| Wednesday, December 20, 2006 |
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Samsung Drift |
If you're looking for GPS functionality in a very small handset with a killer screen, the Drift is your man. Google Maps works amazingly well, thanks largely to it just being a well-written application. Even in dense urban area with tall buildings, the GPS is surprisingly accurate. If you're in the suburbs, it's dead on.
Helio's web site makes some pretty fanciful claims about its capabilities that I have to take issue with though. First of all, "3G" is far from lightning fast. Sustained transfer rates may be significantly higher than they used to be but what good is a 700kbps connection if you have to wait five seconds every time you click on a link? Latency seems as bad as it ever was.
MySpace mobile is a complete and utter joke. They make it sound like a custom front end was written and optimized for the mobile experience but I can assure you, that's far from the case. All you can reasonably do is check bulletins and email. Browsing through profiles is effectively impossible since it doesn't seem to load any images.
One minor bummer I found -- and this is true of all sliders -- is that with a single LCD, using the phone as a watch is kind of a pain. I miss the monochrome external LCD of my PEBL since you can see it even in dim light without having to turn on the backlight.
For some reason, I can't get Gmail in any form whatsoever on this phone though. I've tried every URL I can think of, including their mobile-optimized gmail.com/app, none of which return any kind of result. Being a Gmail user, this is a deal breaker for me. What I don't understand is how this oversight happened when they obviously have a partnership with Google.
The bottom line is, if a sweet looking phone with GPS is what you want, look no further. Just don't expect any kind of real web surfing to be going on, despite Helio's claim: "It's your internet; we haven't built any walls around it"
They say that but yet they also say that they'll optimize sites for mobile use. Whatever
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posted by Labanon @ 1:15 AM  |
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Name: Labanon
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