Nokia Asha 311

 Latest models in Asha lineup delivered great features and they are pretty close to standard smartphones that we have on the market. Nokia Asha 311 is here to compete with entry level smartphones and we are pretty sure that this cell phone will offer some nice features to users.
Form
Nokia is one of those manufacturers with a penchant for visual design.
Regardless of the overall strengths or weaknesses of a handset the company produces, design is consistently on the positive side of the checklist and even the worst of its portfolio looks rather dapper compared to much of the rest of the market.
The Asha 311 may be a budget device but that doesn’t mean Nokia has scrimped on the aesthetics. The shape is a neat rectangle with gently curving sides and corners which work well with the proportions.
Nokia’s also gone for its usual range of luminescent colour options and the 311 features a contrasting panel on the lower portion of the phone, separated by a narrow chrome band which also houses the solid control keys.
Overall we think it looks very smart.
That said, it is a little on the small side and those with larger hands may find it a bit fiddly to get to grips with.
Another minor grievance is the inconsistency of materials used. The build quality actually feels surprisingly solid for a budget device but Nokia has clearly saved production costs by using a fairly low-quality feel plastic for the main back panel.
There’s nothing necessarily wrong with this but the lower contrasting panel feels like a much nicer material and we can’t help but think the experience of the device in the hand would’ve been substantially improved if the whole thing was made from this superior plastic.
We also find it a bit irksome that Nokia insists on fitting a proprietary charging port rather than allowing the already present Micro USB to fulfil charging duties.
Display
The budget constraints and diminutive size of the Asha 311 means it’s only sporting a basic 3-inch TFT touch display with 56k colours, low resolution (400×240 pixels) and low pixel density of only 155 pixels-per-inch (ppi).
But at the very least it’s capacitive rather than resistive and is reasonably responsive when navigating the homescreens.
Being a Nokia screen the blacks are quite good, but apart from that everything’s a bit fuzzy and the colours don’t really pop.
Hardware
The Asha 311 is reasonably well provisioned in the processor department thanks to a 1GHz single core CPU which ensures the operating system runs quite smoothly and the device is capable of running games such as Angry Birds reasonably well (although this is a version built and optimised specially for S40 handsets).
However, in other areas it’s less impressive with 128MB of RAM and 140MB of onboard storage.
It does at least have MicroSD support for cards up to 32GB and connectivity is quite well catered for with Bluetooth, MicroUSB and Wi-Fi – the latter being rather unusual for feature phones and thus a welcome addition.
Software
The S40 operating system is a major bone of contention here. Generally we found it extremely obtuse and frustrating to use compared to other contemporary touch-based platforms such as Android, Windows Phone and iOS.
Many of the most typically used settings and functions are buried deep inside a maze-like burrow of layered menus and sub-menus. Needless to say, it doesn’t offer the most intuitive experience.
Another issue is that despite the touchscreen’s decent responsiveness, the way the platform reacts to this isn’t great. The transition animations between screens feel too quick and effectively twang across the display awkwardly.
Although the app icons are bright and colourful they’re also fairly flat and bland. The homescreen interface is divided into three panels you flick between. One is an app drawer for all installed apps, the other is a fullscreen dialpad and the third is a favourites page which you can populate with your most regularly used app shortcuts and contacts.
Facebook and Twitter are preloaded onto the phone, together with Angry Birds and a digital gift card which allows you to download up to 40 EA games, but you have to do this within 60 days of activating the gift card.

You’ve also got apps onboard for a range of phone functionality including a weather app, file browser, email, maps, contacts, music and a calendar.
In fairness there are plenty of apps available on Nokia’s S40 app store, but as we mentioned with the Angry Birds example earlier, many of them are specially made and optimised builds for S40 devices and this does have an impact on the end user experience.
It’s also fair to say that although you get some very well known and well established apps on S40 (EA Games titles, What’s App, Facebook et al) you also don’t get anywhere near the broad range of 600,000 + apps found on Google Play or Apple’s App Store, instead there’s just over 100,000.
Imaging
As you might expect on a budget handset, the camera is not particularly impressive. It’s a 3.15-megapixel shooter with a 2048×1536 pixel resolution and VGA video.
Visuals are typically washed out and grainy with very poor contrast, white balance and exposure, although colours are not too bad.
The result is that every shot or video looks like a dream sequence from a film.
Battery
Battery life isn’t too bad but then we’d expect as much from a feature phone. It’ll easily last a day or two with moderate use but it also charges quite rapidly compared to most smartphones.
Final Thoughts
The Asha 311 typically retails for around £100 (RRP is closer to £70 but we haven’t found it anywhere at that price) and for that amount of money, compared to what else you can get, it’s not an appealing device.
It’s too obscure and fussy in terms of how you interact with it and it simply doesn’t offer enough compared to something similarly priced like the Huawei Ascend G300 which gives you way more bang for your buck via Android.


