Diaries of a Nokia Fan Boy

My favourite website to go for reviews just got their hands on the HTC Magic and have posted a full-blown review. The main reason why I like going to the website is because they tend to provide, while slightly biased, very detailed reviews, including extra’s like 360-degree spin, high resolution photos, screen captures, and my favourite – the audio signal quality chart. They also provide highly detailed specs of every GSM phone there is out there, and allow for searching and comparing of phones. They also provide phone ratings, and even links to sellers.

Actually it was the audio signal chart that I wanted to look at most. GSMArena calls it Tolerable, and its exactly what I expected after using it to listen to music – virtually no lows, and good mid to high range, maybe dropping off a little early on the highs. Comparing to the iPhone 3GS, the numbers look quite poor, however when I’m listening to it in my head phones, most songs really are tolerable. I’m sure that those with lower expectation of audio quality would even be pleased with it.

I’m using Ultimate Ears: SuperFi 3 Studio, and sorry if it seems a little like a sales pitch, but the head phones really do sound amazing, especially when you get them for $34.99!

That said, the overall review takes a generally positive light of the phone, probably a little more positive than mine, and compares the phone to the iPhone 3GS, Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, and HTC Touch Diamond2. If you’re serious about getting the phone, have a read through the review, its good fun if nothing else.

GSMArena: HTC Magic review: Practical magic

-Nokia FanBoy

Hi Everyone!

Sorry took me so long to post again about my experiences with the new phone, however I was away on a vacation trip and unable to take the time to write the review. On the bright side, this gave me lots of time to play with the phone, especially considering most of my time was spent in transit!

I will not be going over many details of the phone, just some key aspects that stand out to me.

Battery:
Ok, I know that everyone will say that battery life has to be taken with consideration for usage, but I’m comparing the battery life to my old Nokia N95 8GB, and I’m disappointed! I mean I wasn’t using the media player, since I didn’t have a headphone adapter, I wasn’t using GPS since I don’t have a turn-by-turn system installed, but then why is it that the battery lasted so much less?!

I understand some aspects of why the battery was low. For example, the bigger screen with the brightness set to 100% does eat up a lot juice. Since the screen is twice the resolution of the N95 8GB it makes sense that it would consume more power rendering the graphics. The fact that the input is primarily via the touchscreen it probably consumes more power than buttons. And of course the faster processor would consume more power. But what about the fact that N95 8GB has a 16M color display, dual CPU’s, and a hardware 3D accelerator? That takes up juice too!

But personally, I think that the main drain on the battery is inefficient code. Just looking at how much my battery life increased when I upgraded my N95 8GB firmware (from v11 to v20) tells me that a large portion of battery consumption is inefficient code.

Screen:
Maybe I’m just spoiled by Nokia’s 16M color displays, but 65K just doesn’t seem to be enough. I mean sure, its color, I can’t see that its only 65K colors, but when I look at a picture on that screen and on my computer its clear as night and day!

On the upside, the higher resolution is nice, and the bigger screen itself is very attractive!

Audio:
It would be unfair to judge the audio capabilities of this device solely on its core audio player performance. To be fair, the Magic does not seem to be placed as a media device, as can be seen by the lack of 3.5mm jack, however I found the sound quality to be decent, at best. The biggest issue is, of course, bass. For someone listening to classical music with little bass instruments, this would be fine, however I like Jazz, Rock, a bit of Pop, and of course, at times, Classical. And the sound quality just wasn’t high enough for me.

What is an issue, however, is a lack of equalizer presets, which do not seem to be included with third party media players. This tells me that media players are only a front-end interface for the same back-end sound “producer”. In lament’s terms: don’t expect third party media players to improve sound quality.

Now, the really bright side to this is the innovative media players available for Android!

TuneWiki automatically downloads lyrics to your songs and displays them together with the song… Synced!!! Of course not all songs are available in their database, and sometimes the words are slightly mismatched, but this is just such a cool feature that I don’t care!

MixZing, on the other hand, suggests songs based on which song you play and what songs you have in your library. When you play a song it automatically creates a playlist for that song and throws in 20 suggested songs, which you can add or delete via a kind of impromptu rating system. The benefit is that the playlists created by MixZing are available from other media players on the device.

*** I was out of town for the last couple days, but now, as promised: ***

Camera:
After being spoiled by my Nokia N95 8GB’s camera, this camera is really quite upsetting. Before I got the N95 I was debating buying a high-end P&S camera, but decided against it after seeing the quality of the photos of the N95. Unfortunately, however understandably, this is not the case for this phone. After all, this is not a super high-end phone, like the N95 8GB was made to be, nor is this a camera centric phone, but it still would have been nice to see a decent camera.

One thing that I would like to see in the future is a better camera interface design. While it is nice to be able to see the entire picture without having to look past icons on the screen, those icons can be very useful. Especially if you know what you’re doing you can greatly improve the quality of the photo, or add an artistic flair to it.

Reception:
I was very surprised by the quality of the reception of this phone, this time comparing it to an old model by HTC: the original Touch (also from Rogers). One would think that a phone’s reception would improve as the manufacturer goes through generations of very similarly featured phones. Well I wasn’t sure what to think of the results…

Driving around the gorgeous Rockies poses a big problem for reception, however a perfect testing ground for comparing the sensitivity of the signal. This would show how well the signal strength will work in places like underground garages, elevators, etc. My expectation was to see a clear winner – either the Touch or the Magic, however that was not the case. As we were driving around sometimes the Touch would have 4 bars signal strength while the Magic had no reception, and sometimes it would be the opposite. Overall I believe the Touch, sadly, won out. But there could be a number of reasons for that, ranging from 3G nature of the Magic and EDGE nature of the Touch, it could be one was more sensitive on some frequencies while the other on others (the Magic did catch the signal sooner when we were entering a 3G area vs. EDGE area).

However, in the city, both phones performed equally well. While the Magic did generally show a weaker signal, neither phone had an issue connecting and keeping a call.

Telephony:
Ironically, this is the one part of my review I am not ready to talk about. Since my main mode of communication is via SMS, I haven’t had a chance to thoroughly review this part of the phone. I did, however, notice some issues of having the audio cut out every now and again, and talking last night the other person complained that the audio was cutting out on their end also. As there are a large number of reasons for this I cannot say if it is an issue yet, and will have to do more talking first.

*** Again, I will add more as I have more time ***

-Nokia FanBoy