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Your mobile phone is no longer just a portable device for making phone calls - in some cases it's a complete home entertainment system waiting to be pushed to its limits. We look at the top five phones with entertainment capabilities, and the top five smartphones for the portable office.
PHONES
Samsung SGH-D600
This is the black, pebble-shaped phone advertised by José Mourinho, the Chelsea Manager. This isn’t the phone for you if you want to be connected to the office every waking minute, but while it doesn’t bamboozle you with mobile office options, it does offer plenty of other features. Pictures from its 2-megapixel camera are displayed on a large, sharp screen, and video clips can be transferred to a TV screen.
Sharp 903
This phone, available exclusively with Vodafone, is the current leader of the megapixel race. Featuring a 3-megapixel sensor and a swivel screen, it sets itself up as a replacement to entry-level digital cameras. The result is stunning pictures that are ideal for printing at the standard 6 by 4in size. It also offers 3G connectivity for video calling, and will enable you to view the mobile television broadcasts from Sky News, CNN or MTV. The handset is quite large, but it should keep you entertained everywhere from the train to the traffic jam.
Sony Ericsson W900
If music is your thing then this will be the phone for you. Made by the creators of the original Walkman, the phone includes a 512Mb Memory Stick Duo card for storing music and comes with a decent set of headphones as well as dedicated music buttons to help access the audio content more easily. The inclusion of a 2-megapixel camera and the easy-to-use menu interface also found in the K750i model means that this isn’t a one trick pony.
Nokia 6680
Those afraid of venturing off the Nokia beaten path should check out the 6680. The flagship model of the company’s 3G offering, the camera phone offers plenty without getting too clever for its own good. For office users, the Symbian S60 interface lets you view Word and Excel documents on the move. It also offers video calling, a 1.3-megapixel camera and direct printing via Nokia’s XpressPrint feature.
Motorola Razr
This phone has stolen the show with first a silver version, then an Oscar-themed black edition and now a bright pink model in time for Christmas. The phone isn’t too hot on features, apart from quad-band performance that lets you use it virtually anywhere on the globe, but it still gets heads turning. A forthcoming 3G version will give this phone some substance, albeit at the expense of style – the 3G RAZR won’t be as slim.
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SMARTPHONES
Blackberry
This is still the best-loved handheld and has become a must-have gadget in the business world. It has even been called the Crackberry by those who get addicted to checking their e-mail every couple of minutes. Its success can be attributed to three things: its qwerty keyboard, its large colour screen and its automatic access to your e-mails, unlike the devices that have to dial-in to check whether you’ve got messages.
The Treo 650 has a stronger focus on the mobile and PDA elements. Like the Blackberry, the phone has a qwerty keyboard for easy e-mail typing, and it also offers all the functionality of a diary and contacts book. Because it runs on the Palm operating system there are thousands of third-party applications available, ranging from dictionaries to cocktail bibles.
Although they have different names, these phones are identical apart from the operator branding. Here the qwerty keyboard slides out from underneath the device and this makes for a smaller unit overall. The phone’s other strong point is that it features the new version of the Microsoft Mobile operating system. It also offers connectivity via GPRS throughout the country and wi-fi when you find yourself in a wireless hotspot.
HP iPAQ HW6515 Mobile Messenger
HP’s entry in the smartphone market, comes with a large screen and is wide enough to allow comfortable typing on its querty keyboard. It does use Microsoft’s older Pocket PC Phone Edition 2003 operating system, which limits it to GPRS but should mean that it provides tried and tested reliability.
This new model, the latest in Sony Ericsson’s P series of smartphones, won’t be available until early 2006. When it does arrive, though, it will be 3G and wi-fi enabled and come with a 2-megapixel autofocus camera and a querty keyboard beneath the flip-down numeric keypad. The P990 is closer in appearance to a traditional mobile phone than any of the other devices on test.
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