Nokia’s powerhouse N97 touchscreen, QWERTY keyboard-packing smartphone may have arrived to mixed reviews, but its new, rescaled Nokia N97 Mini stablemate offers a refreshed take on the device.

Its ‘Mini’ moniker doesn’t mean this is a heavily stripped down version of the original N97, however.

While it does pare down some elements of the N97 – such as a smaller screen and reduced internal flash memory from 32GB to 8GB – the N97 Mini is still a big hitter in the pure feature count department.

The N97 Mini is a full touchscreen smartphone device, running on Nokia’s Symbian S60 5th Edition platform – previously seen on recent models like the N97 and 5800 XpressMusic.

It has a 3.2-inch display, and has a slide-out full QWERTY keyboard with a tilting screen, and, geared up to be a web-orientated multimedia device, it supports high-speed HSDPA mobile data as well as Wi-Fi connectivity.

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While Motorola might have been feeling pretty happy about actually releasing a phone again in the Dext, it clearly wasn’t the handset to re-launch the brand. So step forward the Milestone (Droid to our US users), the latest Android phone – but can it be Moto’s greatest?

The first thing you’ll notice about the Motorola Milestone is the build quality – compare it to some Android phones out there and you’ll feel that it’s much better than the plasticky options available from some companies (including itself – the Dext had an element of low quality about it).

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The latest addition to the Nokia family is the first device running Maemo 5, a new OS that takes the best of Nokia’s internet tablet range and stuffs it into a phone-sized chassis. Featuring a huge 3.5-inch screen and full slide-out QWERTY keyboard, it’s also packing a seriously strong engine under the hood to power things along. Will the N900 shed the ageing image of Symbian and bring Nokia to the next level to match the likes of the iPhone?

The first thing you notice about the N900 is its size. It’s certainly hefty at 110.9 x 59.8 x 18mm, and the weight of 181g means it’s not going to win any slimming contests either. But it’s worth pointing out that Nokia hasn’t once said that the N900 is a phone, a successor to the N97 or anything along those lines – it sees it as super-charged internet tablet with phone capabilities, rather than the other way around.

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Compare the pain of dragging three thickset Booker Prize candidates to the south of France with you with the 220g weight of the Sony Reader Pocket Edition and you’re halfway to understanding the appeal of eBooks.

But with Amazon’s Kindle arriving in the UK imminently, should you burn your bookshelves just yet?

Small, light and very good looking are three ways to accurately describe Sony’s gorgeous device. It’s just one centimetre thick and the screen is a pleasure to behold.

It measures 5 inches diagonally, and despite the low sounding resolution of 800×600, text displays much more crisply than it does on the finest LCD.

Better yet, because the Pocket Edition uses E Ink, it only draws power from the battery when it’s asked to refresh the screen. That means you can leave it on the same page almost indefinitely and the battery won’t die – Sony claims the battery lasts up to “nearly” 6,800 page turns.

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Archos is usually the first name on the lips of avowed video junkies, but the French company’s media players have often been hamstrung by arcane menus and fiddly interfaces.

So the Archos 5 Internet Tablet, which runs Google’s lovely Android OS is, in theory, a match made in PMP heaven. With its huge 4.8 in, it also nicely fills the void between big-screen mobiles and small-screen netbooks.

A giant among Androids
That screen means that this is the largest production device to run Google’s Android mobile OS to date and, with an 800Mhz processor, also the fastest. A promising start.

Video, as you’d expect from an Archos PMP, is highly defined across 4.8in of screen territory and moving-image prowess is second to none. But there’s more than one trick to this slender black pony.

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A poptart of a mobile phone

It shows how far the mobile world has come when even the most budget-friendly

phones can pack some touchscreen action. We’ve seen a few devices try and go

down the smartphone route on the cheap (the HTC Tattoo) and some offering bog-

standard touch at rock-bottom prices (Orange Vegas we are looking at you), but

LG’s latest money friendly endeavour, the LG Pop, tries to bridge the gap

between price and functionality.

