Epson Stylus Office BX305FW

Not everybody uses inkjet all-in-ones for printing photos and for home and small offices, plain paper print is much more important. Epson has a range of small office inkjets, going under the brand Stylus Office. The Stylus Office BX305FW is an economically priced model, still offering print, scan, copy and fax.
The printer follows the general lines of Epson's recent releases, with its signature wave-shaped top to its fold-out, 30-sheet Automatic Document Feed (ADF) tray. The only paper feed is a near-vertical tray at the rear, which Epson rates at 120 sheets, but since that’s of 64gsm paper, you'll be lucky to get 100 sheets of 80gsm into it. The paper feeds to a two-stage, pull-out tray at the front.

The control panel, which has a textured grey surface and is fitted at a fixed angle, is quite crowded, with a large square for menu navigation, buttons to start and stop jobs, a number pad and five, fax quick-dial buttons. There's a two-line, text-only LCD display with no backlight, but good contrast, so it shows up well under overhead light.

There are no memory card slots or PictBridge socket in this machine, though, given its low price and target market, this is understandable.

At the back of the left-hand side are three sockets for USB, phone line and third-party handset. Most people will probably opt for wireless connection, though, which is standard. It can be set up through WPS setup with a couple of button presses, or you can enter a passcode, using the number pad.

Fold up the whole of the scanner section and you can get at the print head and its four ink cartridges. These clip in very easily and after the obligatory pumping are ready to print.

The Stylus Office BX305FW runs under Windows and OS X and there's a copy of Presto! PageManager 9 Standard included, to handle document management and OCR on both platforms. Other Epson software is provided, including applications for basic photo manipulation and printing Web pages.

Epson is among the most ‘optimistic’ manufacturers when it comes to print speeds. It claims speeds of 34ppm and 15ppm for black and colour print on this machine. Even assuming were talking draft mode, that’s still considerably faster than you're likely to see in real life. Our five-page black text document returned a speed of 3.6ppm and, although the draft mode speed measured 12.5ppm, that's quite a bit less than half the claimed speed.

Our five-page black text and colour graphics document was printed at 1.3ppm and this is pretty slow, even for a machine like this one, costing well under £100. A single-page colour copy took 53s and the five-page text copy from the ADF took 1:34, neither of which is particularly impressive. Finally, a 15 x 10cm photo on glossy paper took a very slow 3:24. In normal mode, it still took 1:33.

The text prints we produced are usual Epson fair, with noticeable jaggies around many characters, easily visible without magnification. Draft text is very light and looks like the output from a dot-matrix printer which hasn't seen a fresh ribbon in a while.

Colour graphics come out bright and smooth. Although there are dither patterns in evidence, these are only apparent when you look closely and black text over colour shows no signs of ink bleed. The colour copy maintains its colours well, though areas of solid fill look blotchier than in the original. Colour photos are well reproduced, with good levels of detail and colours which look as they should.

Two sets of cartridges are compatible with this printer, offering standard and high yields. Even the high-yield versions only average 400 pages, though, with the standard yield ones nearer to 180 pages. Epson doesn't price them expensively, so the cost per page comes out at 3.3p for black and 10.2p for colour, both including 0.7p for paper. While not cheap, you won't find much better costs for a printer at this price.

Verdict

Epson's Stylus Office BX305FW is a serviceable all-in-one for office use, with a bonus of full fax support and an ADF for scanning and copying multi-page documents. Print quality is only average and speeds are definitely on the slow side, but for under £70 at online prices, you get quite a bit of printer for your money.

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LG Optimus One P500

The budget Android smartphone market has really taken off in the last year with beautifully made handsets like the HTC Wildfire or models with high resolution screens like the Orange San Francisco being available for well under £200. And, one of the more recent arrivals is the LG Optimus One that we're looking at today.

Clothed mainly in soft touch black plastic, this phone is built around a 3.2in screen, which is slightly smaller than that of your average high-end smartphone and as such the whole phone is a bit smaller than the likes of the iPhone 4. Specifically it measures 113.5 x 59 x 13.3 mm, so is about 5mm shorter and narrower.

It's also immediately clear this is a budget phone from the fact that the screen is a flexible plastic rather than glass. Otherwise, it's an elegant enough device with its smart black and silver livery. The curved edges and general layout of buttons also makes it a nice device to hold and handle.

Eschewing the fashion for all touch sensitive controls, the One has a full compliment of four physical, backlit, buttons running underneath the screen, corresponding to Menu, Home, Back and Search. We rather like the way LG has separated the Search and Menu keys from the Home and Back, signifying their status as less-often used extras rather than main navigation buttons. All four have a nice noticeable click and feel securely planted. Thankfully, pressing the Home button activates the screen, allowing you to unlock the phone, without having to stretch for the power button.

