This is the BlackBerry watch–kind of, sort of, but not really. It’s actually the inPulse Smartwatch, a watch not designed, branded, or approved by RIM, which was created to work with your favorite non-Apple fruit-themed smartphone.
The watch syncs with your BlackBerry, letting you know when youre getting a message or call while your phone is stashed away.It doesn’t read messages. Not a heck of a lot of info available about the product beyond that.
How soon we forget. On Friday everyone was talking about Motorola’s first Android handset, the CLIQ. Now, a few days later, everyone’s in a tizzy about the kind-of announced-but-not-yet-revealed Android handset for Verizon. Well, perhaps T-Mobile’s new press release will get the CLIQ back into the public consciousness–the phone that PCMag lavished praise upon and awarded its Editor’s Choice.
T-Mobile today announced that the CLIQ is currently available for pre-sale: Order one via the carrier’s site or by calling up T-Mobile. The handset is priced at $199 with a two-year contract. Those who preorder will also get a free car charger and will be entered to win a trip for five to one of five unlisted locations.
The phone officially goes on sale November 2nd.
Reader Joseph P. asks: I read both of your reviews of the Samsung Rogue and the LG enV Touch. Which camcorder has better video quality? Which phone by Verizon would you say has the best video quality for recording?
Hi Joseph,
Both the Samsung Rogue and the LG enV Touch recorded video at 640-by-480 resolution and performed well in testing. So did the HTC Imagio, although that’s a smartphone and requires a different Verizon plan.
It would be tough to split the difference in quality between all three. The LG and HTC Imagio were slightly sharper and more colorful than the Rogue, though the Imagio blew one test by being out of focus the entire time for reasons unknown.
(More after the jump.)
Spring Design has unveiled Alex, which the company claims is the first e-book reader powered by Google Android. It’s also the first reader with two screens: a 6-inch panel based on e-ink (specifically, monochrome EPD, or electronic paper display) for regular reading, and a separate 3.5-inch color touch LCD for browsing the Internet and supporting content for the main screen.
In fact, that second screen is an entirely self-contained Google Android device. Alex includes a Wi-Fi radio, as well as internal 3G support on both EV-DO and GSM networks–assuming Spring Design can find carrier support for the thing.
Alex also includes earphones, stereo speakers, an SD card slot, browser bookmarks and history, and the ability to transfer content from the touch LCD to the e-ink display for easier reading. Spring Design said it’s currently in talks with said carriers, and is targeting a release before the end of this year.
If it’s any consolation to those of you Sidekick users who lost your data during the Danger server outages earlier this month, Microsoft wants you to know that it’s hard at work trying to get that data back. “The Danger / Microsoft team is continuing to work around the clock on the data restoration process,” the company wrote in a post yesterday.
Microsoft also used the post to apologize for the delay, but insisted that it was making, “steady progress.” The company also added that it “hope[s] to be able to begin restoring personal contacts for affected users this week, with the remainder of the content (photographs, notes, to-do-lists, marketplace data, and high scores) shortly thereafter.”
The Sidekick’s carrier, T-Mobile, has already offered monetary compensation for affected users.
Verizon’s new Motorola Droid site is notable for more than its coded clock counting down to October 30. It’s also full of direct attacks on Apple. The site says, in an Apple-like font with Apple-like graphic design:
For one last twist, the site makes its claims using Adobe Flash, which was recently announced for every major mobile OS except the iPhone. Flash on Android phones will require Android OS 2.0, which the Droid has.
The phrasing, ownership and branding of the site make a lot of interesting points. As John Gruber over at Daring Fireball points out, this is a Verizon site – Motorola doesn’t make a single appearance. The competition set up here isn’t Verizon vs. AT&T or Motorola vs. Apple, it’s Verizon vs. Apple. As Rene Ritchie of the iPhone Blog says, Verizon wants to make it clear they have no intention of being a “dumb pipe” anytime soon.
