Hasta La Gadget!

In a Chinese invitation we received earlier today, Foxconn Technology Group and Mozilla confirmed an upcoming press conference that will detail and make their Firefox OS partnership official. The event will take place in Taipei next Monday (just a few days before Computex truly kicks off), and it’ll see Mozilla welcome the 19th partner to its Firefox OS alliance. There isn’t much meat in the email, though we did spot a little hint in the rundown that says one or more of the “latest” Firefox OS products will be on show. Whatever they may be, we shall keep an eye out for them as soon as we land in Terry Gou’s back garden next week.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Via: Focus Taiwan

Sick of that spotty (read: non-existent) cell coverage 1,000 miles off the coast of Alaska? This time, you can’t blame AT&T. There is an option for getting connected, though, and it’s not quite as pricey as you think. Spot, a subsidiary of satellite communications giant Globalstar, recently announced its new Global Phone, a fairly basic lightweight handset that supports phone calls, SMS and compressed data at speeds of up to 28 kbps for $499. Usage fees are also fairly reasonable, with plans ranging from 10 minutes per month for $25 to unlimited calling for $150, plus a $50 activation fee. There’s also an 80-minute plan for $40, 200 minutes for $65 or 400 minutes for $100 with monthly billing. The device itself sports four hours of talk time or 36 hours of standby, and provides direct access to GEOS International Emergency Response Coordination Center when you dial 911. The Global Phone is available now through a variety of retailers, including Bass Pro Shops, Cabela’s and REI.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile

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Source: Spot

ASUS’ Fonepad has been making its way around the world with a 1.2GHz Intel Atom Z2420 processor and 16GB of built-in storage, but apparently there’s a need for covering one’s face with a beefier version. Announced in Taiwan earlier today, the 7-inch tabletphone will be offered with a faster 1.6GHz Z2460 plus 32GB of memory (with microSD expansion as before). This new model will retail for NT$10,900 locally, which works out to be about US$360; whereas the original model will still be available for NT$8,990 or about US$300 (which is, by the way, a tad more expensive than the UK price). We’ll let you know when ASUS comes back with more information regarding availability in other regions.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile, ASUS

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Via: Engadget Chinese

Quite frankly, Huawei’s 6.18mm-thick P6-U06 is quickly becoming the company’s worst leak in this half of 2013. Following yesterday’s spy shots of said phone in black, today we received three new ones courtesy of an anonymous tipster, and this time we have a close-up of the brushed metallic back of the phone. Interestingly, the camera looks different than the one — what appears to be a dual-SIM model — in the TENAA filing, and we also noticed that the volume rocker is on the left side of the phone this time, while the headphone jack is now located at the top left side instead of at the bottom left. The overall shape of the device matches what we’ve seen before, though.

On a related note, we’ve also been notified of an upcoming Huawei launch event in London on June 18th (Huawei Device chairman Richard Yu told us he’s attending), and we wouldn’t be surprised to see this slim phone popping up there — hopefully alongside the mysterious Edge that was leaked in March. Two more shots of the P6-U06 after the break.

Update: Meixcan blog Circular got hold of a couple of photos — embedded after the break — of the P6-U06 lit up. One of the shots reveal that the phone features a 1.5GHz quad-core chip, 2GB RAM and 8GB of storage space, along with Emotion UI 1.6 running on top of Android. We’re not sure if the “No SD card found” message is an indication of microSD expansion, though.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Another 1080p quad-core Android phone, you say? Well, there’s a bit more to it. Launched by BBK spin-off Vivo in Beijing just now, this 5.7-inch Xplay goes one step further than its smaller X1 and X1S cousins by packing one extra audio chip and the OPA2604 operational amplifier from Texas Instruments in order to add extra oomph to Cirrus Logic’s CS4398 DAC and CS8422 stereo asynchronous sample-rate converter — both of which are featured on the X1 series. If you’re a DIY audio enthusiast, you might have already tinkered with an OPA2604 while making your own headphone amplifier; so in other words, Vivo is trying to save you the hassle.

Before we dive into the audio performance, let’s quickly look at the rest of the phone first. Underneath the 500-nit LTPS display lies a Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 quad-core SoC (1.7GHz, 2GB RAM and Adreno 320 graphics engine), 16GB or 32GB of built-in storage, 3,400mAh battery and NFC. On the back you’ll find a Sony 13-megapixel imager next to a pair of speakers (FLAC playback is supported natively), but flip the phone over and you’ll be looking at a surprisingly generous 5-megapixel front-facing camera — much like the one on Oppo’s mid-range Ulike 2. Vivo’s somehow managed to pack all of this into a 7.99mm-thick body with a screen bezel of just 2.3mm thick (which bests Pantech’s thin-bezeled Vega Iron) and a large viewable-to-total area ratio of 75.11 percent. Alas, for 3G there’s only WCDMA 2100, meaning the phone may have to rely more on GSM 850/900/1800/1900 or WiFi in many parts of the world. More after the break.

Update: Hands-on photos added below, followed by a couple of video clips after the break.

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Source: Vivo