Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY, Sony Ericsson Arc and LG Optimus Black all debuted this month on Optus and Virgin plans.
Xperia PLAY is one of the first Sony PLAYSTATION approved handsets with a dedicated game pad where you would usually find a QWERTY keypad.
Currently PLAY is available on Optus and Virgin, and Telstra is expected to follow suit in a few weeks. See all Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY deals. Plans start from $37/month including phone.
Xperia Arc is SE’s flagship Android smartphone. Star of the show is the stunning 4.2″ Reality Display with Sony Mobile BRAVIA® Engine. And the 8.1 MP camera. The phone is beautifully designed with sleek lines and curves. It runs Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) on a 1GHz scorpion processor.
LG Optimus Black continues the theme of great display screens and slim lines in smartphones. This one features a 4″ NOVA display designed for a bright performance in all light conditions. Its 9.2 mm thick, curving down to 6mm at the edges for an ergonomic fit. It runs Android 2.2 (Froyo) and has a 1GHz OMAP processor, 5MP Camera with LED flash and HD video recording.
There you are. Three very good smartphones, as if you didn’t already have enough decisions to make. Of the 3, my vote would go with the Xperia Arc for the looks and specs. But LG have been turning out some good devices too. So be sure to check them all out at Optus and Virgin before making a decision.
Now that all Windows Phone 7 devices have hit the market, here’s a handy compilation of whats out there. Microsoft roped in HTC, Samsung and LG for the initial batch of WP7 enabled phones. In an increasingly popular trend, carriers divvied up the available phones for exclusive deals. At Phones&Plans we don’t much like this trend as it locks people out of getting the phone they want, and create ridiculous situations like two practically identical phones – HTC Mozart and HTC Trophy – going with different carriers under different names.
Given the high specification set required to run WP7 smoothly, plans are surprisingly reasonable. For instance the HTC 7 Trophy from Vodafone is available for just $39 per month, however Telstra plans start at $80 per month for the LG Optimus 7Q.
Telstra:
LG Optimus 7Q -
The Optimus 7Q is a qwerty slider with a 5MP camera, HD video and a massive 16GB internal storage. Plans start from $80 per month.
HTC Mozart -
As the name suggests, Mozart is a phone for the music lover. Click here to see the full review. Telstra is running a Mozart themed campaign for the phone featuring 16the century Europeans courtiers. Plans start at $60 per month on a 24 month contract.
Optus:
Samsung Omnia 7 -
WP 7 enabled Omnia 7 from Samsung is exclusive to Optus. The phone is available for $18 per month on the $19 plan, but there’s not much you can do with just $70 of included credit and 100MB data. The 49 Cap is a better option with $8 for the phone and $500 in credit and 1.5 GB included data.
LG Optimus 7Q -
The Optimus 7Q is on Optus as well as Telstra. Optus plans are better as they let people pick up high end phones on lower plans. Optus deals start from just $39 a month, that includes $20 phone repayment and $19 for the plan. The phone is available for free on pland from $79 onwards, much the same as Telstra. Of course this is not a real comparison considering the world of difference between the quality of Optus and Telstra networks.
Vodafone (VHA)
HTC Trophy -
HTC Trophy is targeted to towards gamers, promoting XBox live integration and gaming hardware. As we mentioned earlier, under the hood it isn’t too different to the Mozart, just promoted to a different target segment.
If HTC marketing have done their homework, it would appear that Telstra users are the classical music types while the Vodafone set can’t be pried away from their eToys.
Windows Phone 7 was formally announced in Australia earlier this week. We saw general reactions go from its-yet-another-Microsoft-disaster to hey-thats-not-bad-at-all. Microsoft has worked hard to dissociate Windows Phone 7 from Windows Mobile – its previous unsuccessful attempt at a Mobile OS. This time round, the focus has clearly been on simplicity and usability. And surprisingly the OS does deliver to that message rather well.
So what is Windows Phone 7 all about?
First up, the Windows Phone 7 OS is very different to the current market leaders Apple iOS and Android at a very fundamental level. Navigating through the phone feels rather like browsing through a glossy lifestyle magazine. Big web 2.0 fonts, friendly menu names, smooth scrolling and intuitive navigation. It is all about ease of use.
Before Phone 7, Microsoft worked as a partner to handset makers creating software to meet different handset requirements. This time they’ve tightened the reins and with Windows Phone 7 control the user experience to a much greater degree, something Apple has been doing from the very start.