Various Web sites are nitpicking Verizon’s claims, but the most interesting phrase here is “open development.” While Verizon is referring directly to Android’s App Market, “open development” is a Verizon buzzword for a new project of theirs that approves mostly-non-phone devices through speedy means. Verizon gives up some control of open-development devices’ branding, too. The irony here, of course, is that the Droid wasn’t approved using the Verizon Open Development Initiative. If anything, it seems to be the opposite: the ultimate Verizon-specced, Verizon-branded device.
A new promotional Web site from Verizon Wireless appears to mention an October 30 date for their new Android 2.0-powered “Droid” phone. It’s still unclear whether that’s an announcement or sale date.
The site, at www.verizonwireless.com/droid, contains a countdown clock in code using ten symbols, each of which represent a number from 0-9. If you decode the symbols, the clock is counting down to midnight at the beginning of October 30, 2009. (At 9:29 PM on October 17, the clock read 12 days, 2 hours, 30 minutes, and some seconds.)
The site’s promotional language describes the Droid further. It promises “5 megapixels … Android 2.0 … speech recognition … notification panel … directions … video … tunes … 10,000+ apps … the network … multitasking … high speed … hi-res.”
The site also attacks Apple’s iPhone in direct language that’s rarely been seen before. “iDon’t take night shots,” it says in an Apple-like font on a white background, similar to the look of Apple ads. “iDon’t allow open development … everything iDon’t, DroidDoes.”
The Droid is generally assumed to be the name of a Verizon Android phone produced by Motorola. Last week, Verizon Wireless CEO Lowell McAdam promised the first of several Android phone launches “in a few weeks” and followed up with an official press photo of himself and Google CEO Eric Schmidt wielding two Verizon Android phones, one assumed to be the Motorola device and the other looking like a variant of Sprint’s HTC Hero.
No other phones so far have run version 2.0 of the Android OS, codenamed “Eclair,” though the appearance of a giant inflatable pastry on the Google campus this week foreshadowed its coming.
Verizon has been stepping up their widely-derided smartphone line recently with the Windows Mobile 6.5-powered HTC Imagio and an anticipated near-term release of the BlackBerry Storm2, which we reviewed this week.
You can sign up for more information about Verizon’s “Droid” at http://phones.verizonwireless.com/motorola/droid/?cmp=OTC-Droid-redirect1
(Thanks to Boy Genius for tipping me off to the site URL via Twitter)
The biggest thing about the Motorola CLIQ (aside from the phone’s unwieldy size) is that a company other than HTC finally got around to making an Android phone. The handset is Motorola’s first of what will likely be many entries in the space. The company, it seems, is putting all its eggs in the Google basket, hoping that open-source operating system Android will rescue the manufacturer from what has been, by all accounts, a few rough years.
Fortunately for Motorola (and the rest of us), it managed to get things right the first time. The CLIQ isn’t just Motorola’s first Android phone–it’s arguably the best handset to run the OS thus far. At PCMag, our reviewer gave the device our Editors’ Choice award, thanks to its terrific social-network-friendly skin on top of Android.
Motorola seems to really get the whole point of the OS: Unlike many other smartphone operating systems before it, customization is really the name of the game with Android. Motorola put Sidekick users directly in its sights with the device–a group that may well be a little less loyal to those devices, after this month–and has scored. The CLIQ’s success bodes well for the next Android device from the company, which by most accounts is due out soon for Verizon–which would also make it the first phone with the Google OS on that carrier.
Just as T-Mobile is issuing word that it was able to recover “most” of the data lost as a result of recent Microsoft/Danger server failures, word is coming out that a number of Sidekick owners are filing suit over the issue.
A man in Bakersfield, CA has issued a suit against Danger, on behalf of “all other similiarly situated,” claiming that the company should have been “more careful” with regards to its data backup.
The man’s attorney, Ira Rothken, issued the following statement,
T-Mobile and its service providers ought to have been more careful the use of backup technology and policies to prevent such data loss. We are hopeful that T-Mobile and the rest of the defendants will do the right thing, use this as an opportunity to redesign the system as a new standard for cloud computing storage, and provide full compensation for the data loss.
A number of other similar suits have also been filed.
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