VC’s Techie CockTail

Over the months for people who have been following my blog would have noticed me using a term VALUE-FOR-MONEY (VFM), I am amazed how this term is getting evolved as the years go by and technology becomes affordable.

For the last few weeks, I’ve been able to play around with Samsung’s J150 , a mobile phone costing around Rs. 4,700/- (95$). In brief I will list out its pros and cons for you to decide whether this phone will suit you,

PROS

+ Nice screen measuring 1.9″ and with a resolution of 176 x 220 pixels (256K TFT) is bright and crisp for a phone at this price range

+ Measuring at 111 x 45 x 9.9 mm, its slim and handy with a metal like finish.

+ Music quality was good with a micro SD card slot coupled with a FM radio & video player it can double as a portable multimedia player

+ Camera @ 1.3 Megapixel was quite good

+ Standard phone functions like Network reception, Call quality, Messaging like SMS / MMS, phonebook (1000 entries) are all upto mark, Battery life was also good

+ Connectvity like USB, Bluetooth and GPRS / EDGE makes the deal much more sweeter

+ The user interface was nice and easy to a extent to use with with some customization options available for the users.

CONS

- The music player can’t be minimized to the background so essentially no multi tasking

- Some audio files with more than 128 Kbps bit rate wasnt recognized

- I doubt whether installing java apps / games via PC is available usually samsung phones allows java stuff to be installed via wap

- Ringtones & wallpapers can be kept from the files stored in the phone memory which is very limited

- The phone’s keypad film has started peeling off within a month

If you have any comments on this phone / if you feel there are other phones in this range which are more worthy than this , please feel free to put your comments here

written by Vignesh \\ tags: j150, Samsung

Its been a while I got my hands on my friend’s Asus P320, supposed to be a stylish smartphone first but also one of the cheapest windows smartphones (retailing around 10,500/- rs or 210 $) available in the market probably the other cheaper winmo phone out there is HTC P3400. Here are some of my observations on this phone & some of my friends own views on it,

• I was amazed by its size & weight (99 x 55 x 13 mm @ 105g), it was in someways seemed smaller than my non smartphone and quite stylish to say. But it doesnt have that kind of premium finish but at this price its quite good
• The 2.6″ 240 x 320 TFT screen was nice and the windows mobile 6.1 pro was customized with asus’s own launcher which displayed some useful info on the homescreen
• The main negative of this phone is its processing power , armed with 128MB ROM and 64MB RAM & TI OMAP 850 (201MHz) processor, its slow and according to my friend it sometimes wont allow you to multitask saying that there is no memory
• Connectivity wise its very good, like GPRS / EDGE, WiFi, Bluetooth , USB makes it worthy of a road warrior atleast in India where there is no 3G yet
• The music and video playback was ok and with a micro sd card slot the memory can be expanded for your work & multimedia needs
• The 2 megapixel camera with Autofocus & video recording is quite good
• Other standard windows smartphone stuff like Pocket IE, Pocket Office, PDF reader is all there
• Phone reception wise was ok it seemed to struggle sometimes but voice quality was good and battery life is also quite ok

So what to make of it all, people who want to try windows mobile and dont want to burn their pockets while doing so can give it a try. But be sure you have some amount of patience if you want to multitask.

written by Vignesh \\ tags: asus p320, windows smartphone