Elsewhere there is a volume control on the right edge, headphone jack and power button on the top, a 3.0 megapixel camera on the back and microUSB on the bottom edge. The volume rocker again has a nice noticeable click though the thinness of the buttons means it's not the easiest control to use by feel alone. Pop the back plate off – via the thumbnail notch on the top edge – and a rather glamorous looking silver inside is revealed. Sadly it's just painted plastic, not metal. You do, however, get a sizable 1500mAh battery and microSD slot for adding up to 32GB of storage to the fairly miserly 170MB found onboard. 

Turn the phone on and its screen is presented in its full glory. The LCD panel packs in 320 x 480 pixels, which is lower than the San Francisco and high-end smartphones but is on par with or higher than most cheaper Android devices. Thanks to the smaller screen, the lower resolution isn't quite so obvious, resulting in a sharp looking image. It's no iPhone 4 but you're definitely not going to be constantly distracted by a horrible pixellated mess everytime you try and write a text message. Viewing angles are impressive with the picture not breaking up significantly no matter where you view it from. It also produces nice natural, if slightly muted colours.

It's also nice and responsive when it comes to touch sensitivity, and supports multi-touch for the all essential pinch to zoom gesture. It's just a shame LG couldn't have packed in a glass screen for the price, as no matter this model's merits, it just feels less than premium.

The LG Optimus One runs Android 2.2 with some light customisations by LG. So instead of the App Launcher, Browser, and Phone icons running along the bottom there are Phone, Contacts, App Launcher, Messages and Browser, which seems like an improvement to us. Slide the notifications bar down from the top of the screen and there are quick switches for turning on/off WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS and Aeroplane mode, and there's a Mute button as well. Again, this seems like a sensible little addition.

Less welcome is the T9-style keypad that LG has replaced the standard onscreen keyboard with. While the phone is a bit narrower than some other touchscreen smartphones, so is a bit more cramped to type on, it's still wide enough to accommodate a standard QWERTY style keyboard. Thankfully, you can switch back to the very capable standard Android keyboard.

Otherwise, we're looking at a pretty standard version of Android, so you have five homescreens on which to place loads of widgets and apps. Tap the App Launcher and there's the full selection of apps to choose from. The phone uses a 600MHz processor so it's certainly not the speediest going but it generally trots along nicely with few moments of stutter.

LG has added a selection of its own widgets including a calendar and viewers for messages, weather and bookmarks. They all seem to work quite well though none particularly blew us away with any extra features over and above the norm.

Log into Gmail, Facebook and Twitter and, if you so choose, your contacts list will be populated by information from all three services, with you hardly having to lift a finger. It's a common feature on Android phones now but it's always satisfying to see.

Messaging services include a text message inbox, instant messaging client and both Gmail inbox as well as a general inbox for other email services. All work very well and are a breeze to use.

GPS is onboard and you have GoogleMaps and Google Navigation to take full advantage of it, or you can download a 3rd party sat nav app as well. The phone seemed to pick up a signal with reasonable speed so we had few complaints here. The slow processor will mean that 3rd party apps (with 3D graphics showing where you're going) are a bit sluggish, though.

Music is well catered for with an easy to use mp3 player and FM radio, though the player doesn't support fancier formats like FLAC. Video isn't so well represented with neither support for many files types nor the grunt to play higher quality clips. Of course, youtube is on hand for the majority of your video viewing.

The web browser is the usual excellent Android affair that is speedy and renders most web pages perfectly. If lacks Flash support but otherwise is more than up to the job. With Wi-Fi as well as 3G you can have fast downloads when at home or on the move.

The 3.0 megapixel camera lacks a flash so is fairly limited in its scope, but will do for the odd social snap in well lit environments. Thankfully it does have autofocus, though, so can be used for taking sharp closeup shots. It can also capture video at a perfectly adequate resolution of 640 x 480. It's not HD but there's enough detail to see what's going on, it's actually the limited 18fps that hurts the quality, making motion look jerky.

Making a few test calls on the One threw up no obvious issues, though general quality isn't anything special. There's no active noise cancelling for reducing the amount of noise transmitted from your surroundings to the person you're calling. The speaker phone is fairly weedy as well.

Finally we come to battery life and as we expected, the large battery combined with a slower processor and smaller screen meant this phone happily kept going for three days general use.

Verdict

The LG Optimus One is quite simply some phone. As a budget smartphone, it more than gets the job done and if you can find it on a good deal, there's no reason for you to avoid it. However, equally there's little to really make us recommend it. Frankly, the Orange San Francisco still stands out as the bargain choice at the moment.

