At CES 2011, hidden among the 3D televisions and me-too-tablets were hidden some real gems. Our colleagues at CNET Asia recently spent some time with one of them: Razer's new gaming laptop, the Switchblade.

For the uninitiated, the Switchblade was unveiled at CES last month and won CNET's Best of CES People's Voice Award. It is a portable gaming PC with keys that can be customised to suit the application being run at the time. The prototype we saw wasn't able to run games, but its keyboard showed how it could display different icons based on the game played.

With no availability date and price, will you be able to buy the Switchblade eventually? Senior product evangelist Chris Mitchell said Razer "wants to do systems and has a vision larger than just peripherals". So, even if the company doesn't release the Switchblade in its current form, we expect to see something that reflects the same concept within the next few years.

Via CNET Asia

The Tonino Lamborghini Evoluzione smartphone.(Credit:CNET Asia)

Singapore-based Primo Mobile unveiled the Evoluzione, an Android smartphone bearing the famous charging bull logo found on Italian sports car manufacturer Lamborghini.

Specs-wise, this mobile phone falls in the mid-range category. It comes with a 3.2-inch HVGA (320 x 480) display, 600MHz Qualcomm processor, HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and a 5-megapixel camera. The device runs on vanilla Android 2.1 (Eclair) currently. A company representative said there's a possibility of an upgrade to Android 2.2 but stopped short of confirming it.

What sets it apart is the brand. Tonino Lamborghini is a spin-off brand of the car manufacturer which offers lifestyle products such as watches and coffee makers. It commissioned Primo Mobile to produce a smartphone and the result is the Evoluzione. This smartphone will appeal to fans of the brand rather than tech-enthusiasts because of the specifications. It will go on sale in Singapore come first quarter of 2011. The company is speaking to operators worldwide and hopes to offer it globally next year. The Evoluzione has an estimated retail price of AU$525.

The Tonino Lamborghini Passione feature-phone.(Credit:CNET Asia)

Aside from the Android device, Primo Mobile will also be offering the Passione feature-phone. This will also go on sale next year though no price was given. Aside from the regular black version, a limited edition yellow model will also be offered bearing the signature of Tonino Lamborghini on the back battery cover.

The limited edition yellow version will bear Tonino Lamborghini's signature. (Credit:CNET Asia)

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While it doesn't show very much, the interface is clearly modelled after the XMB user interface. This is similar to what you'll see on the current handheld game deck and the PS3 console. A message indicates that "there are no content items". So we won't get to see any games running on it. But given the frequency of new information, we won't be surprised to see a game demo soon.

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Upside

The Optimus Chic is meant to be a stylish alternative to the Optimus One. It has a clean front facade and is quite compact at 112.5 x 57.9 x 12.9mm.

While the P500 has a 3-megapixel camera, the Chic comes with a 5-megapixel version. Aside from taking higher-resolution images, it can also shoot VGA videos at 30fps, which will result in smoother motion compared with the Optimus One's maximum of 18fps.

According to the official LG UK product blog, the E720 will come with a feature that allows users "to control the device from their PCs". No other details are given, but this is possibly similar to what HTC has done with its HTCSense.com service, which lets users perform tasks such as locking their phones or pushing apps to the device from a Web browser.

Downside

Even though the use of touch-sensitive shortcuts gives the E720 an uncluttered design, their location below the screen can be potentially cumbersome. We've mentioned this in a few different reviews: Physical buttons are better because the chances of hitting one accidentally when playing games is lower.

Despite being slightly heavier than the P500, the E720 has a smaller battery. Its capacity is 1,250mAh, less than the Optimus One's 1,500mAh cell. With the same screen and processor, this could potentially mean a shorter battery life.

Outlook

The Optimus Chic is not available yet, but is supposed to be in before the end of the year. We don't see it so much as a higher-end P500 because the differences are quite minute, but more as an alternative design. The price has not been announced, but given its feature set it shouldn't go for very much more than the Optimus One, which costs AU$349 before operator subsidies.

