In the summer of 2006, Voxtel, known as mobile and cordless phones proizvoditelnitsa, officially announced the release of WM-market of smartphones and communicators. This news came as a surprise, but did not cause much excitement. First signs of Voxtel has a budget smartphone W210, which has been appreciated for a very attractive ratio of its price and capabilities. Did this unit in late September. Behind him came out and the first communicator Voxtel W420, also featuring a good mix of features for the alleged money. Announcement of the third one WM-devices, Voxtel W740, took a few days ago, and the sample (by the way, engineering, and completely ready for sale) has appeared in our editorial board a few days before the event. Again, exclusive, however, for this you are already familiar:) The main trump Voxtel to entry communicators has aggressively low price of the proposed solutions. Voxtel W210 smartphone at the time of occurrence was worth about $ 300, a communicator Voxtel W420 - a little over $ 400. Newly-born Voxtel W740, sales of which have not yet begun, will be available for about $ 500 (13,999 rubles). If we talk about positioning, then in front of us the middle class with a value approaching the price of low-end models. And most surprisingly, this device, despite the not too prominent hardware power, produces a very good impression. Its strengths - a 4-megapixel camera with autofocus, an unusually compact dimensions and, as we just said, very reasonable price. Well, the opening was delayed slightly, it's time to start a detailed examination.
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Specifications: - Operating system: Windows Mobile 5.0 Phone Edition AKU2.2
- Processor: Texas Instruments OMAP730, 200 MHz
- Memory: 64 MB RAM and 128 MB Flash ROM
- Screen: 2.4 "transflective TFT, 240x320, 65536 colors
- Memory Expansion: microSD (Trans-flash)
- Wireless Interfaces: Bluetooth 1.2, GSM 850/900/1800/1900, GPRS Class 10
- Camera: 4 megapixel, autofocus
- Battery: Li-Ion, 1100 mAh
- Audio: microphone, two speakers, 2.5 mm stereo headphone jack
- Dimensions and weight: 110 x 55 x 15 mm and 120 g.
Traditionally, briefly go through the main points. First, let us say a few words about the TI OMAP 730. This stone is, as you know, very economical and cheap, has a positive effect on the cost of the device and battery life. True, it has to pay for the rather weak performance, which, however, usually is enough to perform basic tasks. The second important point - the screen. Recall that the first company that decided to reduce the size of the device by cutting (up to 2.8 inch) diagonal screen, was HTC, which released a platform Magician (Qtek s100/s110, i-mate JAM, T-Mobile MDA Compact). Since this size - a sort of standard for the majority of smartphones. Voxtel went further and reduced the display of up to 2.4 inches. Good or bad, try to figure below. The third key point - the size of Voxtel W740. In this sense, our hero does not yield to the modern smartphone, and even conventional mobile tubes. And among the communicators, and is aiming to do is an absolute record. Indeed, in this regard in the competition it can be written (and then only with great reserve) Qtek s200 and a few older models. Among the latest novelties there are no devices that have the elegance could be compared with the W740. As a result, at the moment Voxtel W740 - the smallest device on the basis of Windows Mobile. Oh, and the fourth difference - is, of course, an advanced built-in camera W740, which may well replace the owner of a bar of soap budget.
Supplied
Cost (or close to this class) communicators rarely pleased with the rich user supplied. It is the prerogative of the top models. So this complete lack of any bonus in the box came as no surprise.
The set - the minimum standard set: - stylus
- Mains Charger
- sync cable connector miniUSB
- Wired Headset
- CD with accompanying software
- user manual.
Stylus for W740 - rather thin, telescopic, with a plastic tip and the main metal part. To find fault with its execution is very difficult. Can be noted that decomposes it somehow too easily, while most of these designs require for this little effort. In the case Voxtel w740 quite literally wave the pen. Silo located in the lower right corner of the device. Problems with removing the pen from him you will not. Headset from the category of "normal." Standard headphones, earplugs, issuing a bad sound, fitted with a pin for fixing the wires on my shirt and answer button. For the volume control has no place, and the plug has a cross section of 2.5 mm. Nothing more if they wanted to say about the headset can not. So let us move on.