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Mophie Juice Pack Plus (iPhone 4)

Chances are you have heard of Mophie. The California-based company has garnered a lot of attention in recent years having become obsessed with finding a solution to that most nigglesome of tech problems: smartphone battery life. Mophie focuses solely on Apple products and the latest addition to its so-called 'Juice Pack' range, the 'Plus', is arguably its most important product to date.

What gets us excited is the technical achievement. The Plus is currently only available for the iPhone 4, but it crams a 2000 mAh battery inside. To put this in perspective the iPhone 4 has a 1420mAh battery. On its own Apple claims the iPhone 4 is good for seven hours talk time on 3G or up to 300 hours of standby, six hours of 3G web surfing (10 hours on WiFi), up to 10 hours of video playback or up to 40 hours of audio playback. In isolation these sound impressive, and they are, but when you're listening to music while surfing the web over 3G and running GPS in the background battery life goes down fast.

Consequently Mophie claims the Plus can more than double the iPhone 4's stamina. It adds eight hours of 3G talk time, seven hours of 3G web surfing (11 on WiFi), 11 hours of video playback or 44 hours of audio playback. Essentially it is like having a second iPhone in your pocket when the first runs out. Furthermore at 70g it has a bearable weight premium. The reservation? It costs £89.95.

 

So how does Mophie go about justifying something that costs as much as two iPod shuffles? Thankfully in a number of ways. The first thing you'll notice about the Plus is its construction. Mophie doesn't market it as a rugged case, but at 18mm at its thickest point it is thinner than many rugged cases and tougher too. I suspect the reasoning behind this is the Plus doesn't specifically cover the screen, instead using a bevel to protect it from falls onto flat surfaces. That said many rugged cases, including Tech 21's famed iBand with d3o, do the same.

Secondly the Plus is very well constructed. It doesn't just feel rugged, it feels good in hand. Mophie has used an injected rubber finish and the back is curved so, while bigger, it actually feels better to hold during phone calls. Obviously rubber also provides a better grip than Apple's stylish, but somewhat impractical glass front and rear.

On top of this it is the little touches that impress…

Everything is done that little bit better. The iPhone slots snugly into the case. The top third comes off and the iPhone slides in with millimetre-precision. The inside of the case has a dock connector and the top of the case slides on top of the iPhone and locks with a reassuring click. It isn't going to come apart without your help.

Around the edges of the case you'll find replacement power and volume buttons (since the existing controls are covered), and gaps for the mute switch and headphone jack. In addition you'll find slits just below the home button, these redirect the external speakers of the iPhone so sound is pushed upwards. The effect is subtle, but it does provide slightly more volume and casts audio a little wider. On the bottom right corner you'll find an on/off switch which toggles the case charging on and off and a useful battery indicator button on the bottom edge. When pressed this illuminates up to four status lights to indicate the remaining charge in the case. A simple, but invaluable feature.

 On the bottom left corner you'll see a micro USB port. This charges the Juice Pack Plus case and the iPhone, but the clever bit is it charges the iPhone fully first before the case. Consequently there is no downside to charging the phone this way as opposed to using a regular dock. Your iPhone can now be charged with any standard micro USB cable too and it charges at the same rate as with a dock connector. Since the port can handle power and data the iPhone can happily sync with iTunes through the case.

What's more the Plus lives up to its grand battery proclamations. You'll get at least two days of battery life on a single charge even with heavy use. This means over the course of 48 hours 4-5 hours of music listening, approximately two hours of video and web surfing, Spotify use and two hours of satellite navigation (we used the TomTom app). With light use the iPhone will make it through three days and if you switch off battery suckers like 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth and GPS it will see you through a working week. In short the Plus will make your iPhone last like your old dumbphone.

 The problem is this doesn't change the price. £89.95 is still a lot of money for a case. Especially since Apple changes the shape of the iPhone with such regularity meaning it isn't likely to fit the iPhone 5. With the next iPhone due in June/July you'll need to be locked into a long term contract or be a frequent long distance traveller to really justify the cost. Especially with Mophie selling the Juice Pack Air, a 1,500mAh variant (also 70g, but 1mm thinner) for £60.

Verdict

It is hard to knock a product which achieves everything it sets out to do. The Mophie Juice Pack Plus is well designed, durable, full of clever touches and delivers on its lofty claims of doubling iPhone battery life. That said we can't help but think almost £90 is a lot for an iPhone 4 case, especially when it is for a phone three quarters of the way through its life cycle. It's a cautious recommendation, but value for money will depend entirely on individual circumstance.

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