Nokia's Booklet 3G is cute and quaint

Nokia's Booklet 3G

Try as we might, we just can’t see the point of this so-called smartbook.Sure, Nokia’s Booklet 3G is cute and quaint. It’s got Mac-like svelteness and would look equally at home on the desk of a CEO or graphic designer. But why would either of them bother to put it there?The smartbook, as near as anyone at Nokia has been able to explain, is a device that melds a smartphone with netbook. I’ve long imagined such a beast would perhaps look like the handheld HP computers of yore — a monstrous phone you could edit a spreadsheet on. But in 2009’s reality, the smartbook is emerging as something quite different, and far more boring: Basically, it’s a netbook outfitted with a wireless network card.Sure enough, that’s exactly what Nokia’s Booklet 3G is: A netbook with a 10.1-inch screen (1028 x 720 pixels), a 1.6-GHz Atom processor, a paltry 1 GB of RAM, and a 120-GB hard drive. It comes with Wi-Fi and a WCDMA 3G wireless card, with service courtesy of AT&T. Our test unit had Windows 7 Starter Edition is preinstalled.

And for that measly configuration, Nokia wants you to fork over 600 bucks. Sign up for two years of data service with AT&T and you can have it for a mere $300, a touch less than other netbooks of this general size and shape.And that’s the head-scratcher. You can pick up a USB 3G adapter from the carrier of your choice for next to nothing and use it on every computer you own. Or you can pay $300 for this single-purpose machine with a minuscule keyboard, dim screen and downright awful performance, while paying a monthly fee for the thing every month for the next two years. Rest assured, that’s all you’re getting: There’s no phone in the Booklet 3G by any stretch of the imagination; it can’t even make voice calls.

Overall, the Booklet 3G (and, to be fair, all smartbooks that follow) is really a back-to-the-drawing-board proposition. As sexy and long-lived, battery-wise, as it might be, it’s simply too slow and far too expensive for anyone to seriously consider buying when far more credible alternatives (like, say, any netbook on the market) are available. Turn this into a free-with-service gimmick and maybe we could see getting behind it. Maybe.

The LG Shine II

LG Shine II

The LG Shine II doesn’t mess with success. The first LG Shine was a best-seller on AT&T thanks to its high-end metallic body and solid call quality. Aside from a few minor improvements, the Shine II is virtually the same as the first model, with the same main benefit—it looks and feels good. It’s a good choice for AT&T subscribers looking for a basic, reliable, and classy voice phone.

Design and Call Quality
The Shine II measures 4.2 by 2.0 by 0.5 inches and weighs 4.4 ounces. The Shine’s brushed-aluminum housing makes it heavy but durable. Just like my old RAZR V3, I’d expect the Shine II to hold up nicely over time. It also looks great, and the cool blue backlighting enhanced the look further. The slider mechanism felt smooth and satisfying.

The 2.2-inch LCD has 240-by-320-pixel resolution. A new five-way control pad features a prominent, raised center button. The button, left, and right keys were fine, but the up and down keys were very small and stiff. Large-enough Send, End, and Back keys sit above an otherwise cramped, recessed keypad. Dialing numbers was tough with one hand.

As a quad-band EDGE (850/900/1800/1900 MHz) and dual-band HSDPA (850/1900 MHz) phone, the Shine II works on AT&T’s 3G network and on 2G EDGE networks overseas. Voice calls sounded loud, clear, and crisp, with a slightly trebly tone in the earpiece. Callers on the other end couldn’t distinguish between the Shine II and a BlackBerry Bold 9700 (also on AT&T); both sounded excellent. Calls sounded fine through a Plantronics Voyager Pro Bluetooth headset. The speakerphone went pretty loud, but sounded harsh and distorted at top volume. Battery life was on the short side, at 3 hours and 46 minutes of talk time.

User Interface, Apps, and Multimedia
The Shine II’s UI looks sharp and is well designed. The Shine II was very responsive to key presses. The stiff control pad wasn’t ideal for gaming, and the Shine II’s sluggish Java benchmark results mean you should stick to 2D titles. The Opera-powered Web browser was surprisingly good, offering mobile and landscape views. The browser delivers accurate renderings of desktop HTML pages, but the tiny screen is an impediment.

The Shine hooks into AT&T Mobile e-mail for Yahoo, Windows Live, and AOL accounts, but not Gmail. A basic IM client offers AIM, Yahoo, and Windows Live support but not Google Talk. Either way, with only a numeric keypad, this isn’t a messaging phone. (If you want a keyboard, the excellent Pantech Impact beckons, and even costs $20 less.) It also works with AT&T Navigator (powered by TeleNav) for voice-enabled, turn-by-turn GPS directions.

