New cell phone and smart phone Ratings for Black Friday

The Samsung Instinct HD

They may not be among the most sought-after electronics products for the Black Friday weekend, but cell phones and smart phones will still be on shopping lists of a hefty 10 percent of gear shoppers in the days following Thanksgiving, according to the latest Consumer Reports Shopping Poll. And we’ve just updated our Ratings, available to subscribers, to add several models to what is already our largest-ever array of tested wireless phones.

Here’s a rundown of interesting capabilities and select test findings on four of the more interesting new phones. Clicking on their names takes you to the model page for the phone, where you’ll find additional information, including some specs and a model overview. (Subscribers who are logged in will also see full test results.) Prices are with a two-year contract from the indicated carrier, including rebates.

Samsung Instinct HD, Sprint ($250)
Though pricey for a cell phone, this is one heck of an image-taker, with the best video capabilities we've seen on any phone, even they’re not quite up to the high-def quality Samsung claims (images look more like those from a decent pocket camcorder). In our tests, the Sprint was no slouch as a still camera, either, and boasts a flash, manual ISO settings, face and smile detection and multi-shot mode.

Garmin Nuvifone G60, AT&T ($300)
Made by a leading name in GPS, and with one of the best navigation applications we've seen on any phone, this talented cell phone a fine stand-in for a dedicated portable navigation device (PND). It boasts spoken turn-by-turn directions and street names, along with automatic re-routing, preloaded maps of North America, a trip computer, and a helpful "Where am I?" option for emergency assistance.

First Impressions: Samsung Behold II smart phone

Samsung Behold II

Usually successor phones bear a fairly close resemblance to their earlier namesakes. But the Samsung Behold II, $230, available Wednesday from T-Mobile, looks and behaves little like the first Behold.

While that predecessor is an advanced phone with touch screen and a 4.9-megapixel camera with advanced controls, the Behold II is a smart phone, with a larger screen (3.2 in. vs. 3 in.) and more buttons at its base for accessing the phone's more advanced features. Measuring 4.57 in. x 2.2. in. x .48 in., the Behold II is about average in size for a smart phone. It includes built-in Wi-Fi, a full Web browser, virtual QWERTY keyboard and a 2GB MicroSD storage card, which you can upgrade to 16GB. The phone runs on the Android operating system, but the older 1.5 version. That aging OS lacks the native support for Microsoft Exchange Server, Facebook, and some of the advanced e-mail capabilities built into the 2.0 version of Android found the Motorola Droid, Samsung Moment, and other phones.

Our telecom engineers are currently testing the press sample we received from Samsung, but I've already had a chance to use the phone for a few hours. Overall, I found the phone decent enough, though not up to the standard of the Droid and some of the other smart phones that have hit the market recently, which offer better performance for less money. Here are my first impressions:

Display. Its 3.2-in. active matrix organic light emitting diode (AMOLED) display is pretty sharp: about 185 pixels per inch. Images seemed crisp and the colors were vibrant. Videos, including those I shot with the phone's camera, appeared smooth and sharp.

Phone controls. Where some smart phones lack hard phone buttons, and bury virtual phone controls on the desktop, the Behold has a well-located phone button on the bottom left corner of the phone. The virtual dial buttons were also easy to see and use, too, and buttons for voice mail, speed dial, contacts, and call log were conveniently displayed on the bottom.

The elements of Apple style

Apple’s computers are elegantly styled by anyone’s measure, and the careful—one might say obsessive—design extends even to the out of box experience. The packaging is ergonomically designed to smooth and guide the setup process. On the newest iMacs, each provided part is snugly wrapped in clear plastic with easy-to-peel tabs for removal. (This contrasts with the fingernail-defying protective film on a lot of other PCs; an HP all-in-one we are testing had six separate peel-off pieces on the mouse alone, and eight on the main unit.)

The manual and system DVDs are cached in two DVD-sized slipcases, one labeled “Everything Mac” and the other “Everything Else.” The silicone power cord unrolls with no kinks, and the back of the system unit is as clean-looking as the front. No brand names, feature lists, or “Designed for Windows 7” or “Intel inside” type stickers distract you from the basic functionality, save for the understated Apple logo. There’s a luxurious feel to the whole package.

