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| XCute DV1 |
| General |
| Network | Gsm 900 / Gsm 1800 / Gsm 1900 |
| Announced | 2005, 1q |
| Status | Available |
| Size |
| Dimensions | 87 X 46.6 X 23.5 Mm |
| Weight | 118 G |
| Display |
| Type | Tft, 16m Colors |
| Size | 640 X 240 Pixels |
| | - Second External Oled Display, 65k Colors (96 X 65 Pixels) |
| Ringtones |
| Type | Polyphonic (64 Channels), Mp3 |
| Customization | Composer, Download, |
| Vibration | Yes |
| Memory |
| Phonebook | 500 Entries |
| Call Records | 10 Dialed, 10 Received, 10 Missed Calls |
| Card Slot | Minisd, |
| | - 20 Mb Shared Memory |
| Data |
| Gprs | Class 10 (4+1/3+2 Slots), 32 - 48 Kbps |
| Hscsd | No |
| Edge | No |
| 3g | No |
| Wlan | No |
| Bluetooth | No |
| Infrared Port | No |
| Usb | Yes |
| Features |
| Messaging | Sms, Mms |
| Browser | Wap 2.0/xhtml |
| Games | |
| Colors | Cool Blue, Titanic Silver, Sunny Orange |
| Camera | 3.15 Mp, 2048x1536 Pixels, Rotating Lens, Video(vga 30fps), Flash |
| | - Mp3 Player
- Video Player
- Tv Out
- T9
- Language Learning
- Voice Memo
- Pim Applications
- Built-in Handsfree |
| Battery |
| | Standard Battery, Li-ion |
| Stand-by | Up To 150 H |
| Talk Time | Up To 4 H |
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XCute - DV1A phone that shoots 30FPS Video? Meet XCute's DV1
We first talked about the DV1 from XCute Mobile back in February. The DV1 is noteable because it is not only one of the first 3 megapixel cameraphones available on the market, but because it is capable of shooting 30 frame per second video at VGA resolution. That is serious video. Well, only a few months have passed since that initial story and we now offer you a full hands on review. Since it is the multimedia capabilities that make the DV1 so special, I am going to spend a bit more time on those aspects of the phone and perhaps a bit less on the other more mundane parts.
The DV1's Physical Design
But before we start talking about all of the features with a high gee-whiz factor, first let's talk about the physical design of the DV1. To the uninitiated, the DV1 probably looks like a slightly off-centered clamshell phone with a very beefy hinge. The DV1 isn't particularly large at 90mm x 46/61mm x 26mm (3.54" x 1.81/2.40" x 1.02"), or heavy at 121g (4.26oz), but that large diameter hinge certainly does make it look bigger than it really is. That hinge area is where you will find the camera lens, flash, and macro switch on one side, and the function dial on the other. Beneath that dial on the side of the phone is the volume/zoom control and what XCute calls the "shift" key. The body has some rough edges on it, particularly on the rear battery compartment cover, but nothing particularly obvious.
The top half of the folder is home to a very small and narrow external 65k color display (much smaller than the black area that surrounds it would suggest). The top half of the folder itself is attached to the rest of the phone with a rotating hinge that allows for 270 degrees of rotation, enough that you can twist it around and close the phone so that the main display shows - something that serves no real purpose as best I can tell. The reason for the hinge becomes clear when you start taking photos and recording videos, though, as it allows you to hold the device like a miniDV video recorder, in a somewhat gun-like setup. The hinge in my unit felt a bit weak and was a cause for concern, but XCute has told me that the hinge has been replaced with something more durable in the current handsets. The top of the device is where you will find a rather large speaker port. Under an attached rubber cover on the bottom of the DV1, you will find the miniSD card slot, the USB and headset port, and the power port.
The inside is where you will find the main display, which is capable of showing a whopping 16.7 million colors. That sounds very impressive, and the display does look good when viewing photos, but it is lacking when it comes to displaying the phone's UI. It almost appears that the pixels are arranged in a different pattern than is normal, often causing horizontal and vertical lines to look jagged, and causing awful artifacts on most text. The numeric keypad is quite nice, offering large and spacious keys. The 4-way directional controller (d-pad) is good enough, though a 5-way controller with a center button would have been welcomed. The softkeys are too narrow for my liking, something that becomes particularly obvious when the phone is configured for recording videos or shooting photos.
