Now I must mention here that this review is fairly brief, initial thoughts and opinions based on only a couple of days use so some things like battery life are not fair to judge because those 2 days are not ‘normal’ use. I will not be going into the OS in any details as Windows Phone is well pretty standard and well described in many other reviews.

So, initial impressions it’s a big phone with a 4.3” screen and is based on the chassis of the Android ZTE handset, the Skate. It feels solid and robust but the design does not stand out as being anything special. Now I can be forgiving of this because of the price point but then again I can’t help but think that they could have done something to make it a bit more appealing, none the less it looks less appealing to steal and as long as it does the job that is the main thing. It does just look a bit last year.

The Lumia feels better in the hand, more premium where the Omnia W from Samsung sits in the middle of the two.

The screen is good for video in that it feels more immersive because of the size and when tapping things on screen you do not feel like you have to have pin point accuracy like you might have to on a smaller device, I found though that I turned off the automatic brightness and put the settings onto full to get the best out of the screen. On it’s own its not bad but compare it to other screens using AMOLED technology, like the Lumia 800 and the Omnia W and well its um not as good.

If it is general phone, messaging, email and web browsing then the Tania will perform over and above the standards you would need, absolutely no complaints here.

However if you are into your audio, video and media then the Tania isn’t going to do justice for you unless you are streaming media over WiFi or 3G. 4GB of internal memory, of which some is used up by OS and apps makes for little in the way of storage space and the lack of MicroSD slot, as on all Windows Phones means streaming is really the only option unless you like only a select media library on your device. The Omnia W and Lumia have 8 and 16GB respectively.

Whilst 3G is getting better as is access to WiFi it is not to a point where you can get a reliable media streaming service at all times and what’s more this is going to impact on your battery.

Sound quality is good from the internal speaker and the 3.5mm headphone jack allows you to connect your favourite pair of headphones.

The camera is only 5 megapixels but performs reasonably well, certainly better than I expected and 720p HD video capture is available too and again it’s not bad. However if you are used to a higher resolution cameras like I am on the Xperia Arc then it’s not as good but if you are considering the Tania as an upgrade from a standard mobile, as a first smartphone I think you will be fairly impressed. The dedicated camera key is nice, not need to use the screen only.

Whilst I only used it for 2 days battery performance seemed ok and noticed no massive drain but big screens never help.

The Tania uses a standard SIM not a micro SIM like the Nokia Lumia 800 so that saves a bit of messing about.

Windows Phone runs well on the device, I experienced no lag and web browsing was a pleasure because of the big screen and the ability to turn it into landscape mode too has real benefits especially when it comes to typing out a text message or an email.

Overall I would give the Tania a 6 out of 10.

Why? Well I feel that for an extra £50 you can get the Samsung Omnia W at approx. £299 inclusive of VAT as opposed to approximately the £250 inclusive price of the Tania. What do you get for the extra £50, 8GB as opposed to 4GB of internal memory, a faster 1.4GHz processor and a Super AMOLED display. Having said this the 4.3” screen has an appeal for many as opposed to Samsung’s 3.7” as does a £50 saving but when you would normally be sticking with a phone for 12-24 months you might as well go the extra mile to get something that offers that bit more.

The last 3-5 years has seen a countless number of handsets come to market, often with few differentiating factors or reasons to upgrade.

Expensive if you buy SIM free, or frustrating if your stuck in a contract the desire for a new phone had never been so great because your phone would now be considered ‘old’.

Well 2012 will be the year that manufacturers look to go back to having less handsets and more ‘hero’ handsets.  That may mean a new phone every 6 months and not every 3 or just one big headline device for the year.

This is not to say that a range of 12 handsets will reduce to 3 but where a range may have been available in 5 different colours and then updated with a slight hardware tweak 3 months later, this is less likely to be the case.

HTC UK chief Phil Roberson insisted (in a comment to Mobile Today) the company had a strong 2011, even in the latter half of the year. He said: ‘We had a fantastic year, with 65% growth year on year in the UK. But in Q4 we delivered a lot more products than in the past. Now we want to create more of a ‘hero’ approach. We make great phones, but it is hard to do that when the portfolio is spread too much”

So there may not be so much choice throughout 2012 but as a consumer you can potentially be assured of one or two killer phones that you can upgrade to with less worry that it will be out of date 3 months later.

HTC are one of the first to go on record to say such, so if they are focusing on a ‘hero’ device what will it be?!

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.

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:

• Consumers are clearly shifting from feature phones to smartphones. Smartphone penetration reached 45% in the UK, 38% in the US and France, 23% in Germany and 17% in Japan.  
• Consumers are increasingly using their smartphones for Internet access. Germany saw the biggest increase with the percentage of smartphone owners using their device for daily Internet access jumping from 39% to 49%, while Japan had the highest percentage accessing the Internet daily on their smartphone at 88%.  A little over two-thirds of smartphone users in the US and over half of smartphone users in the UK access the mobile Internet daily.
• Smartphone owners are continuing to get online on their computers. Across all five countries approximately 75% of smartphone owners said they continued to use their computer to access the Internet daily.  
• Consumers are embracing tablets as the fourth screen. Tablet usage increased across all five countries with the highest penetration amongst the total population in the US at 11%. The rate of tablet usage is even higher amongst smartphone owners – hitting 17% in the US, 11% in Japan and 10% in the UK.

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.

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

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.

I took a look at the top 10 iOS games (as at 21st January 2012) and they are as follows-

• NFL Flick Quarterback *
• Angry Birds *
• Fifa 12
• Fruit Ninja *
• Angry Birds Seasons *
• Hatchi
• Catchphrase
• Where’s My Water *
• Doodle Jump *
• Words With Friends *

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.

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

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?