That’s not to say there haven’t been notable gaffes in Apple’s designs through the years. The puck mouse on the original iMac was universally derided, and some people don’t like other Apple mice for various reasons. Some Mac laptops got much too hot in use, or had their wrist-rest surface discolor. And before Apple improved their batteries, there were lots of complaints of premature failures or even batteries puffing up like balloons. Their keyboards lack a number pad and have small cursor keys. And the iMac’s minimalistic design places all connections on the rear, making it a bit of a chore to plug in a USB flash drive or an audio headset.

But Apple’s product design is still a tough act to follow, if the industry’s clamor to create Apple-look-alikes is any measure. We have yet to see an MP3 player as coveted as the iPod line, nor have the bulk of iPhone users longed for much besides possibly better cell coverage. And, Mac computers remain the alternative to the Windows PC world that people choose most. —Dean Gallea

A look at Apple’s new MacBook and Mac mini

The new Macbook 13-inch laptop

Continuing my look at Apple’s newest computers, here’s my take on the new Macbook 13-inch and Mac mini.

MacBook 13-inch

Apple’s replacement for the 13” plastic-case MacBook keeps the price at an entry-level (for Apple) $1,000. They’ve given it the large glass-surface, multi-touch, gesture-enabled trackpad of its bigger siblings. They’ve also rounded the case’s edges, switched to an LED-backlit screen, and installed a non-user-replaceable, 10 percent higher-capacity battery with twice the claimed service life (1000 charges) and two hours longer claimed charge life (7 hours).

A couple things were dropped from the previous model: the external battery-charge indicator, the FireWire port, and the remote-control pickup. I guess Apple doesn’t consider this a media-centric laptop.

Under the hood, Apple has bumped up the processor from 2.13 GHz to a 2.26 GHz Core-2 Duo. The hard drive went up from 160 GB to 250 GB. The weight has gone down about 5 ounces to 4.7 lbs.

Some nice touches: The cover snaps closed magnetically, and has a thin, soft-plastic gasket around the edge that might help keep moisture from reaching the keyboard in transit. The seamless bottom panel is actually plastic-coated aluminum, which should help spread out the heat and reduce hot spots on your lap. The top surface of the wrist-rest area stayed cool in our tests.

All in all, this MacBook is a better value than the prior one: a little faster, a little lighter, a little longer running, and able to hold more stuff.

The new Mac mini

Mac mini

Apple’s latest entry in the compact desktop arena hasn’t changed on the outside, but has the expected configuration improvements inside. The Mac mini $600 model goes up from the previous 2 GHz to a 2.26 GHz Core-2 Duo processor, doubles the memory to 2 GB, and expands the hard drive from 120GB to 160GB. It keeps the FireWire 800 port, the generous 5 USB ports (though two are taken if you use a wired keyboard and mouse), and the mini-DVI port along with the adapter needed to connect a DVI display (you can buy a $19 adaptor for a VGA display.) Apple has added a mini-DisplayPort connector, now standard on Apple PCs, for Apple displays and the few non-Apple displays that can fit it.

For $200 more, the sibling model has a 10 percent faster processor (2.53 GHz), doubles the hard drive to 320GB, and doubles the memory to 4 GB.

The Mac mini remains an enigma, being shipped without a keyboard and mouse, presumably to keep the price low. If you add Apple’s wired ones, the price goes up $100, or you can go wireless for $40 more. You’ll also want speakers if you plan to play music, since the mini’s internal speaker is insipid.

In my next post, I’ll take a further look at the design and style of Apple’s new computers. —Dean Gallea

Droid vs. iPhone: A 10-round bout

[Update: See the author's response to commenters in his follow-up post: "Droid vs. iPhone: Them's fightin' words'" —Ed.]

The Motorola Droid, available today from Verizon for $200 after rebates, is the latest in series of phones, including the Blackberry Storm, T-Mobile G1, and Palm Pre, to be floated as a potential threat to Apple’s iPhone, the undefeated champion of the smart-phone world. Other media who’ve weighed in on the showdown include Walt Mossberg of the Wall Street Journal, Gizmodo, and Engadget.

