2012 is set to be the year where we see less new smartphone models according to many reports and suggestions from multiple sources, including our own contacts with manufacturers.
The last 3-5 years has seen a countless number of handsets come to market, often with few differentiating factors or reasons to upgrade.
In the market for a new phone,enticed by a BlackBerry because you already own one – well how about £106 cash to encourage you to upgrade?
You can get up to £106 if you upgrade your current BlackBerry and buy a new model.
Just click here to see what value you will get for your phone if you upgrade to a specific model. Confirm you want to go ahead. Buy the smartphone of your choice from your preferred retailer (Clove 
) and then once received send the old one back and register your new phone. Once complete BlackBerry will send you the pre-agreed amount as a cheque.
The phone that was just a little out of budget is now within budget! If you are upgrading from a 9800 to a 9900 you get the full £106 which brings the cost of the 9900 down from £466 to £360 including VAT.
UK smartphone ownership is nearing 50%, according to a report published by Google and Ipsos on the Google Mobile Ads Blog. Not only did the UK show the highest smartphone penetration (45%), but also the largest increase in smartphone usage, rising from 30% to 45% in the space of 6 months. The study also found that in the UK, US, France, Germany and Japan more people use a mobile phone (feature phone or smartphone) than a computer (desktop or laptop).
As could be expected, the study also found that smartphone usage among females and the 45+ demographics has risen in all five countries. Some of the other key findings of the report included:
Via NMA
One of the most talked about devices from CES is the Sony Xperia S. The first Sony only branded smartphone it has a number of features which makes it appealing to a wide audience, but it has come to light that the Xperia S will have another feature, an anti-stain shell.
This has hardly been mentioned by the Sony team to date, but Xperiablog picked up this information off of the Sony Ericsson Facebook page.
Now most phones will resist some marks on their casing but actually being treated with nano-technology to generate an anti-stain coating is going to give it an edge. This will no doubt be especially useful on the White version as this is more likely to show the marks.
Mobile memory is a complicated scenario to grasp these days and for the average user, deciding how much is needed is extremely difficult. Most modern smartphones offer 16GB as a base and then the fun starts. 16GB sounds like a lot, but when you consider that a good quality film can take up almost 2GB of space, you start to realise that it can disappear quite quickly. The fact is that no matter how much space you have, you will fill it up because that’s what us humans do. If you move into a new house with lots more storage space than your current house, will you have the same amount of free space available in 6 months’ time? We don’t like space, whether it is real or virtual, yet we crave lots of space to fill up.
So, when we are considering the purchase of a new smartphone, space looms large on the specifications sheet. It is one of the first lines we look at and a lack of perceived space can be enough to stop that purchase from happening. 16GB on its own feels like too little for most power users and this is where expansion memory can fill the gap. Expansion cards are common, almost universal, on Android smartphones and this gives the user the opportunity to grow their device as their memory requirements increase. A 32GB card is now reasonably priced and this potentially takes the total on almost every medium to high-end phone to 48GB.
48GB has to be enough for anyone surely? Many would still say no and want more, but the ‘many’ will always want more. As I said it is in our nature and the main reason for this is that we do not seem willing to embrace Cloud services just yet for our storage needs. We are used to keeping our files and data locally and having to view them from a remote place still doesn’t feel natural to the majority. It would seem as though the developers of these services are pushing users to store their media online, but to date Amazon, Apple and the rest are not seeing huge success in this specific area. They are all doing better in the world of Cloud synchronisation where data is seamlessly transferred between devices and there are some successful enterprises such as Dropbox who benefit mostly from people syncing small amounts of data and small files. The world of online storage, however, has a long way to go before people start to consider it as a reliable add-on to their fixed memory. For this to happen, pricing needs to reduce, mobile networks need to get faster and be more reliable and security needs to be proven. To be fair the online storage services perform perfectly well at this time, but a major shift is required to change the mindset of the majority.
So we are left with the desire for local memory and that means deciding if a smartphone with fixed memory is best or a smartphone with the potential to grow via expansion cards. The benefits are obvious for phones with expansion cards; flexibility, expandability and the ability to swap that information with other devices such as desktop via card readers etc. The only downside is that the memory is not fixed and so has the potential to be less reliable. The fact is, however, that in 2012 these cards and the housings they sit in within smartphones are very reliable and that you would be unlucky to have a major problem.
Fixed memory offers fewer benefits, but has the perception of offering better reliability. This is debatable and I personally would prefer a smartphone with an expansion slot. But if you asked me what my two favourite smartphone are, the Nokia Lumia 800 and the Galaxy Nexus would be my choice and neither have expansion slots. So, at the end of the day it matters little in the grand scheme of smartphone ownership.
Image: jscreationzs / FreeDigitalPhotos.net
With MWC just around the corner, one of the hot topics is quad-core smartphones.
HTC have been the most talked about manufacturer and are rumoured to be announcing a quad-core handset.
4 times the power and capability of a standard processor, twice that of a dual-core it all sounds very exciting and will no doubt give true credibility to begin a breed of smartphones often referred to as superphones.
Gaming, 3D graphics and more will improve and give an even better experience, a superphone will allow for more and more to be done on a mobile device and it all sounds fantastic but I can’t help being a little bit of a pessimist here.
