WITH SO MUCH CHOICE AND SO MANY NEW FUNCTIONS, HOW DO YOU KNOW WHAT’S BEST FOR YOU?

CHOOSING the right mobile phone can be like traversing a technological minefield unless you know exactly what it is you need and what is available.

A new national survey by global consumer technology retailer eXpansys has just revealed that we spend more than two hours every day using our mobile phones.

We now spend far more time using our phones to text, surf the net and access social networking sites like Facebook than we do actually talking too.

So what, exactly do we use our mobile phones and smartphones for?

Do we require something that takes great photographs? A piece of phone-tech that doubles as a movie-making kit? Access to great business applications or social networking? A 21st century Filofax?

There’s a veritable maze to navigate to get the best option. And every phone is as different as the myriad of must-have functions users list whenlooking for their ideal handset.

Here’s a handy breakdown of the Top 5 Best Multi-taskers on the market right now to help you step through the phone tech minefield unscathed.

Acer Stream

The gorgeous Acer Stream is exclusive to eXpansys and does everything in HD. It’s 3.7" display, using the latest AMOLED technology for better colour, the 5 mega-pixel camera that captures stunning HD video at a moments notice. And when your done recording, the built in HDMI port lets you connect your Acer Stream directly to your HD TV to share your movies on the big screen. Perfect for would-be Steven Speilbergs.

£399.99 on sim-free deal from eXpansys.  Click here for more info/buy.

Motorola MILESTONE XT720

The Motorola MILESTONE XT720 is a thoroughbred a media phone. Android based, it has an 8 mega-pixel camera paired with a Xenon flash (like proper digital camera's), which means it can take amazing photo's in poor light conditions. Add in HD video recording and top if off with a HDMI port, which lets you connect the XT720 directly to your HD TV. Great for photos and video.  £359.99 on a sim-free deal from eXpansys. Click here for more info/buy. 

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 mini pro

One of the smallest smartphones ever. No bigger then a small box of matches but features a QWERTY keyboard, Google's Android OS and full access to all of Google's services, from search and navigation to the Android Market that lets you download thousands of apps. Great for people who want pocket-sized major functionality and are not fans of touchscreen keyboards.

£254.99 on sim-free deal at eXpansys.  Click here for more info/buy

Samsung Galaxy S (8GB)

A social networking addict? Checking and updating your Facebook account several times a day, sharing your every move with your extended online family. With HD video recording you can film your every move and the latest version of Google's Android OS enhanced by Samsung which outputs everything to a Super AMOLED screen means you are your friends can watch it back and look gorgeous in any light.  The perfect match for social butterflies.  

£439.99 on a sim-free deal at eXpansys. Click here for more info/buy

HTC Desire

Most new smartphones claim to be the real alternative to Apple’s iPhone. But the HTC Desire truly is the obvious first-choice iPhone rival on the market right now. It has a 1GHz processor to let you play movies and run multiple apps. The AMOLED screen is also enhanced by HTC's Sense interface so it is simple to use but with access to loads of great Marketplace apps. If you want an all-rounder with the functionality of an iPhone but none of the restrictions of Apple’s closed software, then this is your ideal choice.

£429.99 on sim-free deal from eXpansys.   Click here for more info/buy

If you love big-screen smartphones running the Android OS – and, let’s be honest, who doesn’t? -  but you want more touchscreen for your money, then the Acer Stream might just be your perfect match.

Its gorgeous looking large (3.7-inch) AMOLED screen means there’s no real need for the usual over hyped array of navigational buttons. Instead of awkward digits, use a swipe of your finger across the crisp, smooth lines of its face to get into its impressive inners. Or use the buttons it does have to navigate through your videos – that’s exactly what they’re designed for and they do the job effortlessly.

The Acer Stream is a multimedia best-friend in every sense. Featuring a 5-megapixel camera recording at 720p, with 24-frames-per-second, and a built-in HDMI port means you can beam all your video favourites directly onto your HDTV from your phone.

