Huawei may not be a well known name at the moment, but the company has serious plans to build brand recognition over the next few years. The Chinese manufacturer’s strategy revolves around well-specced devices with good build quality and very competitively priced. As the first part of that strategy does the MediaPad represent the arrival of a major new name in mobile?

Visually the MediaPad might represent the closest thing we ever get to a seven inch iPad. From the front and the sides it is virtually indistinguishable from the iPad 1.

From the rear it seems to take a few cues from the HTC Flyer, with its unibody aluminium chassis broken up only by plastic sections at the top – to house the camera module, and the bottom, with a removable panel where you can insert your microSD and SIM cards (there is also a non-SIM version of the device available, while the device will also be available in the guise of the Orange Tahiti).

There are no buttons on the front and only volume and power buttons on the top horizontal edge. Along the right edge, in landscape mode, are ports for HDMI, microUSB and charging. The latter is important; the MediaPad will not charge via microUSB.

Along the opposite edge are twin speakers. We found these to be awkwardly placed as it is almost impossible not to obscure one of them with your palm when holding the device to watch a video.

The screen on the MediaPad is very impressive. The resolution of 1280 x 800 pixels gives it a pixel density of 215ppi, higher than pretty much any tablet of any size on any platform. By default, though, it is set to run in standard resolution, 1024 x 600, and you need to switch to the higher res mode in the settings. This makes the icons and text smaller, and there was a small hit on the device’s speed as well.

The IPS display has wide viewing angles, and the images it produced were bright and crisp.

The MediaPad was responsive throughout, with the only issues coming from the idiosyncrasies of the Honeycomb OS itself, such as the peculiar UI design that sees the back and home buttons in the bottom left corner of the screen, and the apps button in the top right corner when logic states they should be alongside each other at the very least. Huawei has now confirmed that the MediaPad will be updated to Ice Cream Sandwich.

Similarly the main performance concern came with the browser, which is slow when scrolling large pages, and tended to be very laggy when using the keyboard. This is not uncommon on Honeycomb devices, and the far superior performance of both Opera and Firefox on the MediaPad showed that it was indeed a Honeycomb issue here as well, rather than a problem with the hardware.

There are dual cameras on board. The rear one, with shoots five megapixel stills, was slow and produced mediocre output – we’re still far from convinced that tablets even need cameras, especially at this quality. More useful was the front camera for video chat.

The MediaPad runs an unskinned version of Honeycomb, which Huawei has chosen to supplement with some additional software. This includes a useful office suite for editing Microsoft Office-compatible documents, as well as some games.

The ubiquitous Angry Birds is here, along with a couple of Gameloft offerings, including the Asphalt 6 racing game that needs a near 600MB download before you can actually start playing. The Aldiko ebook reader is also pre-installed, and the Kindle app is only a download away if you prefer. At the size of a paperback book the MediaPad makes for a fantastic eReader.

A good range of video formats is supported in the video player as well, and while we did encounter some audio sync issues with a couple of our test videos the tablet also served well in this area. Google services apart, however, there is no on-board content store.

As a device with few design features in the hardware, and a plain version of its OS for the software the MediaPad suffers from the same problem that a lot of Honeycomb tablets do: it lacks its own identity. And as a result it feels expensive, even as its mid-range price point. Even so, it is among the best seven-inch Android tablets we’ve seen to date, and has plenty to offer anyone looking for a more compact but well built device.

Cast your mind back a bit and maybe you’ll remember FitFinder, the controversial social network app by Floxx. Well, this is their next offering in the world of apps, and its name is Spottd.

We’ve seen a fair share of social networking apps come through the doors at Smartphone Daily, so it takes something a bit special to stand out from the crowd, and we’re happy to say, Spottd does just that.

Spottd is all about the here-and-now, allowing you to connect with your friends, and share the things you love. Spottd allows you to check recommendations of places, such as restaurants, pubs and clubs to find the best place that suits you. This sort of feature is always going to work better in a larger city, and we were surprised to find several places recommended in Bournemouth that we didn’t even know existed!

Spottd also allows you to create your own recommendations, adding a description and photo to it if you so wish. When we gave this a go, the process was simple enough to do, although it was a little fiddly to add a description to our recommendation.

As well as recommendations, Spottd allows you to create your own profile, although it’s a bit basic, it does what it needs to do. The best thing about Spottd is definitely its layout and design. It’s suprisingly easy-to-use and the simple layout means you won’t get confused when looking for specific locations.

