iPhone

iPhone killers, anyone?




By Christopher Lim
Asiaone.com

IF you're in the market for an Apple iPhone, the odds are you won't be swayed by clones that offer you lots of features the iPhone doesn't have - but don't boast enough of the features it does have. You want it all. You want something that does everything an iPhone does but does it better, and with some extra abilities sprinkled on top to sweeten the deal. What you probably don't need is a fantastic camera or weapons-grade corporate e-mail ability.

If that sounds like you, you might want to give the new HTC Magic ($1,048 without plan from next month on) a spin.


Great value

LG's Arena ($768 without contract) is amazing value for money considering what you get for the price. Its rounded matte metal back makes it look like a smaller version of the old iPhone, which means it looks very pretty. However, it packs a 5-megapixel camera with a flash, which is unusually impressive among stylishly designed phones. It's also better than the cameras in the current iPhone and HTC Magic.

The Arena is the first phone to have Dolby Mobile surround sound built in, for a more immersive cinematic experience while on the go. All the better for insulating yourself in crowded MRT trains. It also has more potential storage memory than the Magic and the iPhone, with 8GB built in and the ability to expand up to 24GB.

For bedroom DJs

The Arena's Dolby surround sound might be good for movies, but dance-music fans will drool instead over Samsung's BeatDJ ($648 without contract), which was clearly created for the bedroom DJ.

You can manipulate songs to simulate the scratching sounds popular in dance music, and even layer sound effects and your voice on top of what's playing.

Samsung's close relationship with Bang & Olufsen has yielded yet another Samsung phone with excellent sound quality, which will please music lovers whether they are listening through earphones or the built-in stereo speakers.

Just don't count on doing hardcore Web surfing on the Web DJ because while the 2.8-inch screen isn't exactly tiny, it's smaller than the LG Arena's and HTC Magic's three-inch and 3.2-inch screens, respectively.

Slick Android

Sony Ericsson and BlackBerry set themselves apart from Apple by specialising in areas like digital photography and e-mail efficiency respectively, but HTC was the first, to truly go toe to toe with Apple on the exact same playing field. What was HTC's secret weapon? Google. The Magic is HTC's second phone to use Google's snazzy Android operating system. In fact, it's the second Android phone publicly released by any manufacturer, although plenty more are expected to be announced in the coming months. Android phones are the closest competitors to iPhones on the market. The very first one, the HTC Dream, was functional but ugly as sin. It also used an older version of the Android software, which lagged the iPhone in many ways.

The new version that comes as the Magic, however, is a whole different story. Until the new iPhone 3.0 software is released sometime in the middle of the year, the Magic is noticeably better in many ways than the current iPhone. You can copy and paste text like a phone number from the Web browser into your address book, take videos and upload pictures straight to Google's free Picasa Web photo albums - none of which the iPhone can do. Many other phones can perform these tasks, of course. But the Magic is the only one that works as slickly as the iPhone. For example, it passes the flick-scrolling test: When you open the address book and flick your finger to scroll the list, nothing is accidentally selected. Of course, if you're not looking for something that closely replicates an iPhone, there are plenty of new options.

This story was first published in The Business Times.