Multimedia Galore
The XCute DV1 has many multimedia capabilities. Since this year seems to be the year of mobile music, we'll start with the DV1's MP3 player - a rather simple application. The MP3 player has no support for playlists, but does allow you to select folders of music from internal memory or from a miniSD card to be played, which is often good enough. If you don't have the stereo headset, you can still hear the music played through the mono speaker at the top of the device. The forementioned d-pad controller is the main control for the MP3 player, letting you start, stop, and pause music as well as move to the next or previous track. The MP3 player has a few available skins to choose from, and the normal shuffle and repeat modes available. The currently playing track is shown on the external sub-display, but since the display is so narrow, the track name is quite difficult to read as it scrolls by. In any event, the 20MB of internal storage the DV1 offers would never be enough for a real music player, so to counter that, XCute has put a miniSD card slot in the device. I used the DV1 with a 512MB card and it worked fine.
One of the big selling points of the DV1 is its digital video capabilities. The DV1 is capable of recording 30 frame per second video in either MPEG, MOV (Quicktime), or ASF (Windows Media) formats at a very large 640x480 pixel resolution. To use the DV1 as a digital video recorder, you open the phone so that the two halves are at a 90 degree angle to each other, and then twist the display 90 degrees. You then hold the DV1 much like you would a gun, with the lens facing the front and the button in the middle of the function dial (not the d-pad) acting as the record/stop button.
Here are a bunch of sample video clips recorded with the DV1. All of them are of the same street intersection with the exception of the macro mode demo. Most were shot as AVI files except where ASF or MOV formats are indicated. All videos are at the full VGA resolution (though the DV1 can record QVGA video, too). 15FPS AVI fine quality (3.0MB), 24FPS AVI fine quality (5.6MB), 30FPS AVI fine quality (5.7MB), 24FPS AVI medium quality (4.3MB), 24FPS AVI low quality (3.2MB), 24FPS ASF medium quality (4.3MB), 24FPS MOV medium quality (4.3MB), Macro focus demo (6.7MB)
In general there appears to be little difference between the 24FPS and 30FPS video. Even the file sizes are virtually the same. There is a difference in file size when you change the quality settings, though. The difference in quality is quite obvious if you zoom the videos to 200% of their original size. In the low quality version you will also see that there was a problem in the video. It appears to have been corrupted somehow while it was being recorded. This happens infrequently, but consistently. It appears to be more of a problem with AVI files than with MOV files, though. I didn't shoot enough ASF files to be able to comment on them. The white balance and exposure adjustments seem to be too slow, and the exposure jumps around a bit much, causing brief flashes in the video at times. But overall, we are still talking about pretty good quality, 30FPS video from a phone. That's impressive.
I believe that more people will be interested in the DV1's 3 megapixel still images than in the video capabilities, though. As is the case with the video, the exposure metering seems to be a bit flaky. If you give the system time to settle down a bit, though, you will usually get a reasonably exposed photo. The DV1 offers a tremendous number of camera settings, even going so far as to allow the user to adjust the sharpness and color saturation levels. 5 different quality settings are available, too, though at the lower resolutions they seem to have no impact on image quality, just on file size, so if you are shooting 1MP or VGA images, feel free to just use the lowest quality setting. You probably won't be able to tell the difference.
There's a problem, though. Considering that the DV1 has a 3 megapixel sensor, photos shot at VGA resolution should have been able to go up to slightly over 3x magnification simply by making use of the data coming from the camera sensor. Instead, it appears that the full sensor frame's worth of pixels are resampled down to VGA (1x magnification) and then resampled back up to account for the digital zoom, which results in incredibly blurry photos. The proper way to do this would have been to reduce the downsampling rate and then only use a VGA sized subset of the image data. That way no pixel data would have to be guessed at, and the images would still be sharp, looking the same as if you had shot a 3MP image and then just cropped a 640x480 section out of it with an image editor on your PC.
The DV1 offers a lot of options and settings in the camera. On top of the sharpness and color saturation adjustments you can make are the sepia, negative, and black and white photo modes. The camera also has general modes for shooting portraits, landscapes, sports, and other things.