Acer has gone for a unique look with this phone too. A large clock and your most used apps is all that sits on the uncluttered home screen. It might not be to everyone’s taste – traditional Android home screens are littered with lots of widgets – but it’s certainly simplified things. And at the push of a button all the other widgets are just a finger-tip away.

The Stream's media buttons and HDMI port clearly have media lovers in mind. You’ll get a proper look when it is officially released in August but, suffice to say, when you hold the phone in landscape mode, it becomes an impressively specified hi-def media player with a few, very simple control buttons to get you to just about any point in your video with ease.

The Acer Stream is available exclusively from eXpansys, on a sim-free basis for just £399.99. I’ll say that again - £399.99. It’s one of the cheapest large-screened Android smartphones on the market. Bang for your buck? Oh yes – and then some.

The Acer Stream is all about its HD. It has truly spectacular colour due to its AMOLED 3.7inch screen and its 5 mega-pixel camera captures seriously good HD video as standard. No blurry home-movies with this truly lovely bit of kit. 

OK, so it doesn’t have a camera flash, and it doesn’t include standard definition TV Out but, let’s be honest, with this amount of kit under the hood would anyone really want to put in standard def anyway? No. Thought not.

Battery life is as much as you’d expect from any large screen smartphone – if you use it lots you’ll need to charge it most evenings. 

And, while it might not have the eye-catching design of, say, the Samsung Galaxy S, it’s not – like many of the latest handsets, pretending to be an iPhone. It looks great, does the job very impressively and costs nothing compared to some of its better-known Android cousins.

It’s too impressive to be called a budget phone but it’s a good deal cheaper than anything out there, which rivals it in spec. In fact, it’s probably the best for the money on the market right now.

The Acer Stream is available exclusively at eXpansys, click here for more details. 

Do you have more questions about the Acer Stream? We are running a Twitter Question and Answer session on eXpansysuk Twitter account on Wednesday. We'll help answer your questions. Not already following us on Twitter? Click here.

WHY IS A FIVE-YEAR-OLD MACHINE STILL SO POPULAR?

The Xbox 360 S enjoyed an unrivalled launch in the UK last week, with sales monitor GfK Chart-Track stating that the machine has “achieved the biggest launch in the UK for a ‘revised’ home console”.

The slimmer, smaller Xbox was launched on Friday carrying an RRP of £199.99 and promptly sold out in numerous high streets, with queues forming everywhere it was available.

“[The Xbox 360 S] surpasses the launches of both PS2 Slim and PS3 Slim and recording over two days around the same as the original Xbox 360’s launch sales total back in week 48, 2005,”GfK Chart-Track added.

Even the PS3 Slim’s magical launch could only muster 40,000 units in the first week the machine was available.

So, just what is it that has made the Xbox 360 S so hugely attractive to so many? 

Well, it’s quieter, smaller and has wifi out of the box, for a start.

It’s also shinier – literally – which is never a bad thing with new tech launches.

It has a hard drive more than twice the size of the Xbox Elite – a whopping 250gb, more than enough room to store movies, music and all the latest games on.  What’s more it is ‘Kinect Ready’ so gamers will be able to use the new motion-sensing hands free controller that has voice recognition so you can turn the console off without moving from your seat. See previous blog for more about Kinect.

Plus, the original Xbox 360 is five years old already (the entire lifetime of most old gen consoles), meaning many will want to upgrade to a newer model and, with the price being no different from the old Elite model, this was bound to cause a stir on release.

But the magic behind its launch success is down to a much more simple factor than shiny, under-the-hood specifications. It’s a matter of the 360’s incredible games catalogue and the proven quality which has seen it dominate core gaming for half a decade.

The Xbox 360 S is the daddy of all gaming consoles and that’s not something that is about to change in a hurry.

We have limited stock available click here to find out more or buy now.

We've had our first delivery of the exciting new Xbox 360 however stock is already in constraint for these beauties so get your orders in quick. With a new smaller chassis, Wireless N,250Gb hard drive, Whisper quiet operation and Kinect ready the new Xbox is the console for summer! 

Let’s start at the beginning shall we?

The Huawei S7 Android Tablet is in no way an Apple iPad-beater.

It is, very much, in a class of its own.

