Gadgets leaked by text are far less exciting than blurry, hurriedly-snapped photos, but we won’t turn up our noses at a preview no matter the method. It now appears that Cowon have a touchscreen MID in the works, the Cowon W2, according to a test page at the Bluetooth SIG, though specifications are still scant.
Nokia’s trouble breaking into the US market has become a cliché over the years, so it’s good to hear that the Finnish firm may be turning their fortunes around. According to a VentureBeat report, Nokia and AT&T are working together to launch a Symbian handset that will be based on a Qualcomm chipset; definitive specifications are unknown, as is launch date, but Nokia are reportedly being more accommodating of US carriers’ desire to customize individual devices.
Rumors are circulating that Apple has rejected Intel’s Moorestown chips as unsuitable for their mobile device range, after Cupertino engineers decided that the Intel CPUs demanded far too much power. According to Fudzilla, Apple have informed Intel that Moorestown needs to have one-tenth the idle power consumption it manages currently before it’ll be suitable for any of Apple’s devices.
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The Apple Tablet rumors this week have already been tenuous and, well, more tenuous, so let's throw another vaguely unbelievable tidbit into the ring. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, Apple have been shopping around their tablet to Australian media companies, "in an effort to sound out whether they would be interested in delivering their content to the tablet." The paper suggests that Apple have been sending around details of the tablet's specifications; however none of the media companies themselves would talk on the record.
Nintendo are tipped to be readying a refresh to their DSi handheld, timed to coincide with the games console’s first birthday on November 1st. According to Nikkei, Nintendo Japan are readying a new DSi with dual 4-inch displays, rather than the existing 3.25-inch panels used in the current model.
Update: A Nintendo spokesperson has told Famitsu.com that “Our company isn’t doing any interviews [about this]. We think it’s a speculative article.” Neat sidestep, guys.
Remember the mysterious HTC smartphone that showed up this time last week, and that we all assumed was the upcoming Snapdragon-based HTC Dragon? Well, the source of those images, TheUnlockr, has decided it’s the Dragon too, or to be more exact Verizon’s version of the handset, the HTC Passion. He’s claiming 90-percent certainty on the ID, and if so you could be seeing this Android smartphone on shelves by the end of the year.
The Passion (aka the CDMA Dragon) is expected to be the Android version of the HTC HD2, which basically adds up to a huge capacitive touchscreen – the HD2 uses a 4.3-inch panel – together with all the wireless connectivity you could hope for an a 1GHz processor. The touch-sensitive buttons beneath the touchscreen on the Passion certainly look like those on Verizon’s other upcoming Android handsets, such as the Motorola Droid, and the white notification bar is similar too.
The first examples of Nokia’s Booklet 3G netbook are yet to drop into buyers’ hands, but according to leaks fizzing out of Taiwan the Finns are already discussing orders for their second-gen model. Notorious rumor-monger Economic Daily News has suggested that a new Booklet 3G with updated specifications is expected to be released in 2010, a statement that is, frankly, stating the obvious. However, reading between the lines we’d expect any updated netbook from Nokia to take advantage of Intel’s upcoming Pine Trail processors, such as the Atom N450, and we do know a little about that CPU’s release schedule.
Apple may have told us that the new MacBook, Mac mini and iMac updates finalize their holiday 2009 line-up, but that doesn’t mean they’re not thinking ahead. Digging through the configuration files in the 10.6.2 update of OS X 10C531, Spanish site Applesana.es have spotted two references to new MacBook Pro notebooks, and believe that they might bring with them quadcore processors and ATI Radeon 4500-series graphics.
Now the SlashGear team love tech in all its myriad forms, but even we’d have trouble mustering too much enthusiasm for a SIM tray. However, we’ll make a semi-exception for a tray tipped to slot into Apple’s fourth-gen iPhone or “iTablet”; according to ChinaOnTrade, this part – which they claim to have directly sourced from Foxconn, already fingered as a potential Apple Tablet manufacturer – will go on sale October 23rd for $14.05.
Has NYT executive editor Bill Keller accidentally let slip details of Apple’s upcoming tablet? That’s the big question after video footage of the paper’s Internal Neiman Jornalism Lab leaked out, in which Keller mentions delivering journalism to “the impending Apple slate”. Some sites are seeing this as confirmation not only that Apple are developing the tablet and working with news organisations, but of the name of the device itself.
Video after the cut
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