Windows Phone 7.5 mango will be featured on the new Titan 2 when it arrives, possibly at MWC in Barcelona, so to set the scene we’re going to take a closer look at the original Titan, complete with Windows Phone 7 OS. Mango or not, the 4.7-inch display is the most striking feature of the Titan. The Titan stretches a mighty 131mm x 71mm but weighs in at a lightish 160g. For all that screen real estate the Titan is still not too chunky – just 9.9mm thick.

The included headset is poor, but swapping the stock headset for decent headphones proves there is nothing wrong with the audio output of the Titan as such, it’s just a question of how you capture and render that output. So Titan buyers should invest in a goodish pair of headphones to take their smartphone experience to the next level.

Lack of storage is a more serious problem – just 12.6GB are available as standard, so users might need to look seriously at cloud solutions. The lack of any microSD card storage doesn’t help matters.

The rest of the specs fare a little better – the second generation single-core 1.5GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon MSM8255 CPU easily outperforms older HTC handsets such as the 1GHz-packing HTC Trophy. On WP Bench the Titan managed a benchmark score of 96, compared with a measly 50 for the Trophy, and this doubling of performance held good across the board; the processor executes its workload in half the time, with double the frame rates and speed of data transfer. That single-core CPU will only impact users keen on 1080p video capture, everyone else should be happy with fast-launching apps and quick webpage-rendering. Even processor-intensive voice recognition functionality in Bing runs briskly and without a hitch.

The fly in the ointment is the immature state of the Mango update to the Windows Phone 7 OS. The browser is prone to the occasional bug when laying out pages, and multi-tasking can lead to stuttering. The 1600mAh battery gives excellent service, on the other hand, delivering a full day’s use with plenty of juice still in reserve – there’s about a day and a half of moderate usage in that there battery. Network performance – both 3G reception and data speeds – were about average for a premium handset. Calls were sharp without any sign of distortion.

Now about that enormous display. The HTC features a WVGA resolution amounting to 198 ppi. That’s clearly on the low side, with individual pixels appearing faintly jagged on text and vector graphics, although photos are free from such anti-aliasing problems. But that’s just a snapshot; zooming out on a page can make text blocky and unreadable, impairing user experience. HTC can blame the 800 x 480 pixel straitjacket on Windows stipulations for the WP7 operating system, but it’s a crucial failing on a screen this large. Otherwise the panel is good quality, with vivid colours even at extreme viewing angles.

The HTC packs a faster, smoother, more quickly auto-focusing f/2.2 rear-facing camera. The 8MP shooter sports its own dedicated button and captures sharp, vibrant images which the Titan intelligently compresses from 8MP shots into 1-1.3MP jpg files, doing the same sort of thing with its 720p video capture to give an 800MB or so file for one minute of footage.

Other HTC phones have been known to lose masses of detail by over-compressing images, not the Titan however. Auto-exposure is also handled smoothly, producing less jarring sequences when the amount of light entering the lens changes. Software enhancements make managing your photos fun. The Titan also features a front-facing snapper although resolution is poor. Despite the low resolution, Windows Phone is magnificent on a display this large – the minimalist look and feel seems calm and self-assured in all the extra space.

Sending emails, searching for content, surfing, all are intuitive and stress-free. The huge virtual keyboard compensates for any lack of pixel-per-inch-ness, typing is more precise and therefore more enjoyable. There are a few OS glitches still, but the HTC is a great advert for the Windows Phone OS.

HTC announced its huge Titan 2 Windows Phone at CES 2012, sporting a 16MP camera. Detail in shots taken by the Titan 2 was truly astounding thanks in part to its rear-illuminated sensor. The Titan 2 camera also offers image stabilization, a selection of focus modes, 720p video capture and a dedicated button for the camera. But it’s not all good news – all tha extra photo-capabiliy means the batery is no longer removeable but has at least been souped-up from a 1600mAh pack to a 1730mAh version.

Design-wise the Titan 2 if anything resembles the HTC Thunderbolt most of all, and its smooth rear surface is good to the touch. Inside there’s a 1.5GHz Snapdragon CPU with a slightly meagre 512MB RAM, as well as 16GB strorage space, although annoyingly there is no possibility of expanding that. The 4.7-inch WVGA capacitive touchscreen is limited by Microsoft to an 800 x 480 resolution but Windows 7.5 Mango still renders sharp and bright. No official release date has been announced.

Nokia Lumia 900 has been very popular and now Nokia has released a white version of the same Windows Phone. Here is what Nokia Lumia 900 looks like in white.

The first one is Nokia Lumia 900, the one below is Lumia 800. These pics were actually leaked, or perhaps published on Nokia Facebook on purpose. This picture was soon taken off, so we wonder if someone had a happy finger on their mouse, or whether this was planned strategy of Nokia to get the discussion going.

Rumours circulate suggesting that there is a new and improved version of Lumia 900 with better camera about to hit the international market.

In any case Lumia 900 specs include 1.4 GHz processor, 4.3-inch AMOLED display, (thus far) 8MP camera with Carl Zeiss optics and dual LED flash. Also 1MP front facing camera, 16 GB internal memory, 512 MB RAM, and 1830mAh battery.

Sorry, that’d a bit of a daft title when I look back at it. Of course Windows phones are looking to grab a major share of the action in the smartphone world – just as Apple OS phones (i.e. iPhones) want to grab a big slice of the pie. Because smartphones are where the money is, so the more share they have the greater profits they’ll make.

The smartphone is the new mobile device for the second decade of the 21st century – an all in one communications hub that is as comfortable delivering broadband class connecting speeds as it is getting you in touch with social media sites or making your life easier with an app. More and more phone users are choosing smartphones, as a solution for business and pleasure alike – a handy version of the internet that fits in your pocket and enables all kinds of interactivity including shooting and uploading high quality video and photo files.