The Shine II’s music player includes an adjustable EQ, ringtone creator, and music recognition software. There’s 102MB of free onboard storage. A microSD card slot sits underneath the battery cover, but not under the battery; my 16GB SanDisk card worked fine. The proprietary headphone jack is a disappointment, and there are no wired earbuds in the box. Thankfully, the Shine II now supports stereo Bluetooth. Music tracks sounded very bassy over Motorola S9-HDs, even with the Shine II’s custom EQ off; LG seems to have hardwired in a bass boost. Tiny album art thumbnails displayed when available. Standalone 3GP and MP4 videos played very smoothly in landscape mode, though the video player was sluggish and clumsy to operate. Streamed CNN videos played smoothly for about 10 seconds before freezing and timing out on several attempts.

Camera and Conclusions
The 2-megapixel camera includes an LED flash and auto-focus. A built-in image editor resizes, crops, and rotates photos, and features some basic effects. Test photos looked OK, with a little noise but decent resolution in shadowy areas, and a slightly soft, grayish focus outdoors. Shutter speeds were just under one second. Recorded 320-by-240 videos had good color balance, but were too jerky at 10 frames per second.

The LG Shine II is a good handset, but I’d like to see its price come down. Otherwise, it runs into headwinds on AT&T’s lineup as better phones get discounted. The $99 Sony Ericsson c905a is a vertical slider like the LG Shine II, but it has a vastly more powerful 8.1-megapixel camera with face detection. The $149 Samsung Mythic SGH-a897, our current Editors’ Choice for AT&T feature phones, offers mobile TV, a high-resolution touch screen, and plenty of music and video features.

Neither of those phones have the Shine II’s aluminum-chic design, though. For thousands of folks to date, that has been enough to seal the deal—and it likely will be enough once again with the Shine II.

BlackBerry service in less than a week frustrated people

BlackBerry

TORONTO  The second outage of BlackBerry service in less than a week frustrated people who depend on the messaging device and comes at a bad time for its maker, which faces increasing competition in the market it helped pioneer.BlackBerry subscribers often are so reliant on the devices that they peck at their keyboards all day and keep them on their night stands while they sleep. When e-mail and Web service on the devices went out Tuesday night, Twitter and other online forums were peppered with complaints.

BlackBerry service was restored Wednesday morning, and the company behind the service, Canada’s Research in Motion Ltd., blamed a software upgrade for the problem. The glitch, which comes after another outage last Thursday, could damage the company’s reputation.

“One of RIM’s big advantages is that it’s perceived as a reliable device,” said Duncan Stewart, director of research and analysis at DSam Consulting. “To lose the advantage of reliability would in fact be a very big deal for this company.”

Herbert Sexton, 34, said his BlackBerry service has been spotty all week where he lives near Atlanta. One day no messages come in at all and the next, 130 e-mails flood his inbox. Messages he’s already replied to pop up again. He said the disruption could push him to a different phone.

“I like to have something constant,” he said. “If service keeps going out, you never know what to expect.”

RIM has sold more than 75 million BlackBerrys worldwide since the gadget debuted at the start of this decade and became part of popular culture. It earned the nickname “CrackBerry” among people who became addicted to using it to stay productive or in touch with others while on the go. Frequent users of its compact keyboard have been known to complain of suffering from “BlackBerry Thumb.”

RIM counts more than 36 million subscribers, including 500,000 in the U.S. government. President Barack Obama has been a BlackBerry devotee.

After originally focusing on corporate or government customers, RIM has expanded into the consumer market in recent years with touch-screen models as the BlackBerry Storm. The consumer market, however, can be more fickle. And there RIM faces tough competition from devices such as Apple’s iPhone, Palm’s Pre and the Motorola Droid. RIM’s stock has dropped 23 percent since September.

The iPhone in particular stole much of RIM’s thunder because of its design cachet and the seemingly limitless supply of programs, known as “apps,” that users can download to customize their phones. Yet the iPhone also has not been as reliable as many users would like. AT&T, the sole carrier of the device in the U.S., has been upgrading its network to reduce the dropped connections and long waits people have encountered when trying to run programs.

Although RIM’s service is sold by wireless carriers, RIM manages its messaging network itself. That can improve reliability, but the centralized structure also means that any problems can affect millions of users. BlackBerry service went out at least three times in 2008.

This week’s outage apparently stemmed from a flaw in recently released versions of RIM’s instant messaging software, known as BlackBerry Messenger. On Wednesday, RIM released a new version that resolves the program and encouraged anyone who downloaded or upgraded BlackBerry Messenger since Dec. 14 to upgrade to this latest version.

RIM, which is based in Waterloo, Ontario, apologized for any inconvenience experienced by customers.