Category / Smartphones

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Nokia Lumia 720 audio review

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Earlier this week, I published my extensive review of Nokia’s Lumia 720. If you haven’t read and watched it already, I’d sincerely recommend that you check it out, but today I’m bringing a new option of consuming our written word to the table. Alex, the lovely robot found within iTunes on Mac OS X, has made an audio version of my post which sounds remarkably good for one of these text-to-speech things. The concept of audio reviews is something I’ve been considering for a while now, so if you think it’s worth us continuing (even if we have to replace Alex with a human or alternative robot voice) give us a shout in the comments or on Twitter.

Right click and save this link to download, and you can subscribe (and rate and review the podcast) using iTunes! Don’t fancy iTunes or use a different podcatcher? Here’s our RSS link!

If you have any feedback, questions or comments, tweet us or send us an email to podcast@digixav.com. We’d love to hear from you!

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Nokia Lumia 720 review

For years, Nokia has known that the best way to expand market share is to saturate every corner of it with a device. After an initial launch of just two devices in late 2011, Lumia devices are now available at seemingly every price point from £99 to £499, and one of the latest devices to join the range, the Lumia 720, sits firmly in the middle of this vast expanse, priced at around £249 unlocked. It follows on from the Lumia 710, which I reviewed last year and felt was a bargain considering its low price and high quality, but the 720 faces fierce competition from a sea of Android-powered handsets including diminutive versions of the top-selling flagships from HTC and Samsung. As such, is this mid-range combination of Windows Phone 8 and Nokia’s trademark hardware design worth your attention? Read on to find out.

Continue reading →

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Signs of the third Vu-pocalypse appear as LG prepares to resurrect the square phablet

Optimus Vu

Remember LG’s ridiculous Optimus Vu, the 5″ phablet with a 4:3 1024 x 768 display? Or its international variant, which was one of the few devices to call itself a phone and carry a Tegra 3 processor? Or Verizon’s variant, dubbed Intuition, which could only muster a review score of 4.4 from The Verge? Or the Vu II, which took the original device and bumped the internal hardware up to appropriate levels for a 2012 flagship?

There’s a reason nobody (except me) remembers these things. It’s because they were horrible. And yet, LG just doesn’t know when to stop. Continue reading →

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Sony thinks sticking a real camera on your phone makes sense, proving high degree of insanity

Sony Alpha QX10 Xperia Z Leak Continue reading →

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Samsung evokes memories of 2003 with leaked Galaxy Folder

Samsung Galaxy Folder Side

You thought Samsung didn’t make enough bizarre phones already? Well, thanks to All About Samsung, we have a couple of images of the Galaxy Folder, which takes design cues from the Motorola RAZR (no, not the Android one) and shoves a second 3.7″ WVGA AMOLED panel on the rear of the standard clamshell design so it doesn’t look totally ancient when you try and use the thing like a conventional smartphone. Inside, it’s said to include a 1.7GHz dual core Snapdragon 400, 2GB RAM, LTE and an 1820mAh battery. Remember when clamshells would last a week on a single charge? Yeah, those days are long gone. Continue reading →

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Digixav Podcast 013 – July 12th 2013: Nokia Lumia 1020 special edition

Nokia may have given us 41 million reasons to zoom in yesterday, but today Xavier and Chris bring you 1020 reasons to listen to the podcast, as our second episode this week focuses on Nokia’s new Lumia 1020 and its 41MP sensor.

Links

If you have any feedback, questions or comments, tweet us or send us an email to podcast@digixav.com. We’d love to hear from you!

Right click and save this link to download, and you can now subscribe (and rate and review the show) using iTunes! Don’t fancy iTunes or use a different podcatcher? Here’s our RSS link!

You should also check out our intro music on SoundCloud! It’s Melodic Trap by Harry Ling.

by Xavier Voigt-Hill

Motorola blags about Moto X ahead of announcement in new ad campaign

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After confirming it at D11, Motorola’s latest newspaper ad tells us that more official news about the Moto X and its apparently somehow real customisation options lie just around the corner.

Source The Verge

by Neil Thomas

Thoughts on WWDC

This year was very out of the ordinary for Apple, at least in my mind. It started when the page went live on www.apple.com. The image was completely different, it was colourful, vivid. It used a light font. It screamed “this is new”. Rampant speculation occurs. Then WWDC rolls around.

I’ll start with Mac. Mavericks came out, starting a new line of names because they ran out of cats. In my mind, as I type this on Mavericks B1, this is a very major behind the scenes update, without much of a surface change. The battery life got a major upgrade, which should go hand in hand with some of the stuff that I’ll talk about later. iBooks for Mac is also great for a student like me. Maps is kind of unneeded, but also a nice addition.

Then they announced the new Macbook Air. Apple has been very slowly iterating on the leading ultrabook and all around laptop on the planet, and this year is a huge one. Intel’s new Haswell processors push the battery life up to a claimed 12 hours, but early testing shows that the battery actually far exceeds that, with The Verge gettings 13.5 hours and PCMag almost hitting 16. This is definitely a nice upgrade, especially when it goes hand in hand with Mavericks. Then they announced the new Mac Pro, which is an amazing feat of engineering even if it does look a bit like a trashcan.

Then, iOS 7. This is what everyone was waiting to see and boy did Apple deliver. In a mere 7 months they completely redesigned the OS from the ground up and threw in a few new features to boot. It is still very unfinished, as you can see from the icons on the homescreen, but it is a huge update that the Apple team working under design guru Jony Ive should be proud of. Let’s hope they keep working on it to make it even better. As an Android user it is tempting me to switch, even though it is apparent where some of the new design features came from (Android).

Overall, this was a great WWDC – one I think that Apple, for once, over-delivered on the hype. I’m looking forward to see how all of these products do in the real world, especially iOS 7. Who knows, I might get an iPhone 5S.