Design
Visually Voxtel W740 is very good and if not design a keyboard unit, a common style (and light!) Which "podsmotren" from phone Motorola, we would not refrain from loud epithets. Looks pretty strict machine and at the same time effectively: black hull, straighter lines, lack of any designer frills. The screen is surrounded by a thin glossy insert that visually makes it a bit more, which in our case does not seem superfluous. At the bottom of the screen placed rare today touch buttons that add the device some personality and a kind of charm.
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Separately want to mention housing W740 - virtually all metal, except for a U-shaped plastic inserts on the front side and the area surrounding the hardware keys. Despite this, the machine is very easy - just 120 g and dimensions are also pleased. With full confidence we can say that this is the most compact device. Its dimensions are 110 x 55 x 15 mm. For comparison: the parameters of the smart phone Nokia E60 - 115 x 49 x 17 mm, Nokia N72 - 109 x 53 x 22, and Qtek s200 (aka HTC Prophet) - 108 x 58 x 18. True, the width of our hero is not shown quite honestly. We measured: the thickness of the body without acting on the rear of a camera - 15 mm, and with it - 17 mm. W740 still get a little leaner same s200 and much easier. The front side of the case presented quite commonplace and familiar set of elements. Central to this is the display in the lower part of which is a thin strip of soft keys. Under this track are the hardware buttons: four-way navigation key with inscribed in the center of the confirmation button, and the phone buttons "call" and "lights out". Soft keys not, but their lack of fully compensate for the aforementioned touch buttons. A total of five. The first reason that duplicates the functions of the "green tubes", the second is the mail application, third - contacts, the fourth - Windows Media Player, and finally, the fifth takes you back to the screen Today. The same, however, can be done by clicking the "lights out".
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Returning to the hardware buttons, say that their style and technical design copied from the best-selling phones from Motorola. However, they are well fit into the overall style of the communicator. But implementing them is almost impossible to find fault, except that coverage may not be too persistent.Cruising the buttons - a small, but clicking is pretty tight and snaps, allowing tactile determine whether a key is pressed. Backlight is soft and does not hurt your eyes in the dark. It's a pity only that she could not manage: it automatically shuts off after two seconds after a keypress. Above the screen you will notice a notch voice dynamics, decorated with silver inserts. Frankly, where we expect to see the usual LED indicators. However, they did not have anywhere else. On the one hand, small problem. But on the other, for example, your obedient servant, which is hardly inattentive man who forgot to turn off Bluetooth when testing time mode MP3 playback. As a result, had to swear loudly and run the test again. But it is a trifle. Far worse would be if you forget to turn off this voracious module and the battery would have sat right in the middle of the day. So with the indicator (at least one) worse just would not. Hopefully, the manufacturer will consider it in the future. By the way, continuing to talk about something that is not worth mentioning places without a single button for on / off. Her partially replaces the button lights out. With its long-pressing device completely off. A transition to standby mode automatically after a specified period of time. Not here, and the keys to a "soft reset". Essentially turning off the device and is a soft-rezet. But the hard reset is carried out from a menu of programs, in which there is a corresponding label.
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Will continue to inspect the building from all sides. On the right side wall is a pair of keys for volume control. As usual, when talking with them by voice speaker volume control, and in standby mode - a system. Rather, the system: the Voxtel W740 are two of them, but that we shall speak below. Under the volume control is key to activate the built-in camera and the shutter to the realization that there is a serious remark. As you know, the W740 has a camera auto-focusing. This means that the shutter key works the same way as in conventional cameras: first, we just pritaplivaem her for guidance on the focus, then click through for the shutter. So here, this key has a very small stock of progress and tactile difficult to determine whether it is recessed enough to focus or not. Further pressing is carried out even tighter, resulting in what can inadvertently pull the hand that negatively affect the quality of images at high shutter speeds.
