Latte Boom Review

Interface:

Because of the specific layout of the buttons, using the phone feels a little weird, but one gets used to this, too. From the home screen the two soft buttons act as shortcuts to the mp3player/camera and, in order to browse in the menu, you have to press the volume slider inwards. The main menu is visualized in a vertical list with icons to the side. You can scroll up and down using the slider and you can select by pressing it inwards or by the left soft button.


The phone book can memorize up to 300 contacts, each of them containing a few numbers of a different type, a picture and a melody. You can save *250* more numbers on the sim card. You can search for numbers using the Quick Search option, but you’ll be disappointed not to find results by a contact’s second name.





The organizer includes a calendar, featuring opportunities for setting tasks (as well as an alarm with a recurrent option), To-DO list, 3 alarms that can be set for different times and days (with a recurrent option) and a World Clock with an interface of the world map. A calculator, unit converter (weight and lenght) and currency converter are to be found in the Extra menu. The stopwatch is in the Fun & Games menu.



In messaging you’ll find two separate boxes for SMS and MMS. The Ezi Predictive Text input, designated in the menu as “Smart abc”, analogous to T9 and iTap, is there to help you type in texts. When writing a text message you can format, using three different fonts, as well as different styles and alignment.



Latte Boom is a three-band GSM phone, featuring an American and a European version. The first one works perfectly in the US and the second one is only usable in certain zones, due to its 1900 MHz. We consider the lack of Bluetooth, to help you both transfer data and connect to a handsfree or even to a multimedia device (stereo headphones or stereo system) a big disadvantage.


Camera:

The phone’s back is equipped with a 1.3 megapixel camera and a small ‘mirror’, but unlike Slim11b it does not have a flash that can be conveniently used as a flashlight. You start the interface in two seconds, by holding down the button on the right. The interface is a little confusing, but it takes just a while to get used to it: the icons are allocated a number, showing which number key to press in order to change a setting, using the slider.



The images are with very low quality, which would be suitable for the first cameraphones. Being in 2007, we may say that the Boom has awful camera. It is useless.




You avail of a video recorder, but it can only record with a poor resolution, suitable for playback on the phone’s display and not on a PC.

You can view the pictures you have taken in the gallery. A list of thumbnails is visualized there and you can view the zoomed up pictures.


Multimedia:

The video and audio players are to be found here. We used the video player to view a video that comes preloaded with the phone, and a Janette Jackson music video in a mp4 format. You can not watch videos on a full screen and the only options are viewing at a speed that’s different from the normal one. The music was heard through the loudspeakers, which really amazed us! The sound was louder and better than that coming from Nokia N95’s loudspeakers, which was until now at the top of our ranking and is now overtaken by this small Latte model. Although a little sharp, the sound is nice and better than any other in-built phone loudspeakers.

The audio player uses the same loudspeakers, which is its main advantage: your phone acts as a small stereo system. When you plug in the headphones from the set you can not share the music with anybody else, but you’ll enjoy the benefit of a bass: they isolate the surrounding noises so that you can hear very well and enjoy a good sound quality. This is one of the best phone headsets that we have used; however, in case you are not pleased with it, you can easily replace it, thanks to the interconnect. The inconvenience, related to the music player is that it can only play the files from the „My Music” directory on the card and it does not show the tracks’ full names. You can use shuffle and repeat, but there are no playlists. Since the model is intended as a business phone, the music player can be left at a background level and you can listen to music while you’re doing other things with the phone.

Latte Boom is equipped with three games, but you won’t be able to add any others because of the lack of Java. In „Extra” you’ll find an application, calculating Body Mass Index (BMI) and a ladies’ calendar.