Review: Samsung Galaxy S2 i9100

I know, I’ve been putting this off far too long. So long in fact that I’ve managed to get through three of these phones before actually having time to write a review (nothing to do with the build quality of the phone, just general bad luck and service provider cock-ups). Anyway, here’s what I think of it.

Coming from a Dell Streak it feels quite small, but I suspect it would still seem larger than average to the majority of users, with a 4.3” display and sizeable bezel at the top and bottom of the handset. The styling is fairly minimalistic and as up-to-date as one would expect from a high-end smartphone, although I’m going to stick my neck on the line and say the build quality is nowhere near as good as my iPhone 4 – it doesn’t feel particularly well put together with dust-trapping gaps between the screen edge and surround and a fragile, plasticky back cover. Then again, if we’re comparing it to the iPhone 4, at least the slightly suspect back cover allows for an easily user-replacable battery, a feature sorely lacking from the iPhone and the whole device is undoubtedly slimmer, lighter and eminently more pocketable.

Looking over the phone, you’ll notice an 8MP camera with LED flash, 2MP front camera, headphone jack, dual microphones, micro-usb port and the obligatory volume rocker, although sadly no dedicated camera button, which is a major issue if you’re a keen phone-ographer like me: the time it takes to unlock the phone, tap the camera icon, then tap the shutter button can often result in you missing a brilliant shot and I found myself longing for the simplicity of the old sony cybershot series phones where I could slide the lens cover and take the picture in a couple of seconds. I could totally understand a lack of shutter button if the camera wasn’t any good, but incredibly, the galaxy S2 produced the best shots I’ve ever taken on a phone, better even than my old Sony Satio. After seeing the SGS2 review photos on engadget, I came away with a kind of “meh” feeling – they were alright, but pretty average for a modern smartphone. However, having had the phone for a couple of weeks I’ve managed to take far better photos with it – people even assumed I’d used my SLR. Have a look for yourself! Video is much the same story – up to 1080p with high-quality audio, although when recording at max resolution there is some juddering of moving objects.

The screen is also fantastic – you’ve doubtless heard all the professional reviewers banging on about how great the screen is, and they’re right. It really is brilliant – bright, vivid colours and pin-sharp clarity. In general, I would rate it even higher than apple’s retina display, which, although slightly sharper, lacks the same level of colour as the super amoled+ display on the SGS2.

The stock software experience is pretty good – love it or hate it, touchwiz runs silky smooth on the galaxy s2, and although there is some annoying preloaded samsung software (games hub for example), it’s easily removed and doesn’t really get in the way. Browser, keyboard, music player and other “general” apps are smooth and bug-free – the only crashes I’ve had were caused by poorly developed third party apps, and the phone was extremely quick to recover. The 1.2Ghz dual core processor coupled with 1GB RAM and Mali 400MP GPU powers through everything, and I mean everything you can throw at it – even the top end gameloft games and autodesk-style apps. As far as hardware and software is concerned, I really can’t find anything wrong with it – most of the tweaks Samsung have implemented are useful, and those that aren’t can easily be removed.

Battery life is good and although I can’t say I’m getting the two days of moderate/heavy use that others are claiming, it will take a whole day of whatever I throw at it which is good enough for me. The speaker and microphone seems to be good quality – people can hear me and I can usually hear them, and as I’ve got pretty poor hearing that’s a definite recommendation.

So, to sum up, the Samsung Galaxy S2 is a truly brilliant phone. Whilst it’s not without it’s flaws, the mindblowing performance, screen and camera quality, along with a sleek, well-optimised OS makes it the best smartphone on the market right now. Whether it will retain it’s crown for very long remains to be seen – Samsung’s bosses are already making noises about the S3!

Review: Dell XPS 15 L502X Sandy Bridge

It left china, went to korea, then Kazakhstan, then Poland,
then Germany and finally it’s here in London at my house – the brand new Dell Studio
XPS 15 Sandy Bridge refresh, more commonly known as the L502X.

