Rumors have been circulating that HTC was planning a mid-cycle replacement for the One V, the Proto, that would keep the line relevant in the face of some noticeably toughercompetition. It may be more of a reality than a notch on the roadmap. As long as The Verge‘s press renders are authentic, the Proto should be an almost straightforward, international edition of the previously China-only New Desire V (T328w). HTC wouldn’t be reinventing the wheel — it would reportedly add a much-needed second core to the 1GHz processor but keep the same 5-megapixel camera, 4GB of storage and 7.2Mbps 3G as the smartphone’s early 2012 prequel; though we’d imagine the second SIM slot would be nixed. If, where and when the Proto shows up is still left to the imagination, though. Next week’s IFA show is a tempting target for a late 2012 release, but there’s no hard and fast rule that any introduction has to coincide with a major event.
The future of Motorola post-acquisition may still be a mystery, but the manufacturer has managed to stay quite active over the last few weeks: it unveiled the Atrix HD, its first smartphone with an HD display and native ICS build, and there’s already much anticipation around Verizon’s Droid RAZR HD ahead of the holiday season. For the here and now, however, it’s Sprint’s turn to soak in the Moto love with the Photon Q 4G LTE. (Say it five times fast.)
Naturally, the name of the phone doesn’t leave a whole lot to the imagination. As you’d expect, it’s a follow-up to last year’s Photon 4G that trades WiMAX for LTE and adds a full-sized QWERTY keyboard. What the name doesn’t tell you, though, is that this phone costs a lofty $200 on contract, and features a qHD ColorBoost display (not to be confused with the Atrix’s 720p screen, which uses the same branding). In other words, it’s gotta be pretty good to have any success at that price point. How does the latest Googorola device hold up against the rest of Sprint’s LTE lineup? Is it worth the premium? Follow us southward to find out.
On the heels of its successful debut in Korea and Japan, the Optimus Vu: will make its global debut starting in select markets in Europe, Asia, Middle East/Africa and Latin America starting in September. With the world’s first 5-inch 4:3 aspect ratio display, the Optimus Vu: blurs the line between traditional tablets and smartphones for a truly unique smart device experience. Since its March debut in Korea, the Optimus Vu: has sold over 500,000 units, demonstrating public acceptance of its …
It’s been a whole five months since Sony released its last flagship Android smartphone, so clearly it’s time for another. Benchmarks have emerged of the Sony LT25 “Tsubasa”, with soruces speaking to Xperia Blog indicating that it will be a smartphone heading to multiple carriers across the world. Both LTE and HSPA+ models of the phone will be offered, with specs said to include a 720p screen, a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor, and LTE connectivity.
NeNaMark 2 results show that the handset features a 1196×720 display, with the 84 missing pixels taken up by the on screen buttons in Ice Cream Sandwich. An Adreno 225 GPU is also onboard, which means we should be looking at Qualcomm’s extremely popular Snapdragon S4 MSM8960 SoC.
AnTuTu indicates that the clock speed is 1.5Ghz, so Sony’s latest handset should feature the same silicon that HTC and Samsung are using for their phones in the United States. Several carrier variants are in the works too: the LT25c is said to be tailor made for China Telecom, the SO-01E will make an appearance on NTT DoCoMo, the SOL21 will feature on KDDI, and the LT25i and LT25i will be LTE and HSPA+ models for other international markets.
Sony has an event at IFA 2012 lined up, and we’d hazard a guess that it’s where we’ll see this new handset, along with the recently leaked Sony Xperia Tablet. Sony’s event starts on August 29th, and we’ll bring you coverage of all the goodies that Sony unveils on the big day.
Our SIGGRAPH demo of the ARM Mali-T604 GPU gave a brief preview of Samsung’s upcoming Exynos 5 Dual CPU, but now all the details of the company’s next great processor are ready for us to view. Other than that GPU which includes support for up to WQXGA (2,560 x 1,600) resolutions — perfect for the 11.8-inch P10 mentioned in court filings — and much more, the white paper uncovered by Android Authority also mentions support for features like Wi-Fi Display, high bandwidth LPDDR3 RAM running at up to 800MHz with a bandwidth of 12.8GBps, USB 3.0 and SATA III. It also claims the horsepower to decode 1080p video at 60fps in pretty much any codec, stereoscopic 3D plus handle graphics APIs like OpenGL ES 3.0 and OpenCL 1.1. All of this is comes courtesy of a dual-core 1.7GHz ARM Cortex-A15 CPU built on the company’s 32nm High-K Metal Gate process and Panel Self Refresh technology that avoids changing pixels unnecessarily to reduce power consumption. There’s plenty of other buzzwords and benchmarks floating around in the PDF, you can check them out in the PDF linked below or just sit back and see what tablets and phones arrive with one of these — or the competition from Qualcomm’s S4 and NVIDIA’s Tegra — inside starting later this year.
