Consoles and Gadgets: Mobile

Showing posts with label Mobile. Show all posts

BlackBerry 9670 flip spotted running OS 6.0, causes eyes to bleed, children to cry

According to BGR, we're apparently looking at the first shots of a phone numbered 9670 in RIM's BlackBerry parlance, a true QWERTY flip running BlackBerry OS 6.0 on a 480 x 360 display with WiFi, a 5 megapixel camera, optical pad (as is the case with every new BlackBerry these days), microSD expansion, and a huge external display that's eerily reminiscent of Moto's RAZR 2. The device is said to be running CDMA, which almost certainly means it's being shopped around to Sprint and Verizon exclusively among major carriers -- the only other big potential takers would be Bell and Telus, and they're in the midst of migrating to HSPA -- so we'll just sit back, relax, and see if this thing materializes at WES next week. Granted, we've got to see it in person and gaze at a few non-blurrycam shots before passing final judgment, but we're admittedly a little worried about the merciless beating the ugly stick may have delivered up in Waterloo this time around.

source: BGR

Lenovo talks up LePhone, shows off app store ahead of May launch

Lenovo's Android-based LePhone (not LePhono, sadly) may not be officially launching in China until next month, but the company did just hold a launch event of sorts in the country, in which it revealed a few new details and did a fair bit of boasting. According to The Wall Street Journal, Lenovo says that it's aiming to sell "millions" of the phones in the next five years, and "tens of millions" after that -- although not just involving this particular phone, obviously. Lenovo COO Rory Read also reportedly further added that the company is ready for a "tough fight" against Apple's iPhone, and that Lenovo will have a "better brand position" that RIM, which hasn't yet gained a significant foothold in China. That's certainly plenty ambitious for a company new to the cellphone space, and should no doubt only further fuel those rumors of a certain acquisition.

via: I4U News

Apple's 4th-generation iPhone revealed

Well, we told you so. The fourth-generation iPhone prototype that leaked its way out into the world over the weekend has found its way to Gizmodo, and they've examined it exhaustively enough to prove that it's the real thing. Not only does it show up in iTunes, Xcode, and System Profiler, but it has different product identifiers than the 3G or 3GS, and it's packed with Apple-labeled components inside. Unfortunately, they couldn't get it to boot out of recovery mode, but a number of new features and changes are evident just by holding it. Obviously, it's thinner than the 3GS, with smaller internal components and a larger battery inside the metal frame. There's also a front-facing camera, a larger and better camera with a flash on the back, a higher-res display that's slightly smaller than the current models, a second mic for noise cancellation, and that new back, which Giz seems a bit confused about but we're fairly sure is glass or ceramic. It's also three grams heavier than a 3GS, with a 16 percent larger battery and the same new MicroSIM slot used in the iPad.

We're also told the phone was found running iPhone OS 4.0 but that it was remotely killed before Giz could actually see it, and that they can't get it to boot because it requires a bespoke build of the OS. We're assuming Apple's hot on the trail of this thing, so hit the source link while you can and check a couple more pics after the break.

source: Gizmodo

PhoneGap framework fine for App Store development, sez Apple

Now, we've all been concerned about recent updates to the iPhone dev agreement -- you haven't been sleeping and your parents are, quite frankly, worried for your sanity. And it's a heady subject: "what is the fate of PhoneGap in the wake of the iPhone OS 4 beta SDK?" Well, worry no more, little one -- it seems that Jesse Macfadyen, a contributor to the project, pinged Apple to make sure that users of the mobile development platform wouldn't find their apps rejected simply for using the tool. As you remember, the agreement states: "Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine" (and of course HTML and CSS are cool), so PhoneGap -- which indeed sticks to HTML, CSS and Javascript -- is totally safe. Now developers can get back to having their apps rejected for any number of other silly reasons.

via: Mac Stories

Feel-goodroid: Nexus One is in the black, 60K Android devices activated per day

We'd heard a couple times that the Nexus One was selling at a mere trickle, but what we haven't heard is whether the phones that have sold are enough to generate a profit for Google -- and on its earnings call today, the company claimed for the first time that its superphone is indeed in the black. Speaking both of the Nexus One specifically and of the platform as a whole, the company said that "it is a profitable business for us... we are driving the business to be a profitable business," some of the strongest language we've heard that Google intends to fully convert Android from a hobby into an integral part of its financials going forward. On a related note, the company also boasted on the call that it's "seeing more than 60 thousand devices sold and activations daily," which -- by our rough math, anyhow -- would work out to close to 22 million Android activations annually, and they're now up to some 38,000 apps in the Market. Certainly seem like these guys have cemented their position as a mobile powerhouse, doesn't it?

