Technknowledge

Showing it's serious about smartphones, Dell is reorganizing the company around its newest product.

Dell is forming a new communications business unit to be helmed by Ron Garriques, a former Motorola executive brought in to run Dell's consumer business two years ago, Reuters first reported Friday. Dell officials confirmed that the consumer group will be folded into the small and medium business group run by Steve Felice.

Dell started selling its first smartphone at the end of November in China and Brazil only. The new unit run by Garriques will develop hardware and software for phones and other mobile Internet devices.

Dell has recently fallen even further behind its once-lofty perch as the world's biggest producer of PCs. It is now No. 3 behind Hewlett-Packard and Acer, both of which offer consumers computers and smartphones. The company is, like most consumer hardware makers, increasingly moving to smaller mobile computers like smartphones and laptops as the desktop market has cratered.

Motorola's handset business has been down in the dumps of late, like Luke Skywalker stuck in the Death Star trash compactor, with the walls slowly closing in ready to crush. In Star Wars, Luke had R2-D2 to save him from oblivion, and in a similar vein, Motorola has turned to an Android to save the day — Google's Android. Can Motorola escape its recent turmoil, blow up the Death Star and put an end to the tyranny of the evil Emperor? Its fate rests with the Motorola Dext.
Showing its softer side

Motorola unveiled its first Android in San Francisco last week as a T-Mobile exclusive under the name Motorola Cliq, just before announcing it would release the same phone outside the US as the Dext. From a distance it seems like Motorola has approached this phone in the right way, focusing on software rather than trying to outdo Nokia and Sony Ericsson on hardware specs.

The Dext will be built from a respectable list of components. Its 3.1-inch touchscreen is coupled with a full QWERTY keyboard, it has HSDPA, Wi-Fi, GPS and sports a flashless 5-megapixel camera. Motorola has opted for a five-way nav pad under the slide, which could cramp up the rest of the keyboard, but we'll have to wait to see if this is a problem.
Socially acceptable

The big news is the introduction of the Motoblur UI. Customised interfaces is one of the things we love about Android, and Motorola's looks like a winner with its focus squarely on social media. Similar to the Palm Pre and HTC's Sense UI for Android, Motoblur will sync contacts from your favourite social networking sites, like Facebook, with your phone's address book, keeping track of changes to user profile images.

Motoblur also comes packed to the rafters with home screen widgets, allowing you to monitor your friends' updates and tweets without having to open an app or link to a web page. While you're gawking at their recent activity you can comment or update your own status, again without having to leave the home screen.

Also included with the software is an online backup location for all of your private details and the ability to remotely wipe the phone. If you lose your phone you can activate a GPS tracking service, and after you've recovered the phone you can backup the data you remotely wiped directly from the Motorola server.

The Motorola Dext may not have the design to set hearts aflutter, but Motorola's commitment to software shows promise for the future. There's no firm yet as to an Australian release date, so stay tuned for news as it comes to hand. For now, take a peek at the launch video posted by our colleagues in the US.

If news of the imminent Motorola Droid announcement wasn't exciting enough for Android fans, it looks like Sony Ericsson is set to make a similar claim.

Could it be?

Though the message on the Sony Ericsson website isn't Android specific, if there's any upcoming SE handsets capable of "crossing the line" between the extraordinary and the magical (cue eye-rolling) it would have to be the upcoming Xperia X3. We first saw leaks of the X3's interface back in July, followed by a leak on the website of online retailer Expansys. Details are still scarce, but rumours suggest that the X3 will run Android on a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, and if it's released after the Moto Droid then we assume it will run on version 2.0 of the Android OS — a powerful combination indeed.

Stay tuned for more details on 3 November, and cross your fingers this is in fact the X3 and not a new range of stereo headphones.

Design

When looking at the N97 front-on you could be mistaken into thinking this latest Nokia is nothing more than an iPhone clone, though this would be selling Nokia's excellent design well short. It might be a touch thicker and heavier than Apple's phone, but it also addresses a few of the physical elements of the iPhone that we wish had been changed in the iPhone 3GS update. Between the 4mm in extra depth and the matte plastic finish, the N97 is much easy to hold, and then there's the sliding screen and the superb keyboard below it.

If you've seen pictures of the N97 you've probably seen it on its back with the slide open and the screen tilting up. When open, the screen sits at an angle just shy of 45 degrees, making it easy to read while using the well-spaced keyboard, or navigating the menus with the large five-way nav key. We love this design, every part of it feels slick and deliberate; from the smooth sliding mechanism to the position of the keys, Nokia clearly has user experience at the front of its design philosophy. The only oversight we can find is the absence of a "back" key on the keyboard for stepping backwards through the menu system. It's easy enough to reach up to the touchscreen, but this gets annoying after the fourth or fifth back-step in a complex menu tree.

Which brings us to the downside in this aforementioned Nokia design philosophy. While the physical design of the N97 is excellent, the Series 60 platform is starting to show its age next to the shiny new touchscreen platforms from Google and Apple. The N97 runs on Series 60 v5, and while this is the latest version of the platform, trying to navigate through the system is becoming tedious — even for us, who know the system so well. Completing simple tasks like turning off input sound effects or changing the ringtone takes six steps and has us wishing Nokia had a simpler menu with even simpler menu titles like "Sounds", rather than the legacy titling from a decade of its preceding platforms.

The 3.5-inch touchscreen is one of the phone's outstanding elements. Nokia uses resistive touchscreen technology, which compared with capacitive touchscreens, is considered the lesser technology, especially in regards to responsiveness. Nokia takes this assumption and turns it on its head, delivering outstanding responsiveness and a bright, colourful screen to boot. The screen is easy to read and our test videos look fantastic.
Features

Even though it was first announced six months ago, the N97 will still be one of the most impressively specced phones on the market when its released in Australia during July. Alongside the touchscreen and full-QWERTY keyboard, the N97 comes with a decent mix of business and consumer features including HSDPA and Wi-Fi for web browsing, A-GPS, a built-in digital compass and Nokia Maps for navigation, a 3.5mm headphone socket, and 32GB of internal memory plus a microSD card slot to increase this to a possible 48GB.