As we said previously, we get a lot of social networking apps through our doors, but we can safely say that Spottd is definitely one of the best we’ve seen in a while.

Find yourself constantly running out of battery at the worst possible moment?

Most smartphones are designed to get through the day on a single charge, but with heavy use they can often fall short. The PowerSkin series aims to solve that problem.

PowerSkin is a portable battery pack that doubles up as a case. Clip it onto the back of your phone and it will more than double the handset’s battery life. It’s stylishly designed, with a soft-touch finish, and lighter than you might expect, which means it can be used as a day to day case.

We’d recommend it most to the power user, though. If you find your battery always delivers less juice than you need then it is an essential add-on; more casual users will likely find the extra few millimetres added to the size of the phone is not a trade-off worth making.

Verdict: 7/10

Price: £49.99
Web: www.powerskin.co.uk

ZTE isn’t a smartphone brand you are likely to have come across unless you keep your ear to the ground. The company is quite prolific in the UK, but it tends to make handsets which are branded by operators. Its most enduring relationship is with Orange, and it has produced the popular San Francisco for the company as well as its Rio and Rio II, Atlanta and Miami.

ZTE is going it alone now, and the Libra is one of the first of its own branded Android handsets to hit us for review (We reviewed the ZTE Racer last year). ZTE specialises in low cost smartphones, and so the £166 Libra hits its mid range spot. With a 3.5 inch screen and Android 2.2 on board, initial impressions on the specifications front are positive.

The hardware has its plus points too. The chassis is quite tough, the backplate in particular is a lot more solid than many and has a sort of metal look to it which is appealing. There is a little brushed metal looking (plastic) panel on the front below the screen too, and that also lends a slight touch of class.

Physical buttons beneath the screen offer Back, Home and Menu functions, with Search relegated to an on-screen option only. It is quite refreshing to see physical buttons where touch buttons have taken over, and the Back button doubles up as a charge indicator.

Android 2.2 is unskinned and ZTE doesn’t add its own widgets or software to the range that comes with the operating system. There is an FM radio, though, which gives you an additional audio possibility over and above music playback.

The processor runs at 600MHz. We’ve seen the ZTE Libra advertised as having a Flash enabled browser, but were not able to stream from the BBC news web site because what the browser can handle the processor can’t.

We’ve already noted that the screen measures 3.5 inches. Its 480 x 800 pixels are most acceptable for a low cost handset, and the screen was responsive to the finger.

Memory is on the short side at just 512MB of both RAM and ROM and just 150MB of free internal storage. At least you can make use of a provide 2GB microSD card for adding more storage, and cards can be hotswapped as the slot is under the backplate but accessible without removing the battery. You can go right up to 32GB of storage via the microSD card route if you desire to.

There is a 5 megapixel camera lens on the back of the chassis. That’s the standard resolution for smartphone cameras these days, though sadly in this particular incarnation it does not have a flash to support low light shooting. There is no side-button camera shortcut, but it is very easy to put a launch icon on any of the five home screens.

There is a very predictable and basic set of effects (mono, sepia and negative), and white balance settings (auto, incandescent, daylight, fluorescent and cloudy), and while you can crop and rotate images there’s no more sophisticated editing ability built in. Still, there are plenty of third party apps to have fun with in that respect.

Overall, the ZTE Libra is a very standard Android smartphone. It does perform well enough, and we like the high resolution screen, and attractive price. You’ll need to keep an eye on the battery, though, which at 1250mAh probably won’t see you through a full day and might have trouble keeping you afloat if you are a fan of Wi-Fi, GPS or lots of mobile data usage.

Web: www.zte.com
Price: £166 SIM-free

Essential Verdict
Performance: 6/10
Design: 8/10
Features: 5/10
Value for Money: 7/10
Overall score: 6/10
Standard in most respects, but let down by battery life

Review written by Sandra Vogel.

Everything is cyclical. After a number of years in which smartphones have been getting larger and larger we can’t help but wonder if smaller isn’t due a comeback. We hope it is, and we wouldn’t mind at all if the Xperia Ray was the device to kickstart the trend. It is a lovely handset, one of the most immediately appealing that we’ve seen in some time.

It’s not a device for the power user, but is a mainstream phone for anyone who wants a quality piece of kit in their pocket.