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Sony Xperia tipo

Sony Xperia tipo comes to the budget friendly market and even it represents pretty cheap device it offers nice features. This device is ideal for people that are not chasing high end performances and flagship devices.
Aesthetics and design
The tipo (yep, that’s a lower case ‘t’ in there), is a tiny phone, designed for small hands. If you’re a bit of a monster-digit then you might want to steer clear. The small handset will fit nicely in the pocket though, being 103 x 57 x 13 mm in size and its weight of 99.4g won’t weigh you down.
For all its low cost Sony has thought a bit about the look and feel, and the tapering of the edges inwards is a neat touch and makes a change from blockier designs. The inward curve arguably makes the phone a bit more comfy to hold than straight-sided phones too.
There’s also a little lip of bright shiny plastic beneath the three touch-sensitive shortcut buttons under the screen that takes the phone away from being a rectangular monolith.
Build quality isn’t bad. Yes the phone flexes slightly if forced, but it feels quite solid for all that. And Sony has mounted the headset slot where it should be on the top edge to keep music lovers happy. So far, then, so good.
Display
A small phone inevitably means a small screen, and this is a bit of a problem especially when it is low resolution too. The screen here measures 3.2 inches and it has 320 x 480 pixels. Reading web pages isn’t the most rewarding experience as you have to do a lot of scrolling. Watching video is less enjoyable than it could be too. Tapping at the keyboard is tricky if you’ve larger hands.
That’s not our only gripe with the screen either. It seemed to be a bit reluctant to respond to taps sometimes. This wasn’t so bad as to really irritate, but every now and again a tapped icon failed to react, and we felt irked.
Hardware
A phone that costs £126 isn’t going to have earth shatteringly good hardware, but the mix needs to be serviceable. What you get here is an 800MHz Qualcomm processor which is supported by 512MB of RAM. It does OK, but isn’t blistering – which is what you’d expect really.
We did find that sometimes apps were a bit slow to load, and some YouTube clips took their time to render and play too. But it is nothing beyond what’s to be expected for a handset at this price.
What did irritate us was a memory expansion issue. With just 2.5GB of built in storage you’ll need a microSD card and the slot is under the battery. If you like adding data such as music by swapping cards in and out, then the need to power down first will become a pain.
And you just might want to swap microSD cards in this way, because probably one of the key strengths of the Xperia tipo is its music playback.
This handset sports Sony’s xLOUD audio technology. That, says Sony, is designed to deliver crisp and loud sound. It’s certainly loud. Louder than we’re used to from any mobile phone. Music quality is good too, with tinny tones coming in at the top volume levels but overall impressive quality being delivered.
Camera and video
There’s a crunch when it comes to the camera though. A 3.2 megapixel flashless shooter with video limited to VGA quality isn’t exactly going to light up the world. Snap quality is so-so and while there are a couple of scene modes (beach and snow, night, sports), the controls are generally lacklustre.
In general we’d say the camera is OK for shots and video you want to keep on the handset for fun, but if you have any intention of using the media you capture elsewhere, get a proper camera.
Operating system and software
Android 4.0 is not to be sniffed at and it is great that Sony has managed to cram it into this small, low cost phone. There’s no word on an upgrade to 4.1 Jelly Bean though, so purchasers might not be at the top of the OS tree for long.
Sony’s skin is fairly harmless. There’s none of the corner-icon business that made the teeny Xperia X10 mini so alluring and things feel intuitive and easy to get at.
There are a couple of useful apps in the form of a battery life extender called Power Save and a neat utility called LiveWare. The latter lets you configure specific apps to start when you plug in headphones, charger or a headset. How convenient, for example, would it be to plug in a headset and have the dialler fire up automatically?
Power Save lets you set the phone up to shut off certain functions, say Wi-Fi or vibrate, to help eek that little bit more battery life out of the handset. It can be set to kick in when the battery gets down to a pre-set level, or at certain times of the day, or even just when you manually choose it.
Final thoughts
The Sony Xperia tipo might seem like a very attractively priced handset and indeed the lure of Android 4.0 for £126 is great. But be sure the other good things about this phone are what you want. Music? Check. Web browsing? Not so good.

