device to say the Nokia N78 or even the older N73. However, when you examine the N79 more thoroughly, you will notice some enhancements both in looks and personality.

The N79 that we received from Nokia came with some of the normal boxed contents that you get with the N-Range series: A Nokia Travel Charger (AC-5), A USB Connectivity cable (CA-101), Nokia Music Headset (HS-45, AD-54) CD with Nokia PC Suite software and the User Guide. In addition, the handset came with a 4GB microSD card (MU-41) as well as two extra Nokia N79 Xpress-on smart covers to modify the look of the N79.

Design:

The first thing we noticed about the N79 itself was the colour! Looking at the handset from the front, the device has a white plastic front with a chrome trimmed finish. Slightly unusual but not bad we thought; quite distinctive. Try accidentally or even purposely smudging the bodywork of this device and you’ll fail miserably, which of course is good news. The screen of course is easier to smudge, but that is what screen protectors are for!

The alphanumerical keypad is 100% flat which we found were very responsive when they were pressed which is what you want from a flat keypad. The directional key pad button located in the middle of the handset was not marked by a line or symbol like they are on some phones; no big deal though. However, we didn’t feel it would make playing platform games the best experience on this mobile which does by the way support the N-Gage games’ platform. The select button in the middle works well and produces a satisfying ‘click’ when you press it. It also has a light underneath, which blinks every few seconds to show that the handset is still on when it enters the power saving mode or to notify you of any incoming communication e.g. missed calls, messages etc.

The screen on the N79 displays 240x320 pixels and measures 2.4 inches; smaller than that of an N96 for example, but equivalent to the N78 or N73. We do feel in order to truly maximize the N79’s potential, the screen could have been made bigger. There is enough room to have enlarged it, so this was a negative for us. Perhaps we have been spoiled with 2.8 inches screens we have seen in the past by Nokia which are so useful, especially for internet browsing etc. The actual display itself is good. Clear enough to see in poorly lit conditions but has enough contrast to be seen under direct sun light. It’s just the size that lets it down somewhat.

The back cover has a quite impressive feature which changes theme of the phone to match the colour of the back cover that you put on the handset. This is not a big thing as most people will probably download their own theme anyway, but a small innovation I feel is worth mentioning.
All in all the handset feels quite solid in your hands but is also relatively light which we believe is important for most.

Ok, so those are the looks of the N79, so now let’s look at its personality!

Telstra T6

Design

For a cheap and cheerful, the Telstra T6 is a sexy little number. No, not iPhone sexy, but the faux stainless steel finish elevates this phone's aesthetic a notch or two, and its matte-black plastic battery cover helps the T6 not look like the budget-priced phone it is.

The keypad is flat and definition-less except for a braille dot on the number five, though this hasn't hindered us using the pad quickly or accurately. The numbers aren't uniform in shape, but it's the asterisk and hash keys that suffer as they're the smallest, and it's better that these less used keys are harder to find than the alpha-numeric keys which will be used constantly when punching in text messages and phone numbers.

Its low resolution display is deceptively sharp and colourful. Some of the edges around larger fonts look jagged, but overall the T6 does a good job of masking this cost-cutting screen. Even watching Foxtel TV on the phone is fine, though the picture is heavily obscured when viewed off-angle, so you'll want to keep the screen aligned correctly while viewing.

One feature many of our readers in rural areas will be pleased to see is the external antenna connection on the rear of the phone, next to the 2-megapixel camera lens. Hidden behind a switch, this socket will connect the T6 to an antenna to boost the available signal range. With this attachment the T6 gets Telstra's Blue Tick, indicating superior range over regular mobile handsets.

Features

Expect this section of the review to be short and sweet. Telstra lists the available features on the side of the retail box and when it lists "Bluetooth 1.2" as a selling point, you know the company is scraping the bottom of the spec sheet.
The most noteworthy feature is the T6's compatibility with the Telstra Next G network. For AU$129 outright, you get a phone that downloads data at 3.6Mbps and can connect to the growing range of Telstra online services, like BigPond Music and TV, Foxtel Mobile TV and WhereIs Maps. Visual features like maps and streaming video are best viewed on phones with larger screens and sharper resolution, but the T6 does a decent job of displaying what it can.


Performance

The good news is that the T6 is a fantastic mobile phone, even if it isn't the all-in-one smartphone solution we're seeing in phones of late. We're happy with the quality of audio during calls, and we're told by those we called that they could hear us loud and clear. The phone's manufacturer ZTE estimates battery life at three hours talk-time when using the Next G network.