It has realistically been about 18-24 months that dual-core handsets have been on the market and only in the last 8 months or so have dual-core handsets begun to take off in a big way. There are still however millions of phones using single core processors. Even now new phones are still coming out with single core 1, 1.4 and 1.5GHz processors.
Dual-core definitely has benefits and quad-core will have even more and I am an advocate for pushing forward mobile technology but I can’t stop myself from thinking dual-core has not even settled in yet!
5 years ago the most powerful phones and PDA’s had processors of say 300-600Mhz. All this time later, and devices are still produced with speeds of approximately 2 times this.
Dual-core is here to stay but devices have yet to get the most out of the 2 cores. If manufacturers can 5 years on produce still very capable phones with a 1GHz processor it shows that there has to be more work done on optimising the dual-core.
It takes time for everyone to adopt, invest and develop these technologies so is quad-core really all that great? Is it just for marketing purposes to make it sound better?
If time and money was invested into optimising a dual-core in the next 12 months, would it actually be better than a quad-core?
Think of car engines, they come in all different sizes but it doesn’t mean that the 4 litre is always better than the 2 litre, because if the engine has been tuned and parts customised the 2 litre can soon be more powerful than the 4. Is this the same with smartphones?
I guess time will tell as to which will be the winner.
iOS is seen by many to be the platform of choice for those serious about gaming on the go, but is this true?
I took a look at the top 10 iOS games (as at 21st January 2012) and they are as follows-
The titles marked with an ‘*’ are also available in the Android Market and of the three that are not, Fifa 10 is available on Android (Fifa 12 supposedly coming soon), Hatchi is brand new and so is Catchphrase.
When you further consider that the Angry Birds titles are free on Android, you start to build a picture of minimal differences between the two when it comes to gaming. Titles like Riptide GP, which is stunning on Android, prove that the gaming capacities of both platforms are very high and a further look at the top 50 games would likely go further in proving my theory.
When it comes to mobile gaming, there is no one king of the hill. No matter what mobile platform you are using, you should be able to find enough games to suit your needs.
Nokia has revealed in its Q4 2011 earnings report that it has sold ‘well over 1 million’ Lumia phones, which matches the forecast that analysts predicted of between 1 and 2 million. This is not a blockbuster figure but signals a promising start for the Finns in their transition from Symbian to Windows Phone devices.
The first quarter of 2012 will be an important 3 months for Nokia and it will hope to boost revenue with continued sales of the Lumia 800 and to continue the growth of the Lumia brand with the release of the Lumia 710 and Lumia 900.
Innovative marketing campaigns for the Lumia 800 such as the Deadmau5 DJ set and a rework of the classic snake game have helped to promote its new flagship device already and Nokia hopes to further increase sales with its ‘Love Me, Keep Me’ campaign, which we are currently offering here.
Figures via The Verge
Plastic, one of the best inventions in the world, what would we do without it?
Metal, a fantastic discovery – it has helped us build the world we live in.
Plastic is versatile, metal is strong and feels robust but which do you prefer, a plastic or a metal structure?
You may wonder what I am going on about and why, well here is the point that I want to make.
Why is it so many products but specifically phones manufactured from plastic and would users be more satisfied with devices is they were metal, even if it added to the weight?
I completely understand that plastic can often be moulded with more ease, it is cheaper, it allows the phone to transmit signals better etc. but the one problem you always get is no matter how much you pay, it just feels plasticy and a little flimsy.
Yes, I know you get better grades of plastic, but why is it that the Motorola MOTOLUXE which I have been using recently feels stronger, more robust and more expensive than the Samsung Galaxy Nexus which is considerably more expensive….the reason is that is has a metal body.
Yes, the back cover may be coated in a soft touch, grippy material, but remove the battery cover and you have in your hand a solid metal back cover.
I am not complaining, I know the likes of HTC and others have manufactured phones with metal bodies and I know metal can increase the weight of the device and I certainly wouldn’t want metal keys on a keypad (so thank you for plastic) but why isn’t a little more time put into making a device feel great.
The Galaxy S II, the Nexus, and many others are examples of fantastic phones, but would they be that bit better if they felt a bit more solid?
I was thinking that it would add to the size and put users off, but I think most are interested in product that looks the part and feels the part. The RAZR has a strong metal body (ok there is a bit of Kevlar in there too) and it is impossibly thin.
I use a Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc on a daily basis, I love it (although its slow now) and I have no desire to change, it looks fantastic but it just feels cheap because of the plastic. The same elegant design could be kept with metal but it would feel wonderful and you wouldn’t get the problem of the plastic casing cracking as it has done on many Xperia Arc’s to date.
So am I the only one who thinks this or would you compromise 5-10grams and 2-3mm in thickness to get a phone that just feels more solid?
The current king of the tablet world is the Apple iPad 2 and for many good reasons but unless you have plenty of cash to spend and want the Apple iOS then the iPad may not be an option or one that you desire.
How about something running Google Android that is considerably cheaper than a lot of the competition?
Enter the ZTE V9A – Light Tab. From one of the world’s largest smartphone manufacturers, the Light Tab is a 7″ tablet computing solution that offers performance and reliability at a price that we all prefer.
Features of ZTE V9A – Light Tab 2 include:
The ZTE V9A – Light Tab 2 is due to be available at the end of February at a price of £234.99 inclusive of VAT.
For more information click here or copy the the link below into your web browser:
http://www.clove.co.uk/zte-v9a-light-tab-2