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Scroll Engage

 When Google Nexus 7 was delivered to the market it certainly offered fantastic features and hardware at incredible price. One of devices that will try to get involved in this market segment is the Scroll Engage and we are pretty sure that it will be pretty hard for any device to come even close to Nexus 7.
Hardware
We’ll get the specs out of the way first. The Engage is running the same 1.2GHz Cortex A8 processor that is single core rather than dual core, and is backed by 1GB of DDR3 RAM. The GPU is a Mali-400, which offers an acceptable – if workmanlike – level of performance.
In terms of everyday usage, the Engage offers very much the same experience as its bigger brother. Particularly strenuous tasks will result in a spot of slowdown, but on the whole the tablet is adequate for casual users. Of course, when placed side-by-side with the quad core Nexus 7, the difference in speed and smoothness is like night and day. The Engage is totally and utterly outclassed.
Display
As you would expect from such a cheap product, there are caveats all over the place. The LCD screen has pretty average viewing angles and isn’t very bright, even when on the full setting. It also possesses a bluish tint.
However, while Engage has a smaller screen than the Extreme, it has the same resolution of 1024×768 pixels – the same as the Apple iPad 2, no less.
Google Play
The same issue regarding the Google Play market that impacted the Extreme exists here, too. At first glance, it looks as if the Engage doesn’t have the Google Play app installed. However, by dropping the Google Play widget onto your home screen, you can forcibly gain access.
It’s an odd situation that is apparently a consequence of Google’s often obtuse licensing arrangements with manufacturers, but at least it’s easily resolvable as things stand.
Camera and video
We were also disappointed to discover the camera is the same as the one used on the Extreme. It takes fuzzy and washed-out images, meaning you won’t find yourself taking many family snaps with this slab of tech. Its positioning is also a little bizarre – when holding the Engage in portrait mode, your hand entirely covers the camera lens.
A front-facing snapper offers similarly low-grade results, but this is less of an issue as it’s used primarily for video calling, where image quality isn’t as much of an issue.
General use
There are areas where Storage Options’ device actually beats the Nexus 7. Firstly, it has expandable memory, so you can add in additional space using microSD cards – something that Google’s tablet can’t do, much to the chagrin of those who purchased the cheaper 8GB version.
Secondly, the Engage can also be connected to your TV using a HDMI lead – another feature that its high profile rival can’t boast.
Storage Options have even been kind enough to include an adapter in the box which permits the use of USB peripherals such as joypads and flash drives – the latter of which offers yet another way of increasing the amount of storage available.
Conclusion
While the Scroll range may feel increased pressure from the arrival of the Nexus 7 to the low-cost Android tablet party, the Engage still offers a competitive solution. The 4:3 ratio screen will find favour with those coveting the iPad experience, and the ability to add in more storage is a massive, massive plus – 8GB Nexus 7 owners are already finding that their shiny new tablet just doesn’t offer enough on-board memory.
It’s also worth remembering that the Engage is £40 cheaper than the cheapest version of the Nexus 7.