Navigating the phone's menus and settings is zippy, though it doesn't attempt much in the way of graphical flare and animated menus. Web browsing is fine, though the browser is a simple mobile browser and best for viewing sites optimised for mobile phones. CNET Australia's mobile site looks good, even though the browser wraps the text and pushes the menus and photos around a bit.

Overall

The T6 is the phone we never expected to see from Telstra, a phone carrier with a reputation for its high prices. The price tag on the T6 is spot on for a phone with this feature set, and the Telstra Blue Tick should offer those in remote areas some peace of mind. The T6 would make a great phone for teenagers; it doesn't look so bad and it offers the power to watching TV on the go, though it sorely lacks the multimedia aspects of more expensive models.

By Joseph Hanlon

Telstra's blue tick phones

To counteract these concerns, Telstra established the "Blue Tick" as a way of indicating to its customers which Next G capable handset has superior reception in regional areas, as per Telstra's own in-house testing procedures. These tests include practical handset trials both in the labs and on the ground in remote areas, emulating typical usage where possible.

Because we haven't tested these claims ourselves we suggest that you don't consider the blue tick a guarantee of clear reception, but more a recommendation to help start the conversation with your local mobile phone dealer about which handset will best suit your needs.

As with all mobile phone technologies, this list fluctuates; with phones being added and subtracted as they become available or are superseded.

By Joseph Hanlon

Vodafone 1210

Design

The Vodafone 1210 is a remarkably plain looking smartphone that measures in at 110 x 46 x 18 mm and weighs 105 grams. The 1210 is dominated by its 240x320 pixel display screen. Underneath the screen sits four control buttons; two for selection, one back button and a home button. Further down is a five-way joystick selector that's very similar to those found on many Sony Ericsson models and small dialling buttons. Vodafone sells the 1210 as its "house brand" solution for businesses who want blackberry-style email-aware smartphones, but don't want the price tag associated with such devices. That doesn't stop Vodafone from selling Blackberry units; it's just that this particular unit is the no-frills entry-level model. As a no-frills substitute, it's thus perhaps not suprising that the 1210 is somewhat on the plain side. For those who crave such detail, it's actually an OEM phone produced by Asus for Vodafone.

Features

The 1210 is a 3G capable phone running the Windows Mobile 5.0 platform. Unlike many other Mobile 5.0 phones, however, the 1210 doesn't feature the cut-down Office suite and Internet Explorer. Instead, Vodafone has opted for the no-frills variants of those options; ClearVue for the Office reading capabilities and Opera for Web browsing. As it's a business mobile, there is no integrated camera. Onboard storage comes in the form of 64MB of memory, along with a MicroSD card slot, which hides under the battery. The practical upshot of that is that if you want to add storage, you may as well buy a really big MicroSD card, as you won't be able to access it easily once you've slotted it in and you'll have to power down the phone every time you do so.

Performance

As a regular phone, the 1210 performed quite well. Vodafone rates it for up to 3 hours GSM talktime (4 hours UTMS) with a standby time of up to 300 hours. That jibed well with our tests, where the 1210 lasted eight days between recharges on moderate usage. We hit a typical problem that we have with joystick phone controls with the 1210, which often misinterpreted a "down" press as a "select" press, and vice versa.
As an business phone, however, things were a little more murky. Opera itself ran well and did as good a job at rendering complex pages -- in some cases much better -- than competing Internet Explorer or Blackberry Browser alternatives. Likewise, if you're just scanning a document, the ClearVue solutions work quite well. It's when you come to data entry -- such as the email component that the 1210 sells itself on -- that things get much trickier. There's just no good way to do that via a regular phone keypad. The closest we've seen to a good solution comes in the form of the Blackberry Pearl and its semi-predictive keypress method. The 1210 has none of that and you're left slap-bang in the realm of TXT-speak, which isn't really suitable for most business purposes outside of certain youth-branded markets. Even simple things like setting up POP email accounts -- the 1210 supports POP, Windows Mobile Email and Blackberry Mail -- is rather tiresome due to the number of repetitive keypresses involved.

With any budget item there are compromises to be accepted and the Vodafone 1210 arguably falls on the wrong side of those compromises. It's a perfectly usable phone, good for browsing and checking work documents, but when it comes to anything more than just reading your email, it's just too fiddly to be genuinely worthwhile.

By Alex Kidman

Sony Ericsson W302 Walkman

Big sounds, small package

The W302 is aimed squarely at the budget buyer, but it's still a member of Sony's Walkman family, so its sound quality is excellent. We compared the sound output from the W302 against our usual test set-up — the wonderful SanDisk Sansa Fuze MP3 player and a pair of beautiful Audio Technica headphones. The W302 sounded clear and full when we listened with our own headphones, and we noticed hardly any difference in sound quality.