Coming from a studio XPS 1645, it must be said that the
design is a bit of a letdown. Don’t get me wrong – it feels nice and solid with
the brushed aluminium, chiclet keyboard and metal speaker grilles giving it a
definite premium feel, but it still looks like a bog-standard dell laptop with
a few fancy bits stuck on it, whilst the old studio XPS range feels far more
like a viable windows alternative to the macbook pro. The big sticky-out black
bit at the back where the ports are positioned looks ugly as well, and the
decision to put the HDD and battery lights there seems somewhat inane as they
can’t be seen whilst you’re using the laptop.

However, it must be remembered that the old studio XPS had a
major flaw – that lovely design obscured the fan vents and made severe
throttling pretty much a certainty, not much of a problem if you were using it
as a multimedia laptop as dell wanted, but for gaming, which it was more than
powerful enough to cope with, the throttling made it practically useless, and
even during non-3D tasks such as batch processing raw files the problem reared its
ugly head again, which was one of the factors which persuaded me to replace it
with the XPS 15.

Thankfully, the L502X has no such problems – temperatures get
a little toasty, but performance is not reduced, and therefore I’m more than
happy to put up with the slightly dull aesthetics.

Speaking of performance, it’s good. Very, very, very good,
and I don’t even have the high end configuration. Mine is configured with a
second generation Intel i7 2630QM processor, 4GB DDR3 RAM and an Nvidia 525M
graphics processor, which is pretty much the base spec. I’m not sure I’d class
it as a gaming laptop, but it’s more than capable of running the latest titles
at its native resolution providing you turn down the settings to medium, and it
absolutely flies through CPU intensive tasks like batch RAW processing and
video encoding – noticeably quicker than the already formidable i7 720QM in my
old machine, and almost as quick as the 4.2Ghz i7 920 in my desktop rig. Rest
assured that benchmarks will be up within a week or so, just as soon as I have
enough time to install a few games, and possibly 3DMark vantage.

The keyboard, touchpad and speakers have been proclaimed as
the main improvements in this model, and I’d partially agree – the Chiclet keyboard
is possibly the best laptop one I’ve ever used, and I can genuinely say I
prefer it to the much-admired one on my macbook pro. The touchpad is also very
nice, with a good “feel” and nice, soft-press touchpad buttons. However, that’s
where the magic ends, and we get onto by far the biggest letdown for me – the
speakers.

When reading reviews of the XPS 15, the speakers were one of
the major attractions – every reviewer rated them highly, with some even using
words like “stereo replacement”. Now, I wasn’t expecting quite that much, but
sadly I was still disappointed. Clarity of sound is good, and they do go very,
very loud – easily enough to fill a room. However, unfortunately the built in
JBL subwoofer is shockingly bad, so bad in fact that I reckon they should have
done without it all together. When you turn up the volume past about 70%, it
makes that dreadful “broken sub” noise – rather than a nice thud, you get a kind
of pop. In some kinds of music, it gets away with it, but whenever you play
anything with a decent bassline at a higher volume you’ll find yourself
reaching for the nearest pair of headphones. To be fair, they’re still good for
a laptop, and a sure improvement over the somewhat weak and rattly offerings in
the studio XPS line, but they’re definitely not the revolutionary feature they
were promised to be.

Now onto the battery life and screen, and thankfully these
are areas where things begin to look up, mainly due to the nvidia optimus technology,
9-cell powerpack sticking out the back of the machine and B+RGLED technology employed
in the screen. I was expecting battery life and screen quality to be good, but
battery life in particular really blew me away – I’ve got 9 hours out of it
when typing with wifi off and a dim screen, and even when surfing and listening
to music or watching youtube you’ll still see around 5 to 6 hours, which, if I
remember correctly, makes it by far the longest lasting desktop replacement
laptop. The screen is pretty much exactly as I expected, although it is NOT the
same as the RGBLED screen used on the XPS 1645 as many people have claimed – it’s
not quite as colour-accurate, although there’s very little difference, and the
reduction in saturation actually makes me favour the B+RB over the RBG – it just
seems a bit easier to look at.

Finally, I guess I should say a bit about connectivity – the
inclusion of SATA 3, USB 3.0 and the new intel wireless cards on the L502X
proved to be a major talking point amongst potential buyers. Obviously, with no
SSDs or USB 3.0 devices to test it with, I can’t really comment on the data
transfer speeds, although I’m confident they’ll be very good. The intel wifi/Bluetooth
chip is as you’d expect really – it’s fast and reliable, and I haven’t had any
dropouts. My macbook pro does pick up slightly more networks, but unless you’re
one of those guys who steals the open wireless internet from the guy a couple
of streets away because they can’t bear to download pornography over their
mother’s internet connection, it shouldn’t really matter to you.

