Aquos can't fail to impress

It looks sleek and elegant with a curved black-rim screen in contrast with the curved white back cover and it comes in a quite thin body for a 5-inch phone that’s 9.1mm thick. The phone is compact and light, only 138.92 x 71.48mm and 144.8 grams.

The SH930W has good performance thanks to its dual core 1.5 GHz processor and hefty 2 gigabyte working memory or RAM, compared to 1 GB RAM of most smart phones.

It runs on Android 4.1 Jelly Bean operation system, which is intuitive to use and navigate.

The SH930W has an impressive Full HD screen. It uses a TFT transmissive capacitive touch screen with 1920 x 1080 resolution in 24 bit colour depth and in 443 pixel per inch resolution depth. So the screen can display Full HD movies very sharply and beautifully. At its full brightness, the screen was also readable under direct sunlight.

The Aquos Phone uses HSPA+ 3G protocol with 42 Mbps bandwidth but does not support my TrueMove H 850 MHz 3G connection, so I tested its data and smart phone functions mostly on a Wi-Fi connection.

The test found that the SH930W ran applications fast and smoothly. HD video clips played smoothly and beautifully. The menus were responsive and screen scrolling was smooth and fast. Games also ran fast and smoothly.

The SH930W comes with several useful business applications, including CamCard, CamScanner, and CamDictionary. The CamCard is very useful business card reader app. You just take a picture of a business card and the CamCard will add the photo as your new contact.

The CamScanner will turn your phone into a scanner. You can use it to capture and scan any paper document with the camera and you can email the scans in PDF or JPEG format.

The CamDictionary lets you use the camera to focus on a word and get instant translation. It also has window for you type the words in English and get a Thai translation.

The phone also comes with the Kingsof Office application for working with Microsoft Office documents.

The Aquos Phone has an outstanding main camera with 8 megapixel resolution. It comes with 28mm lens for wider views and beautiful scenery shots. Best of all, it uses a BSI (Backside illuminated) sensor that allows the camera to take nice photos even in low light. And the main camera is capable of recording Full HD 1080p video at 30 frames per second.

The test found that the camera really captured sharp and clean photos even indoors without turning the flash on. Portraits looked sharp and beautiful. I captured nightlights with good results as well.

Unfortunately, the camera does not come with the functions burst mode or the mode of firing several shots for selecting the best one.

The phone also provides 2 MP front camera for making video calls.

The SH930W can be a high quality MP3 player. It comes with SRS TruMedia technology for creating 3D sound environment. It also provides equaliser with several preset settings to choose from.

The phone comes with nice white in-ear earphones with good sound quality. I tested it and found the music quality was quite impressive with clarity and ample bass sounds. The music quality was much more enhanced with deeper bass and more details when I tested the phone with my premium Sony in-ear earphones.

The phone comes with 2100 mAh battery. With the light sensor turned on to adjust the brightness of the screen according to the light environment, I could survive a day with one fully charging when I turned Wi-Fi on and used the phone mainly for Facebook monitoring.

But when I adjusted the screen brightness to the full capacity, the battery ran out fast. 

Sharp says the phone can be used for about 5.9 hours for Internet browsing via Wi-Fi at 50 per cent backlight capacity. Or it can play video with the headset for about 5.1 hours with 50 per cent backlight capacity. Full charging takes about 3 hours.

Sharp SH930W Aquos Phone retails for Bt16,900.

 

 

          Key specs

_ OS: Android 4.1 Jelly Bean

_ Processor/Chipset: MSM8260A Dual 1.5GHz(S4)

_ Radio Band & Standard: GSM bands: 850/900/1800/ 1900; UMTS bands: 900/1900/ 2100; HSPA+ Rel-8: DL/UL, up to 42/11Mbps

_ Display: 5-inch TFT transmissive LCD with Full HD(1920x1080) resolution and 24 bit, 16.7M colour depth; Capacitive 2.5D touch panel

_ Camera: Rear Camera 8M, auto focus, w/flash, 1080P recording; Front Camera 2M, 1080P recording@30FPS

_ Connectivity: GPS and AGPS, WiFi: 802.11 b/g/n, Bluetooth 4.0, micro USB 2.0

_ Sensor: G-sensor / E-compass, Ambient light sensor / Proximity sensor, Gyro meter

_ Battery: 2100 mAh; Talk time: Up to 480 minutes for WCDMA, Up to 840) minutes for GSM

_ Dimension: 138.92mm (H) x 71.48mm (W) x 9.1mm (T)

_ Weight: 144.8g