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On the left side of the case, we have an expansion slot and a headset connector, which are covered with plastic plugs.
The upper edge is completely empty, but at a lower connector is miniUSB, serves to connect the charger and sync cable, and cut the microphone and stylus holder. On removing the pen, as we have said, no problem.
And finally, the back side of the case. Here is camera lens, and LED lights for it and the battery cover. The lens is placed on a small ledge, which adds a couple extra millimeters of thickness of the shell.I must say that the "eye" camera does not covered, and especially its location only increase the likelihood of mechanical damage.
The battery cover - a metal, rather thin, but durable as the body as a whole. Extracted it tugovat, but almost adjoins tightly, without creating a single reason for the appearance of backlashes. Hidden under the battery the most usual slot for SIM-card.
Summing up the interim, we say that, despite some minor inconveniences, design and ergonomics Voxtel W740 is not bad. Communicator looks quite stylish, we have quite convenient, and its size can carry it anywhere. By the way, Voxtel W740 - the apparatus, which is very flatteringly the fair sex. And if any visitor immediately gets the title of "brick" or - even worse - "Pandora", the novelty of Voxtel was greeted with an unusually warm.
Screen
According to its physical size screen Voxtel W740 is similar to the communicator display Gigabyte s-Smart i128, and g-Smart i120. To date, these devices - the smallest among the display of such devices. No inconvenience as a small diagonal does not deliver, even on the contrary, due to lower point size, the picture looks much smoother. And for the ordinary user of mobile handset display Voxtel W740 and does seem high. Characteristics of the screen are the same: a resolution of 240 x 320, 65536 colors. Viewing angles - very bad, the contrast is consistent with the latest standards.
As for brightness, it is regulated in six steps, including the zero division. Minimum level can quite comfortably read the text on the screen in the dark without eyestrain. A maximum should be sufficient to maintain readability in bright sunlight.
By the way, a strip-regulator for the other is clearly displayed and the number of divisions on which the slider.
Speed and memory
All the advantages and disadvantages of the processor Texas Instruments OMAP730 you should be well known. About them repeatedly stated in our materials and we briefly told about them at the beginning of the review. Will not be repeated, but before proceeding to the results of testing and analysis, share subjective impressions. When viewing contacts, notes and tasks, as well as sorting and other standard kommunikatornyh loads processor behaves quite normally. Special slowing down is not noticed. When making calls, e-mail and the Internet all too smoothly. Tangible "brake" can be seen only when you open large text documents, Excel-tables or working with graphics. For example, saving pictures from a camera takes a W740 for about two seconds, and image scaling to the original size when viewing could take 10 seconds. Of course, in this case about a comfortable viewing video or the ability to play modern games, however. However, for all of us here will say the tests. Evaluation of the overall performance of traditionally carried out using a test suite Spb Benchmark from the company Spb Software House, in the case which, as you know, paying attention only to be results-points and CPU Index Graphics Index, respectively, demonstrating the overall performance of the processor and the speed of the graphics.
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Some tests have been errors, but that does not stop telling us that the performance of W740 is lower than the Qtek s200, which is set OMAP 850 processor with a similar frequency. And if the s200 was not much rapidity, that in our case the situation was slightly worse - the device is not strong, but lagged behind the latter. Now let's see what will show us new from Voxtel when testing the speed of video playback. To this end, we once again resorted to using one of the most popular player TCPMP (The Core Pocket Media Player) version 0.72RC1. Test clips downloaded from the official site TCPMP, encoded the two most popular codecs (DivX and XviD) and use the most common resolution. According to the procedure for comfortable viewing of videos at the specified resolution sufficient rate of 120%. So, looking at the results.