If you’re looking for just about the strangest smartphone to have been released thus far this year, you’re looking right at it right here: the Samsung GALAXY Beam. This device is a relatively powerful smartphone on its own, but with it you get a built-in projector as well. You’ve got a 15 Lumen Texas Instruments DLP (Digital Light Processing) unit at the end of a smartphone that’s essentially the top of the line minus one year from the smartphone evolution timeline – is such a combination worth the effort?
Hardware
This device has a fairly standard 1GHz dual-core processor, a 4-inch WVGA (800 x 480 pixel) resolution TFT LCD display, and the ability to work with HSPA and EDGE/GPRS, with networks differing depending on the country you’re in. Inside the device you’ve got 8GB of built-in memory as well as a microSD card slot that accepts up to 32GB of extra storage in a single card.
On the back of the device you’ve got a 5 megapixel camera with single LED flash and on the front you’ve got a 1.3 megapixel camera. The entire device measures in at 124 x 64.2 x 12.5mm at 145g light. It’s not the smallest device on the market, but it’s certainly small and light considering its ability to tote a projector onboard.
The projector is bright to a degree of 15 Lumen at 1W and can project at nHD resolution (640×360 pixels). You’ve got the ability to project images from the display in mirror mode – this by simply pressing the dedicated hardware button on the right of the device – or in a collection of presentation modes. See more on this in the “Projecting” section later in this review.
The device has a rather nice feel to it with a rubbery textured back and a form-fitting shape all around. The device functions generously as a standard smartphone, which will be rather important to many users at it costs essentially the same as much higher-powered devices also on the market at the same time. Then there’s the yellow band – a daring aesthetic choice which we hope very much will pay off for Samsung so that they’ll continue to go wild with color in the future – it’s nice!
Software
Most of the software aspects here are included in the “Projecting” section – everything aside from that is a fairly standard Android 2.3 Gingerbread experience. If you’re looking for the most advanced standalone software experience for a smartphone on the market, this isn’t it. But for a Gingerbread machine – that is, two generations of Google mobile OS before the current version 4.1 Jelly Bean – this device is perfectly legit.
You’ve got no attached carrier (at the moment) so you’ll only have Google app and Samsung’s collection of pre-loaded apps plus a couple of projector-friendly apps as well. Apps such as QuickPad, Samsung’s Social and Music Hubs, and Kies 2.0 are included.
Benchmarks on this device show, again, that this isn’t the battle-ready gaming and processing beast that’ll be beating all competitors, but it’s certainly beefy enough to make the projector elements worthwhile. The processor at work here is the rare NovaThor U8500, that is working with a 45 nm architecture with 1GHz dual-core ARM Cortex-A9 for CPU and ARM Mali 400 (single-core) for GPU. This processor also exists in the Sony Xperia P and U, Samsung Galaxy S Advance, and several other lesser-known devices.
Projecting
You’ve got a whole host of options with your built-in projector up top of this device. Samsung lists personal theater, fun group sharing, mood generator, outdoor entertainment, professional presentations, education, and room decoration amongst their suggested use cases. Users purchasing the Samsung GALAXY Beam will likely use the device less than they expect that they’d planned, but will find that when they DO use it, they’ll be pleasantly surprised at how well it works.
You can play movies at home with whatever movie app you’ve got on the device – like the Samsung Movie Hub, of course. You can play YouTube videos at a party. You can project images of disco balls and fireplaces – a collection of repeating images such as these are included on the device so you can get the idea rather easily. You can bring this device with you camping to watch a movie projected on to your camper – an idea, again, I’d never have thought of if Samsung hadn’t suggested it.
Then comes the professional uses, the first of which is showing off a slide show in the classroom or at a meeting. You’ll look positively magical busting out your smartphone in a meeting that projects your ideas onto the wall with no outside assistance. And what a fun idea it’d be to show off your portfolio in a coffee shop up on the wall where everyone can see at once!
Then there’s OHP mode – over-head projector – where you’ll be doing both input and output at the same time. This mode projects whatever images are on your screen while at the same time your back-facing camera is watching whatever is in front of it to see what your device wants to project. Such a simple concept and certainly something a Samsung engineer one day realized was awesome enough to be included as a sell-point in their big list of features.
The camera’s position on the back (closer to the center than the top where it’d normally be on most smartphones) is certainly intentional. While it may simply be down there to get out of the way of the projector which sits at the head of the smartphone, it also feels more natural here to do over-head projector action.