via: engadget

Pantech's Sirius Sky smartphone does Android 2.1 on Snapdragon

One gigahertz is becoming the bar of entry in the world of Android, and the upcoming Sirius Sky from Pantech meets that with its Snapdragon processor. It's also helped along by an Android 2.1 install and a 3.7-inch 800 x 480 OLED screen that does look rather vivid in the above shot -- presumably taken indoors. 500MB of storage is offered internally by the phone while expandable memory bumps things up to 32GB, upon which pictures from the five megapixel camera can be stored for later mockery. The phone is said to be hitting Asian markets "pretty soon" and, while there are rumors of a US release, they're sounding a bit unsubstantiated at this point.

source: sourceLand of Android

Telstra's landlocked T-Hub tablet phone launches in Australia

A few years back, Telstra -- synonymous in Australia with "communication" -- told Apple it had no business making a cellphone. Look how that turned out. To make a long story short, the company has since repented, and is on the verge of releasing an app-filled touchscreen phone of their own, the Telstra T-Hub, on April 20th. Thing is, this tablet stays plugged into your wall. Marketed as a "family organizer," the T-Hub stores contacts, surfs Facebook, plays YouTube, displays photos, accesses personal bank accounts and even sends text messages like a smartphone, but does it all while connected to a landline telephone jack -- albeit with cordless handset as backup. While existing Telstra customers can get the device for $300 AUD, the company would of course prefer you get it for $35 with a 24-month service agreement... for a minimum total cost of about $1980 AUD with 2GB data per month. We're not Australian, but compared to US iPhone pricing, that doesn't sound terribly fair.

source: Telstra

Motorola Backflip now scheduled to get Android 2.1 update in Q3

Decide to go with Motorola's unconventional Backflip over an Android phone with a more traditional form factor? Then it looks like you'll have to wait a bit longer than most to get the Android 2.1 firmware update. According to a newly published timeline from Motorola itself, the Backflip is now scheduled to receive the update sometime in the third quarter of this year, compared to the second quarter for the CLIQ and now-ish for the Droid -- the Devour upgrade is apparently still "under evaluation." Of course, all of this can still change and, given Motorola's past history with Android updates, it probably will.

via: engadget

Nokia C3, C6, and E5 try to smarten up the dumbphone market

The countdown is over and the mystery is solved. Nokia just let us in on the secret of its "everyone connect" teaser: a trio of new middling handsets. Yes folks, hardware, but not the N-series flagship many of you were hoping for. Instead we've got a handful of affordable QWERTY cellphones bent on bringing messaging and social networking to the masses. Naturally, these devices aren't going to compete for the attention of the N8-00 crowd -- that's fine, they're not meant to. Today's launch is part of Nokia's global strategy to push the smartphone experience down into the dumbphone market.

Let's start things off with the colorful C3-00 (available Q2 for €90 pre-tax and pre-subsidy) -- Nokia's first Series 40 QWERTY. The quad-band GSM candybar crams its social networking tools onto a 2.4-inch QVGA homescreen with Bluetooth 2.1, WiFi, and 55MB of internal memory (and up to 8GB supported on microSD) coming along for the ride. It's also packing the Opera Mini browser in addition to the standard Webkit fare for browsing the mobile internet on the C3's paltry EGPRS data connection. But hey, €90. Moving on, we've got the more ambitious C6-00 (Q2, €220) 4-row QWERTY slider with quad-band GSM/EDGE and quad-band HSDPA/UMTS on the 850/900/1900/2100 frequencies. The familiar looking C6 runs S60 5th on that 3.2-inch nHD (640 x 360 pixel) touchscreen (resistive, we presume) with a 5 megapixel autofocus camera and flash riding the backside. Of course, it also features integrated A-GPS for free Ovi Maps turn-by-turn navigation as is the case for all new Nokia GPS-enabled smartphones. Finally we've got the E5-00 (Q3, €180) for those in need of a S60 3rd device that's a bit more business-minded than the C3 but twice the price (but still cheap). That means tri-band UMTS, A-GPS, WiFi and another unfortunate 2.4-inch LCD.

via: engadget

Firefox ported to Pre, N900 says 'psh, whatever, I'm still awesome'

WebKit's all well and good, but every once in a while there's a reason why you've got to pull out the Old Standby, right? Once reserved for the Maemo Elite, Firefox is slowly spreading from pocket to pocket, and webOS is mercifully the latest to get hooked up. We don't know the full backstory here yet -- it looks like you can't download a user-friendly package right now -- but this'll undoubtedly be a good option when the Pre's in-built browser simply won't do. It's not an official port we're looking at, but let's be honest: the community does a better job half the time, right?