So, to sum up, it’s a decent improvement over the old studio
XPS series, with a few awesome little features that really make it stand out
from the crowd. However, in my opinion, it’s not the revolutionary machine that
some reviewers make it out to be (PCMag, I’m looking at you), and there is definitely
room for improvement – if dell sort out that subwoofer and move the HDD and
battery indicators to the front, they’re onto a sure winner.

8/10

New Laptop Inbound!

Decided to order one of the new Dell XPS 15 laptops to try out the sandy bridge platform. Got offered it for a price I couldn’t refuse, but I won’t be getting it for a couple of weeks. Here’s the specs:

So, it’ll be interesting to see how it will compare to my current Studio XPS 16. I’m expecting it to be slightly faster, but there probably won’t be a vast difference. Either way, should be a lot of fun!

The failure of the British Education System

Possibly a bit of over-dramatisation there, but sometimes I look at people and am just totally struck dumb by how they managed to go through life not knowing something. I realise of course that I’ve been quite privileged education-wise, and that not everyone has had the advantages I’ve had. If for example someone doesn’t know the stock frequency of an i7 920 CPU then no biggie, they can get through their life without really needing that info, but when someone can’t spell a word on the year 1 spelling list I am, to say the least, concerned.

Today, I was sitting in the starbucks opposite my work, sipping my morning coffee, when a man in a van pulled up and began setting up a stall selling electronic cigarettes. It was quite fancy as well – printed metal signs, gazebo, leaflets, the whole works.  The 3G around there is pretty slow, and in between waiting for pages in my phone to load, I started to read his signs, which had aroused a vague interest in me as to how exactly those things work. They were written in pretty bad english, but one sign in particular caught my eye, and when reading the second-last line I experienced one of my “AAAARRRRRGGGHHHH WTF??????” moments.  Here it is, and it looked like it cost quite a bit of money to produce.

Oh dear......

How can anyone who has managed to start a business, buy stock, buy a van, print posters and create a website spell “something” as “some think”?  It’s just astonishing, I just don’t know how anyone can look at that and think “that looks right”.

That’s all I can say really, so I guess I’ll just leave you to form your own opinion.

My best purchase to date

I was at college a couple of days ago when I got a phone call from a friend saying that her speakers had broken, and did I know how to fix them? I went round, took a look, and my answer was a definitive no – something pretty major had blown in the subwoofer. She then asked me if I could find her a new set so I hopped on ebay as soon as I got home to see what I could find.

It wasn’t pretty. For her budget (£20) anything even resembling decent speakers was very thin on the ground. I ended up being torn between a logitech (!) and trust (!!) 2.1 set, which doubtless boasted the kind of sound quality that wouldn’t shame my mobile phone.

Before comitting to buying what would surely be a total POS, I decided to just input the words “speakers” using a distance filter. Trawling through the usual crap, a set of altec lansing 4.1 speakers caught my eye, or rather the vast sub that came with them did. They had 2 hours left. The current price? £5.

There was, however a problem. On reading reviews of the system, it turned out that the system was even bigger and more powerful than I thought, and even playing music at low volume would have her neighbors around in under 5 minutes. I thought for a few seconds, casting my eye over the speakers currently attached to my PC – a not too shabby cambridge soundworks set – basically exactly what I was looking for.

Now, if I could get the altecs cheap enough, I could simply sell her mine, thereby getting a free upgrade and keeping us both happy. Bidding finger poised over the mouse button, I waited until the final 3 seconds before entering my maximum price.

I won them for a grand total of £7.16, and picked them up yesterday.

So, what are they like? Well, as the title of this p0st might suggest, they are by far the best things I’ve ever bought. The bass is ridiculous – I like my music extremely loud, but anything over 20% volume is to much for me on these, when I frequently had my old set cranked up to 100%. Play a bit of dubstep and the keys in my keyboard rattle, and my jeans even shake on my legs.

