DAB+ in a phone can double your battery life
LG has launched the Stylus DAB+, a new mid-priced smartphone that incorporates a DAB+ tuner — the first mobile phone ever to include that feature, says LG.
Tempted to say ‘Meh, I can stream just about everything anyway’? Well, yes, you can, but you’ll be eating up your data allowance and draining your battery. Streaming over the network is power-sucking at the best of times, and more so if your connection isn’t optimal. The DAB+ module is a receiver only, and receives its data from the public airways so there’s no 3G/4G data involved. Officially LG talks about the unit simply having better battery life. Unofficially, Dr Les Sabel, consulting engineer to Commercial Radio Australia, shared with Sound+Image that their unofficial tests suggested a run time of 38 hours, or double the battery life compared to streaming.
The phone runs Android, and the DAB+ tuner is accessed by means of an app, of course. This seemed stable at the launch, and anyone used to smartphone conventions will be able to use it almost instinctively. After a scan of the airwaves, you can simply select the station from a list. Within a second or so the music emerges from the headphone socket. Any text information and artwork broadcast by the station is shown on the screen. The station URL is also provided, so you can jump to the station in your browser (then using mobile/Wi-Fi data).
A little disappointingly, the tech data usually provided by DAB+ radios — bit-rate, channel band, Bit Error Rate and signal strength — are not available. Apparently the thinking was that consumers aren’t interested in this stuff. Well, some of us are!
Radio means aerial. It uses the headphone cable for this. Rather than using the LG earbuds, we had a good listen with a pair of Oppo PM3 headphones, and reception was fine with these. As was the sound quality.
You can also listen using Bluetooth speakers (only the SBC codec is provided). You will have to leave headphones plugged in so that they can act as the antenna, or possibly kludge up a 3.5mm plug with a wire to act as an aerial. Bluetooth 4.1, with low energy support, is employed, so battery life should continue to be reasonable.
The Stylus is perhaps best thought of as a ‘phablet’. It is very much a working device, including (as the name suggests), a stylus for use with its 5.7-inch, 1280 × 720 pixel screen. The hole in which the stylus is kept is fitted with a sensor, so that when you pull the stylus out, a menu pops up offering all the stylus-enabled apps for selection. If you wander off with the stylus receptacle empty, the phone will warn you, a nice way to reduce the chances that you’ll lose it.
There’s a quad-core 1.2GHz processor, 2GB of RAM and 16GB of memory, but this can be expanded thanks to the MicroSD slot. The main camera is a 13MP model, while the front one offers 8MP. A 3000mAh battery powers the thing, and version 6.0 of Android is included. The unit supports LTE 4G mobile networks, and has Wi-Fi up to 802.11n built in.
It will be widely available from early May from Optus and Virgin, Big W, All Phones, Harvey Norman and Good Guys, for $449, presumably with some plans available from the carriers. Unlocked ones will work on the Telstra network.
More information. www.lg.com.au