7 things you need to know about the Huawei W1.
Aug 05The one thing more obscure than the Huawei brand name is probably the knowledge on how to pronounce it. From a western tongue twisting Hoo-Ya-Wey to a mandarin tinted ‘Waah-Weej’ it becomes clear that this Chinese technological behemoth still has some marketing to do in the western world. (If only to end the bickering on how to pronounce it). However : Huawei speaks not to us in fancy commercials on tv (or a pronunciation lesson on Youtube) Huawei speaks to us with their range of products. Where the company used to be but a shady side-brand that would manufacture for other brands and suppliers, they now step into the limelight and present themselves as one of the major runners up to give Apple, Sony, Nokia and Samsung something to worry about at night. Its not because Huawei is not on every billboard that they don’t make decent products : The Huawei W1 we had in our hands is the puddings proof.
Specs.
The Ascend W1 is a “Windows Phone”. A four inch IPS display with a resolution of 480 by 800 and a Qualcomm dual core snapdragon 1.2 gigahertz processor. It comes with 4 gigabyte of onboard storage, the ability to pimp said storage with an SD card and it has 512 megabytes of ram. It has a 5 megapixel front facing camera and a rear facing camera with VGA resolution. There is of course wifi, Bluetooth, 3g (no lte) and you can even call other people on the phone with it. To give you a frame of reference : we compare the device against Nokias Lumia 620 which is a little more “abundant” in these regions.
1. Look and feel. The W1 is a rectangular black slate, just like every phone on the market today. But with that being said, what you do notice right of the bat, is that its fairly thin, light but well balanced, and offers an ‘edge’ over the Nokia Lumia when it comes to screen protection. With that I mean that the screen has a little “border” around it that keeps it from scratching when you place the phone upside down. (Where the Nokia comes with the “glass on top” design). The back of the W1 is slightly rubberized giving an awkward but nice sensation of having something ‘tough’ in your hand while being elegant at the same time. The “thinner” body of the W1 feels nicer to hold that the slightly more bulky 620 with its sharper edges. Design-wise the W1 is not going be in the Louvre anytime soon, but both in your pocket and your hand it feels nice
The rubberized back of the W1 against the slightly thicker back of the 620.
2. Speed.
We put both the Nokia 620 and the W1 side by side and launched the browser, the phone application, the store and played with the tiles. The 620 is slightly smoother when it comes to scrolling through your tiles, but on opening applications .. the W1 wins. In all honesty its a top-gear style photo finish to see the difference but applications do pop up a fraction of a second faster on the W1 then on its Scandinavian counterpart.
3. Screen.
Although the W1 comes with a nice 480 by 800 Ips display, the brightness and color resilience is not that awesome. With both devices on auto-brightness, the W1’s colors were slightly duller then the Nokias. These are things you notice ( and perhaps only notice) during comparisons but they are there nonetheless. Screen brightness and color depth help you use your phone outdoor and read emails comfortably instead of peering at your smartphone like a pensioner.
The W1 and the 620 side by side.
4.Camera.
Well, we will let the results speak for themselves here. The W1 takes some more time to focus and shoot, so snapping that picture of “The Flash” changing his underwear might be problematic.
“We love coffee” shot by the W1
The same shot with the Lumia 620.
5.Battery
Because of the “longer” shape of the phone, Huawei managed to cram in a larger battery into the phone, resulting in a fairly good +1 day battery life.
The W1 (bottom) and the 620 (top)
6.Apps
If there is such a thing as “Stock Windows Phone” .. The W1 has it. No extra “Nokia Apps” , no added “ Samsung Store” Just plain Windows phone and the Windows phone store. This might be the one place where Huawei chooses a different strategy than its competitors, opting out of using “branded software” as a selling point. This is a tricky bargain as the Windows App ecosphere still needs to grow and gain maturity. But for those of you who know where to look for your apps, or can live without Nokia’s City lens and Gps software (which is in all honesty, excellent) the W1 is the perfect platform to start.
7.Price
The Nokia Lumia 620 is sold at about 215 euro’s in stores, where the W1 eats only 179 one-euro coins out of your account. When we look at what you get for this price : its not bad, not bad at all. As an “entry phone” for the Windows Phone market this is a surprisingly good “bang for your buck” phone. Ok, its no iPhone 5, its no Nokia 920 .. but in the end it comes down to what you need. If the form factor is OK for you and you prefer a practical little smartphone to an over-pimped sub-tablet .. The W1 is perfect for you. The question that you want to ask yourself is : Do I want to spend the extra 35 euro’s on a Nokia ? Is the fact that Nokia offers up some stock apps like navigation and the “city lens” worth that extra money ? Or am I a geek who knows the ways of the force and kind find my own apps in the store ?