I liked what I saw when I put a press sample of the Droid through its paces. (See the Droid review here.) Now, as our testers complete their extensive tests on the Droid, here’s my 10-round preliminary take on how the new Verizon smart phone fares against the iPhone 3G S, which remains—at least for now—the highest-rated smart phone in our Ratings (available to subscribers).

Ding ding:

Round 1. Touch screen. Advantage: iPhone. Both phones have highly responsive touch screens. But the iPhone's is multitouch for all functions, allowing you to zoom in and out of photos and Web pages by pinching or spreading your fingers. The Droid has such multitouch functionality only when running certain applications, according to Engadget.

Round 2. Interface. Advantage: Droid. A tough call, since both phones have a terrific icon-based interface that makes finding and launching their many features a snap. However the Droid, which employs the latest 2.0 version of Google’s Android operating system, allows a higher degree of personalization via widgets and other tools, and you put all of your e-mails from different accounts (except Gmail) under one view.

Apple’s new iMacs: A closer look

The new iMac

Amid the hoopla surrounding the release of Windows 7, Apple introduced refreshed lines of iMac computers. We took a look at the 21-1/2 inch model ($1,200 to $1,500) and the 27 inch one ($1,700 to $2,000). (See how we rated previous iMac models in our desktop computer Ratings, available to subscribers.)

Both iMacs have larger displays than their predecessors (20-inch and 24-inch respectively) and come with the latest Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard operating system. They include a newly-designed wireless “Magic Mouse,” and a wireless keyboard, both of which use a Bluetooth connection. (For a glossary of standard computer features, see our free Computer Buying Guide.)

Magic Mouse. This has a touch-sensitive top surface that senses left and right clicks and lets you slide your finger around to scroll a window’s content in any direction. Slide your finger up and down for a normal scroll, or with the “control” key depressed to zoom the whole screen for a closer look. It takes a bit of practice and some independent finger dexterity to use the scrolling, but we were able to get pretty good at it.

The mouse also lets you use a two-finger swipe to navigate back and forth in the Safari web browser, and browse album covers in iTunes and photos in iPhoto. But we couldn’t get that feature to work on either of our iMacs. Apple’s helpline wasn’t able to help us—the products are apparently too new. But we found an Oct 27th software update for the Magic Mouse on Apple’s “support downloads” website that fixed the problem when installed.

Verizon has a star smart phone: Our first impressions of the Motorola Droid

The Motorola Droid, the spunky phone Verizon recently introduced as the anti-iPhone in a barrage of clever commercials, is now in our hands as a press sample. My initial impression? The Droid lives up to its promise as one of the more capable and interesting phones of a busy fall season.

Available from Verizon on November 6 for $199, the Droid has attracted attention initially for being the first phone to offer the “free” beta version of Google Maps Navigation, which provides spoken turn-by-turn directions and other features previously available on phone only at extra cost.

Our Cars blog will be taking a closer look at Google Maps Navigation on the Droid later this week. Meantime, here are other highlights of the phone:

“Raw” implementation of the Android operating system. The Droid employs the latest, 2.0 version of Google’s Android operating system in a different manner than many other Android phones we’ve seen. Phones such as the Motorola Cliq have fine interfaces that sit over Android, and enhance its features and functionality. Droid does Android “raw,” without such customization. It doesn’t suffer for it, however. Instead, the Droid brings out the OS’s capability for personalization via the addition of widgets and other tools.

Mediocrity, thy name is Nuvifone

Garmin Nuvifone
[Image courtesy of Garmin]

It’s amazing how quickly the market for bundled GPS applications has exploded, as my colleague Jeff Bartlett notes on the Consumer Reports Cars Blog. If the Garmin Nuvifone had been released when it was first announced two years ago, it would have been a mobile marvel. A full GPS unit and a phone? Inspired! Unfortunately for Garmin, similarly inspired apps for phones such as the iPhone, Blackberry, and Android came out while it put the finishing touches on the Nuvifone, which is now making an unfashionably late arrival to its own party.

