Hasta La Gadget!

Alcatel One Touch (that’s all part of the company’s full name, incidentally) clearly intended on making a big splash at this year’s IFA. The company announced a number of relatively high-end handsets in Berlin this week, including the flashy Idol Alpha and the massive Idol Hero. But let’s face it, not everyone is able to shell out big bucks for handsets. Thankfully, the company also used the show to take the wraps off of four new budget Android 4.2 entries in its C-Series of handsets. The company had three on-hand at tonight’s Pepcom event: the C1, C3 and C5. The biggest of the bunch, the five-inch C7 was here in spirit, making an appearance as a dummy unit. Thankfully, the company’s got a bit more time to perfect that one, seeing as how the handset isn’t due out until some time before the end of the year.

The C5, which is set to start shipping in November, was on-hand in all of its final production glory. All said, it’s not a bad looking piece of hardware. Granted, it loses a bit of its luster placed up against the likes of the Alpha and Hero, but again, this is a budget device we’re talking about here. The handset’s got a 4.5-inch display and a white face that’s at least somewhat reminiscent of Galaxy devices, with the usual trio of touch Android buttons on the bottom. The device we handled had a metallic red backing, with a prominent five-megapixel camera up top and a speaker grille along the bottom. Inside is a quad-core 1.3 GHz processor — a step down from the C7’s quad-core version.%Gallery-slideshow83371%

Follow all of our IFA 2013 coverage by heading to our event hub!

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Chromebooks are not exactly known for their high end specifications, which is perhaps why they never really sold like hotcakes either. Well, the Acer C7 Chromebook is sorely in need of far more processing firepower than it packs at the moment, and where the original $199 model lacked in terms of a battery life that amounted to just 3.5 hours, the new refreshed Acer C7 Chromebook intends to compensate its weaknesses with a couple of key upgrades, namely a 6-cell, 5000mAh battery that offers (theoretically) twice the battery capacity as its predecessor, which should translate to around seven hours of computing, as well as 4GB RAM that doubles up on the previous 2GB.

Unfortunately, the processor will remain the same, with an Intel Celeron 847 1.1GHz processor running the show underneath the hood, but it ought to get the most basic jobs done without any hiccups, especially with the bump in the RAM count. How now, brown cow, is the refreshed Acer C7 Chromebook worth taking a look now?

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Google Admits Privacy Violation In Street View Mapping Project, New Dell Inspiron I15RV-1428BLK,

It’s been just over a month since Google unveiled its gorgeous and affordable $249 Samsung Chromebook only to surprise us days later with an even cheaper system, the $199 Acer C7 Chromebook. At first glance, these two laptops are very similar, both in purpose (cloud-based computing on a budget) and in specs (11.6-inch display, dual-core CPU, 2GB of RAM), but there are significant differences under the hood. Samsung’s offering achieves its svelte form factor, 6.5-hour battery life and attractive price via a fully integrated and fanless ARM-based design while Acer takes a more conservative approach — cramming standard off-the-shelf components like a 2.5-inch hard drive, small-outline memory module, mini-PCIe WiFi card, and Intel Celeron processor into a traditional netbook-like chassis. Does being $50 cheaper make up for the C7’s lack of sex appeal and short 4-hour battery life? What other compromises in performance and build quality (if any) were made to achieve this lower cost? Most importantly, which budget Chromebook is right for you? Find out after the break.

Continue reading Acer C7 Chromebook review: Chrome OS on the cheap, but at what cost?

Filed under: Laptops, Google, Acer

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Good news for Nokia owners, as the company has begun the phased rollout of Symbian Belle Refresh. First and foremost, the OS update brings a new web browser with support for HTML5 web apps. Users will also discover new home screen widgets, and for those who’ve yet to snag ’em, Microsoft Office and Nokia Maps Suite 2.0 are also made part of the update. Symbian Belle Refresh is supported by the Nokia N8, E7, C7, C6-01, X7 and Oro, and will also include new imaging apps that are specific to the N8. The vanilla version of the software is now available, and Nokia expects that operator and country specific updates will be up for grabs in the coming weeks.

Filed under: Software, Mobile

Nokia rolling out Symbian Belle Refresh with new web browser, home screen widgets originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Aug 2012 16:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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