• LG Optimus One P500

(Credit: Opera)

Opera has just made its Opera Mobile 10.1 browser available for download on the Android Market. Still in beta, this app costs nothing and gives users an alternative to the built-in Webkit browser.

We downloaded it and, so far, it works well. At the moment, we can't tell with any certainty if it's any faster than the default browser, but sites load without problems and scrolling around large pages is smooth. Like the desktop version of Opera, you get the Speed Dial feature, which puts all your favourite pages on one page for easy access. Regular users of Opera can also turn to the Opera Link feature to synchronise their desktop bookmarks to the mobile browser.

Try it out yourself by searching on Android Market or visiting m.opera.com/next on your Android smartphone. Take note that this version is not the same as Opera Mini. The latter uses the Opera servers as a proxy to send optimised versions of web pages to your mobile device so as to reduce loading times.

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• Xenon flash with 8-megapixel camera
• Unibody aluminium design
• Some useful HTC apps including one for handling incoming calls

• Camera implementation needs improvement
• No panoramic feature for camera
• Touch-sensitive keys under screen can disrupt gaming

HTC announced three Windows Phone 7 devices for Australia during Microsoft's launch of its new mobile operating system last month. Of the three, only the HTC 7 Mozart sports a unibody aluminium chassis similar to what's found on the HTC Legend and the latest Desire HD smartphones. It is also the only model among all the launch devices from HTC, LG and Samsung to come with an 8-megapixel camera and Xenon flash (which did not perform to our higher expectations).

Design

With a 3.7-inch WVGA screen, aluminium chassis and curved edges, the Mozart looks a lot like the HTC Desire from the front. Those who love metallic materials will be pleased to see that the aluminium extends all around the back, save for two plastic portions on the top and bottom. We feel the non-symmetrical ridges and cut-outs of the unibody design are quite cool-looking, but admit that not everyone will take a liking to it.

Unlike the Desire, the Mozart has touch-sensitive buttons on the front. These are the Back, Start and Search keys as required by Microsoft. While they work well, and we like the haptic feedback we get when we used them, we would have preferred physical shortcut keys as found on the Desire. This would reduce the occurrence of accidental presses when playing games holding the phone in landscape orientation - when we were playing Rocket Riot, the Search key was unintentionally activated, kicking us out of the game. Since Xbox Live is a big part of what makes WP7 attractive, we feel physical keys will reduce the chance of such occurrences.

The Mozart does have some physical buttons around the edges. These include the power toggle on the top, camera shutter on the bottom right edge, and volume controls on the left.

(Credit: CNET Asia)

The 800x480-pixel LCD display was bright and showed text and images well. We had no issues with it whether indoors or out in bright daylight.

Like the HTC Legend, the plastic cut-out on the base has to be removed to access the removable battery. The Mozart doesn't come with a memory expansion slot, but you do get 8GB of built-in storage.

Features

Connectivity-wise, you get the usual crop of options available to a high-end smartphone. These include HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and A-GPS for satellite navigation.

At the software end of things, we know Microsoft has dictated how the interface should look, so there's no chance of HTC adding its Sense UI to the Mozart. To differentiate itself from other vendors, the Taiwan manufacturer has included a few proprietary apps.

The starting point of getting a unique HTC experience on the Mozart is through the HTC Hub program. The first thing you'll see upon firing it up is the time and weather - this looks just like the most prominent widget found in every HTC Android phone with Sense. Apart from that, it gives thumbnails of other exclusive HTC apps, which will take you to the Windows Marketplace to download.

Of the available apps, the one we found most useful is called Attentive Phone. This gives the handset extra features for handling phone calls. For example, the "quiet ring on pick-up" option detects when you pick up the Mozart from a table when it's ringing and lowers the ringing volume. The other options include "flip for speaker", which activates the speakerphone during active calls when you turn the phone over; "flip to mute ringer"; and "pocket mode", which detects when your device is in a pocket or bag and increases the ring volume accordingly. These features have all been implemented in the Android-based HTC Sense and we are glad to see them in HTC's Windows Phone handsets.

