Hardware features

The RBM HD comes equipped with one of the Snapdragon family of system on chip – a Qualcomm MSM 7230 chipset featuring a 45nm 800MHz Scorpion processor, an Adreno 205 GPU and 512MB RAM. In terms of performance, this hardware setup is not too shabby at all. Impressively, our benchmarking results pegged the entire system on chip combination as a rather highly rated device - slightly ahead of the Motorola Droid (Android 2.2+), and just behind the Google Nexus One (Android 2.2+) in terms of system on chip performance.

The device supports HSDPA 900 / 2100 with a downlink speed of up to 7.2 Mbps. Coupled with the full range of 2G GSM support, this means the phone isn’t locked to a particular network.

The 5-megapixel camera does an admirable job of taking photographs, but does suffer in low light conditions (as do most cellphone cameras). The LED flash didn't compensate too well in low light scenarios, occassionally washing out the image rather than illuminating the scene. This is a fairly average performance for a cellphone camera.

The camera can also record video at 720p and the Qualcomm MSM 7230 chipset is handily capable of playing this back at that resolution on the 480x800 resolution screen.

Most of the other bells and whistles you’d expect are in place, such as Bluetooth, an accelerometer, ambient light sensor, proximity sensor, ambient noise reduction and GPS. Internal storage of 4GB combined with a microSD slot (up to 32GB) should provide enough space for most purposes.

The battery lasts a long time in standby mode, and we can fully believe the manufacturers claims of 380 hours. Of course, no one buys a phone to leave it in standby, and in practice the RBM HD exhibits typical smartphone tendencies of a full charge lasting for just about a day’s worth of average to heavy use, before needing a night-time charging.

Call quality was adequate, with the earpiece, microphone and noise cancellation appearing to work in admirable harmony. The rear loudspeaker sounded rather weak, however. It’s not terrible, but it certainly could have been louder and better.

All in all, the RBM HD features fairly standard hardware among current Android devices, with nothing to really complain about, nor make a fuss of.

Screen

The screen is also fairly standard kit for a modern high-end smartphone - a 3.8-inch, 480x800 resolution, 16M colours, TFT LCD with a capacitive touch-sensitive layer. This means it can take advantage of multi-touch user input schemes and is generally more sensitive than the now outmoded resistive touch-screen. Of course, this is not a Super AMOLED or ‘Retina Display’ but it does the job.

At 245.51 PPI images appear to be sharp enough, but of course pixellation also depends on the user’s eyesight. Most should find the screen to be colourful, bright, sharp and responsive – good enough for prolonged periods of browsing, reading and viewing.

Software

One of the attractions of the RBM HD is that it comes with the vanilla Android 2.2.1 (FroYo) operating system. Thankfully, Red Bull Mobile branding didn’t extend to a custom user interface (UI). The standard Android FroYo UI is functional and intuitive - there are no complaints here.

RBM did include a bunch of ‘value add’ apps. The Red Bull Mobile portal is a fairly typical content portal with a Red Bull flavour - free wallpapers, videos, music, news, and access to the streaming Red Bull TV. There is also Red Bull Radio, an exercise coach, and a Red Bull Flugtag game. I make mention of these (possibly) innocuous apps because they are annoyingly irremovable. Of course, where there’s and Android user with a will, there’s a way…