While the critics continue to argue among themselves over whether there is even an identifiable niche in the market for tablet computers like the iPad – the ‘it is too big to be truly mobile and not big enough to replace the laptop’ row rages on – the Huawei S7 has quietly gone about its business in a hugely impressive manner.

In many ways, the Huawei S7 tablet is 2010’s answer to the Filofax - a truly mobile 7” organiser and browser. It even has that 80s-style leatherette coverwrap synonymous with the famed Filofax to neatly protect the technology inside. It could, largely because of its mid-sized splendour, enjoy more real usability on the morning commute than any number of its larger tablet rivals could dream of, too.

So, from the off, let’s stop all the ‘is it a real rival to the iPad’ nonsense, shall we?

This is a different machine. 

And in this case, size really does matter.

The S7 falls neatly between a large smartphone and the large tablet benchmark set by the Apple iPad. And, as such, it creates its own niche in the marketplace.

It is more than small enough to carry in your hand, case or bag, but not so big that when you pull it out on the train it’s going to be cumbersome or make you look like the most ridiculous of attention-seekers.

And it’s big enough to mean that while you can anonymously enjoy reading the headlines, sending an email or watching a video, you’ve not developed serious red-eye by the time you reach Piccadilly.

It’s also a natural companion to an Android smartphone. I can see many Android owners using the Huawei S7 tablet as a big brother to their smartphone for a more comfortable read to and from work on a daily basis.

So, as an Android device, there’s that whole acclaimed world of apps from the Google Marketplace at your fingertips – on a decent mid-sized screen that won’t make you squint. It’s all win.

It could be the perfect tablet for the more technically minded and, especially, the businessman who commutes. 

But it’s not only its size that makes the Huawei S7 a real contender. It’s price is a real eye-opener too.

It comes with 3G and wi-fi connectivity already under the hood and costs just £299.99. That’s a huge saving in comparison to the entry level 3G and wi-fi equipped iPad. The 3G capable 16GB iPad is priced at £529. Even with the addition of the necessary 32GB SD card for storage on the Huawei S7 tablet you are looking at an almost £200 saving on the price of a basic 3G enabled iPad.

So, how does the technology inside the unit break down? Well, the Huawei S7 armoury includes a 768MHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor, 7-inch resistive WVGA (800x480 pixels) touchscreen display, Wi-Fi b/g/n and 3G HSPA connectivity.

It also provides Bluetooth 2.1 support (including A2DP), a 2-megapixel camera and, naturally being an Android device, has a wide range of apps available, which can be downloaded directly from the Android Market.

The Huawei S7 also features microSD card support and will be able to handle up to 32GB of storage, which users can pick up in a S7-bundle from eXpansys for £369.99.

It all works a treat too. The 7” touch-screen is neat and responsive, the unit is nicely designed and easy to handle with a mere handful of operation buttons designed to keep navigating your way around its multifunctions streamlined and simple.

I’m impressed. It does what it’s supposed to. It also looks the part and won’t hurt the bank balance. It may just become the businessman’s new best friend.

I am old enough to know better – but that’ll never stop me.

I am a geek. I have been a cowboy, a space marine, a monkey and a villain. I play video games and like shiny things that make me go ‘wow’.

I am a journalist - I have been almost as long as I have been a human. I have hidden in celebrity hedges. I love rock music. I write about new consumer technology and they give me free stuff to play with.

In another life they would lock me up.

But today, with the sun in the sky and a twinkle in my eye, I am yours. Your eyes, your ears and your hands.

Trust me. I am Adam, Chief Geek.

In a market supposedly dominated by Apple they have managed to increase turnover from £1.4bn to £2bn and figures for the last three months suggest that even bigger record sales are on the cards.

I’m guessing Nokia aren’t too chuffed. The Swedes dominated the mobile phone market in modern times but have seen HTC, Samsung and Apple massively leapfrog them since the smartphone market opened up in the last two years.

"Normally, June is an off-peak season. The sales figures are really amazing," Michael Chiang of Taiwan International Securities told the AFP news agency.