The Ray’s instant appeal comes from its diminutive size and superior build quality. It isn’t small in the same way the Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Mini Pro is. That device is very deliberately designed and has had its software tweaked to fit the small screen.

The Ray feels natural rather than forced, harking back to the days when smallness was a compliment, and it runs Android 2.3 with the same skin Sony Ericsson packs into its 4-inch handsets. But its compactness does not mean fragile; the build is excellent.

The device has a stripped back design, with only one physical button and two capacitive ones below the display and the bare minimum of ports and buttons around the edges.

The screen measures 3.3” – a little smaller than we’d have ideally, although we suspect a 3.5” if not a 3.7” screen could be fitted into the same size chassis in future versions of the product. But it is spectacularly sharp: at this size the 480 x 854 pixel resolution equates to a pixel density of 297 pixels per inch. Only the iPhone’s famed Retina Display surpasses it.

Turning on the Ray reveals the Timescape UI that Sony Ericsson puts on all of its Android handsets. It’s one of the better custom skins. The social networking elements can be largely ignored if you’d rather use your own choice of apps, but some of the other tweaks are welcome. Dragging one app icon onto another on the home screen, for instance, will group them into their own folder. There are five home screens in total, with a good selection of pre-installed widgets you can place on them.

The Xperia Ray is powered by a 1GHz processor, backed up by 512MB RAM. It isn’t the fastest phone we’ve ever used but we had no issues at all with responsiveness. The software seemed well optimised, producing a lag-free experience, and was able to handle any task we threw at it.

These include video recording. As a single-core phone the device cannot manage full 1080p video, but is 720p-capable and was not class leading but generally good. Likewise the performance of the 8MP camera for stills, which took excellent shots in good light, though offered diminishing returns in poor light, especially with an underpowered LED flash.

For web browsing the Ray was fast and powerful, even handling Flash content with ease, while the display made reading text very easy on the eyes. It does, of course, use the standard Android browser, which is always pretty good. The multimedia apps are also stock Android and equally effective.

There’s little additional support for video formats so you may need a third party app for some of your files, and an app for the Qriocity service is also included if you want to buy or rent movies. It could prove useful in some circumstances, although we found the choice to be limited and pricey.

The phone’s main downsides, ironically, also relate to its size. The keyboard in particular is inevitable pokey and may cause problems for the large-fingered messaging addict.

But on the whole there is so much to like about the Xperia Ray, not just the styling but in the all-round package. Even the one area where smaller phones always fall down – battery life – significantly exceeded our expectations.

Price: £299 SIM-free
Web: www.sonyericsson.com

Essential verdict
Performance: 8
Design: 9
Features: 7
Value for money: 9
Verdict: 9/10

The very first Android smartphone, the T-Mobile G1, had a full slide-out Qwerty keyboard among its key features. Since then devices with this form factor have become relatively scarce as Android manufacturers have embraced the large-screened slab, and if a keyboard has been needed they have tended to opt for the BlackBerry-style thumbboard instead.

So the Xperia Pro is most welcome. It joins the largely consumer focussed Xperia range, and even though its own styling is quite friendly it brings a touch of business functionality to the Android world.

There are two consequences to the inclusion of a slide-out keyboard. One is that typing does – or at least should – become a lot easier; the other that the phone becomes noticeably thicker. The 13.5mm girth of the Pro is far from being the thickest we’ve seen, but it does stand out at a time when manufacturers are falling over one another to make their devices thinner and thinner.

You will notice that extra thickness in your pocket and hand, although thankfully the weight is about average at 142g.

And does it make typing easier? Yes it does, with qualification. The keys are well sized, are highly legibile and well-lit, and have the right amount of travel plus a satisfying clickyness to them, which means you can work up a decent speed.

However it is only a four row keyboard, so typing numbers is no less fiddly than using an on-screen keyboard, and we did also feel that, when open, the top section of the handset was too close to the top row of keys, cramping our thumbs for space a tad more than we would have liked.

Sony Ericsson has added touch of cleverness to the keyboard in that how the phone responds when you slide the keyboard open depends on what you are doing at the time. For instance, sliding it open in the browser will display the address bar, or in a messaging app will enable you to reply to the message you’re reading. It’s not always perfect, but is a nice touch.

Ultimately though, we found ourselves only using the keyboard for longer periods of typing, and using the on-screen options for smaller tasks such as entering URLs and even composing short text messages.