Battery
With the package we’ve got, there are two full removable batteries that can be switched in and out of the device along with a battery charger that doesn’t need the smartphone to work. This means you can have a battery charging in your home or office while you’re out and about with the smartphone, then when you need more power, all you’ve gotta do is swap. We’d certainly recommend this setup for any smartphone user who needs to be up and running at all times, but especially here with the projector situation.
The reason for this is that the Samsung GALAXY Beam uses its 2,000 mAh battery up relatively fast if you’re using the projector quite often. It’s an impressive feat to see this device playing a full-length 2-hour movie without needing to be plugged in, but if you’re thinking about then taking it out for a night on the town with the same battery, you’ll be out of luck. Without using the projector you’ll easily have a full day’s moderate use with one battery.
And remember to keep that charger handy regardless of how much you think you’ll need it!
Wrap-up
The Samsung GALAXY Beam is certainly a specialty device. If you have a need for a projector that’s also a smartphone, or a smartphone that’s also a projector – this is your only real legitimate choice. This smartphone is powerful enough to be your normal everyday driver, but you’re certainly going to want to know that you’ll be using the projector on a daily basis to make it all worth your while.
This device is currently available internationally (UK, France, Singapore, India and Brazil) and USA launch dates have not been announced, but are expected soon – rather soon, we hope!
If you thought the Apple and Samsung legal tussles weren’t getting interesting enough, another filing has revealed that the father of all smartphones Galaxy has at least two Windows Phone 8 devices in the pipeline. According to the filing that’s been unearthed by The Verge, both are running on a dual-core 1.5Ghz Qualcomm MSM8960 chipset — which is currently Samsung’s chip of choice for LTE regions. The Odyssey looks set to be Samsung’s high-end Windows Phone, with a 4.65-inch high-definition Super AMOLED display and NFC ready for Microsoft’s own mobile payment plans. Meanwhile, the Marco will apparently forego the near-field delights and house a humbler 4-inch WVGA Super AMOLED screen, for a presumably gentler price. According to the legal documents, both devices are gearing up to launch in Q4 of this year — after we’ve seen Windows Phone 8 in its entirety.
Confusingly announced by Fujitsu, the Toshiba Regza T-02D will settle into a wall of similarly bright-colored, good-looking smartphones in NTT DoCoMo stores starting this week. The (Japan-only) phone’s 4.3-inch OLED screen holds onto a middling qHD resolution, but Fujitsu says its “new AMOLED Plus technology” will apparently render in higher clarity than any of its preceding smartphone displays — we’ll wait to see it in action before coming to any conclusions. There’s no word on who’s behind the dual-core 1.5GHz processor, but Xi connectivity (how Japanese carrier NTT DoCoMo brands its LTE provision) makes a Qualcomm chipset likely. Fujitsu is also pushing the phone’s ‘human-centric’ Android skin, like what we saw on its own quad-core slab). This involves a collection of UI tweaks to the base Android 4.0 OS, including Intellicolor, where the phone will sense the color of ambient light and tweak the display accordingly. The phone’s 13.1-megapixel camera reaches an impressively high ISO level of 25600, running on Sony’s back-illuminated Exmor R sensor, while Fujitsu’s also channeled the ghost of the original Motorola Atrix, resurrecting a fingerprint unlock sensor. Other features worth mentioning include high-definition NOTTV compatibility, plus certified water and dust resistance. As is expected from the world of Japanese smartphones, there’s a selection of colors too — the T-02D will be available in Pink, Black and Blue from launch. Japan residents wondering exactly which company made the phone can try to get their head around the full release below.
Such is the natural order of things. First the blurrycam, then the FCC sighting (albeit the Sprint version) and if you’re lucky, a final juicy leak. This is the story of the Samsung Jasper for Verizon. Details of the mid-range chin-heavy phone just showed up on Twitter, and claim the device will have a dual-core 1.5GHz Snapdragon MSM8960 processor, a mediocre 800 x 480 display and Android 4.0. The skinning looks lighter than some other Samsung attempts, and the buttons along the bottom are also a deviation from other recent big hitters. While the DNA all seems a bit familiar, it seems Verizon will finally have a version to call its own.
Announced earlier this year in February the EdenTab or Eden TAB a 7″ Android 2.3.3 Android tablet (Set to be upgraded ton Android 4.0) that comes with a Samsung S5PC210 1.2GHz Dual Core CPU, comes with 1GB of RAM and 16GB of internal memory, a WXGA resolution and SIM (Free) slot, is now set to arrive in Japan within august and will be sold between 34,800 and 36,800 Yen!
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