The shots below are meant to test the camera's white balance system with incandescent lighting, the type that you typically find at home or in a bar. Offices tend to use florescent lighting, which has a different impact on the camera's white balance. In the dog and frog examples you can see that the automatic setting produced a far better photo. The manual incandescent setting resulted in a photo that was much too cool looking. In general, the automatic white balance seems to work better than the presets, suggesting that the presets need to be tuned a bit to be more in sync with real-world situations.
The photos shot outdoors show similar results. It was a very bright, sunny day, but the auto white balance setting came up with a more accurate photo than did the manual sunny setting. Both photos suffer from a blue haze on the top half of the frame, but that is not a function of the white balance system.
Below you will find another comparison between the DV1's automatic and manual white balance settings. The photos were shot on a decidedly cloudy day, but the manual cloudy white balance setting produced photos with a general magenta cast. The automatic white balance resulted in a more natural, and accurate, photograph. The automatic white balance system on the DV1 is quite slow, though. You'll want to give the camera a few seconds to adjust both to the brightness of the scene as well as figure out what the proper white balance should be.
Here is the same scene in the remainder of the DV1's photo resolutions. Notice that the 1 megapixel and VGA images show significant jagged edges on the leaves of the plants. This appears to be due to a lack of a reasonable resampling algorithm in the camera. The net effect is that you really need to shoot your photos at 2 or 3 megapixels in order to get a decent looking photo. If you want a lower resolution photo, you'd be best off to use a program like Adobe Photoshop to resample it yourself.
A rather pleasant surprise that I found in the DV1's camera settings was the ability to adjust the way the camera computes the proper exposure. The DV1 has two settings: one for a central spot metering mode where only the very center of the scene (which contains the subject, presumably) is used, the other setting, which is the default, is the matrix metering mode that evaluates the entire scene. You can see the difference below. The photo shot in the matrix metering mode is overall brighter so that the plants in the foreground can be seen a bit more clearly (washing out the car a bit in the process).
DV1 User Experience
The XCute DV1 has what I would call a reasonable user interface, especially for such a small player in the mobile phone market. In general the system is consistent and predictable. The left softkey is typically OK/select or brings up a list of options. The right softkey almost always brings you back to the prior menu. I really would have preferred a button in the d-pad for OK and select, as well as a dedicated Clear button to handle the back function, but the system is workable as it is.
The main menu, which can be displayed in page, list, or icon grid mode, can be navigated by using the number keys on the keypad. The same can not always be said of the sub-menus, however, which is a disappointment. I do like how the sub-menus will often show you a setting's current value when it is highlighted by listing the value on the next line in a different color, similar to how many Samsung phones operate. This saves you from selecting an option only to find out that it was already set as you wished.
The 4 directions of the d-pad controller can be configured to act as shortcuts to the user's most used functions, which is great. Setting one of those to the user configurable shortcuts menu can save even more time by letting you put all of your most commonly used functions in one easy to reach menu. But the UI has some real misses, too.
Let's start with the feature dial on the right side of the hinge. It has icons for the phone, camera, media player, video recorder, voice recorder, and mp3 player on it. An icon is backlit when active. So far, so good. You switch the DV1's modes by pressing the side button closest to the function dial, the "shift" button, as XCute calls it. Pressing it will cause the phone icon to go dim and the camera icon to light up, activating the camera at the same time. Press it again and the camera is turned off and the media player comes up while its icon gets the backlight. One major problem, though, is the speed with which you can rotate through these modes, or more precisely, the lack of speed. Each of these mode changes takes over a second, meaning that it takes over 7 seconds or so, at best, to get to the MP3 player mode. You can more quickly access the MP3 player by going through the main menu, but you don't have that option for most of the functions. The shift key is the only way to turn on the video recorder, for example. Worse yet, if you want to get back to the phone mode, you have to long press the shift key to do so since the red hang-up button on the keypad has no effect at all. In my opinion, the red hangup button should always take you back to the standby screen. If you long press the key you will end up turning off the phone. There is simply no way to get back to the phone and its regular menu system without using the shift key. The shift key is by far the most annoying aspect of the DV1. Nice idea, but it was poorly implemented.