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The results were predictable. The same would be expected, and the conclusion: for comfortable viewing of video with a resolution greater than 320 x 176 pixels, our hero does not fit. However, on its screen such clips look better, than on a standard 3.5-inch QVGA-display. Much memory Voxtel W740 - pretty standard: 128 MB ROM and 64 MB of RAM. From these volumes available to the user a total of about 87 MB. Not a bad number.
The expansion slot allows you install a microSD card up to 2 GB.
Sound
In terms of implementing sound possibility W740 looks a bit better than most smartphones. It is worth to note the presence of the second speaker, through which our hero sounds much louder than any analog. You can guarantee that no call will not be missed, and as a general alarm, he will not be equal - raise the dead! Both speakers are located on either side of the upper body, so that if you hold the device in hand, they do not hide behind, and the sound is not jammed. Voice speaker - too bad. In the area of good reception the sound is clear and the caller's voice is always recognizable. On the headset, we have already discussed in the "Set". There is hardly anything you can add on this occasion, besides the usual recommendation to use alternative headphones if you're going to listen to music on the device. However, for these purposes will have to buy an adapter, since the audio jack W740 has a cross section of 2.5 mm.
Sociability
In terms of wireless interfaces, Voxtel W740 looks very modest by today's standards. The device is equipped with a Bluetooth-module version 1.2 and the phone module, designed for quad-band GSM 850/900/1800/1900 MHz with support for GPRS Class 10 (3 slots for reception, 2 transfer). Popular nowadays high-speed data transfer standard EDGE, unfortunately, is not supported. All calls are made through the program Phone, which is part of Windows Mobile 5.0 Pocket PC Phone Edition, which is called by pressing the green button with the image sensor or the first button on the additional panel.
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Bluetooth-module controlled by a set of drivers from Microsoft and offers a pretty standard features: file transfer, connect a wireless keyboard, headset profile, DUN (Dial-Up Networking) and newfangled A2DP, to listen to music via Bluetooth Stereo headphones. During testing, the interface is no problem we have not emerged: the communicator regularly works in conjunction with headsets from Jabra and SonyEricsson, but also to establish contact with the PDA Fujitsu-Siemens Pocket Loox C550 and the Nokia 6021.
To centrally manage all wireless modules used by the program Wireless Manager, which should be well familiar to you.
Luggage
Finally, we got to the most interesting item in the review of W740. Luggage our hero - really good. Moreover, with full confidence we can say that she is the best among all Windows Mobile smartphones, so we will talk about it long and detailed.
To begin with, that it uses CCD-matrix, has auto-focus function, but the resolution matrix is 4 MP. Such a high resolution integrated camera we have already met once - in the communicator RoverPC S5. Was there and AF, however, the quality of finished images still left much to be desired. The only communicator with more or less quality camera was ASUS P525. In daylight obtained quite nice pictures, which was not ashamed to show friends. Therefore, we will compare the W740 with it. Thus, pictures can be done to save the following resolutions: 2304 x 1728, 2048 x 1536 1600 x 1200 1280 x 960 640 x 480 384 x 288, 320 x 240 and 192 x 144. The digital zoom is, oddly enough, is not provided, although it has never been such a very necessary function.
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Automatic white balance works much better than any other device.However, it still sometimes mistakes happen. In daylight (and it does not matter in a sunny or cloudy weather), no problem - if the balance is not perfect, it is very close to that. But when shooting indoors is better to use presets, of which provided a total of five: auto, day, incandescent, fluorescent lights and night. In addition, there are also additional effects: black and white, old, cool colors and warm colors. As for modes, there are only three: portrait, self portrait, and continuous shooting. The latter due to the weak performance of the processor is unlikely to be in demand, and portraits can easily be removed and in normal mode. So all of this, by and large, self-indulgence. Preservation of images is possible only in the JPG, and the size of finished pictures at maximum resolution and quality is an average of 350 - 500 KB. Here are some examples of built-in camera in various conditions: When shooting outdoors, indoors, macro photography and so on.
