Nutty Mobiles

Oh, we liked the HTC Desire. It still sits at the top of our 20 best mobile phones list, proudly casting a belittling eye over HTC’s own Desire HD, the Samsung Galaxy S, Google Nexus S and even Apple’s iPhone 4 juggernaut. Though the HTC Desire’s technology is now being surpassed, it’s aged beautifully thanks to some timely price drops. [...]

Android 3.0 is here, and it’s a stunner. Released only for the Motorola Xoom tablet so far, the new operating system, which started life on Android smartphones but is now formatted for the larger touchscreen, will eventually make its way onto the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 as well as other tablets from big manufacturers like Acer, HTC, Dell, Asus, LG, [...]

Overview, design and feel The Nokia X2 is an entry-level handset with plenty of features and a penchant for music playback. It sits somewhere between the Nokia C1-01 and the Nokia X3 Touch and Type in both functionality and price. With the recent trend in cramming as many features as possible into a phone in an effort to jump on [...]

Nokia may have made a deal with Microsoft to bring Windows Phone 7 to the fanbase, but in the meantime Nokia struggles on with Symbian in various flavours. Right at the bottom of the tree is S40, a relatively basic OS version. Now, Nokia can endow S40 with touch, and we saw this in the Nokia C3-01, and the Nokia [...]

The PlayStation phone is the device equivalent of El Dorado, in that it’s spent a long time as a golden fable to trot out when conversation slows. Now the fusion of gamepad and Android phone has emerged into the modern world in the form of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play. It’s a time when iPhones have permeated the globe, able [...]

If beauty were only screen deep, the Nokia E7 series would stand a good chance in a Miss Handset competition, even up against the likes of the iPhone 4, HTC Desire S and Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc. This QWERTY keyboard phone boasts a four-inch capacitive touchscreen, AMOLED ClearBlack display and sleek brushed aluminium casing that feels great in the hand. [...]

The HTC Incredible S is the latest Android phone from the Taiwanese brand, filling the 4-inch screen gap it has in the UK. The brand has already launched a phone under the Incredible moniker in the US, making it slightly odd that it’s chosen to bring that product line to the UK – but given the success of the Samsung [...]

We’ve overhauled our BlackBerry Torch review in light of recent firmware upgrades and a big drop in price – from £40 to £30 a month in some cases, and nearly £100 off the SIM free price. Take a look at our updated review to see if this extra cost savings make the BlackBerry Torch a market leading smartphone. For years, [...]

The latest edition to the Galaxy family is the Samsung Galaxy Ace GT- S5830, which packs quite a punch considering its middle-of-the-road specification and £199.99 prepay/£25 contract price point. The Android 2.2 (Froyo) operating system helps this smartphone stand tall next to other mid-range touchscreen devices, such as HTC’s Wildfire, which comes with a noticeably slower processor and older version [...]

When Motorola announced the Atrix smartphone at CES this year, the tech world sat up and took notice. What’s this? A phone that acts like a computer? Sure, the Google Nexus S has a built-in near-field communication chip that will (eventually) let you buy a sandwich on your way to work just by tapping your phone on a till. Yes, [...]

The US’s slimline, Android-running HTC Aria was due to arrive on UK and European shores back in November, albeit rebranded as the less-musical-sounding Gratia and boasting Android 2.2 (Froyo), rather than 2.1 (Eclair). Now it’s finally here and ready to carry the tune begun by the HTC Wildfire. In so doing, it will have to face off against rival fare [...]

Upon first touch, the Nokia C5-03 is sleek but not stunning, chunky but light enough, and rocks minimalistic buttons, touchscreen capability and a shiny derriere. But if you were picking up this smartphone in the hope that it might provide some real competition in the mid-range budget area, you may be in for a little disappointment. The Samsung Monte offers [...]

Windows Phone 7 has been with us since last October, where the first flurry of handsets came quickly with a trio from HTC, the HD7, HTC 7 Mozart and HTC 7 Trophy being joined by the Samsung Omnia 7 and LG Optimus 7. Since then, things have been a little quiet on the hardware front, with the Dell Venue Pro [...]

This review is of an LG Optimus 2X unit supplied with pre-release software. In accordance with TechRadar’s Reviews Guarantee, we have not included a final score for this review. This is our in-depth experience with the version of the phone supplied to us, tested as thoroughly as usual. We knew it as the LG Star originally, and we waited impatiently [...]

Pulse has been around for a while on iPad and iPhone, but as is often the case, poor Android felt left out. Luckily, no longer. It may not have the same hype as media darling Flipboard, but Pulse is an excellent way of getting a more visual look at your daily news feeds. Every channel you subscribe to (some are [...]