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Samsung Galaxy Beam

 If you are looking for a smartphone that will give you the projector also than Samsung Galaxy Beam is one of rare devices that you can buy with this feature. This certainly is a nice feature but do you really need it or not? Another important question is about the quality of this projector.
Aesthetics
Surprisingly the projector doesn’t add a huge amount of size or weight to this phone. In fact, lay it down on the table and look at it face on and you’d never know that the top edge houses the projector. On the other hand, it is clearly visible head on, and it makes the top edge of the rim, at its thickest part, about 15mm thick. Elsewhere it is about 12mm.
The projector does add some weight to the Galaxy Beam, but again it’s not a huge amount. This handset weighs 148g, which when set aside around 110g – 120g for similar sized rivals isn’t a huge gain.
Overall then, we have to say that the inclusion of the projector does have some effects on the handset’s look and feel, but nothing to get excited about really, and if anything the large top mounted projector lens looks rather cool.
Samsung has even added a banana yellow trim round the edge of this phone to give it that little something extra.
Hardware
Projector aside, the Samsung Galaxy Beam runs on a fairly standard upper mid range set of specifications. So we’ve got a dual core 1GHz processor and 8GB of internal storage at the heart of things. Neither of these key specifications are going to blow you away, but on the other hand we found them perfectly adequate for our needs, and of course the storage is easily bumped up with a microSD card.
Because it needs its hardware to be in the centre back of the handset the projector displaces the key slots. The SIM slot is on the left edge of the chassis, microSD on the right. Both are under hinged covers and accessing them is not a problem. You might prefer you SIM to be a little more tucked away, but it’s not a big deal in our view.
More annoying is that the headset connector can’t go on the top edge. Instead it is on the upper part of the left edge, where we found it snagged a bit in the pocket.
Display
The screen is large enough at 4-inches and its resolution is 800×480 pixels. Now, we’re starting to see higher resolutions at the top end, and they really do blow 800×480 handsets out of the water, but the Beam does a good job nonetheless.
There’s just one word of caution. It is a TFT PLS panel and when we stepped outside it became a little washed out. In bright sunshine it might be hard to read.
Camera and video
Considering the Samsung Galaxy Beam has a projector on board Samsung hasn’t paid a huge amount of attention to its cameras. The main snapper shoots at 5 megapixels, and has an LED flash, and the front camera has a 1.3 megapixel lens. Video shoots up to 1280×720 (720p).
There isn’t anything much to write home about in terms of services on offer or quality of output, and there’s no camera shortcut button on the side of the chassis. Samsung has saved the button for turning the projector on and off.
The projector on the other hand is fun, though it does have its limitations. It projects onto any surface at a resolution of 640×360 in full colour. Samsung provides some apps such as Ambience Mode which sends animations or videos to the projector along with musical accompaniment and Visual Presenter which takes what the main camera shows and projects that – effectively allowing you to use the handset as an overhead projector.
There’s also Quick Pad. Draw onto the screen or use a cursor and your work is projected. There’s also the facility to use the projector as a torch. And of course you can project anything that is displayed on the Beam’s screen – streamed video, web pages, whatever.
In theory this is all quite exciting. But there are limitations. You can only move about two metres away from the projecting surface before the image focus controls run out of scope and that means projections can’t be that large.
And you need to be in a pretty dark environment for it to work at all. Showing family and friends your latest snaps is only going to work if you turn the lights out and draw the curtains. HDMI, which isn’t on this phone, might be a better bet for that kind of task.
The long and the short of it is that when the projector works well it is very, very good, but it just isn’t capable enough to be more than a bit of a gimmick. Which is a real shame.
Operating system
The single most irritating thing about the Samsung Galaxy Beam is that it runs on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread). That now feels decidedly old hat, and with Android 4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) established and 4.1 (Jelly Bean) already in the wild this definitely has a negative effect.
Still, Samsung has skinned it with TouchWiz 3 and added lots of widgets including a fair few social ones for you to fiddle with, and to be fair Android 2.3 has plenty of distance left in it if you don’t need to be up there with the leaders.

 General use
In everyday use the Samsung Galaxy Beam performed quite well. It is a good handset for web browsing and video viewing thanks to its fairly large screen, and our only real annoyance on everyday terms was the awkward location of the headset slot.
The yellow banding round the edges is attractive, and general attention to detail in the build makes this a comfy handset to hold. The stippling on the matte backplate means it’s not a fingerprint magnet, either.
We actually forgot about the projector much of the time, though as that is the unique selling point of this phone we aren’t sure Samsung would be pleased to learn that.
Battery life
Samsung has done two clever things regarding battery life. That projector is a power eater, so clever thing one is to equip the handset with a 2000mAh battery. That’s larger than most, and it can keep the projector going for up to three hours and in our experience gives the handset a good chance of seeing out a full day away from mains power.
Clever thing two is to provide two batteries, so that you can carry a charged spare if you think you are going to need it.
Conclusion
The Samsung Galaxy Beam is a competent smartphone though the version of Android is a bit of a let down. Its two batteries give it superb longevity and its physical design is attractive. The projector is a bit of a gimmick though it works well within its limitations of projection size and darkness requirements.
Of course you pay for that projector and the Beam is a bit more expensive than other handsets with similar general specs. Clove, who provided our review sample, currently lists it at £412 inc VAT. That’s in the same price bracket as the HTC One X, Moto Razr MAXX and even the quirky but popular Samsung Galaxy Note.

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