Away from the keyboard and the Pro is essentially the same device as the Xperia Neo we looked at back in issue 2. This means Android 2.3 with Sony Ericsson’s largely unobtrusive skin (and Sony Ericsson is also committed to delivering Android 4.0 updates for all of its 2011 Xperia handsets in due course), powered by a 1GHz processor and 512MB RAM, with a 3.7″, 480 x 854 pixel display.

There’s nothing groundbreaking there, but it’s a solid package that offers a strong taste of what a Sony Ericsson flavoured Android is all about.

The 8.1 megapixel camera is on a par with what we’ve become accustomed to seeing from Sony Ericsson. Not quite company’s best but still better than many of its rivals. We like the fact that Sony Ericsson handsets usually have a dedicated camera button, but the one here was a little tricky to use as we found the keyboard would start sliding out whenever we tried to press it.

Multimedia performance is strong in all areas, with excellent media playback, and great sound quality from the built-in speakers. You can watch video in the browser, too, thanks to the Flash support, and there are also apps on board that can be used to buy content. The Pro is furnished with a good selection of third party apps, including an office suite for document editing.

Whether or not the Xperia Pro is the phone for you will depend entirely on whether or not you need a physical keyboard. We found it to be surplus to requirements for casual messaging purposes, it was only when we got down to some serious work – sending business emails, or typing documents when we didn’t have a laptop to hand – that it came into its own.

Maybe that’s the reason we see so few device like this: it is a niche product. But if it is what you need then the Xperia Pro is currently your best option.

Price: £306 SIM-free
Buy now from: www.clove.co.uk

Verdict: 7/10
It lacks anything truly unique but if you need a decent keyboard this is your current best option

The app allows you to import photos in to the app to start editing, or has a function allowing you to take a photo through the app.

When you’ve chosen and loaded the photo you want to mess around with, the fun can really begin. On the bottom of the screen, there are two tabs that open up to give you a series of tools for you to customise your photo. There is a zoom in tool that makes aspects of the photos smaller, and a zoom out tool that makes things bigger. You can also drag your finger on certain body parts to distort them. When you’re done, you can save them to your phone or SD card to share with others.

Photo Warp is some harmless fun that did give us a few giggles when we tried it out. For a free download you couldn’t ask for much more.

How big is too big? That’s the question you’ll be left with after handling the HTC Titan. It’s the best Windows Phone handset we’ve seen to date by a considerable margin, but for many users the sheer size of the device will make it a non-starter.

The screen measures 4.7 inches corner to corner. While this may not seem like a major increase over the 4.3 inches that had become standard at the high end, in Android especially, it is a significant difference.

Holding the phone in such a way that we could reach our thumb up to press the Phone button on the top left of the screen we were no longer able to press the crucial Back button at the bottom left. Hold it so that we could hit the Back button and the top of the screen was out of reach.

Unless you have particularly long thumbs the Titan in your hands, as in ours, is a two-handed device. That’s fine when you’re sat down, exploring some of the more advanced features of the device, but when you’re on the move and want to perform even the simplest of tasks, such as knocking out a quick text message, it becomes a real inconvenience.

It is important to stress this point right at the start because it impacts fundamentally on almost everything you will do with the phone. We strongly suggest heading to a high-street store for a hands-on before buying.

In every other regard the Titan is a fantastic device. While needing to be large to accommodate the screen its slimness ensures it still fits in your pocket reasonably comfortably (although its length is pushing it to the limit). The build quality is also outstanding, with a real solid, premium feel.

The display also impresses. We’d been disappointed by the Super LCD displays in previous HTC devices, preferring the AMOLED that the company used to use, but the one here is a real leap forward over those we’ve seen before. It is incredibly bright, the viewing angles are unlimited, and the gap between the actual display and the casing have been reduced to such an extent that they seem to meld seamlessly into one another. Even the resolution of 480 x 800 pixels, which we often see on displays an inch smaller than this, did not feel too low.

There’s also another area where HTC has made big strides: the camera. We’ve become accustomed to a feeling of real disappointment whenever using HTC cameras. Regardless of how many megapixels they cram into them the image quality barely goes beyond passable.

Not so here. For the first time the camera can produce the good in low light conditions, thanks to the f/2.2 lens and back-illuminated sensor, reducing the need to use the rather flimsy dual-LED flash, and it’s strong in good light as well. The Titan’s camera doesn’t match the Nokia N8, of course, but it is on a par with the Samsung Galaxy S II or iPhone 4, the current best alternatives.

