TechTalk: Exploring the Latest Technology News, Updates, Reviews, and Gossip

The phone market is vast and growing by the day. Today, even for those with a shoe-string budget, the options are many. Of course, you may have to compromise on factors like screen resolution, camera and even media capabilities to certain extent. But if ease of connectivity packaged in an affordable phone is what you are looking for, then the mobile terrain won’t disappoint you. In our quest for sub 10K phones featuring 3G and Wi-Fi, we found more than a handful of phones. We’ve listed here 10 such phones that you can look at starting from the lowest priced one.

Samsung’s on a roll with this, the Ultra Touch being the third mobile handset bearing an 8 megapixel camera lens. They’ve gone with an amalgamation of form factors with this one – it has a touchscreen like the Pixon and it’s also a slider like the INNOV8. But enough talk let’s get on with the review. Form Factor What I love about the handset is that it’s extremely slim and sleek even though it comes as a slide down keypad that’s totally unnecessary, and it also has an 8 megapixel camera with an LED flash. It’s well designed for most part but there are few things that I was not too happy with. The 2.6-inch AMOLED capacitive touchscreen features a 240 x 400 pixel resolution with 16 million colors and a built in accelerometer and sensor. The display is also scratch resistant and very responsive. What I didn’t like was the fact that the handset didn’t have a hot swap slot for the microSD card. Worse still you’ll have to remove the battery if you need to access it. Another problem I had was...

Nokia’s E-Series of business class handsets has always been a fore-runner when it comes to this particular segment. The company has made sure that their handsets are more than aNokia E75 Mobile Phonedequately loaded with goodies for both work and play. I won’t mind admitting that the E71 impressed me quite a lot with regard to functionality and I was quite eager to get my hands on the latest in the range of the E75 and see what the improvements in the system were, from OS and UI to the design. After working with it for a week, here’s the story. Form Factor : Nokia has gone with a slide out QWERTY for the first time with this the last in their popular business class E-Series range. Sadly, their folly lies in the design of this particular feature. The E75 is essentially a variant of the E51. This model is however, equipped with a much larger 2.4-inch screen (240 x 320 pixel, 16 million color resolution). A secondary VGA camera and light senor are located on either side of the speaker. Th...

The Storm is here and while I’m sure you're anxious to know how it fared. We were too. So it took us a little while to get through with testing and here’s what we have to say. Form Factor The 9500’s build quality exudes a certain sturdiness with slim chromed lines and who can miss that brilliant 3.5-inch SurePress touchscreen display that is anything but conventional and clearly visible even in broad daylight. It sports a resolution of 360 x 480 (184ppi) pixels and 65k colors with an accelerometer for screen rotation. Though it's 3G ready, video calling might be a bit of a problem considering there’s no secondary camera. The 3.2 megapixel AF camera comes with a single LED for a flash and is located at the back. On one side of this slim device (that we thought to be a lot thicker from the previews) is a 3.5mm standard earphones socket, volume keys and a dedicated camera key. A customizable key that’s usually set to Voice Command is located on the other side with a micro USB p...

Samsung’s newest 8MP camera phone that we spoke of just a few days ago has now been officially launched as the Pixon. According to the reports and a press release the handset is the world’s slimmest full-touch 8-megapixel camera phone. The Pixon has a 3.2-inch WQVGA touch screen display and features that include x16 digital zoom, auto-focus, fast-shutter, face detection and geo-tagging since it comes with internal GPS. Other features include a media player that supports Samsung's DNSe for audio, an FM radio, Bluetooth with A2DP and microSD card support for external memory. The handset also has a dedicated website called - The Photographic Adventures of Nick Turpin. "Now everyone will be able to ‘get their pics on’ so much more quickly and easily. For the first time you will have a camera on your phone capable of delivering the quality of image of a regular camera. The big benefit is not just the ease with which people will now be able to capture and share camera-phone shots, b...