Hasta La Gadget!

A quick gander at Samsung’s Canadian support site for the Galaxy S line reveals that two Android 2.2 updates are currently available: one for the Vibrant — offered by Bell, Virgin Mobile, and SaskTel — and one for the Fascinate as sold be Telus. This all follows just a few days after Sammy had to pull the Vibrant’s Froyo update on word that it seemed be killing the internal microSD storage, so hopefully, this build will be just a little more drama-free. Oh, and Samsung had originally said that Telus Fascinate owners would be waiting until next year to upgrade their units, so it’s pretty neat that they were able to rein that in a bit and get it pushed at the tail end of ’10. So have fun, Canadians — you’ve beaten your friends with T-Mobile Vibrants and Verizon Fascinates to the punch on this one, and we encourage you to lord it over them at every opportunity.

[Thanks, Robert B.]

Samsung Vibrant and Fascinate get Froyo in Canada, hopefully with fewer bugs this time originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 27 Dec 2010 03:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading Dell Venue launched in Hong Kong, we go hands-on

Dell Venue launched in Hong Kong, we go hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Dec 2010 07:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Pantech‘s bringing a new wrinkle to the mobile hardware space with its newly announced Vega Xpress handset. This 4-inch Android 2.2 beastie will come equipped with an unspecified amount of DDR2 RAM — yes, the stuff that usually goes into x86 laptop and desktop computers — which Pantech will have you believe is going to blow the competition out of the proverbial water. The company claims the new phone doubles 3D graphics performance relative to its previous best, while power efficiency is also said to be two to three times better. Other specs include a 5 megapixel autofocus camera, 802.11n WiFi, an 800 x 480 resolution, and a 1500mAh battery. Yours, provided you’re anywhere near Korea, some time soon.

Continue reading Pantech Vega Xpress comes with DDR2 memory, extravagant performance claims

Pantech Vega Xpress comes with DDR2 memory, extravagant performance claims originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Dec 2010 09:37:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In case you missed it, this weekend Staples announced that it was no longer offering the 10.1-inch Viewsonic G Tablet because of a “manufacturing defect.” Well, as it turns out, Viewsonic is claiming there’s really no hardware defect at all — instead, the manufacturer of the Android 2.2, Tegra 2-powered tablet is reporting that there’s really a “user experience issue.” Nope, that doesn’t sound much better, but according to Viewsonic’s VP of Marketing Adam Hanin, the G Tablet saw a fair number of returns because of its sluggish software experience, which was caused by the preloaded Tap and Tap Android layer. A number of issues were also caused by the lack of Flash, which Adobe hasn’t yet certified for Tegra 2 (we hear that’s finally coming at the end of January). “We believe it is the user experience that caused all the returns, and we are taking important steps forward with the G Tablet,” Hanin told us.

So, what are those steps exactly? Viewsonic will be releasing an over-the-air software update before the end of the week and will also provide links for users to manually download and install a beta version of Flash on its support page. Naturally, we asked Hanin why the G Tablet was shipped in this half-finished state at all — he told us that while Android and Tegra are great platforms, Google’s lack of support for larger devices means that companies like Viewsonic have to “go out and put together their own software and app stores.” We’re not sure that’s a great answer — in fact, it sort of sounds like Viewsonic is trying to blame Google, Adobe, and NVIDIA for its own half-finished and laggy software, when it released the tablet on its accord own to retailers. Either way, we’ve now seen more than enough terrible “user experience” issues on the early crop of Android tablets — Honeycomb, where are you?

Continue reading Viewsonic: There’s no G Tablet ‘manufacturing defect,’ it’s a user experience issue

Viewsonic: There’s no G Tablet ‘manufacturing defect,’ it’s a user experience issue originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 20 Dec 2010 21:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We have no idea why Samsung’s having such a hard time delivering its overdue promised Froyo upgrades worldwide for the Galaxy S series, but it’s not looking any easier for them this weekend: the only Canadian Galaxy S to get upgraded so far, Bell’s Vibrant, has just had its update pulled. Seems a healthy number of users attempting the upgrade using Sammy’s Kies desktop software ended up with inaccessible internal storage, which sucks for a variety of obvious reasons — and that would be the apparent reason for the removal of the update. Here’s the official statement:

“There have been intermittent issues reported during the firmware upgrade process with Kies for the Samsung Galaxy S i9000M series of phones. Samsung’s development team is currently aware of this issue and working towards a solution. Accordingly, The firmware update feature, which affects the ability to upgrade to Android 2.2, is temporarily disabled until a solution is released. We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Maybe we can just go straight to Gingerbread or Honeycomb at this point?

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Samsung pulls Froyo update for Bell’s Vibrant after reports of fried internal storage originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 18 Dec 2010 19:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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