The basic split is between Windows OS phones and iPhone OS – with BlackBerry a contender still wobbling after a very dodgy year. So your basic fight is Android vs iPhone.

In other words: the age old fight between the PC user and the Mac user has migrated to the smartphone industry. In the Apple corner, we have devices that are cooler than cucumbers, with impeccable physical design and an apparently ergonomic interface – i.e. one that you learn as you go, with no need for a manual.

In the Windows corner we find phones that tell you how to use them, support apps created by people other than the OS developer, and can be fixed when they break.

Apple has experienced a weird kind of backlash in the last year and a half – ever since it brought out the MacBook Air, which was supposed to be the last word in portable computing but was so thin it couldn’t cool itself properly. Result – a lot of burned knees and a dent in Apple’s previously untarnished reputation, which got worse when new iPhone versions had glitches in them.

Because Apple doesn’t like admitting that anything is wrong with its gadgets. The device is sealed, impenetrable for a reason. So us plebs can’t get inside it and mess it up. That’s all very well when they work – but when the iPhone started going funny (voice recognition apps that didn’t recognise accents, for example) then there was no way to fix things. Unlike a Windows phone, which can be opened up, reprogrammed and generally played around with just like a Windows computer.

Of course letting software in from multiple providers (which is what the Windows OS allows you to do) opens you up to the prospect of hacking, of phishing, and of finding out that unheard of glitches in the programming code are suddenly making your phone do weird things. That’s the bugbear that Windows users have always had to put up with. The more stuff you add to your Windows system, the worse it performs.

But then the average shelf life of any smartphone these days is one year – after that the newest, must have version has come out and whatever you’ve got in your pocket is rendered by default old and embarrassing. So there’s hardly any time for a really comprehensive Windows glitch-fest to make itself known.

In which case maybe we’ll take price as an indicator of whether to buy a Windows phone or a Mac phone. And unsurprisingly, the price you pay for being super trendy, not being able to do anything when your phone goes wrong (except take it back to an Apple store to be tutted at by a supercilious employee) and occasionally having to put up with an app that doesn’t work, is a lot more than the price you pay for a Windows phone.

So if you want something that looks pretty much the same as an iPhone, works very similarly and doesn’t cost upwards of £400 ($633), think twice before you take a bite out of the big Apple. 

About the Author:

The above article is composed and edited by Shannen D. She is associated with many Technologies communities as their freelance writer and adviser. In her free time she writes articles related to  social media, internet dongle related articles etc. 

Nokia, once the undisputed king of the mobile phone world, has been wandering in the wilderness for a few years now. Since the launch of the first iPhone in 2007, Nokia has been slow to adapt its business model. Although they have produced a few touchscreen models such as the N97 and N8, these have not really kept up with the changing face of phone design and user expectations.

2010′s N8 was a hugely popular phone, largely thanks to its fabulous 12 megapixel camera, but in most areas it felt clunky and archaic. Not just in its physical design, but also in its outdated Symbian operating system. The more recent MeeGo powered Nokia N9 showed that the company still knows how to make a good looking phone, and it was so popular with punters that Nokia have used the same design for their first Windows Phone.

But the Lumia 800 is already proving to be a great deal more popular than the N9, even though it looks virtually identical. If there is one thing that the iPhone 4S has shown, it is that companies can produce phones that look identical to earlier models and still break sales records, providing that they have enough decent software features to entice people. For the iPhone 4S, this was Siri. For the Lumia, it is all of the fabulous Windows Phone features coupled with some more traditional Nokia services – as well as some new ones.

One of the Windows Phone features that the Lumia benefits from is the Xbox LIVE support. This comes as standard on all WP7 devices, but the Lumia is also benefitted by the new Xbox LIVE Companion app. With this app, Lumia owners can control their Xbox console with their phone. They can also get access to music, video and games from Xbox Marketplace. With the Xbox being the most popular games console on the planet, and Nokia being a well loved and respected brand name, this combo could have the potential to push Lumia sales through the roof.

But Nokia is not just relying solely on Microsoft entertainment features, bringing many of its own services to the table. The most interesting of these is probably Nokia Mix Radio. Mix Radio is Nokia’s answer to Spotify and Apple’s iCloud. It is an online music streaming service that allows Lumia owners access to millions of songs to stream to their devices, and it doesn’t even require a sign up.

This free service works out of the box, and Niels Munksgaard, head of Nokia Entertainment, feels that it puts Nokia “back in the game”. Streaming music and radio services are increasingly becoming the preferred method of listening to music, with mp3s becoming as old hat as vinyl and audio cassettes.

The greatest thing about Nokia Mix Radio is that it has already thought of a solution to what is probably the biggest flaw of competing services like iCloud. If all of your music is contained online, then you have absolutely no way of listening to it without an internet connection. While most of us are usually within reach of a Wi-Fi connection, or have access to 3G, there is nothing more annoying than getting on a long train journey to find that your phone cannot connect, leaving you with a few hours of watching blurry hedges through a dirty window.

With Nokia Mix Radio however, you can choose to download new playlists that you create. These playlists can be activated offline, and provide you with around 14 hours of internet-less musical entertainment.

Nokia Mix Radio is also a great way to discover new music. New artists can be added into your playlists based on what you like, and you can find information on gigs and performances by artists in your playlist – including phone numbers to book tickets.

Nokia Mix Radio is only available on Nokia produced Windows Phones, like the new Lumia and, presumably, several more devices to be released in 2012. With features like Mix Radio, Nokia are not only making themselves more attractive to former customers who had jumped ship over the past few years, but have also provided a way to differentiate themselves from the rest of the Windows Phone deals on the market.