Taken on my new phone Samsung Galaxy S2 using the ‘Camera 360′ camera software.

Initial impressions – unbelievably light. In one way that’s a good thing because it helps cancel out the physical size of it. Huge and heavy might have felt a bit cumbersome.  On the other hand, it’s hard to believe this is a premium device. It’s plastic and the back cover is wafer thin.  Looking at it you wouldn’t think it was a £500 + phone.  That is until you switch it on!

Stock Camera

The screen is wonderful. A 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus display. Videos look amazing on it and if you’re a camera freak like me then it’s brilliant for shooting photographs and video. Photo’s by the way are 8 megapixel and video is 1080 full HD.  I’m going to start using it in place of my point and shoot camera to see how i get on.  I’ll miss the zoom but i’m interested to see how well it does.

Touchwiz is pretty funky (Samsung’s equivalent of HTC’s Sense). I think HTC has some nicer widgets but Samsung’s aren’t to be sniffed at either.  Besides which you can customise the hell out of your homes creens via the marketplace anyway.  The phone is very responsive and no matter how many apps i open it never seems to lag!  I can’t get my head around that because i’m so used to using task managers to end tasks to free up memory and speed up the phone a bit.

I’ve done one test video and i’m pleasantly surprised with the results.  It’s no HD camcorder replacement but for a phone it’s pretty darn impressive!  I really like the camera too, it’s quite advanced and there’s plenty of tweakery to be done in there.  There’s an action mode which i assumed was for sports shots but it’s not.  Instead it takes several pictures of a moving subject and blends them into one picture.  Very clever.  Here’s a sample video i did this afternoon:

Click here to view the embedded video.

I updated the firmware last night which i think has fixed the screens auto brightness behaving erratically but the wifi signal seems weak and GPS takes a while to lock on.  I’ll update after a bit more tinkering.

Well i handed my beloved HTC Hero over to the hubby and i got myself a Motorola Milestone. I must say i haven’t taken to it as quickly as i did my Hero. It feels very much like a work-in-progress device unlike the Hero which felt fabulously polished. I love the screen on the Milestone, it’s bigger and better than the Hero (and in fact most phones). It feels very solid and it looks geeky. It’s a brilliant portable internet device.

But as a phone, it’s crap.

There is built in noise cancellation and it’s a pain in the ass. You have to hold it really close to your mouth or else the person on the other end can’t hear you. The problem with this is your cheek then brushes against the screen pressing either the mute or the hold icon. The screen should switch itself off but it doesn’t always unless you hold your phone at an EXACT angle and at an EXACT distance away from your face in preferable lighting conditions ….. WHAT THE FUCK!?

So as i say, it’s a shit phone. Interestingly though if you use something like Fring or Skype, the noise cancellation switches off and you can use the phone normally. Sadly there is nothing in the settings that lets you switch off the noise cancellation yourself, It really is a pity because there have been thousands of complaints about it. But Motorola don’t seem to do ‘listening to the customers’.

I carry around a Samsung Soul with me and i use that for the phone and my Milestone for texting and internetting on the go. And as an internet device it is amazing. The big screen is wonderful and it’s nice and snappy. It’s saving me having to go and switch my main pc on a lot. I can facebook, tweet, post to wordpress, shop on amazon, have my fave news feeds delivered to me, play on google earth, play games, email and what not without going near my pc. Fabulous! It’s a great time saver.

Now the main reason i went with this (because i was very happy with my Hero as i said) was for the physical keyboard. Well, imagine my disappointment when it turns out the physical keyboard isn’t great! Ok it’s not shite but the keys are so flat that you keep hitting the wrong one or press two at once. It’s much faster to type on the virtual keyboard. But what it is handy for is if your in the car (as a passenger of course) or on the bus, it’s a lot easier to use the physical keyboard when you’re shaking all over the shop.

The camera is also important to me because i’m always taking snaps and don’t always have a main camera with me. It’s not brilliant but it was ok for a phone – until that is i updated it to Android 2.1 which has added more camera features and a shed load of noise to the images. Lord knows why and i hope they fix it. Mind you that said, the ladybird macro photo just below this post was taken with this phone and i don’t suppose it’s that bad?

