Hasta La Gadget!

It’s totally unfair to Kyocera that we played with its new Zio M6000 mid-tier Android smartphone mere hours after our first look at the HTC EVO 4G, but while we were excited to see a cheaper phone with an 800 x 480 screen, the end result is pretty disappointing. The device crams that resolution into a 3.5-inch screen, which wouldn’t be so bad if the capacitive touchscreen element wasn’t so low-end. It seemed both unresponsive and lacking in accuracy — at times we had trouble even dragging open the notification tray. We were told that we were looking at a prototype of the device, but the crumminess seemed pretty uniform across multiple Zios we tested. The device also seemed just generally sluggish — we’d think the 600MHz Qualcomm processor could handle Android 1.6 just fine, but perhaps there’s some optimization left to do. Kyocera told us that the phone is easily upgraded to 2.0 or 2.1, based on carrier wishes, and that they don’t have any plans for skinning it. Ironically, running 1.6 on this high res display actually ends up looking worse than a regular low-res screen, due to the blurry icons and UI elements. The cheap looking capacitive touch buttons aren’t much out of the norm for Android, but interesting the phone doesn’t have any haptics to let you know if you’ve clicked one. Meanwhile, the haptic feedback for touchscreen typing is cranked to 11 and significantly unhelpful.

In one final negative note, the phone takes one of the worst pages out of the Palm book and put plastic doors over not only the USB plug but the microSD slot and side-mounted headphone jack as well. On the plus side: this is an incredibly thin and light phone, and we doubt the price (less than $200 or so unsubsidized) probably will be beat in the US for a while. Expect to see it on a low-end CDMA carrier (like Virgin Mobile or Cricket) near the middle of the year. Check out a video after the break!

Continue reading Kyocera Zio M6000 hands-on: you get what pay for

Kyocera Zio M6000 hands-on: you get what pay for originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Mar 2010 21:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Sure, Verizon and AT&T shout at each other across our TV airwaves all the time, but how often do we get to see two exactly same phones running on both carriers? The Pre Plus and Pixi Plus have just such a distinction, and we stopped back by the Palm booth with our Verizon Pre Plus in hand just to prove to ourselves we weren’t dreaming. Naturally we couldn’t keep ourselves from a little browser battle (check out the video after the break, the winner may or may not surprise you!), and we even caught the two phones commiserating about that dismal plastic USB jack flap of infamy. Sure, we’re longing for a new webOS device, and have a hard time thinking AT&T will reverse Palm’s fortunes alone, but there’s something special about this new era we’re entering with the likes of Palm and Google where you can (almost) choose your device and then your carrier, not the other way around.

Continue reading Verizon vs. AT&T: Pre Plus edition

Verizon vs. AT&T: Pre Plus edition originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Mar 2010 20:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We checked out Motorola’s i1 last night at a dinner event, but didn’t get any decent video for you so we went back to the booth and sorted that out. The i1 is definitely an interesting device, though whether its rugged mil-spec feature set — we were playing shuffleboard with them last night, seriously — will appeal to its intended market is still kinda up in the air. Don’t get us wrong, it’s not like the set is missing a pile of features, but it’s essentially a giant glass display and we worry it’d eventually suffer a shattering end. Check out the video tour below and chime in, if you use iDEN let us know what you’re feeling about this.

Continue reading Motorola i1 video tour

Motorola i1 video tour originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Mar 2010 20:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Now that the excitement of the EVO 4G announce has finally worn off, it’s time to get down to more practical matters — in a street fight, would the WiMAX-powered beast hold its own against an HD2 and a Desire, for example? We had all three in a room just now, and here’s what we’ve got to say:

• It feels significantly beefier than the HD2, but in reality, it’s not — it’s just a single millimeter thicker. The brushed metal back of the HD2 is a little sexier, but just by the tiniest of margins; it’s hard to argue with soft touch and a kickstand, obviously.
• We would’ve never noticed this without the Desire next to it, but the EVO’s text is pretty huge, a side effect of the fact that it’s running the same resolution on a screen 0.6 inches larger. It’s not annoying, really, but it struck us that they could’ve comfortably fit quite a bit more information on the screen without getting cramped. The Desire’s display is more vibrant, too, but that makes sense — we’re indoors under artificial lighting and the Desire has AMOLED on board.
• The EVO’s got touch-sensitive buttons below the display that function much like the Nexus One’s, but no worries: they work quite a bit better. We think this might be because there’s more touch-sensitive bezel real estate below the keys; on the Nexus One, you’ve got to be far too accurate for comfort.
• Interestingly, this is the first EVO we’ve seen today with a silver earpiece grill — Sprint’s have been red. We’ve confirmed with HTC that production devices will be silver.

Want to draw some of your own conclusions? See the shots for yourself in the gallery below.

HTC EVO 4G vs. HD2 and Desire… fight! originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Mar 2010 19:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The new social-networking site acts as a way to let nerdy boys pay cute girls for their attention. What could possibly go wrong here?