Hasta La Gadget!

Let’s face it, it’s a question the world’s been dying to know the answer to: which of the T-Mobile G2, HTC Surround and iPhone 4 will withstand a (literal) grilling the longest? Well, just in time for a mildly singed breakfast today, we have the answer. As you might have surmised from the title, HTC’s WP7-equipped Surround showed the most endurance, though in the end it too cashed out its Earthly credits and moved on to that great scrapyard in the sky. Video of its final moments awaits after the break.

Continue reading Windows Phone 7 beats iPhone 4 and Android … in a grilling contest (video)

Windows Phone 7 beats iPhone 4 and Android … in a grilling contest (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Nov 2010 06:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The alternative headline for this post was “a visual tour of the phones Americans aren’t getting,” but alas, the HD7 spoiled our macabre fun with its T-Mobile plans. All the same, there’s no disguising our disappointment at having to settle for Samsung’s Focus and LG’s Quantum in the US, while the rest of the world gets to enjoy the delights of the far prettier Omnia 7 and Optimus 7 from each manufacturer. Even HTC, which is also bringing the 7 Surround Stateside, is sending its aluminum-clad 7 Mozart to other, presumably sunnier, climes. Sadly, we can’t force these phones’ makers to bring them to you, but we can certainly live up to that promised visual tour. Check out the gallery below plus video after the break.

If there’s one thing that really stood out to us, it was the quality of the Omnia 7’s Super AMOLED display. It should be no surprise anymore that it delivers stellar black levels and eye-twisting viewing angles, but it still managed to take our breath away set against its WP7 contemporaries. The 7 Mozart doesn’t do too badly for itself, but the HD7 ended up a distant third in our eyes. Closeup video of all three displays follows after the break.

P.S. — LG’s Optimus 7 was too late in arriving to join the fray for this post, but rest assured that it, along with the other WP7 handsets featured herein, will be getting a full review in the coming days. If you’re curious about the (admittedly small) differences in specs between these phones, don’t forget we’ve broken them all down in our comparison from launch day right here.

Continue reading Samsung Omnia 7 takes on HTC’s HD7 and 7 Mozart in battle for WP7 supremacy (video)

Samsung Omnia 7 takes on HTC’s HD7 and 7 Mozart in battle for WP7 supremacy (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Oct 2010 07:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you think wireless carriers in North America charge too much, you are right. An analysis of cellphone plans worldwide found that consumers in the U.S., Canada and U.K. pay the highest for voice and text service on their phones, while those in India, Hong Kong and Japan pay the least.

Receiving phone calls is free in most countries, except U.S. and Canada–that’s why the rate per minute is doubled for these two countries, say Chiehyu Li and Bincy Ninan in a paper published by the think-tank New America Foundation.

The cheapest postpaid voice plan is available in Hong Kong at $8.50 for 600 minutes a month (a penny a minute), while in Canada the cheapest plan is $38.70 for 250 minutes. By comparison, the least expensive postpaid voice plan in America costs $39.99 for 450 minutes.

Even when it comes to texting services, American and Canadian consumers pay more than almost every one else worldwide.

“The United States tends to fall in a band of countries that charge higher prices to individual wireless consumers for everything except pure voice service where prices are comparable,” say Li and Ninan in their report. “It is essential we consider steps that could be taken to encourage competition or impose regulation such that the U.S. becomes an engine of innovation for better and more competitively priced service offerings.”

This is not the first time that an analysis has shown that American users pay more for service on their mobile devices. In July, an analysis by Tableau Software showed American users pay some of the highest prices in terms of dollars per gigabyte (GB) of data on the iPad. (Check out their amazing interactive chart here.)

The New America Foundation’s analysis threw up some surprising results with respect to texting and data services.

Texting is Expensive But Data is Not

Texting is becoming increasingly popular in the U.S. but it comes at a stiff price–though if its any help, U.S. consumers can take heart that their counterparts in the U.K. pay more.

For postpaid text plans, the U.K. provides the most expensive plan at $7.70 for 75 texts a month (10 cents a text). The U.S. is a close second at $5 for 200 texts a month.

The cheapest text rate offered is in Sweden at $17.80 for 5500 texts. India and South Korea charge only a penny for every text sent.

Not surprisingly, when it comes to unlimited data plans on mobile phones, the U.S. does much better –landing in the middle tier of service rates. American users can get $30 a month plan, which is cheaper than Canada’s $72.90 a month for unlimited data.

But Sweden’s unlimited data plans are among the best, coming in around for $13.80 a month, followed by India at $19 a month.

If you want a detailed breakdown of how countries compare for voice, text and data, check out the analysis on New America Foundation’s web site.

See Also:

• How Google Could Have Changed the World With Nexus One — and Still
• Virgin Mobile Offers Unlimited 3G for $40
• Five Ways To Slash Your Cellphone Bill
• Is It Possible to Live Without a Cellphone?

Charts: New America Foundation

Apple might be billing its next big event as “Back to the Mac,” but don’t let that fool you into thinking its computer platform has been waning. Quite to the contrary, according to IDC, which reports the Cupertino team has grabbed third spot in the US PC sales charts with a 10.6 percent market share, bumping the incumbent Acer into fourth. Two million Mac shipments during the period represented an increase of 24.1 percent relative to last year, while the overall PC market turned in a somewhat morose 3.8 percent growth. Gartner’s also unleashed its numbers unto the world today, giving Acer the lead for third by the slimmest of margins, but both stat teams agree that the Taiwanese vendor has suffered a bad year along with Dell, which has also experienced some shrinkage. Toshiba’s the only major Windows machine seller to see its fortunes improve with double-digit growth, while HP seems to be hanging on to the top spot nice and steadily. Hit the source links for worldwide numbers.

IDC: Apple’s now third largest PC vendor in US with 10.6 percent market share originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Oct 2010 18:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What’s the first thing you should do when you get the N8? Considering it packs the biggest image sensor embedded in a phone yet, Carl Zeiss optics, and an eight-digit pixel count, it seemed obvious to us that the answer was to take it on a picture- and video-taking stroll around London. On our way out we saw our iPhone 4 looking all sad and lonely, so we went ahead and brought it along as well. Below you shall find one gallery of pure, unadulterated N8 sample shots, another interspersed with the iPhone’s results for comparison’s sake, and a final one with side-by-side 100 percent crops from each image taker. Once you’ve digested all of those, we suggest hopping past the break and tucking into some tasty video comparisons for dessert.

Naturally, all the images are entirely unretouched (but for our masterly watermarking) and the iPhone 4’s HDR hocus pocus has been left off. We’ve also provided a zip file containing all the full-res imagery shot with the N8 in a link below.

A quick note is also merited about the N8’s resolution. The sensor’s display ratio is 4:3, which means that full 12 megapixel shots are only available in those dimensions. The camera software, however, defaults to shooting 9 megapixel snaps at the increasingly popular 16:9 ratio — this is done simply by cropping away the “excess” bars at the top and bottom of the image, meaning that the 9 megapixel images are giving us identical performance as the 12 megapixel ones, they’re just chopped down (from 4000 x 3000 to 4000 x 2248) for the sake of convenience. Now, on with the show!

Continue reading Nokia N8 vs. iPhone 4: camera showdown

Nokia N8 vs. iPhone 4: camera showdown originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Sep 2010 23:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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