Conclusion.
We like the W1. Its a decent entry model phone with a fairly good screen, a fairly fast processor, a fairly good camera and a very good price. This phone is either for the geek on a budget who knows where to find the right apps, or for my mum in law, who just needs to do some basic stock functions like email, Facebook, texting and calling. The W1 is not a cheap disappointing up-sell tool: It holds its value in the market being Huawei’s step up to bigger things .. both for the consumer as for the company.
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Sync all your iTunes playlists to your Android phone with Tunesync
Jul 30The thing with proprietary software solutions, is that they are great. Everything tends to work smoothly together right up to the point where you decide to wander off the beaten path of supplier XYZ. A couple of years ago I made the crucial mistake of pouring my entire music collection into iTunes. Now, some 10 000 songs later .. its still in there. Being totally OCD I have organized all my tracks into nice little playlists and enjoy my tunes in the “Apple walled garden”. Whether I am playing them from the Mac, sharing out the iTunes library over iTunes to my other macs, blasting them from the Airport express speakers or syncing them to my other i-Devices.
But a couple of weeks ago I could not help myself myself and crawled over the walled garden into android territory with my purchase of a Galaxy Note 2. And accessing my delicately curated iTunes library from THIS device turns out to be an near impossible task. The deep crevasse that divides me from listening to my tunes on my “droid” consists of an incompatibility to sync with iTunes (only IOS devices of course) and the total inability to get the music on my Android in an organised form. Sure I can browse the filestructure of my iTunes library and copy over files to the SD card on my Phone .. but iTunes has “reorganized” my music into folders according to artist .. not according to playlist.
Enter Tunesync. A two-part application app in the android store that saves the day. The deal is simple. Download the server part of their app and install it on your Mac that is running iTunes. Download the CLIENT side of their application and install that to your Android device. Make sure both are on the same wifi network and be amazed !
Tunesync detected my (massive) iTunes library and started indexing the playlists right away. After I selected the playlists I wanted to have on my Android it started to copy over the tracks AND the playlist order in my Androids music collection. 20 minutes later I had all the grooves I needed on my Note2. Tunesync regularly “checks” if the playlists are still up to date and “updates” them whenever I connect or start up the app. I had expected some glitches and on one occasion Tunesync had given me all my playlists .. with no tracks inside ( it erases and re-copies all the tracks on every sync instead of doing an incremental) but when I retried the sync it worked flawlessly.
Tunesync does one thing and it does it well, and the hilarious part is , it does it better then Apples iTunes-IOS wireless sync ! The app is 4.99 in the Play store and worth every dime.
Tunesync is available from the Play Store.
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Jay’s top five must have Windows Phone Apps.
Jul 23
- Kids Korner (a pivotal function on windowsphone 8, if you have kids with sticky fingers u will love it as well) http://j.mp/18sqrFw
- Netflix (this is vital on long car rides, to again please the children)
- Twitter ( I am huge on social media, being a stay at home dad, it helps pass the time)
- Facebook ( See reason above )
- Instance (Instagram client) who needs to wait for the official app this works just as well *note, does not support video*
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Samsungs “John Snow” of “Slabtops” and other interesting mutations at the #ativ #premiere.
Jun 21The house was pretty packed yesterday in London for Samsungs ‘Ativ premiere 2013’ event. Press, partners and people from Samsung from all parts of the globe milled around in a mostly darkened hall, patiently anticipating the new product releases the company was about to give from its giant stage that was to be the focus of tonights events.
Staring at Galaxies.
To be honest : We did wonder what the fuss was all about. Earlier this week Samsung had already leaked the specs of its “Galaxy Zoom” : Its recent addition to the Galaxy Smartphone line that was probably invented by the Hulk himself. In his unstoppable urge ‘Hulk-Smash’ everything together, the Galaxy Zoom was born after they gave the green monster an S4 in one hand and a point & shoot in the other. When the green guy got the order to “Smash” them together, the Galaxy Zoom was born. In short : An S4 with an actual optical zoom. Future owners of this device who want to carry this in their pockets might get the line ” Is that an S4 Zoom in your pocket or are you really really happy to see me ? ” Where the S4 Zoom “should” be a phone that feels like a point and shoot, the ‘other’ Hulk-Smash experiment leaves no room for interpretation. The Samsung Galaxy NX is a powerful DSLR (with interchangeable lenses) tied to an Android OS and a 4G connection. For those paparazzi who want to snap up that money shot of Lindsey Lohan latest nipple-slip and send it to the Sun’s headquarters : they can now do it all from one device.