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Agree that the street photos taken by our hero, look at the order of magnitude better than any other built-in device camera. Well, as a model for comparison, we took the ASUS P525 and made a series of comparative images in the same conditions. First there are pictures of ASUS P525.
And now the same species, but made Voxtel W740. As they say, feel the difference.
As you can see, in all cases Voxtel W740 camera surpasses its counterpart installed in the device from ASUS. So it will fit perfectly as a replacement for any budget digital cameras. Well, or at least on the image quality will be located much closer to her other peers. As regards the video, they are not as good as photo opportunities, but also not bad compared to other devices. The device writes video to WMV format with the only available resolution - 192 x 144, but with sound. By default, the maximum length of video is limited to 30 seconds, but if you want this restriction can be removed and record as much as allow the amount of free memory. Settings for shooting video - the same as pointing the focus is carried out before the shooting, in the process will not succeed.
Runtime
Before the tests for the battery recall to you that the battery capacity is 1100 mAh W740 and measurement of time was made in three basic modes. 1. Maximum load. Vykruchena the brightness to maximum volume of the speaker, too, including Bluetooth, a Windows Media Player in the cycle is played a "heavy" video. Battery life in this mode was - 4 hours 36 minutes. 2. Normal operation. Bluetooth is turned off. The brightness is set to the second division of the account. On the PDA was started reading the text in Haali Reader with automatic scrolling. Time work was 8 hours 38 minutes. 3. MP3 Playback. Bluetooth and the screen turned off. Listening through headphones at maximum volume. We used Windows Media Player and files with a bitrate 192 Kb / c. Hours - 8 hours 44 minutes. The results mean, and so high while working at maximum load due to the fact that this same load for the W740 is created only by the inclusion of Bluetooth-module. For example, the same Qtek s200 has been burdened in addition also included Wi-Fi. With ordinary use, which includes 20 minutes of calls a day, listening to music, short sessions synchronization via Bluetooth, and a little reading, have to charge the battery about once every 1.5 days. With increasing load the machine, of course, have to feed more often, and if we use the W740 as just the phone, he can easily live for two days.For clarity, as usual, contains a chart showing the results Voxtel W740 in comparison with the communicators of competitors.
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Additional software
Here we have nothing to say. Included with the W740 is not available, no additional tools except a program to configure the connected GPS-receiver.
Price issue
Price communicator Voxtel W740 at the time of the start of sales should be about $ 500 (13,999 rubles). Device will go on the shelves simultaneously with this review.
Conclusions
Voxtel W740 - the very middling, which is lacking to complete the picture and select. Until recently purchased a decent communicator or smartphone for moderate money could only waited a while until the new model does not cease to be new, and its price will not fall to an acceptable level. More and more manufacturers make us happy is quite worthy of attention budget decisions, which are available at reasonable prices in the very early sales. Voxtel And one of them. Submitted by the unit differs extremely compact dimensions, comparable to the size of an average mobile phone, a nice design and beautiful built-in camera. He certainly would not hurt to Wi-Fi module, but let's not forget that it would increase its cost. In addition, some spoils the overall picture of weak performance, but it is unlikely for the majority of potential owners of cars it will be critically important. Following a review we can say that Voxtel W740 is quite likely find a buyer. Presenting a summary of all the traditional strengths and weaknesses of our hero.
Pros: - pleasing design and ultra compact size
- metal housing
- great camera
- low starting price
Cons: - poor performance
- poor set of pre-installed software
- Some minor blemishes on the part of the ergonomics
If you talk about the debut of the market Voxtel Windows Mobile devices in general, it seems successful. All three models were released at the optimum functionality cheaper closest analogues, and it is, pardon the pun, is expensive, especially on the eve of New Year:) We, the translation:
Victor Zaikovsky