When we used the included in-ear headphones, however, we found that the sound lost some of its spaciousness. The audio quality was still good, though, considering that we were using cheap, plastic-y ear buds.

We don't like the W302's proprietary headphone jack, which is shared with the USB cable (Credit: Sony Ericsson)

Unsurprisingly, like its Walkman cousins, the W302 has a proprietary USB port instead of a 3.5mm headphone jack. An adapter is included, but it adds about a metre to the cable length, so you could end up throttling yourself to music. It also means that we had to unplug the headphones every time we transferred music, so that we could plug in the USB cable. But the W302 does have stereo Bluetooth, so it could stream to a set of wireless headphones.

The handset includes an FM radio, which picked up a strong signal during all our travels around central London. It has RDS and TrackID, which can identify a song based on a clip of a few seconds. We found TrackID worked perfectly with pop songs on the radio, and failed gracefully with speech radio and the like, which it didn't recognise.

The user interface for the radio isn't as good as that of other Walkman handsets we've tried. Scrolling through stations is a slow process, setting up new stored stations is confusing, and the lack of a skip function is criminal.

The W302 doesn't support podcast subscriptions, which is a feature we love in handsets that are higher up the Sony Ericsson totem pole, like the W705 Walkman, for example. You can sync podcasts along with your other music using the free Media Manager software, but we're not fans of the software's usability. We like that it supports drag and drop, but it reorganised our music based on its own rules, and it's not clear what file formats are supported. We had to check the W302's folding user manual to learn that MP3, MP4, 3GP, AAC, MIDI, IMY, EMY and WAV are the supported formats.

Syncing the W302 is easy via USB but we aren't fans of the confusing, dull-looking Media Manager software (Credit: Sony Ericsson)

Files in all of those formats can be packed onto the handset's 512MB memory stick. If you like, you can spend the money saved by not buying a pricier phone on a memory-stick upgrade, up to 4GB. The W302 also has 20MB of on-board memory.

Boring browsing

The W302's music features got us through the night, but the rest of the package let us down. Pictures look fine on the 176x220-pixel screen — nothing to write home about, but clear and bright, with vibrant colours. But web pages look awful in the browser, with images an over-compressed mess. Since it also doesn't have 3G or Wi-Fi, we wouldn't recommend the W302 for anything more than an occasional emergency Google search.

Say cheesy

The 2-megapixel camera can shoot video or stills, but, with no flash or LED, it's only suitable for snapshots in bright light. The video quality is dreadful, rendering CNET UK colleagues and potted plants as similarly blurry blobs.

The multimedia experience is also let down by a poor user interface — something that's excellent on some other Sony Ericsson phones, like the Sony Ericsson C510 Cyber-shot. Photos, video and music are hard to find in the media browser. It's also hard to navigate once you're in the photo-viewing application. We struggled to find photos that we'd just taken, and had to trawl through unsorted wallpapers, slowly scrolling past one image at a time.

Tiny buttons

The user interface also proved a problem when we wanted the W302 to act as a dedicated music player. The W302 has a Walkman button, which launches the music player without having to navigate to it from the home screen. But the button doesn't wake up the handset from slumber, which we found annoying — the camera-shutter button does wake the handset, and this is a music phone, not a camera phone.

The keypad buttons are very small, but they're well separated, so they passed our sausage-finger test. The function buttons are not as easy to use, especially the Walkman, camera-shutter and volume buttons on the side, which are tiny and as narrow as a toothpick.

The W302 is cheap but, except for a plastic back plate that wobbles when you take it off, it feels and looks neat. Our black review model had a brushed plastic front and a pleasantly dimpled back, with two rubber feet to stop it sliding on the dashboard. It's also agreeably small and thin, with a restrained colour screen and just a hint of silver around the bevel of the screen. With its smart good looks, no-one ever has to know that it's a budget handset.

Conclusion

The Sony Ericsson W302 Walkman is a small, particularly light music phone with great sound quality. It has some other features, like a low-end camera, but they're just padding out the specs, and we think they're better off ignored.

We'd like better music-transfer software and a standard headphone jack, but we're willing to forgive these failings in a budget-level handset, especially because it includes a headphone adapter and a new Sony Ericsson media manager is on its way. Essentially, the W302 does a good job of sending texts, making calls and playing music, and it does it without emptying your pockets or weighing them down.

By Flora Graham