Other apps include Photo Enhancer for adding effects to images, Sound Enhancer for an audio equaliser, Stocks for checking your quotes, and other extras like a unit converter, notepad and to-do list program. There is also a Flashlight app, but take note that this won't work with the Mozart's Xenon flash as it cannot be turned on persistently like LED lights.

With an 8-megapixel sensor and Xenon flash, the Mozart's camera has the best specifications of all the WP7 launch models. The camera app is pretty responsive and focuses quickly. It also gives options such as portraits, sports and candlelight for different shooting scenarios. Fun filter effects including sepia and negative can also be added.

Taking a photo in auto mode was a bit of a challenge. The Mozart tended to lower shutter speed to compensate for dim lighting. This gave properly exposed shots but also increased the incidences of blurred photos. Typically, it's hard to hold a lightweight camera phone very still, especially when you have to apply pressure to press the shutter button, adding to the difficulty of getting a sharp image without hand-shake blur. We would have preferred it if the camera allowed for a slightly underexposed shot as a compromise for dim lighting.

Of course, using the Xenon flash does go some way to alleviating hand-shake problems. One issue in its implementation is that the shutter sound goes off before the shot is actually taken. A user may instinctively move his hand down before the image is captured, resulting in a missed or blurred shot.

When you do get your shot, images looked decent with accurate colours. Using the sports mode helps to solve the slow shutter speed without flash issue, but image noise becomes more apparent. The HTC 7 Mozart can take 720p HD-quality videos. Click here to see some images and clip.

Overall, we were not impressed with the indoor performance of the Mozart's 8-megapixel shooter. It seems some of these issues could be solved by a software update and we hope HTC releases one soon. It would be good, too, if HTC could add a sweep panorama mode for taking landscape shots, like on the LG Optimus 7.

Performance

With one Live and two Gmail email accounts set to sync every half hour, the occasional phone calls and text messages and social networking, the Mozart battery life lasted slightly over a day of use on a full charge. This is comparable to other smartphones, but given the fact that you can't sync social-networking apps automatically on the Mozart, we expected it to perform a little better.

Call quality was good and we didn't experience any dropped calls during our period of testing. The speakerphone on this handset was good, loud and sufficiently clear. Audio for videos was also decent, though we would suggest using headphones instead of firing up the speakers when in public - it's more civic-minded to do so.

However, on a few occasions, we were not able to connect to the cellular data network in spite of good reception at the location. We tested the network using the same data plan on an iPhone 4 and it worked fine.

Speed-wise, the Mozart performed fine with its 1GHz Snapdragon processor and 576MB RAM. Transitions were smooth and all common tasks such as test messaging and bringing up the address book were done snappily. Loading times were a little long for Xbox Live games, but that slowness has been felt on all the WP7 devices we tried so far.

Conclusion

As mentioned in our Optimus 7 review, the LG has the best set of proprietary apps so far. This opinion has not changed after our evaluation of the Mozart. With better camera specs, this HTC should have rightly aced the imaging aspect but didn't because of some usage abnormalities.

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(Credit: oStylus)

The oStylus is a stylus for capacitive touchscreens. At first glance, it looks more like something your dentist would use, but it is actually quite a cleverly designed contraption.

A swivelling doughnut-shaped tip lets you hold the oStylus at an angle that you like, and the hole in the middle of the tip allows you to see what you are drawing. To prevent scratches on your screen, the tip has a vinyl film so the metal doesn't touch your device's glass. Watch the demonstration video to see how it works.

Creator Andrew Goss ships the product internationally from Canada. The oStylus costs US$37.50 before freight. A signed, limited-edition US$75 version is also available. Don't want to pay so much for a capacitive stylus? Well, you can always use a sausage. Just remember to eat a hole first to see what you are drawing.

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(Credit: Spice Mobile)

3D screen aside, the M-67 is a 2.5G phone with two SIM card slots, a 2-megapixel camera and an FM tuner. It's available only in India, so we don't expect to test it out any time soon.

If you have seen one, let us know how well it works in talkback below.

Via CNET Asia

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