But I know what you’re thinking – surely these are just the same as all the others – loads of bass, and no definition. Well, I’ve got to admit, they’re not quite as clear as my wharfedale 10.1s, but they’re still ridiculously good, a million times better than my cambridge set, and by far the best PC speakers I’ve ever heard. In fact, whilst I was up at Totennham Court Road today I had a look in the BOSE shop, and these are without a doubt better than their PC offerings, which incidentally cost about 80x more.

Happy is really too small a word to describe my feelings about this purchase. And my friend was pleased with the cambridge set, so it’s definetly good will all round.

I would continue, but the urge to listen to Pendlum’s Immersion is far too strong. Stay tuned!

Review: Autodesk Sketchbook Express for Android

Last night I was browsing through the android market and came upon this app. I’d never heard of it before, but Autodesk is a very famous company in the PC 3D Design software world, and the app had good reviews so I thought I’d download it and give it a go.

It downloaded and installed in a few seconds, and opened just as quickly. I noticed that it recommended at least a 1Ghz CPU and 512MB RAM, which is extremely steep as only a small amount of android devices meet those specifications. Thankfully, my Dell Streak is one of them, so I was able to try the app at it’s full potential.

And, it’s really quite something. It’s astonishingly versatile and powerful – you can choose from a huge range of drawing/background colours and different types of pens/pencils/brushes, and it’s really fast and responsive. Here’s my first 3 attempts at doing anything with it, using the basic pencil and white background. At this point, I should mention that I’m not at all artistic, so don’t expect a picasso!

The limits of my artistic talents

Signature

Proof that I actually used the program.....

Definitely the most impressive app I’ve seen in a while, and well worth the download if you ask me. I’m going to look into buying the full version tonight, and perhaps lending my phone to my artistically inclined friends to see what they make of it.

Guide: Copying, writing and reading to NTFS drives on Mac OS X

I’ve recently hit the problem that practically every mac user faces at some time in their life – the inability of mac os x to copy to NTFS drives. Thankfully, I managed to overcome it extremely easily – all I did was install 2 programs the normal way. Here’s how you do it:

First of all, download tuxera for mac, which is available here. It’s free for 15 days, and then you have to buy it, although I’m sure it can be “obtained” on certain sites.

Then, restart your mac and download macfuse from here

Install and restart again, and then copy files to NTFS in the usual way. No special apps needed, no coding required, just copy and paste. Nice and easy!

Thoughts on Apple’s new Macbook Air (13” and 11”)

I paid a visit to the apple shop in bluewater a few days ago after they offered me a free repair on the £35 macbook I bought. The repair took quite a long while, and I didn’t want to leave the shop because I knew I’d never find it again, so I took the opportunity to get hands-on with the new macbook

I’ve found myself becoming something of an Apple convert in recent years, indeed only a week ago I bought myself a 13” macbook pro for use on the go, as I was getting tired of my rather underpowered Samsung NC10. However, unlike most people my age, I don’t believe that everything with the little white fruit on it is automatically brilliant – the mac pro desktops are so overpriced it’s not even funny, and I was always extremely disappointed by the old macbook air’s battery life.

So, is the new one any better? Well, after having a go of it, I can’t say I was particularly impressed. Even with a SSD installed, it’s still just a bit too slow – on my much cheaper macbook pro, everything opens instantly with a normal 7200RPM hard drive, so it would seem that the weak processor on the air is really holding back it’s fancy new SSD. Then again, with such a slow processor, the battery life should be brilliant, right? Surely apple has learned from the mistake they made with the original MBA?

Sadly, it appears they haven’t – battery life is still a dismal 5-6 hours, and when you compare that to my macbook pro, which isn’t really a lot bigger and can last without a power socket for up to 10 hours, the MBA starts to look like not such a sensible buy. The battery also looks like it’ll be very difficult to replace – unlike my macbook pro where most components can be accessed by removing a few screws on the bottom, the ultra-thin unibody construction of the macbook air makes upgrading anything extremely difficult – I’ve been repairing macs for some years now, and even I’d feel a little apprehensive about working on the MBA.

For such a small laptop, the screen is very impressive – at least as good as my MBP. The keyboard also feels extremely solid, surprisingly so considering how thin the machine is, and the materials used are of the usual high quality you’d expect of apple. Speakers are good for its size, but nothing particularly impressive, and the same goes for the webcam and trackpad.

