Hasta La Gadget!

Alright, this one’s pure tradeshow silliness — when Engadget Spanish pressed the Acer rep at MWC about rumored plans to launch an Android handset, dude pulled out a notebook and whipped up a quick product roadmap, including the two mysterious “Android secret models” shown here. That’s all we know for now, but anything’s got to be better than the sad Tempos Acer launched yesterday — and hey, we also got the names of the four announced-but-not-revealed sets we’re due to see sometime later this year. One more pic of Acer’s secret diary after the break.

Continue reading Acer working on two Android phones to launch this year

Filed under: Cellphones

Acer working on two Android phones to launch this year originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In light of its fresh tie-up with Microsoft, we can understand how any LG smartphone not running WinMo might be perceived as a black sheep this week. Still, it bums us that the the company has launched its latest S60-powered handset — the KT770 slider — at MWC this week with little more than a brief mention on LG’s official MWC site and a couple of forlorn demo models stuffed in the corner of the company’s booth. The good news is we decided to make good on LG’s oversight and give this little beauty the love it deserves with a mention, a gallery, and a quick video of its tweaked S60 3.2-based UI in action.

The faux carbon fiber back is a little cheesy — particularly for a device that otherwise looks fairly businesslike — but with 7.2Mbps HSDPA, GPS, a WQVGA display, and a 5 megapixel camera on board, it’s hard to argue that this device can’t be competitive (put this up against the far bulkier, uglier N95, for example). The UI seemed reasonably responsive, and though we weren’t able to test the browser without a connection, we imagine the stock S60 apps work every bit as well as they do on Nokia fare. Check out the video after the break!

Continue reading LG doesn’t rock the WinMo boat, launches S60-powered KT770 on the downlow

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

LG doesn’t rock the WinMo boat, launches S60-powered KT770 on the downlow originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Feb 2009 09:42:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Barcelona — Amid the megapixels madness of its camera-phone announcements, Samsung has shown us another vision of the future — the Blue Earth. The phone is an environmental champion, made from recycled water bottles and powered by a solar panel on the back.

And that’s about all we know. Like the Mona Lisa, the only handset at the Mobile World Congress show is behind glass (which is why we’ve used the official product shot), and Samsung is being not exactly cagey but a little thrifty with the details. We do know that the phone will have a touch screen and also a distinctly gimmicky pedometer, which measures how far you have walked and then tells you how much CO2 you haved saved by not driving.

This is just annoying, and exactly the sort of thing smug Prius owners would like. It reminds me of the kind of vegan who eats wholemeal pasta — a form of self flagellation designed only to telegraph their pious intentions to us less morally aware mortals.

Still, the intention is good, and the phone has another few eco-tricks up its recycled sleeves. There is an energy saving mode which will lower the backlight levels and switch off Bluetooth — useful when charging via the Sun. That solar panel is also claimed to provide enough juice to keep the phone going indefinitely. For those of us who live in less clear-skied climes (I’m looking at you, Britain) it looks like Samsung will provide a separate charger. Low-powered, of course.

Best of all, it will be a real phone, available in real shops in the second half of this year.

Got a hankering for an all new gaming rig, preferably one that could fit in your over-sized backpack should the need arise? Ready to spend boatloads of cash to make it happen? If you’re eagerly nodding your head up and down, have a look at Shuttle’s liquid-cooled SDXi Carbon, a fancily painted machine that checks in at 7.3- x 7.9- x 12.2-inches and gets powered by a 3GHz Core 2 Duo E8400 CPU. Other specs include 2/4/8GB of RAM, between 250GB and 2TB of hard drive space, an optional Blu-ray writer, your choice of NVIDIA GPU, gigabit Ethernet and optional WiFi. The starting price on this bugger is an amazing $2,599, and if you plan on customizing the base configuration whatsoever, you should probably plan on taking out yet another line of credit on what’s left of your home.

[Via HotHardware]

Filed under: Desktops

Shuttle ships liquid-cooled SDXi Carbon SFF gaming PC originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Feb 2009 08:57:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Barcelona — Nokia has unveiled a couple of new cellphones at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. One is a rather slimline QWERTY slider and the other one breaks easily.

First the E75, a business phone that is so dull that it actually has a picture of a desk on the PDF spec sheet. A real, wooden desk. This is a shame as the phone itself looks rather nice — a solid but lightweight handset with a positive and usable QWERTY hidden inside. The keyboard is actually quite a surprise when it pops out, so slim is the phone.

Inside, you get a sensible 3.2MP camera, a proper 3.5mm headphone jack, an FM radio and a slew of office features — VPNs, calendars, encryption for both phone and MicroSD card and an alarm to wake you when you’re done. Joking aside, the E75 might not be a bundle of fun but for the business user it is ideal, and available this quarter.

The E55 is virtually the same, differing only in the keyboard (it has a BlackBerry-like two-letters-on-one-key setup) and the lack of encryption or FM radio, The camera is the same, and the email features and VPN are all there. The standout feature, though, is the weak metal plate on the back. As the picture below shows, it is trivial to pull the plate off. I did it simply by lifting it from the display — the security cable stuck to the back did the rest (that’s my story at least). I snapped the pic and then ran away before the Nokians noticed.

While these phones are both good enough, we wonder just what is going on at Nokia. The Mobile World Congress is the Western World’s biggest cellphone event. That the Finns only came up with two extremely dull business handsets is very odd indeed. Actually, not quite true — the 6720 Classic was also unveiled, but it is a phone so incredibly boring that I have trouble staying awak… Zzzz.

Press release [Nokia]