Hasta La Gadget!

We first heard about — and went to town on — Kyocera’s latest smartphone toward the end of last month. Thankfully, the Torque happens to be an “ultra-rugged” device, meaning its creators didn’t mind at all when we tossed it against a wall or two. The LTE-packing Ice Cream Sandwich handset was made to the Military Standard 810G standard, so you can drop it, get it dirty or even submerge it in up to a meter of water for half an hour or so and go back for a little more Fruit Ninja — it’s also been placed in the hands of Mr. Man vs. Wild himself, Bear Grylls. The handset will be tumbling onto Sprint March 8th, with a $100 price (post two-year contract and $50 mail-in rebate).

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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In an effort to usher its newest flagship‘s infrared capabilities to the masses, HTC is adding an IR API to its OpenSense SDK. Starting today, developers interested in creating applications that use the One’s IR blaster can request the software kit directly from the company. By making this API available to the masses, HTC hopes to build a stable of apps unique to its new hardware, kicking things off with Sense 5’s integrated universal TV remote control software. Devs looking to ease the pain of Logitech’s plans to kill off the Harmony — or those interested in more details — can find just that via the source link below.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software, Mobile, HTC

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Source: HTC

You may not know about TestFlight if you’re used to running apps rather than building them, but odds are that you know its effects when over 300,000 iOS apps have reached testers that hopefully caught bugs in advance. That makes the launch of a private Android beta something of an event, as it gives developers the same simple feedback and provisioning for pre-release apps. Coders who split their time between both Android and iOS also get a truly cross-platform management console as part of the expansion. There’s no set date for when the beta expires, but TestFlight eventually plans to offer its utility directly through the Google Play Store — and might just keep the Android app train rolling smoothly.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile

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Via: TechCrunch

Source: TestFlight (1), (2)

LG was all about the tease yesterday, with its mysterious, alphabetic MWC warm-up video. Today, the covers have potentially been unceremoniously whipped off from at least two of the forthcoming offerings. The ever fruitful evleaks comes up with the goods again, and claims that what you see are the Optimus F7 (left) and Optimus F5 (right). There’s little to go on specification-wise, other than these are undoubtedly Android devices, with a design language not quite in keeping with the recently spotted Optimus G Pro behemoth. So, while you try to join the dots on what might be underneath those displays, we’ll keep an eye out for any remaining L-series and V-for Vu “surprises.”

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Source: @evleaks (Twitter)

Lately, NTT DoCoMo hasn’t had to push its customers to LTE so much as give them a gentle nudge. Just half a year after it notched up 4 million customers on its Xi service, the Japanese carrier has already reached 10 million — no mean feat when it took the carrier a year following the 2010 launch to get its first million. Of course, it’s not too difficult to explain just why adoption has been accelerating. Along with expanding coverage and improved speeds, DoCoMo has been releasing LTE phones aplenty to virtually guarantee that customers will move to 4G. Still, we don’t see any sign that the trend will stop when the carrier is launching a slew of high-end devices to catch 3G stragglers.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile

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Source: NTT DoCoMo