LG have officially announced their first Android handset, the LG GW620, and with it a “two tier smartphone strategy” signifying the company’s intent to continue to offer Windows Mobile devices. The GW620 has both a 3-inch touchscreen and a slide-out QWERTY hardware keyboard, and avoids the heavy customization of HTC Sense or Motorola MOTOBLUR.
Sprint have obviously decided that it helps to have fingers in as many developer pies as possible, with the announcement that they will now be launching Qualcomm’s Brew mobile platform. No specific devices are mentioned by the carrier, only that they will run both native Brew apps together with “high-performance mobile Java” software.
After announcing the Motorola CLIQ with MOTOBLUR yesterday, we grabbed some hands-on time with the new Android smartphone and persuaded one of the company’s demo team to give us a ten minute walkthrough of its capabilities. There’s plenty to like about this distinctive new addition to the Android stable; we didn’t have as much time to play as we’d have liked, but our early impression is that the keyboard is well made, sturdy and tactile, and the capacitive display responsive and accurate.
Video hands-on after the cut
As promised, Motorola have announced their first Android device, the MOTOCLIQ, at the Mobilize conference in San Francisco today. The Motorola CLIQ will be an exclusive for T-Mobile in the USA and go on sale before the holidays; it has a 3.1-inch HVGA 320 x 480 touchscreen, 3G, WiFi and a flip-out QWERTY keyboard. Meanwhile the new MOTOBLUR system syncs contacts, messages, feeds, photos and more from Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo!, Gmail, corporate email Last.fm and more, putting all of the new information on the smartphone’s homescreen.
Click over for full hands-on video!
Firmly convincing us that the Japanese get not only the best toys but the best concepts too, this collaboration between carrier KDDI and Flower Robotics – the iida Polaris – has just drooling with envy. Currently just a prototype – with “commercialization yet to be determined” – the iida Polaris has at its core a touchscreen cellphone which docks into a mobile robot “suit”.
Video demo after the cut
Fresh details and this rather fetching official render of the upcoming BlackBerry Bold 9700 (aka the BlackBerry Onyx) have emerged, courtesy of CIO. Prematurely distributed by T-Mobile USA, they confirm that the Bold 9700 will pack both 3G and WiFi, together with support for UMA VoIP.
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Many of our mobile devices today that we take for granted like MIDs and smartphones don’t use full mobile processors. Many of these devices make do with lower performance MCUs and ASICs rather than full CPUs.
Almost everyone has a mobile phone today and one of the things that consumes the most power inside your mobile phone is the display. Any technology that can reduce the power consumed by the display on our mobile devices translates directly into more run time and longer battery life.
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So, we had some good news from AT&T a bit ago, but it looks like AT&T wants to basically undercut any good forthcomings they may have. At least, that's how we imagine many people are going to see this. If you have a smartphone on AT&T already, then this probalby won't mean much to you at the moment; but if you plan on upgrading, or even getting onto AT&T for the first time and plan on getting a smartphone, then it's looking like you'll be spending a bit more money.
One of the most recent devices announced by RIM was the Blackberry Tour. The smartphone is already offered on the Verizon and Sprint networks and is now making the move to the Alltel network as well.
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