source: PreCentral

Opera Mini for iPhone approved, will be available for free

187diggsdiggOur man Thomas Ricker was just wondering how long it would take before Apple determined the fate of Opera Mini for iPhone, and we've got some good news -- it's been approved and will be available for free on the App Store within 24 hours! Can't say we were expecting that, since non-Safari-based browsers have typically been verboten from Apple's little kingdom, but we're certainly happy to be surprised. We'll do up a full hands-on when we see it in the store, but for now check the demo video after the break.

via: engadget

myTouch Slide found in the wild, looking good in red

Yeah, we saw the myTouch Slide back in January, but it certainly seems to have come a long way in the past few months. For starters, the phone is on now, showing off a slightly custom Android UI and that 480 x 320 screen. The handset also looks to have gotten a fancy red (or is that form of pink?) paint job, and doesn't look half bad for it. Our guess is we'll be seeing this in a number of colors, just like the myTouch 3G, but that's just speculation. There aren't any other details about the phone on offer here, or knowledge on exactly how this shot managed to leak out, but we figure we'll be learning more soon enough.

source: TmoNews

Microsoft Kin One and Kin Two announced: Windows Phone roots with a social slant

58diggsdigg It's finally official: Microsoft Pink -- the product of Redmond's acquisition of Danger -- has just been unveiled as a pair of handsets sourced from Sharp (which made most of Danger's Sidekicks) known as the Kin One and Kin Two. The devices are being marketed as Windows Phones, and while they're ultimately based on most of the same underpinnings of Windows Phone 7, it's a distinctly and totally different experience -- the entire user interface is custom to Kin with a heavy social media slant, a custom browser (we're told it's based on the Zune's browser), and surprisingly, zero support for third-party apps. The displays are capacitive with support for multitouch (yes, you can pinch and zoom in the browser), but there's no support for in-browser Flash or Silverlight.

Kin One -- the phone we'd seen rumored as "Turtle" -- is basically a curved square slider with a QVGA display, 4GB of internal storage, 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, and a full QWERTY keyboard. Kin Two, meanwhile, is the phone leaked as the "Pure," upping the ante with a HVGA display and a more traditional landscape QWERTY slide form factor. It also moves up to an 8 megapixel cam and 8GB of internal storage, but otherwise, the experience is roughly the same as what you get on the One; both phones have WiFi and Bluetooth in addition to their 3G cellular radios. For what it's worth, Microsoft is emphasizing that internal storage really isn't a big deal with the Kin phones, because your entire photo and video collection that you capture using the onboard camera is synced seamlessly with your bottomless online storage; you can access the entire collection from your phone at any time by browsing thumbnails, and if you want the full content, you can download it. Kin comes bundled with a desktop web experience that's entirely based on Silverlight for viewing and sorting just about all of the major stuff that you can see on your phone -- contacts, social network status updates, images, and so on -- and we've got to admit, it looks pretty slick. Keep reading after the break for a lot more info and video!

A big focus for Microsoft with Kin is the totally new, different, crazy UI, which is based on blocky, simple text, monochromatic elements, and zoomed-in, stylized pictures. The big two features unique to Kin are being called "Spot" and "Loop." Loop is sort of the Kin's home screen, aggregating social content from your friends (Twitter, Facebook, and so on) roughly based on order of priority by how you sort your contents, so you don't have to see as many updates from people you don't follow too closely. Spot, meanwhile, is an ever-present green dot at the bottom of the screen where you can drag content -- just about any content, be it maps, images, status updates, videos -- and share it with contacts. Think of it as an "Attach" button in your messaging client, but on steroids.

Both phones have full support for the Zune music and video experience (but not Zune gaming), and it looks like the Zune HD UI we're accustomed to, just as it does on Windows Phone 7. To loop in the Mac community, Microsoft will be offering a Mac-compatible music side-loader -- in other words, it won't be a true, native Zune client and you won't be able to use it to shop for music, but it'll happily connect to iTunes and sync your non-DRM collection. Both phones also support over-the-air firmware updates, so there'll be no need to tether just for that. Speaking of tethering, data tethering isn't supported.

Verizon is getting the Kin One and Two in the US in May, while Vodafone has signed on as the European partner for a Fall launch. We'll update you on specific pricing and availability just as soon as we have it.

via: engadget

Dell Mini 3T1 and Mini 3iX 3G phones spotted with Chinese mobile regulator

If we need another reason to be envious of Chinese residents, it'd be the premium treatment that they're getting from Dell these days. Spotted on Chinese mobile regulator TENAA's website are two 3G phones from seemingly different design departments -- the never-before-seen Mini 3T1 (pictured) is a "TD-SCDMA / GSM dual-mode cellphone" that "supports HSDPA," dons a 2-megapixel camera on the back plus a front-facing one, and we're betting on Ophone for the OS; the second device is the familiar Mini 3iX (an exotic cousin of AT&T's Aero) that will sport the same old WCDMA radio and WAPI (the Chinese equivalent of WiFi). No word on availability of either handsets in China yet, but hey, who cares when the Streak is on the horizon?

