Vodafone Smart II
Affordable Android for first time smartphone users
Building on the success of the Vodafone SMART, the Vodafone Smart II offers an excellent smartphone experience for just £70 on Pay as you go price plans.
The Smart II outperforms its predecessor in every way, while still retaining its low price point to appeal to people thinking about picking up their first smartphone. It runs on Android 2.3, offers a bigger display, better camera, longer battery life, a more powerful processor and more memory than the original Smart, making for an even better user experience. It also features a proximity sensor, which you can see in action in this hands on video:
Samsung Joins the Cloud-Based Streaming Service Biz with Music Hub - Rolling Stone
Consumer electronics manufacturer Samsung has launched its new Music Hub mobile music service for the Galaxy S III Android smartphone in the UK, Germany, France and Spain, with the US to follow. Currently downloadable as a free app for the cell phone, the cloud service lets users store or buy music online, and stream 19 million songs to their handset on-demand for a monthly fee.
In addition to paying for access to the service’s catalogue, subscribers can also upload their digital music collection to the cloud and beam it down on command. Proprietary "scan and match" technology will auto-detect songs which exist in the service’s library however, and save users the trouble of transferring these files. Besides artist recommendation and discovery features, a Music Hub Store is further being offered, which allows songs and albums to be purchased, accessed from a range of gadgets, and stored locally for offline listening.
Determined to expand its reach beyond the Galaxy S III, Samsung says that support for additional platforms such as Android mobile devices and smart TVs will potentially be forthcoming. Currently, users can also access and playback tunes on computers via the Web at musichub.com. Features include the ability to search for songs, share tracks and enjoy lyrics and album info, with back-end technology provided by recent Samsung acquisition mSpot. While myriad vendors including Spotify, Pandora, and Amazon offer similar solutions that serve as online storage lockers, storefronts and jukeboxes, Samsung’s presence across a spectrum of high-tech devices may prove an advantage.
A direct competitor to Apple’s iCloud, Muve Music and other popular mobile and online radio and streaming solutions, and with integration across devices likely to happen incrementally, overnight success may prove elusive, however. As of press time, a specific release date and pricing for the US has yet to be announced.
Vodafone Smart II ups the entry level Android ante for just £70 - mobot.net
Take the newly announced Vodafone Smart II. For just £70 – that's a tenner less than last year's model – you can now jump from a 2.8in screen to a 3.2-incher, plus get some Android 2.3 Gingerbread action and a jump from 600MHz to 800MHz of processing action.
Yeah, that's still sub-gigahertz class, and there's no Ice Cream Sandwich in sight, but come on – £70 really isn't much at all, is it? Besides, if the Sony Xperia Go can dish up Gingerbread with a straight face, the Smart II has nothing to feel guilty about.
In terms of a camera, well, there is one. It offers a mighty 3.2 megapixels of resolution (an increase on the original Smart's 2MP), which is probably just as well since there's only 150MB of on-board storage and a 2GB microSD card in the box.
But that can be fixed, of course, and for not much money either these days. You will have to live with some fairly chunky monkey styling, but if you close one eye and squint just a little, you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference between the Smart II and an old-school HTC Wildfire.
Plus, did we mention the price was just £70?
Samsung Galaxy S3 vs LG Viper 4G LTE: War of LTE Smartphones - ibtimes.co.uk
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Check out how the smartphones stack up:
Display
Samsung's Galaxy S3 features a Super AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 1280x720 pixels at 306 pixel per inch (ppi). Its 4.8in screen will be covered by Corning Gorilla Glass 2 - the second generation protective layer that is up to 20 percent thinner enabling better touch responsiveness. It runs the TouchWiz 4.0 UI which offers visual improvements and gesture-based functionality like panning, turn-over, tilt and double tap.
The LG's Viper 4G LTE comes with a 4.0in capacitive touchscreen with a resolution of 800 x 480 pixels at 233 ppi.
Both smartphones support multi-touch functionality.
Processor
The Galaxy S3 is powered by the quad-core Exynos 4212 processor, which was clocked at 1.4GHz.
In contrast, the Viper 4G LTE is powered by a 1.2GHz dual-core processor.
Both the Galaxy S3 and Viper 4G LTE ship 1GB of RAM.
Camera
The Galaxy S3 features an eight megapixel rear-facing camera with auto-focus and LED flash. It sports geo-tagging, touch focus, face and smile detection, image stabilization and simultaneous HD video and image recording. It offers video recording of 1080p and a front-facing camera of 1.9 megapixels.
The Viper 4G LTE boasts of a rear-facing camera of five megapixels with auto-focus and geo-tagging. It features a secondary VGA camera.
Operating System
The Samsung smartphone runs on Android 4.0.4 (Ice Cream Sandwich) while the LG smartphone runs on Android 2.3 (Gingerbread).
Storage
The Galaxy S3 comes in three internal storage variants - 16/32/64GB (the 64GB is expected to be available at a later date), whereas the Viper 4G LTE has only 4GB.
The Galaxy S3 has a microSD card slot with additional memory space of 64GB, whereas the Viper 4G LTE contains a microSD card with additional memory of 32GB.
Connectivity
The Galaxy S3 features Wi-Fi 802.11 a/b/g/n, DLNA, Wi-Fi hotspot and Wi-Fi Direct that allows W-Fi enabled devices to connect to each other without a wireless access point. It offers support to Bluetooth 4.0 with A2DP and EDR wireless technology. The Viper 4G LTE, on the other hand, comes with Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g/n and Wi-Fi hotspot. It provides Bluetooth 3.0 with A2DP.
Both the Galaxy S3 and Viper 4G LTE feature Near Field Communication.
Battery
The Galaxy S3 packs a Li-Ion 2100mAh standard battery that allows for talk time of up to 21 hours 40 minutes on 2G and 11 hours 40 minutes on 3G networks.
In comparison, the Viper 4G LTE comes with a Li-Ion 1700mAh standard battery that provides for talk time of up to seven hours.
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