As an aside, Android is showing strains of being pulled in different directions by different manufacturers. Application developers need to customise apps to work well across all modifications in the Android eco system as was made clear by the challenge faced by Tweetdeck to make their app work across all variations.
Navigation and User Interface:
Windows Phone 7 opens with a handful of customizable live tiles on the home screen. This makes a welcome change to the ubiquitous grid of icons initially popularised by iPhone. These tiles can represent many things – messages, music, applications, web pages, calendar, news, individual contacts, specific map locations, documents, photos and more. All data is updated on the fly so you can check in on the latest messages, updates, pics and whatever else in one single view.
Then there are the hubs. Everything is set up in hubs that integrate feeds from various sources.
The People hub has your contacts, and a view of all that they are doing including their pictures and social updates across Facebook, Windows Live and other networks. You can send out your own updates to all your networks using the ‘Me’ card.
There’s a Music Hub, a Games Hub, a Pictures and camera hub and so on. Handset makers can create their own hubs like HTC have done for HTC Mozart to create a branded area with links to their app stores etc. Through all this navigation remains impressively clean and intuitive.
This side by side comparison with the iPhone clearly demonstrates the difference in philosophy between the two platforms. Incredibly, the iPhone comes through as technology/application focussed while the Windows phone is more experience driven. Talk about role reversals!
Applications:
Windows Phone 7 comes with native support for a variety of Microsoft applications. Search is powered by Bing; single view email combines feeds from Outlook, Exchange, Live, Google and Yahoo; a handy calendar app, IE mobile which was redeveloped from scratch to be a lot faster than its predecessor; and also a HTCsense.com style ‘Find my phone’ service that uses the Windows Live account to track the phone location and post a message on its screen. Then of course, there’s Microsoft Office including mobile versions of Word, Excel, OneNote, Powerpoint and Sharepoint.
For more applications there is the Marketplace hub, perhaps this OS’s greatest weakness. No amount of aggressive developer outreach programs is going to match the width and depth of the App Store, and to a lesser extent of Android Marketplace, at least in the near future.
Hardware requirements:
Windows Phone 7 makes heavy demands of the phone hardware. Microsoft have specified stringent and quite aggressive hardware requirements that include –
Candybar form factor
Large capacitive touchscreen
Minimum 1GHz chipset
5MP camera with flash
At least 256MB of RAM and 8GB of internal memory
GPS
Ambient light, proximity and accelerometer sensors
Three physical buttons – Start, Search and Back
This heavyweight specification for processor speed and memory comes at a cost, and the result is that Windows Phone 7 will only be available on higher end phones and plans. Compare that to Android running on LG Optimus, free on a $19 plan.
Minuses:
Even though the Windows Phone 7 is an excellent first release, there are many areas that still need polishing – switching between apps is not easy or intuitive unlike iPhone or Android. No flash and HTML 5 support yet. No copy-paste in this release, the same functionality that iPhone was lambasted for. And no laptop tethering, so you can’t use the phone as a modem. The biggest drawback this OS will face is the lack of a robust application marketplace. It has taken years for the Appstore to reach its current level of 100,000 apps, and it will be hard for MS to convince developers to port their apps to yet another platform.
Availability:
Worldwide the Windows Phone 7 will be available on 10 phones, in Australia we’ll see 5 of them. The new phones will be available officially from the 21st of October. 2 phones from HTC – Trophy (VHA) and Mozart (Telstra), 2 from LG – Optimus 7 (Optus) and Optimus 7Q (Telstra), and 1 from Samsung – Omnia 7 (Optus). Microsoft named Telstra as its launch partner though phones are available through other carriers as well.
Stay tuned:
As always, watch this space to compare plans for all the new phones as and when they are officially announced. In the meanwhile Gizmodo Au have some initial plan announcements from Telstra and Optus.
It does appear that Microsoft have it right this time round. They’ve managed to shed their Big Bully image and created a pretty decent product. We wish Windows Phone 7 well, if for nothing else then for fact that they don’t claim to have changed everything, again.
Currently PLAY is available on Optus and Virgin, and Telstra is expected to follow suit in a few weeks. See all Sony Ericsson Xperia PLAY deals. Plans start from $37/month including phone.
See all Sony Ericsson Xperia Arc deals. Plans start from $34 per month including phone.
See all LG Optimus Black deals. Plans start from $30/month.