So i don’t regret having it because having a portable internet device is very important to me and i believe this is the best one. It’s a shame about the phone, keyboard and camera but you can’t have everything. However it has made my mind up that i’ll probably never have another Motorola device but will definitely be going back to HTC -something like the Supersonic (EVO) or whatever they have coming out after that because i’ll probably keep me Milestone for a while yet.

I decided against iPhone because i couldn’t get on with the keyboard (i was practising on my iPod touch) and *oo controversy* i actually think it’s starting to look a little dated! I have a feeling they will give it a cosmetic makeover though next year.

Anyhoo, what i ended up with was this, a HTC Hero!

Read More after the jump….

And i love it! The software (a HTC skinned version of Android) is brilliant, i love how customisable it is and i like how (unlike iphone) you can have fabulous widgets and apps running in the background. It has a Marketplace which is an app store similar to the ones you get for iPhone and Blackberry though not as large as iPhone’s appstore obviously (yet). But you know, after all the rave reviews android seems to be getting i do think that this could be the one to topple apple. In fact the HTC Hero just won phone and gadget of the year in T3 magazine. I gather Stuff has also named it gadget of the year. Not bad considering how young it is. Take that iPhone *insert Karate chop here*

I updated the firmware and that has made a big difference to lag which i know was one of the complaints with this phone. I’m getting no lag at all now. Also improved is the camera. You now get touch focus so in other words touch the screen somewhere and it will focus on whatever you point to. No flashgun but the pics are much better than my Blackberry Bold. The video recorder isn’t great though, quite low quality and if like me you’re used to recording in HD then … well, keep your camcorder or dedicated camera with you!

Some niggles (and they are only niggles) all of the facebook apps for this phone are useless. Nowhere near as good as Blackberry. The twitter widget is also a problem on Vodafone networks for some bizarre reason. But there are other Twitter apps that work fine. For messaging/email/facebook and twitter the Blackberry is still unbeatable.

As i type this i’m sitting with my headphones on streaming music from last.fm. The sound quality is surprisingly good! So much so i’m considering installing the premium version of Spotify enabling me to take a music collection everywhere without having to store it!

As a gadget freak i love this phone. It’s so customisable, it looks great, you can tweak the hell out of it. And i LOVE it!

**Update**

After much playing i’ve started replacing one or two default apps as well as adding quite a few new ones and it has made a big difference. Power manager is helping to save the battery and Advanced Task Manager is helping manage the memory making the phone run much better. Anyhoo …

Barcode Scanner

Barcode scanner can be used for scanning barcodes on CDs, books, and other products, then look up prices and reviews, or search for a word in a book and find where it occurs.

You can also scan QR Codes containing URLs, contact info, calendar events, and more. Scan the code by these applications to go straight to their dwnload page on your phone.

Handcent SMS

This is a replacement SMS app and it drastically changes the look of your SMS application. You can give each person a different background and speech bubble type (for example my Friend Jason who is a Madonna fan i have given a madge background with colour matched bubbles, very cool). You can also give each individual person their own notification sound so you know who is texting without even looking. You can have a pop up window that shows even when the screen is locked – it can either show the full message and you can quick reply from there without unlocking the phone or if you want privacy it can just show who sent the SMS. Or you can disable that feature all together.

BeebPlayer

Unofficial player of BBC iPlayer.
TV programmes
Live TV channels
Live radio.

Shows video in higher quality when viewing over wifi.

Spotify

This only works if you subcribe to Spotify (£10 per month) but honestly it’s well worth it.

You can search for and add albums to your phone/computer instantly! You can either download to your devices SD card or stream over 3g or wifi to save space. There are millions of songs to choose from and is sorta similar to iTunes in how it looks. You add albums as playlists and they get beamed to every device you have running Spotify.

Camera Zoom fx

I replaced my default camera software with this app and wow what a difference it makes to the pictures. This app adds image stabilisation which is very handy for dimly lit indoor pictures as demonstrated here with a photo i took indoors in a room lit by a single lamp:

Find more Hero tips, tricks and recommended apps here.