Hasta La Gadget!

In addition to letting us get our hands on all its IFA announcements today, Acer pulled back the curtain on a concept device. The Acer Extend prototype works similarly to the ASUS Padfone, letting you connect your smartphone to a clamshell-style dock with a display, keyboard and a 6,000mAh battery to recharge your handset.

For the purposes of the demo, a modified version of Acer’s Liquid E2 smartphone was connected to the Extend dock via an MHL cable, though company reps said a market-ready version could include a retractable cord. Even more compelling, though, would be a wireless, Bluetooth-based solution.

In addition to offering much more screen real estate than a phone, the dock solution nets you a full-size, tactile keyboard, and Acer’s optimized this island-style layout to work with a smartphone’s operating system. To that end, there are buttons for Mail, WiFi, Bluetooth and more — more or less the options you’ll find in and Android phone’s Settings menu. Though the keyboard is tailored to a smartphone interface, the Extend lets you view apps such as Gmail in tablet format, meaning you’ll reap the full benefits of the larger display. There’s also a full-size touchpad on board.%Gallery-slideshow77226%

Filed under: Cellphones, Laptops, Mobile, Acer

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Amongst the insanity that is Microsoft’s acquisition of Nokia, another important piece of news quietly dropped. Nokia said that its head of design, Marko Ahtisaari, will leave the company in November this year to pursue “entrepreneurial opportunities.” He’ll be replaced by Industrial Design VP Stefan Pannenbecker. Ahtisaari, who we spoke to earlier this year, led the creation of all recent Lumia devices, including the 925 and 1020. Most of those handsets received wide praise for their design, so if Microsoft hopes to jump its smartphone market share by purchasing Nokia’s device division, this won’t help.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Microsoft, Nokia

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Via: AllThingsD

It’s a weird time at HTC, where its flagship smartphones earn so much praise, but the bottom line continues to evaporate at an alarming rate. It’s the mid-range and low-end that the company now needs to improve in the hope of recouping some of Robert Downey Jr.’s fee. That’s what the Desire 601 is for, a second-tier smartphone that shares more than a little of its DNA with the company’s highly-lauded flagships. We got to spend a couple of minutes with the device, the first Desire handset to ship with LTE, and we’d like to share with you our very first impressions.

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Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, HTC

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While we were playing with HTC’s latest toys, the company let us fiddle with an engineering sample of the BoomBass. The weighty little cube is a Bluetooth 3.0+EDR speaker that pairs to your smartphone over NFC and offers a slide-out base to prop up your device for impromptu dance parties. The 1,200 mAh internal battery that promises nine hours of playback is charged with a microUSB cable, but unfortunately can’t be used to give your phone an extra bit of juice. We know that the little cube will arrive partway through October, but there’s no word on — yet — pricing, so you can keep yourself amused while we wait for a figure by flicking through the gallery of hands-on images we’ve got for you. %Gallery-slideshow77136%

Filed under: Cellphones, Portable Audio/Video, Mobile, HTC

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Microsoft’s outlined its reasoning behind why it’s gone deep into smartphones in a lengthy presentation file. Alongside cheering Windows Phone’s current growth (No.3!), it’s reaffirmed that it’ll bring its products and services to rival mobile OSes, still involving itself with “iPhone and Android/Galaxy phones.” However, it tempers this point, adding that the Redmond company can’t risk “having Google or Apple foreclose app innovation, integration, distribution or economics.” Given the strength of the top two, Microsoft is telling it straight, adding that it needs a “first-rate Microsoft phone experience for users” to compete, suggesting that its portfolio of devices isn’t quite there yet. The slides also outline the purchase of Nokia’s patent collection, one which Microsoft believes is one of the most valuable in the tech sector. MS also thinks that the acquisition will speed up innovation within Windows Phone and protect its future. So, some high hopes for the purchase.

Update: According to slides in the source, Microsoft also has more concrete goals for its Nokia devices acquisition. It’d like to boost its smartphone share to 15 percent by 2018, around four times what it has now, depending on which numbers you believe. Redmond also revealed that it makes less than $10 per handset in its current arrangement with Nokia, and thinks it can make over $40 going forward, while saving $600 million in costs. With all that, Microsoft is projecting $45 billion extra in revenue by 2018, with profits in the $2.3-4.5 billion range. High hopes indeed.

Steve Dent contributed to this report.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Microsoft, Nokia

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Source: Microsoft (PDF)