Update: on the same website we also dug up the Mini 3iW -- essentially the Mini 3i (so just 2G and no WiFi) but with the additional WAPI radio.

via: PC World

Samsung i8910 HD runs 62 apps at once, multitaskers bow their heads

While iPhone 3G owners and would-be Windows Phone 7 buyers sit in the corner, quietly weeping over their lack of true multitasking, webOS and Symbian continue to point and laugh. In mid-January, a Palm Pre Plus was seen cackling with joy over its rivals' misfortune even as the device staggered under the weight of 50 simultaneous applications, and less than a week later, a Samsung Omnia HD performed the very same feat, despite having only half the Pre Plus' RAM (i.e. 256MB) to work with. Now, in what we can only interpret as a large middle finger and "come here" gesture to all who aspire to the cell phone multitasking heavyweight title, we have a video of the i8910 running no less than sixty-two applications thanks to a custom ROM by HyperX. Watch in stunned silence as a finger scrolls through them, right after the break.

via: HDBlog

Bloomberg: Palm is up for sale

13diggsdigg Uh, whoa. Bloomberg just reported that Palm is putting itself up for sale and that offers will potentially come in this week. That's pretty wild news, considering CEO Jon Rubinstein was adamant just a few days ago that Palm had a plan to get profitable -- even while his company's stock price went on a buyout-rumor fueled rollercoaster. Bloomberg says that Palm's already retained Goldman Sachs and Qatalyst Partners to find a buyer, and that HTC (yes!) and Lenovo are both interested -- and Dell's apparently already taken a pass. Naturally none of these parties are saying anything on the record -- we just pinged Palm and they declined comment -- but if this is true, things are about to get wild, and fast. We'll keep you updated, stay tuned.

source: Bloomberg

Square Motorola Android slider leaks out, causes consternation

We swear we've seen a Motorola phone that looks like this odd square thing before, but it's also possible we're crazy. Either way, it looks like Moto's working on a new Blur set running Android 2.1, and if you thought screen size and resolution issues differences were a big part of Android fragmentation before, well, you ain't seen nothing yet. Oh, and as for the story that this pic came from a student who borrowed the phone from a friend whose dad works for Moto? We'd be more skeptical, except that's exactly how we've gotten other dead-on Moto leaks. So... yeah. Anyway, a square Moto slider running Blur. Does that do anything for anyone? No? Okay.

source: Droid Dog

Eclair shocker! Android 2.1 leaked for Samsung Moment

Feeling impatient? Can't wait until Moment gets its Android 2.1 upgrade? The kids at SDX-Developers feel you, with one forum member providing a simple, straightforward download link to a 7z archive containing not one but two leaked builds: ECLAIR.DC23 and ECLAIR.DD03. According to the hub-bub, the latter seems to be giving people the most luck, although some are reporting a "faulty" Marketplace. That said, both builds do seem to work with voice and data. And yes, it will wipe your phone completely -- but if you're looking to get into this sort of action you're probably a risk-taker and a heart-breaker anyways. Good luck, and if you brick your phone don't blame us.

via: engadget

Nokia E71 and E66 owners get free Ovi Maps navigation

Nokia's new Ovi Maps software just made its way to the venerable E71 and E66 business handsets. While Nokia was constrained from offering its premium nav services like Guide Michelin and Lonely Planet on these legacy S60 3.1 handsets, owners are nevertheless being treated to free walk and drive navigation with turn-by-turn guidance. So really, you can't complain... unless of course you picked up a US-flavored E71x which isn't eligible for the free update. Check the full press release after the break for download instructions and a list of compatible devices.

source: engadget

White BlackBerry Bold 9700 shows up on RIM's Thai Website

For those among us who want to jump on the BlackBerry bandwagon, but desire a slightly more distinctive device -- you know who you are -- here's some official indication of an incoming new color option for the Bold 9700. Commended as perhaps the finest device RIM has been able to concoct so far, the 9700 is now being shown sporting a new, creamy white exterior over on RIM's official Thailand website. Seems like the company is developing a habit of diversifying its handsets' colors after giving the classical black some time to hog the spotlight. Here's to hoping the repainted phones filter out to more local online locations and nearby quality phone retailers nice and quickly. A pic of the newly white rear can be found after the break.
>

via: phone arena

Console and Gadgets

Categories

Featured Video

Subscribe

Followers

Recent Posts