So all in all, I’ve got mixed feelings about the macbook air – in some areas, it really shines, but in others it fails miserably. Compared to the 13” macbook pro, which is only slightly bigger, I find the MBA very hard to recommend, unless you have a really, really small bag.

For reference, here is the model I looked at in detail, although I had a quick go of the 11” as well, and found things to be much the same.

Macbook Air:

1.86 Ghz Core 2 Duo CPU

2GB DDR3 RAM

128GB SSD

Nvidia 9400M Graphics

13” LED Backlit screen

My Macbook Pro 13”

2.4Ghz Core 2 Duo CPU

4GB DDR3 RAM

500GB 7200RPM HDD

Nvidia 9400M Graphics

13” LED Backlit screen

 

Another ebay success

Well, yet again I seem to have gotten lucky on ebay. A week or so ago, I was browsing the newly listed items on ebay and found a white 13″ macbook advertised for £35. There was however a catch – the owner had spilt water all over it, and it wouldn’t turn on afterwards. I assumed that the logic board was fried, but for £35 I thought it was worth buying anyway for spares – I could sell them for at least £100.

Anyway, it arrived yesterday and, armed with some Q-Tips and a bottle of rubbing alcohol, I set to work taking it apart and cleaning the logic board of all traces of liquid. I put it all back together, plugged it in, turned it on and incredibly it works perfectly – it’s been running for quite a few hours now and it’s perfect. It needs a new top cover, which will set me back £45, but as I’ll be selling it for £300, I’m not exactly bothered.

It’s got an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4Ghz processor, 2GB RAM, a 250GB HDD, Intel GMA 950 Graphics and a HD Screen.

Here’s a quick picture of it:

Not bad for £34

Dell Streak Android 2.2 Official Froyo o2 Update Review

So it’s finally here, and god knows they made us wait long enough.

Like many others, I was suspicious that the delay was caused by them generally messing around with the update and screwing it up in the process, but bar the bootscreen, they seem to have left it alone.

Performance and speed have definetly improved, and we’ve regained the features that the 2.1 update removed, such as front camera support and wmv playback. Camera and camcorder quality have obviously improved over 1.6, but it seems the same as 2.1, which is no bad thing really – as smartphone cameras go it’s decent enough.

Dell’s new Stage UI homescreen widgets start as default, and whilst they look very nice, I’m not entirely convinced by them. They make the homescreen as laggy as it was on 2.1, and take up a huge amount of space for what they offer in terms of functionality. Some widgets are more useful than others (my favourites are the social and music ones), and they can all be easily removed, although you’ll need to install a custom launcher to remove the annoyingly inefficient 4×4 widget grid.

Portable hotspot functionality and tethering were other features that were hotly anticipated in this update. Suprisingly, o2 thankfully hasn’t removed them, although I’ve noticed it’s a bit patchy – even when 3G signal is 100% and my laptop is right next to my phone, it often disconnects or even won’t connect at all. I got around this problem by using the same app I used on 2.1 (barnacle wifi tether) but it requires a rooted device, which brings me onto my next point.

Rooting isn’t by any means easy. On 2.1, all I had to do was download “universal androot.apk”, copy it to the phone and run it. Now, a far more complex process is required, which I won’t go into right now, but suffice it to say that I had to connect the phone to the PC, and it took me two attempts.

But what about 2.2′s most important feature – adobe flash player support? Well, thankfully, it works really well. Flash content plays back without lagging or stuttering, and I haven’t had a single freeze or application crash yet. It adds a whole new dimension to the phone, vastly expanding it’s multimedia capabilities with the addition of streaming TV services and popular catch-up sites like BBC iPlayer and ITV Player, not to mention flash games.

I feel like I’ve harped on about the negative aspects of this update far too much, so let me assure you – despite it’s flaws,  it’s still definitely worth getting. There aren’t many new features, but the few that there are really make a massive difference to the phone. I suspect that some of it’s faults can be easily solved by independent developers –  the modaco community are constantly tweaking and improving the phone, and I’m sure they will for some time to come. Either way, this update unquestionably makes the Streak a far more competitive option for those looking for a high end phone or tablet, and it’s raised my already high opinion of the device