Another problem is trying to get to all of the camera and video recorder's settings while the phone is configured in the "gun" shape. You have to keep flipping the display back and forth in order to be able to access the menus properly. If the softkeys hadn't been so thin, and if the menu worked in landscape mode when in that position, you would still be able to work through the options. But as it is, changing a setting and looking at the subject on the display are mutually exclusive tasks without some finger gymnastics being involved.
The DV1 as a Phone
When it comes to basic phone functionality, the DV1 is rather average. Its reception on the 1900Mhz band (it also supports 900 and 1800Mhz) was average. It worked in the same places that most other phones worked, but was by no means a strong performer when compared to some of the other recent handsets I have tested in the past year. Audio quality is also quite average. While quite clear, the sound is rather thin. You and the remote caller will have no trouble understanding each other, it is just that it will be obvious to all involved that you are using a mobile phone. In spite of what the spec sheets stated, our DV1 did not have a speakerphone function.
The DV1 has 4 normal profiles and one headset specific profile available to the user. I like how you can change the answer mode (active open, any key, normal, etc) based on the profile in use. Not really necessary, but cool none the less. The contact system is fairly complete, and can hold 500 records. Why it can't make use of all available memory, though, is a question. The DV1 that XCute provided me did come with a USB cable that allowed you to use the phone as a USB storage device, but it did not come with software - so there was no way to synchronize the contacts with a PC. I do not know if such software is available elsewhere.
About the only thing that the DV1 does really well as a regular phone is handle talk time. The DV1 managed a very respectable 7.25 hours of talk time in our test, which is better than most comparable handsets on the market today. But don't think that means that you can freely make use of the still and video cameras without concern for battery life, because you can't. Those functions eat though the battery very quickly in my experience.
DV1 Messaging and Applications
It is quite obvious that the XCute DV1 is not a messaging phone. Messaging support is limited to basic SMS and EMS, even though we were led to believe that MMS support was in the phone. The message editor is very basic, but there is support for SMS profiles so that you can make use of multiple service centers and choose between GPRS and GSM for the message transport method.
There is no email support on the DV1 at all.
The big kicker here is the lack of T9 support. The DV1 instead uses a system that XCute appears to call "smartABC", and it is quite bad, probably owing to the company's focus on the Asian markets and their multiple input methods for those languages. SmartABC is very difficult to use in general, much like a very early version of Motorola's iTap from many years ago. The d-pad is used to highlight one of the suggested words, and the left softkey must be pressed to select a word. There is no smart capitalization system, either. The DV1 enters text in all caps, or all lower case. You must switch input modes to switch case, and doing so resets the current word, meaning that there appears to be no way to enter a mixed case word. On top of that, the 1 key does not enter a period/full stop, you need to bring up the symbols menu and select it there instead.
Quite simply, the DV1's messaging capabilities are a throwback to the 1990s.
The DV1 is also lacking a large suite of PIM applications. It offers a basic calendar app that allows you to set the date, time, note, and recurrence for an event, but an event's alarm can only be set to go off at the actual start of the event. There is no way to use it as a reminder that goes off 5 minutes or an hour before the start. The ToDo list seems to be just another view of the calendar.
A reasonable alarm clock is offered, one that lets you set three different alarms and have them repeat every day, each weekday, or just go off that one time. There is also a world clock application on board.
Conclusion
The XCute DV1 is a highly focused device. It appears that XCute exerted all of the force of their resources on the still camera and video recording capabilities to the detriment of most other aspects of the device. Yes, it can shoot 3 megapixel photos and record 30FPS VGA video. Few devices can do that, for certain. But the MP3 player is simplistic, the messaging system is quite bad, and the user interface that revolves around the featured camera and music abilities is very cumbersome.
The DV1 simply lacks polish. It needs a few good months of time with some usability experts and focus groups, and a real messaging system, to make it viable outside of a niche market. If you really want the video capability, the DV1 can certainly provide you with a lot of great fun, but I don't think that most people will be able to live with the DV1 as their every day phone. It just does not feel finished enough for that, though I would hope that perhaps a future DV2 model could address many of these issues. That would be a sweet phone. |
| Common misspellings on this brand: xcite , dxcute , xucte , xcvute , xcutge , xzcute , xciute , xcu6te , xvute , xcute4 , xute , xcutee , cxcute , xchte , xcu6e , xcutes , xcutye , xcjte |
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