“The John Snow of Slabtops”
Samsung definitely has the time and the recourses to throw ideas around and see if they stick, that much is for certain. Their growing market penetration (and the fact people are dragging their feet in Cupertino) gives them the space and the money to do so. But when they unveiled their Samsung Ativ Q, our initial response was “Meh ?”. A 13 inch “Tablet” that folds its screen and keyboard into multiple kama-sutra like positions is nothing new. Dell tried this once and came up with the horrible “Inspiron Duo”. The specs of Samsungs Ativ Q did raise some eyebrows as it sported a higher resolution then most Retina Macbooks ( 3200 by 1800 on a 13 inch display) and apparently had an “outdoor friendly screen” as its brightness would supposedly outshine the sun. For those who have stumpy digits (Hello Mr Hulk ?) you could also operate the thing with your S-Pen (pronounced “arse-pen”). Where Samsung DID surprise us was with the fact that this thing booted two operating systems side by side. On the one hand it comes with Samsungs latest ‘mutation’ of Android, on the other hand it comes with a “Full Blown” copy of Windows 8 (and Samsung throws in a free copy of Office 2013 to boot). This does make it the “John Snow” of Samsungs presentation. This ‘Bastard Son’ was born out of Samsungs monogamous wedlock with Android. Instead of being short, stumpy and ugly .. it might be the one thing that can save us all from the wildlings of … Oh wait .. I should put down my copy of Game of Thrones RIGHT NOW. What I want to say is : With “multiple” operating systems, AND the ability to run Android apps IN WINDOWS .. this thing might be a sliders dream. As for pricing and power consumption : we do not know whats coming. Perhaps this thing needs chewing-gum-sized strips of raw plutonium to run over an hour at ‘full power’. As for Samsungs heralded 8 hours battery life ? We will see.
The rest.
Overall there were some other 8 inch tablets, the Ativ Tab3, running Windows 8 (full version) but their 64 gig drives and 2 gigs of ram will probably only please a few. Samsung took a stab at cross breeding this tablet with an iMac and came up with a pretty but wide-bezzeled “Ativ One 5” and also pushed out some interesting notebooks for people with fat and thinner wallets. But the “John Snow” of Slabtops .. was the highlight of the evening.
Conclusion.
Does “Hulk Smash” work ? Perhaps. The tricky thing with creating “crossover” devices is that our human minds do still think in patterns of one or the other. When C is the sum of A and B its gonna take us a while to get used to C… Until then we see ‘C’ as A+ or B- .. Are you any good at math ? Keep up ! .. So smashing phones and camera’s together is not a guaranteed success right away, But hey … A couple of years ago “Hulk” smashed a computer and a phone together .. and now look at us.
In the end the writing is on the wall : The lines between our devices is thinning. Laptops, Tablets, Phones, Camera’s, Desktops .. they are all starting to morph together. Wether you “undermine” a DSLR by turning it into a phone or “overpimp” an Android Slate by giving it Windows 8 Pro .. you are wading in murky depts. Some of these mutations might die in childbirth, yet some of them might grow strong and redefine their very product name. Only time will tell. And time is money .. and money is something that Samsung has plenty to burn …
We will of course be offering up a full video coverage of this event in the upcoming week .. We just need to “Smash” it together.
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Let your Android phone handle your missed calls.
Jan 23
I must admit , if I were to keep a record of the number of phone calls I receive on my phone every month .. it would be a very SHORT list. It took me a couple of years (and it was about as hard as circus-training wild cats) but I have gotten to the point where the people in my social circles no longer use the telephone to get in touch with me. They have learned (through ruthless conditioning) that “Calling” Knightwise does not mean you get to ‘talk’ to Knightwise, but using ANY other form of communication (email – im – voxer etc) CAN get them connected to me.
But still , there are those times where somebody calls you and you are either not around to pick up the phone, you are in the shower or you look at the name of the caller ID and think you would rather eat rusty nails then answer the call. So you let it go to voicemail, you have to call back to your voicemail, you might have to call them back etc etc. The perfect solution (for me at least) would be telling the person to “quit calling me and shoot me and email”. But that would be rude. So I let my phone handle that for me.
Enter AutoSMSreplier. A horribly simple app that does one thing well. Whenever a call is “missed” , Auto-Sms-Replier will automatically send a precomposed text message back to the caller ! You can choose the message that needs to be sent (in my case “Hello Noob, no time to chitchat, shoot me an email and my thumbs will take to you” .. or something like that) The app will show you the calls you missed , and who the ‘auto text messages’ have been sent to.
AutoSmSreplier is an android app, its available in the play store .. and its free.
So : how do YOU handle missed calls ? Tell us in the comments section.
