Nokia N76

Nokia N76 has been made available on the market in April at an estimated, pre-tax, unsubsidized sales price of approximately 400 euros.

Nokia N76 is UMTS compatible and offers maximum downloading speeds of up to 384 Kbps. N76 integrates good connectivity features beside 3G, such as: GPRS Class 32, 107 / 64.2 kbps, EDGE Class 32, 296 / 177.6 kbits, HSCSD 57.6 kbit/s, Bluetooth 2.0 and miniUSB 2.0.

The phone is big, perhaps one of the biggest clamshells on the market, measuring 106.5 x 52 x 13.7 mm (folded) and weighing 115 grams (battery included)

Besides the good processor, the phone offers a good-quality sound for music fans, provided that they use better headphones than those included in the sales package.

Nokia indirectly recognized that the N76 model has many major faults in its construction and software integration by accepting covering warranties that include things which are not standard for a handset. The faulty design, the cheap material, as well as the low life battery are among the negative points of the clamshell. There are also serious bugs with the phone such as: lag control of the external music dedicated keys, call interruptions, as well as restarts of the operating system when running clips recorded. Even if these bugs are not present in all phones, it still denotes a bad implementation of the S60 platform.[via]

LG KU580

LG KU580 was announced in April 2007 as a Vodafone exclusive mobile phone which cannot be bought from another mobile network operator. Even if this considerably limits the phone's market, the latest of the Chocolates will certainly not be overlooked by fans. Chocolate Multimedia can be bought only from Vodafone starting last month for about 400 USD without any plan.

The glossy black plastic feels warm to the touch, especially after talking more than 10 minutes on the phone. Moreover, it scratches very easily no matter what you do, and that also includes the screen. Almost identical in sizes with older Chocolates (94 x 53 x 16.5 mm), the LG KU580 is the least heavy weighing only 73 grams (battery included), that's almost 20 grams less.

LG KU580 (Hero) is the top of the Chocolate line, thus it features latest connectivity technologies: GPRS (Class 10, 32 - 48 kbps), EDGE (Class 10, 236.8 kbps), 3G (384 kbps), Bluetooth 2.0 and USB 2.0. As seen in the screenshots, there's almost no difference between EDGE and 3G data transfer speeds, only upload speeds are different.

The best thing regarding LG KU580 is the updated firmware which corrected a whole bunch of bugs that were present in previous models (Platinum Chocolate, Shine). The phone is a masterpiece in terms of design; as usual LG did a great job. I was also surprised by the multimedia part which was much better than I expected with loud and clear vibes.

Even if the phone features a whole range of Internet capabilities, these are working at mediocre standards and could ruin the users’ Web experience. A bigger display and a better camera module would've made it perfect for its price.[via]