Popping on to the scene for a snip under £100, the LG GD510 Pop has a

surprising amount of decent features on offer. On-board there’s a 3.2-megapixel

camera, a 3-inch WQVGA screen, wireless FM radio and expandable MicroSD memory.

But it’s also surprising the lack of features it houses, some that you’ve come

to expect on even the most standard of devices –3G and to a lesser extent Wi-Fi

are both missing in action. Size-wise the phone is the Kylie of the mobile

world: small but perfectly formed.

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Samsung’s latest flagship handset, the Samsung Jet S8000, was released to massive fanfare around the world, and the General Manager for the UK said that he thought it was better than the Apple iPhone 3GS – but can a non-smartphone really compete?

The Samsung Jet S8000 is billed as ‘Smarter than Smartphone’, a direct comment on the fact that while it uses Samsung’s proprietary feature-phone UI, the TouchWiz 2.0 OS, it still packs some mean hardware under the hood.

And we’re not just being complimentary of the specs by saying that, we’re talking an industry-leading 800MHz processor powering the performance from a dinky frame (108.9 x 53.5 x 11.9mm) on a 3.1-inch AMOLED screen.

While it’s hard to see where this might rival the iPhone in the mobile phone market, bar having a touchscreen, it’s certainly cheaper than most of its smartphone rivals, with users getting a free phone and paying less on their contract and up to £150 less to pick up the handset SIM free.

The first thing that hits you when you pick up the Samsung Jet S8000 is just how small it is. While the dimensions will give you an idea just how dinky it is, it’s very hard to describe just how diminutive this feels in the hand.

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Sony Ericsson has brought out another version of its Xperia line up, the Xperia X2, and hopes to capture the interest of those looking for a phone that crosses the line between business and leisure.

The new phone echoes the design of the original X1, but improves in nearly every area, with Sony Ericsson taking the lead on construction for the new X2.

The new phone is a compact device with a slide out QWERTY keyboard, and the panels system developed for the original X1 also remains.

The build quality of the X2 is actually pretty high – it feels plasticky but not in a cheap way, and the design is such that it fits nicely in the hand for one finger use, but slides out with a pleasant action to reveal the full QWERTY keyboard.

There’s an 8.1MP camera on the back with single LED flash, although it’s more a high-end bit of hardware bolted onto a business phone, as it doesn’t carry the full CyberShot branding or anything (although that doesn’t mean it’s a poor effort).

And for navigation there’s now an optical trackpad, like that seen in the recent BlackBerry Bold 9700, and for the most part it allows some pretty simple navigation through the phone.

The phone is based on Windows Mobile 6.5, but like most manufacturers Sony Ericsson has reskinned the OS heavily, while maintaining the raw power it packs.

The bright and wide OLED screen is resistive, which means use of a stylus is mandatory for some elements.

As we said, the panels system is again used here – you can have nine on view at once, and each of them ranges from a full Android-a-like home screen with icons to place everywhere, to a heavily optimised YouTube interface.

And if that’s not enough for you, there are 25 in all, so you can select your favourites as and when you please.

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Sony’s first PlayStation Portable PSP handheld gaming console was first announced at E3 way back in 2003 and first arrived in UK stores in September 2005.

Fast forward four and a bit years and Sony has finally released a pocket-sized version of the PSP, dropping the hugely unpopular Universal Media Disc (UMD) format in favour of digital downloads via its online store.

The PSP was Sony’s attempt to capitalise on the massive popularity of its PlayStation 2 while moving across into a new market – and one that was pretty much owned by its number one competitor in the gaming space, Nintendo.

And while it’s easy with the benefit of hindsight to say that Nintendo’s ‘disruptive’ strategy with its lower-cost, dual touch-screen device has proven to be far more popular than Sony’s notably higher-spec and costlier option, the truth is that Sony has still managed to carve out a significant market for itself with the sleeker, faster and sexier PSP.

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