Everything else about the Titan is great. It runs Mango – Windows Phone 7.5 – and so supports multitasking, among other things. The UI is stripped back, clean and refreshing to use. It’s also fast. The 1.5GHz single core processor may not be class leading – Windows Phone is not yet optimised for dual-core – but we never felt like it was holding us back. The Titan has the look, the feel and the performance of a real high-end smartphone.

Screen size apart, the biggest problem we had with the Titan is that, like the previous generation of Windows Phones, there’s still little here to give the Titan an identity of its own. It is, in may respects, just another Windows Phone. But make no mistake, it is a very good one.

The HTC Titan is available now at www.clove.co.uk, priced £498 SIM-free.

Essential Verdict
Performance: 9/10
Design: 9/10
Features: 7/10
Value for Money: 8/10
Overall score: 9/10
The best Windows Phone to date, and one that gives us plenty of hope for the future of the platform. Now, Nokia, over to you…

Mail clients are pretty thin on the ground for Android devices. It’s strange when you think about it, because almost every other corner of the Android Market is rammed with

choice, well enter Kaiten Mail. A neat new client with a few tricks up its sleeve, albeit one that still manages to suffer the same problems that blight the Gmail app. The app it a decent-looking piece of kit, and intuitive to use right from the off. You log into your email account and Kaiten Mail does the rest, downloading your settings direct from your email provider.

A slider bar at the top of the screen allows you to split your view, displaying an email in the bottom pane and your inbox in another. Kaiten Mail certainly has the edge over most other email clients in the looks department. It’s a neat little package that’s wonderfully easy on the eye, and you’ll find almost everything you want within a few taps of your fingers. Long-pressing on an email opens up a whole raft of options, from replying to finding more mail from that sender.

One thing the app doesn’t let you do is create new folders for your email account. You’re able to move things around in the folders you’ve already created, but if you receive a new email that you want to start a new folder for, you’re going to have to do it online rather than in-app. You can pinch and double-tap to zoom in an email, but Kaiten Mail quite often gets confused over what you’re trying to do and you end up staring at a blank screen instead of the text you were trying to enlarge.

Kaiten Mail is a nice-looking and easy-to-use mail client. It offers a lot of features and touches that you won’t find anywhere else. The problem is, it doesn’t do enough to justify its price tag. If you’ve got multiple email addresses and you want to keep track of them in one place then it’s a godsend, but for the rest of us, there aren’t enough customisation options to set it apart from the apps most phones come pre-installed with. It’s good, it’s just not quite good enough.

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Overall score: 7/10

The Orange Barcelona is a budget pay-as-you-go smartphone, with a tasty £99.99 price tag. Although the price is great, there are a few issues that need to be raised. The Barcelona

has a really small screen, and we’ve still yet to find an Android smartphone designed with a mini Qwerty keyboard that does the operating system justice.

Quite simply, Android was made for tall, thin screens. Putting it into a short, wide screen is a real challenge, and the Orange Barcelona’s 2.6″ display with 320×240 pixels on offer just doesn’t suit the user interface. There are a couple of plus points. The screen is capacitive and it does respond quite well to presses and sweeps. And there is automatic screen rotation so  you can push the handset into a tall-format view.

But we found this rather less useful than we’d hoped. When web browsing, for example, full-page views are simply too small to be readable in most cases; and at a size where text

is legible, you have to do a lot of horizontal scrolling. That is also the case in widescreen view, unfortunately.

Beneath the screen are large Call and End buttons, a D-pad, and four large buttons for the Android Home, Menu, Back and Search functions. Under these, and squeezed into a relatively small space, is the keyboard. A 528MHz processor powers the device, although it does struggle when asked to do too much. Webpages load relatively slowly and is not able to support

Flash, which means watching embedded videos is a no-no.

The Orange Barcelona features a basic 3.2 megapixel camera without a flash. It also has HDSPA and Wi-Fi. There’s also a microSD card under the backplate. Although the Orange Barcelona is indeed a budget handset, we do feel let-down by what’s on offer here, it could’ve been so much better.

—–

Verdict (/10)

Performance: 5

Not what you’d call fast, though it’s not a phone for power users

Design: 6

Screen a bit too small for comfort, but decent enough keyboard

Features: 5

Not much to shout about here

Value for money: 7

Good price, but there are better options

Overall score: 5

An inexpensive Android handset, but we’ve seen much better from Orange at this price