The iPad and iPhone both offer Push notifications, but not every application or web service has been upgraded to use them. Boxcar acts as an intermediary, letting you know as soon as anything happens, whether it’s on Twitter or RSS, Facebook, Foursquare, Reddit, Google Buzz or more. And it does it very well. The real problem isn’t with the Boxcar [...]

One of the iPad’s oddest omissions is multi-user support. Apple may want everyone in the family to have their own iPad, but at £500, that’s simply not going to be the case for most of us. Switch lets you keep your browsing to yourself, with everyone who uses the iPad getting their own user account and password. This protects your [...]

Just over eight months have passed since we first looked at the Dell Streak. An impressive five-inch device with 2GB of built-in memory, powered by a Qualcomm SnapDragon 8250 1GHz processor, the Dell Streak ticks all the boxes as far as specs are concerned. When it hit the scene, one of the glaring drawbacks we noticed was that it was [...]

The Samsung Wave II follows up an earlier device of the same name, the original Samsung Wave. The first Wave launched a new operating system on the world, Bada, and we saw it again in the Wave 723. Sitting underneath a familiar TouchWiz user interface, Bada gives Samsung the opportunity to have its own app store. Samsung is clearly hedging [...]

When the first video hit the net, people thought WordLens was a joke. Instant, real-time translation via the iPhone. Just hold it up to a sign and not only will it tell you what it says (in English or another supported language), it replaces the text on what you’re looking at, like a Babel Fish for your eyes. In practice, [...]

Hot on the heels of the excellent HTC Legend and the even more impressive HTC Desire, is the HTC HD Mini. But whereas the Legend and Desire both come equipped with Android 2.1, the HD Mini has to make do with Windows Mobile 6.5.3. Don’t be put off by the less-than-trendy operating system though, because if anyone knows how to [...]

The Nokia E71 certainly hit the mark for its target business audience, so it’s little surprise that its E72 successor reprises much of what was good about that QWERTY keyboard-packing Symbian S60 smartphone, while updating it with extra power and performance. The E72 features a sleek business-like design, sporting a BlackBerry-style full QWERTY keyboard across its wide body. Some eye-catching [...]

After unleashing the massively impressive HTC Legend, its bigger brother, the HTC Desire, is here – faster, bigger and more powerful and still packing the Android punch. It might be the Nexus One rebadged, but this is a behemoth of a phone in its own right; has HTC tried to do too much? We reviewed a Desire from T-Mobile, which [...]

Not everyone needs a phone with a million apps and a 20MP camera. Sometimes you just want to make calls, text and browse the internet for basic information, with a little style thrown in. Something like the Nokia 7230 slider phone for example. At only 10 x 5.5cm when folded, you’re easily able to slip the Nokia 7230 into your [...]

With a colourful chassis, full QWERTY keyboard and seriously budget price tag, the Samsung Genio QWERTY is squarely aimed at the younger social networker. Available initially from Orange from under £70 on pre-pay, the Genio QWERTY is a very affordable alternative to BlackBerry-style message-centric devices. It joins the low-cost touchscreen Genio Touch in Samsung’s budget portfolio, with the Genio QWERTY [...]

Samsung has fused elements of both the Genio Touch and the Genio QWERTY to come up with a hybrid device – the Genio Slide. The Samsung Genio Slide combines a 2.8-inch touchscreen display and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard, and sports the colourful swappable back panels and youth-targeted features – with an emphasis on social networking – that mark the previous [...]

The Nokia X3 is a slim, budget offering from the Finns. With no touchscreen and modest memory, it still has pretensions of being an attractive music device with a low cost to boot. While the recent Nokia X6 touchscreen topped the rebranded X-series music phone bill with smartphone functionality and a heavyweight 32GB of onboard memory, the Nokia X3 is [...]

Samsung, the famed Korean jack-of-all-technologies, is having another go at mastering the Android phone scene, after making a bit of a mess of it with last year’s original Galaxy. The i7500 Galaxy was a brave first attempt, but Samsung threw it away, alienating early adopters by not bothering to update the phone past its basic Android 1.5 operating system. Seriously, [...]

The Sony Ericsson Vivaz is the HD-video-shooting successor to the Swedish-Japanese firm’s flagship Satio model. With an 8.1MP camera that can also record 720p HD video, it is designed to thrill YouTube-rs with its easy video upload features as well as the bundled 8GB memory card for ample storage. The touchscreen phone has been ergonomically designed to fit the contours [...]