In line with previous N-series releases, the N97 houses an excellent 5-megapixel camera on the back of the handset, complete with Carl Zeiss optics, auto-focus and dual-LED photolights. In 2009 we're seeing the megapixel count in camera phones growing with Sony Ericsson about to break new ground with 12.1 megapixels in the upcoming Satio, but for our money Nokia is still producing one of the best camera phone modules available. This camera is lightning fast to fire up and the super-quick shutter helps to eliminate handheld judder and keep the focus nice and sharp. The colour reproduction tends to be a little cold — whites tend towards shades of blue — but overall the pictures we've taken have been superb.

Multimedia components and the web browser don't seem to have improved much since the 5800 XpressMusic, which is a bit of a disappointment. The music and video player are both fine — compatible with a decent range of media file formats — but the browser still needs some attention from the Nokia software boffins. The browser loads page content slowly, and the view is never optimised for the screen — instead we spent the first five or 10 seconds on each new page zooming and panning to get an overview of a site. The N97 ships with Flash Lite 3 installed and by default Flash content is turned on, but we suggest you switch this off to speed up page load times significantly. As with many elements on the N97, the browser is better than previous Nokia releases, but is still lagging behind the current competition.
Apps and the Ovi Store

We first saw Nokia using Series 60 v5 on the 5800 XpressMusic touchscreen, the company has since evolved the home screen interface and opened up this space on the N97 to five panels of widgets. These spaces can be used for both online and offline widget apps including pre-installed variants for Facebook, AP and News.com.au live tickers, favourite contacts, email notifications and favourite installed applications, with more widgets available to download through the Nokia Ovi Store.

The widgets stand out as the most useful new feature to the N97. While the handset is capable of nearly everything available on previous Nokia handsets, the widgets panels are virgin territory, and a very welcome addition. The pre-installed apps from Facebook and News.com.au are both extremely lightweight; they update seamlessly and quickly execute the app to a full-screen view with a minimum of lag.

We were surprised to see Nokia's excellent email client, Nokia Messaging, missing from the N97. Nokia Messaging is a much cleaner client than the standard messaging app, and is also much easier to use with fingers on the touchscreen. Luckily the Ovi Store was ready to plug the gap, and we recommend that this quick download be one of the first things you do with a new N97.
Performance

Zippy performance, as it relates to the user experience, is steadily becoming the make-or-break of many new smartphones in the market. This time last year most of us were content with slightly sluggish performance, however, this is not the case today. Again we come back to the iPhone and Android smartphone platforms. Both have been developed with touchscreen use in mind and both run at full speed; it's unusual to wait more than a moment for an app or a menu branch to execute. Nokia has been playing catch-up in this department over the last few major releases, and while the N97 is its best, so far it is still a little off the pace. The processing is punchy and the touchscreen is impressively responsive. We have noticed a few bugs here and there — a few blank screens while the N97 clears the memory and makes way for a new app — and the phone does take a moment to make data connections, which slows down the execution of the browser and the Ovi Store app, but overall we've been pleased.

One area Nokia rarely falters is call quality, and the N97 is no exception. After testing the iPhone 3GS just a week before, it's been a pleasure to switch to a phone that makes and receives calls so clearly. It can be hard to decipher good call quality from poorer or mediocre performers, but the N97 is quite noticeably better than we've heard for a while. Battery life is also decent; its nearly two-day cycle is good without being outstanding, and includes constant use of Wi-Fi, web browsing, push email and standard calling and messaging.
Overall

There's a lot to like about the N97 and we think this handset is a more fitting flagship model for the world's biggest mobile phone company than last year's N96. But is it enough to compete in an increasingly competitive mobile landscape? It has the looks, it has decent battery life and comes with most of the essential basics pre-installed. It'll handle your calls, messages, emails and simple web searches, and the new home screen widgets system can be customised to put your top five apps or online feeds right in front of your eyes.

Yet there's something about the N97 that remains lacking; it's not a question of what it does but how it does it. While the performance of the phone is mostly good, this current incarnation of Symbian Series 60 definitely lacks the polish of better operating platforms. The menu tree for apps and settings is unnecessarily complex and for people upgrading to their first smartphone, or first Nokia, the lack of common-sense naming conventions will confuse those that aren't scared away in the first place.

First impressions

Up until Samsung's recent announcement, fashion phones and business phones never share the same spotlight. Indeed, Samsung's last Armani-branded handset was far from earning itself the title of smartphone, with 2G network coverage and a thin spread of technology features.

Its latest, the M7500, is the phone a busy man like Giorgio Armani actually needs. Running on the latest version of Windows Mobile it will easily sync with your MS Exchange server and keep track of all your emails, contacts, tasks, bookmarks and calendar entries. The enormous looking keyboard looks well spaced too, meaning its probably a very handy messaging device.

But surely Armani isn't just about boring business meetings and conference calls. The M7500 also has the makings of a well-equipped media device, with a 5-megapixel camera with flash, 8GB of storage and DivX and XviD video playback on a 3.5-inch WVGA display. Samsung scored big points with us for its excellent media-savvy Omnia Icon and HD Icon phones, and the Armani looks to be in the same league.

For a phone that does everything and carries the name of a world-renown fashion designer it's no surprise that the M7500 won't come cheap. There's no official information about Australian pricing, but Samsung expects it to fetch €700 (AU$1140) when released in the UK.