V3 got some hands-on time with the Huawei Vision smartphone, which was launched last night as the firm tries to grow its brand and presence in the market.

To start with the phone will be available from Phones 4U on a £25 per month contract which includes the handset for free. Huawei said that the Vision will be available in time for Christmas.

The phone has quite a sleek design with a unibody aluminium shell in keeping with rivals such as HTC. Three colours will be available: silver, rose gold or charcoal.

In design, the Vision is reminiscent of the Nexus S smartphone from Google with a similar shape and a curved screen, although the curve is not as noticeable.

We found the Vision comfortable to hold with its rounded shape. It's a nice size and weight coming in at 9.9mm and 121g.

For what will be a budget phone, the specs are quite reasonable. You get a Qualcomm Snapdragon 1GHz processor, 512MB of RAM and 2GB of internal storage. The storage can be expanded via the microSD card slot. We found performance to be good, and a respectable effort for a non-high-end phone.

It almost goes without saying that the Vision will come with connectivity such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and 3G, but there is no near field communication technology.

The Vision runs on Android 2.3 Gingerbread like a lot of smartphones, but Huawei has added its own touch. The home panels can be viewed in a 3D carousel which can be controlled by normal swipe gestures or a scrolling bar.

We like the different approach and the carousel looks good and works well. If you leave the screen on one home panel you get animations of the widgets on that panel. Another addition is the ability to change the widgets on the fly and group apps in folders.

Pre-loaded apps will include Angry Birds, Asphalt 6: Adrenaline, Order & Chaos and
Guerilla Bob HD.

The screen is a decent 3.7in which is a good middle-of-the-road size. We found the screen nice and bright with good clarity. The one problem we did find was a lack of responsiveness, where a button push sometimes took a couple of attempts.

It was far too dark at the event to test the camera properly so we'll leave that for the full review. The specs are reasonable for a budget phone with a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera that is capable of recording video in 720p resolution.

Another thing we didn't have time to test was the battery. It's rated at 1,400mAh, which is a little lower than we normally find in smartphones but we'll reserve judgement until we test it properly.

Overall the phone could be successful if marketed correctly, and could be one of the best budget-friendly phones around. We look forward to getting the Vision in for a full test and review.

V3 got some hands on time with the Xoom 2 and the Xoom 2 Media Edition, which were announced today as Motorola aims to get a jump on rivals as Christmas approaches.

Motorola has made a number of changes to the original Xoom tablet, but not all of them are positive and it could struggle to sell like its predecessor.

The direct successor retains the same 10.1in screen size, with Motorola boosting the display quality to HD and increasing brightness. However, when we used the device in low lighting at full brightness, the screen did not appear a major step up from the original.

The device comes with rounded off corners much like the 7in Acer Iconia Tab A100, and this is not a good look. Motorola has done this to make the device easier to grip, but it doesn't appear to make it any easier to hold than the iPad 2 or Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1.

Motorola has done well to shave off a couple of millimetres from the Xoom, which was a bulky device. The Xoom 2 is 8.8mm thick and weighs 599g, which makes it near on identical to the iPad 2 (8.8mm, 601g) in terms of specs, but not quite as thin and light as the Galaxy Tab 10.1 (8.6mm, 565g).

Confusion surrounds the ports as the pre-production device we saw had SIM-card and micro-SD card slots, but Nick Notton, product manager at Motorola, explained that these will not be included in the retail versions. This is a downgrade from the original, but could be seen on future editions.

Disappointingly, Motorola will also be shipping the Xoom 2 with Android Honeycomb 3.2 and not Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS), which is due to arrive imminently.

Notton said that Motorola will announce more about the ICS update in six weeks, but by that time other Ice Cream Sandwich devices are expected to be on the market and it could be 2012 until Xoom 2 buyers see the upgrade.

In an attempt to win over business users Motorola has preloaded a number of enterprise-specific apps in an attempt to make it an attractive purchase. These include the Citrix Receiver, GoToMeeting, QuickOffice and Fuze Meeting applications.

The Motocast app is an interesting addition that was debuted with the brand spanking new Motorola Razr. This allows users to sync the tablet with a PC or Mac and then access the hard drive wirelessly on the move. The app is the primary reason that Motorola has included just 16GB of internal storage. Notton said that the firm is going to make a big push towards the cloud, and played down security concerns as the ability to remotely lock and wipe the tablet will safeguard data.

Although in principle the inclusion of these apps is a good idea, their usefulness can be significantly impaired when there is no stable Wi-Fi connection. During our hands on we found the device frequently cut out when we were trying to stream content from the remote Mac it was connected to, for example.

We also had a play with the Xoom 2 Media Edition, which is essentially a smaller version of the Xoom 2. Specifications are almost identical aside form the 8.2in screen. Although Notton claimed that 8.2in "is the perfect size for viewing and reading media", we are surprised that Motorola didn't go for the 7in form factor, which is the perfect size for a pocket.

With unofficial pricing suggesting that the 10.1 Xoom is going to retail for £390 and the 8.2in tablet for £358, Motorola will be able to compete with Apple on price. Whether the Xoom 2 is enough to entice users from the iPad 2 is a different matter. V3 will post a full review soon.

The desktop version of Firefox 4 has provided extremely popular since it was launched on 22 March, clocking up 48 million downloads to date.

Firefox 4 for Android was released on Tuesday and we've had a play with the browser using the Google Nexus S.

The home page comes with a number of tabs and shows the addresses of sites that have been accessed recently. It is also possible to view bookmarks, history and pages that have been synced from a desktop.

Mozilla has claimed that Firefox 4 is up to three times faster than the stock Android browser. Although web pages load extremely quickly on the mobile edition of Firefox, it is hard to see such a big difference and depends on the network connection.

However, an area where Firefox 4 is head and shoulders above its competitors is in usability, with gesture control at the heart of the interface.

Swiping right brings up the pane of tabs which are open and allow users to open and close windows. In contrast, a quick swipe to the left will bring up options to favourites, cycle backwards and forwards between pages and access preferences.

Meanwhile, pressing the context sensitive settings button on the bottom of the handset brings up a multitude of options, including the ability to save a web page as a PDF or share it via Bluetooth, Facebook, Gmail, Twiiter or text message.

The menu also allows users to download add-ons, change preferences and view pages that have been downloaded as PDFs.

Although Firefox 4 for Android brings most of the functionality of the desktop version, there are a couple of gripes. Firstly, Flash videos don't work even though our device has Flash 10.2 downloaded. Mozilla confirmed to V3.co.uk that there is no support at present.

"Firefox 4 for Android and Maemo does not currently support plug-ins like Flash. Since Mozilla believes that the web is heading towards HTML5, they support the video tag," the firm said in a statement.

"However, Mozilla is working on a way to deliver a smooth user experience with plug-ins like Flash."

We also found that it is all too easy to accidentally close a tab when trying to switch between windows. This is because the cross is little too big and a finger tap needs to be very precise to avoid it.

Firefox 4 for Android also supports pinch-to-zoom and there is a setting that asks whether text should be reformatted on zooming. However, when this is enabled, the font size does increase but is not reformatted.

Despite these niggles, the general functionality is certainly better than the Android browser and even the Safari app. If Flash support can be added to Firefox 4, it will be the definitive mobile browser.

Firefox 4 for Android is definitely worth a download and is one of the best free apps in the Android Market.