Smartphones - SlashGear

Posts Tagged ‘smartphones’

HTC Touch.B – aka HTC Rome – leaks

By Chris Davies on Tuesday, Dec 1st 2009 No Comments

Live shots of a new HTC smartphone have leaked, supposedly the quietly rumored HTC Rome. The HTC Touch.B has a daftly punctuated name and runs Android, according to MobiFrance, and looks very much like the Windows Mobile powered HTC Touch2.

htc touch b rome leak 1

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T-Mobile USA in talks for LG Android smartphone?

By Chris Davies on Tuesday, Dec 1st 2009 No Comments

lg gw620 official 8 540x388 We’re not the sort to deal in scandalous rumor-mongery, but have T-Mobile USA officials been clandestinely meeting with LG Electronics at the latter’s Seoul headquarters? That’s the talk out of TelecomsKorea, who peg the US carrier as one of LG’s potential lifelines for turning around its drooping market share in North America.

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Zii TRINITY 3.5G ZMS-05 dev smartphone announced

By Chris Davies on Tuesday, Dec 1st 2009 No Comments

ziilabs zii trinity 1 As promised last month, the ZiiLABS team have revealed their first smartphone development platform, the Zii TRINITY, based on the company’s StemCell ZMS-05 processor and throwing in quadband GSM and triband WCDMA/HSDPA. As before, 1080p Full HD is supported together with accelerated OpenGL ES 3D graphics, while up front the TRINITY has a 3.1-inch 800 x 480 OLED capacitive touchscreen. In the future, ZiiLABS say, there’ll be a 4G version supporting the even higher-speed mobile networks.

The Zii TRINITY also squeezes in WiFi b/g, GPS, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR and a 5-megapixel autofocus camera (plus a front-facing VGA camera for video calls), along with a microSD card slot. Wired connectivity includes micro USB 2.0, mini HDMI and composite video output. The battery is a 1,130mAh pack, and the TRINITY will run both Creative’s own Plaszma OS or Google’s Android platform.

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Android Developer Challenge 2 winners announced

By Chris Davies on Tuesday, Dec 1st 2009 No Comments

android adc Google have announced the winners of the second Android Developer Challenge, with the three top apps being SweetDreams, What the Doodle!? and WaveSecure. Decided by a combination of public vote and Google’s own say, the full list stretches to 200 apps and ranges from gaming through utilities to social networking apps.

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BlackBerry Pearl 9100 stars in pre-announce video demo

By Chris Davies on Monday, Nov 30th 2009 No Comments

Leaked photos are one thing, but we do enjoy a video of a pre-release device to really see how it fits in the hand. Having seen the BlackBerry Pearl 9100 (aka Striker) a little over a week ago, now comes a video of the compact smartphone in action courtesy of Salomondrin. No word on how he acquired the Pearl 9100, but he gives a decent overview of its form-factor and the changes from earlier handsets.

blackberry pearl 9100 video leak

Video demo after the cut

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Official Google Phone supposedly spotted again: launch “a certainty”

By Chris Davies on Monday, Nov 30th 2009 No Comments

After the last batch of "Official Google Phone" rumors, now comes Gizmodo with a source of their own to quote. That unnamed source claims to have seen the device themselves, describing it as "Google-branded hardware running a version of Android we haven't yet seen". As for that hitherto clandestine OS build, not only was it spotted running on a smartphone but on a laptop as well, and the source is convinced they weren't looking at Google Chrome OS.

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AT&T LG eXpo with detachable pico-projector coming Dec 7th [Updated]

By Chris Davies on Monday, Nov 30th 2009 No Comments

There’s no sign of an official press release yet – nor a product page – but AT&T are tipped to have unveiled their latest LG smartphone, the LG eXpo. A touchscreen Windows Mobile 6.5 handset, the eXpo’s secret magic is a detachable Texas Instruments DLP projector, which can be used to project videos, images and webpages.

Update: The LG eXpo product page is now live – thanks Alejandro!

Update 2: Pricing is confirmed at $199 for the LG eXpo itself (assuming a new, two-year contract and a mail-in rebate) and $179 for the pico-projector attachment.

att lg expo 4 540x287

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Social networking and the mobile context

By Chris Davies on Monday, Nov 30th 2009 No Comments

There’s a growing call to deliver desktop experiences on mobile devices, and in general that’s a good thing. I don’t want to be limited to cut-down, plain-text “mobile” versions of websites when I have a large smartphone display and speedy 3G connection that could readily handle the full version, and the push for full-HTML browsers (and things like Flash support) has already trickled down from a must-have on smartphones to a common feature-phone element. What’s lagging behind, it seems, is an understanding of how mobile device use differs from desktop use, and nowhere is that more evident than in social networking integration. Several devices promise to bring your online social life to the screen that’s always with you, but the experience is patchy at best.

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Motorola MILESTONE gets video unboxing

By Chris Davies on Monday, Nov 30th 2009 No Comments

Shipments of the Motorola MILESTONE began in Germany a few weeks ago, so it's a little surprising that we've waited this long for an unboxing video. jkkmobile picked up one of the Android 2.0 handsets - known as the Motorola DROID in the US - and promptly opened it up on video. Video unboxing after the cut

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HTC Hero running Android 2.1 with new HTC Sense spotted

By Chris Davies on Monday, Nov 30th 2009 No Comments

HTC’s public plans for their Sense UI and newer versions of Android have basically amounted to asking device owners to wait; an update to Android 2.0 for the HTC Hero has been promised since the end of October, but so far has not proved forthcoming. That might be because HTC aren’t reworking Sense for 2.0 but for Android 2.1; screenshots purporting to show the HTC UI running on the as-yet unreleased OS have leaked.

htc hero android 2 1 sense 1 540x403