Apart from its own ‘must-have’ smartphones, HTC was also the design brains behind O2's XDA smartphone and Google's Nexus One phone.

But it is in expanding its own brands, like the beautiful and ‘most-wanted’ HTC Desire, on the back of massive success stories like the HTC Legend, which has seen it out-sprint even the boldest of positive predictions in the last 12 months.

Better still, the amazing HTC Wildfire Android smartphone is now in stock at eXpansys.

It is, as you’d expect of all HTC gear, packed to the brim with fantastic features you can’t leave home without.

Want a phone that’ll give you lightening-fast access to Facebook, Twitter and Flickr all at the same time? Check.
                                      
Want to be able to recommend apps to mates and colleagues straight from your phone by sending them a link? Check.

Want the kind of next-gen Caller ID that tells you your caller’s Facebook status and birthday date when they ring you? Check.

Check out the HTC Wildfire Android available for £229.99 at http://www.expansys.com/d.aspx?i=200153

SOME may say it’s far from a smart move but expect other mobile networks to follow O2’s lead sooner rather than later and bring an end to unlimited data allowances on smartphones.

The word among insiders is that the newly-merged Orange and T-Mobile are already preparing to follow suit, as are 3 and Vodafone. If that happens the floodgates will, as most suspect, be wide open.

Until now, smartphone subscribers have been free to browse or use their chosen App Store on their smartphone as much as they want for a fixed monthly payment. But that is all about to change.

Nobody likes to tell customers they are going to get less for the same price, of course, so managing the whole unlimited capping affair has been something of a PR headache for O2, I imagine.

It was no surprise that O2 was quick to point out that only three per cent of its 21.4 million customers will be expected to pay extra charges.

Clearly it is no longer economic to keep giving the heaviest users so much bandwidth for so little cost because the more they use, the lower the returns for O2.

But the facts often look conspiratorial in black and white, don’t they?

O2 chief executive Ronan Dunne even went to the extraordinary measure of writing a frank but political sensitive blog about the changes on the O2 website. A sure  sign there were some trembly knees after the announcement.

So what does it all mean?

Well, in a nutshell smartphone customers will be data-capped at between 500MB and 1GB depending on their monthly tariff.

Most smartphone users come nowhere near those limits of course. So, for most of us it will be business as usual. Just get used to the fact that the word ‘unlimited’ is about to be deleted from the smartphone dictionary.

The new tariffs came into force on Thursday June 24 – the same date as the iPhone 4 launch. 

Do you get anxious wondering how many emails are awaitng you when you get to the office?  Ever wish you could work on clearing your Inbox on your drive to work?  Now you can!!

iLane has introduced a revolutionary product changing the way we spend our drive to work. The 7100 model is made for BlackBerry users, with an iPhone and Android OS system compatible device coming in the near future.

HEAR YOUR EMAIL... CLEAR YOUR INBOX... WATCH THE ROAD - it's that simple.

That's the way it goes when you use the iLane.  Have emails read to you, reply back, call the sender, file the email, compose an email, get notified when a new email arrives, check your calendar... all things you can do right from your car while your eyes remain on the road.  Maybe you are on vacation this summer and still want to keep your inbox clean - this is the perfect tool for efficiency. Sure, you can do it from your smartphone, but that requires time to navigate through the system, type a reply, move on to the next one, etc.  With iLane you can whiz through your emails in no time while sipping on your Starbucks.

Check out the videos:

iLane Hands-on demo @ MWC 2010

InsideBlackBerry

iLane - Hear Your Email. Clear Your inbox. Watch The Road.

intellimec

Coming very soon to eXpansys-usa - get your orders in now!!

New hands-free laws have gone into effect today in Michigan, Iowa, Wyoming, and Nebraska. Be safe and consider a Parrot hands-free kit if you don't already have one! Plenty of other states have hands-free laws. If you are not certain if your state is one of them, take a look at the North American Hands-Free Legislation. 

In addition to the Parrot hands-free kits, we offer hassle-free installation services by InstallerNet and plug and play installation harnesses by HFVT. You can get everything you need in one quick stop and if you have any questions our knowledgeable sales representatives are at your disposal.