What can be improved

The screen whilst nice to look at, also tends to sometimes miss touches and swipes particularly when using the keyboard and I found this to be the case after trying several different keyboards and getting the same issue, it also occurred when playing games and navigating around the Operating System and different applications so perhaps a little more tuning on the touch sensitivity of the screen may help.

The phone which seemed to be excellent with GPS tended to be a little flaky with Wi-Fi, I had issues with it even finding Wi-Fi networks both at home and out and about, the other issue I had was the phone did not seem to pick up a particularly strong Wi-Fi signal even when situated right next to the router. The other issue with Wi-Fi was the tethering option, I find tethering drains the battery quickly so I tend to plug phones in to charge whilst tethering, this seemed to overheat the phone after an hour of tethering. In terms of data speeds the phone supports HSDPA 14.4 Mbps, HSUPA 5.76 Mbps so I was surprised to find that the speeds I received on this phone seemed to drag, so I wasn`t overly impressed with the 3G data capacity of the phone.

The other major thing I feel should either be replaced or worked upon is the speed of the camera, it seemed to take an inordinately long time for the camera to focus and take a shot, perhaps I’m being over critical after using the instant shot of the Galaxy Nexus on ICS for too long but I found the shots to be somewhat lacking in speed, although the shots appear to be quite Ok.

Software wise I found a lag when switching between applications, the stock launcher runs well however SPB Launcher tends to devolve into a weird mish mash of all sorts of different parts of Touchwiz/Sense/MotoBlur style animations and settings, so I highly recommend sticking to the Stock Android launcher. The phone does come with 512MB of RAM but this seems to be not enough as the phone sometimes halted when either launching or switching back and forth between apps. I also found on one instance, attempting to use PhotoGrid that the phone just simply did not have enough memory to do what the app was made for, wether that was just bad software design or the phone I’m not sure.

Audio was an issue in terms of volume as well, I found that I had to install Volume+ just to be able to hear podcasts whilst jogging. An upgrade to some high-end earphones alleviated this issue somewhat but I did find that compared to other phones I’ve used that the volume was just very low. Audio clarity on the other hand was fine, nothing to rave about but clear enough once loud enough to be heard.

Niggles that aren’t major but that I encountered and feel potential purchasers should be aware of, if you remove the back cover with the phone turned on, the phone automatically shuts down. The phone has a sound that plays on the boot animation every time the phone boots, I did have a random reboot or 3 during the two weeks I used the phone. The charger also emits a hum or buzz whilst charging the phone, not terribly loud but noticeable if you happen to be standing next to it.

There were 2 things with regards to hardware design that I feel should be mentioned, the headphone jack and the power button which are located on top of the device, this is purely a personal preference thing. I prefer the headphone jack to be located at the bottom of the phone due to it slipping in and out of a pocket more naturally with headphones attached. The power button I find to be in a more natural position on the right hand side of the unit, again both of these things are a personal preference not something bad.

Battery life seemed to me to be quite short, but as someone who uses their phone constantly this is more an indication of my usage patterns, I got around half a day of usage out of the phone, but that was using Twitter constantly, background syncing two Gmail accounts, playing podcasts during exercise and also excessive surfing of the web and watching YouTube videos.