Taken piecemeal, we so far found nothing terribly wrong with the device’s functionality. Our tests of the Nuvifone found it performs commendably as a GPS, on par with standalone units and very similar to the Garmin 265T. It boasts a number of features: spoken street names, a trip computer, pedestrian mode, a higher-end mount, and a “Where am I” emergency option. Premium features such as real-time traffic, gas prices, and weather are available for $5.99 a month. (For the full Nuvifone review from a GPS perspective, see "Garmin Nuvifone G60: First Look.")

On the other side of the Nuvi-coin, there seems to be nothing particularly wrong with its phone. Early tests show it to have very capable phone performance, though it lacks some features common on most phones such as voice command and multimedia messaging. It also runs only on the AT&T network, which has a less-than-stellar rank in our Ratings of wireless carriers (available to subscribers).

And therein lies the Nuvifone’s flaw—it’s just not robust enough as a dual-purpose device to compete with a now saturated smart-phone/GPS market. Its price—$400 (or $300 with rebate)—is another disincentive. Sure, it may do a better job than many of the current iPhone navigation apps out there (many of which we’ve reviewed), but it also lacks the diverse multimedia capabilities of the iPhone, plus the aforementioned basic features that plenty of simple cell phones have offered for a while.

Gokivo GPS: Our review of the iPhone app

The iPhone version of the Gokivo Navigation app.

GPS software for smart phones just keeps rolling off the virtual conveyor belts at companies that develop navigation software. We’ve tested a bunch already—here’s one more, freshly reviewed: the Gokivo Navigator app.

Gokivo is a subscription-based navigation application for your Blackberry or iPhone. We tested the iPhone version, which cost $5 for the initial download plus $10 per month (a non-recurring charge) after a free 30-day trial period. The original download is small, at 2.7 MB. Unlike larger apps that charge a higher one-time fee to download all the maps onto your phone, Gokivo is server-based—like the AT&T Navigator—and loads maps and points of interest dynamically, as you need them.

The Gokivo version we tested, 4.4.2, has text-to-speech (a useful feature increasingly seen on GPS apps), real-time traffic, and the ability to play music while running the app on your iPhone, something not every iPhone app can do.

From our testers, here’s the bottom line:

Gokivo is a viable option for iPhone users seeking navigation guidance, especially those looking just for a short-term solution. But the monthly fee can quickly dwarf the cost of competing applications and even rival the prices of traditional [standalone units] after a year—but without all the features or ease of use. There are benefits to the always-current database, especially with businesses closing or changing hands during the troubled economy. But many users may not find the differences compared to the data in downloaded applications to be worth the monthly charge.

Check out the full review of the Gokivo Navigator. —Nick K. Mandle

Extra Extra: Consumer Reports Electronics Buying Guide is on sale

(Click to enlarge.)

It may be a tad early to start your holiday shopping, but there’s a good chance you’ve at least been thinking about it. Maybe you’ve had a big-ticket gift—like a new TV or home theater—in mind for a while now, but are putting off the purchase till November or December. If it’s sales you’re waiting for, you probably know what you want and how much you’re willing to pay. On the other hand, you might just a teeny bit leery of throwing so much cash at something you know very little about. Which is better: a plasma or LCD TV? Should you upgrade to a Blu-ray player or stick with standard-def DVDs?

If you find yourself in need of expert advice, consider the newest edition of the Consumer Reports Electronics Buying Guide. Inside you’ll find a wealth of information on everything from televisions and computers to smart phones, GPS units, and much more. For each product, the Consumer Reports editors walk you through the basics, explaining what’s available, which features matter, brand profiles, and offering tried-and-true shopping tips.

In addition to product information, the guide offers advice on how to shop smarter, including:

• Netting the best deals online, and protecting yourself when you shop on the Web


• When to repair and when to replace a broken item


• How to haggle effectively


• Finding the best electronics retailer based on our comprehensive annual survey


• How to save—and what to be wary of—with refurbished or open-box products on store shelves


• Where to get free office software, free computer security programs, and more useful freeware