Hasta La Gadget!

Gresso has a long history of offering up smartphones for wealthy people who care more about appearances than functionality. The company has unveiled a new smart phone today called the Cruiser Titanium. The phone is housed in a single piece case made from titanium.

The titanium case is hand polished bringing it to an incredible sheen. The company says that making the case involves nine separate stages. The polishing of the case is a six stage process on its own to begin with followed by three stage hand polishing phase at the end. Titanium is incredibly strong and the manufacturer promises that the case will withstand extreme loads and resist dents.

Each of the buttons on front of the mobile phone are hand polished. The screen is covered in solid tempered glass and uses a special tinting technology to make it appear a deep black color. The manufacturer says it takes 16 hours to create one Cruiser Titanium phone. The display on the phone is a TFT with the 240 x 320 pixel resolution measuring two-inches. The screen can only display 262,144 colors.

The phone runs the Symbian S40 operating system and operates on GSM frequency bands. The phone does have a microSD card slot for storage and only 30 MB of internal storage is available. The device has integrated GPRS and Bluetooth along with a two megapixel camera. This isn’t a phone you buy for functionality; it’s a phone you buy for style. The phone costs $2500 and is available to order right now.

[via Gresso]

Gresso unveils $2500 Cruiser Titanium phone is written by Shane McGlaun & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

As MWC draws near, it’s not surprising to see an increase in leaks, and today we bring you a few more pictures of Huawei’s Ascend P2, which recently made a cameo in some unofficial product shots. The 4.7-inch full HD handset is expected to feature Android 4.1.2, a quad-core 1.8 GHz processor (developed in house), 2GB of RAM, 8GB of built-in storage (plus microSD), a 13MP shooter and a 2200mAh battery. Slotting below the 5-inch Ascend D2 and 6.1-inch Ascend Mate we saw at CES, the Ascend P2 is rumored to be less than 6.45mm thick with Nexus 4-like on-screen buttons. Of course, since the FCC is unlikely to certify such a svelte device, it’s likely we’ll see a tweaked version of this phone if it ever makes it to the US — then again, it looks thicker to us in the pictures. Pricing is supposedly targeting the 3,000 Yuan mark ($480), unsubsidized. Guess we’ll find out more in Barcelona, right? Hit the break for a couple more images.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile

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Via: M.I.C. Gadget

Source: QQ Tech

This week The Guardian is tipping the world from one of their anonymous sources that Nokia may well be bringing their full-on Nokia 808 PureView 41 megapixel sensor to a set of standard smartphones in 2013. This tip comes from “sources close to the Finnish handset maker” and is indeed appearing to us to be just about as incredible as it may seem to you. What we’ll likely see instead is a continuation of the Nokia Lumia 920′s high-powered camera technology rather than the beast that is the lens configuration on the 808 – let’s have a chat about why.

The Nokia 808 PureView is a smartphone that’s meant to be used primarily as a camera. It’s got a massive lens configuration on its back that Nokia never intended to compete with the thin and light frames of the high-end smartphones we’re seeing throughout the industry today. Instead it was (and is) meant to show the world that Nokia can, indeed, deliver this camera power in a real market-ready handset.

What we’ve got with the Nokia Lumia 920 is a device that takes on the same “feel” for the brand that Nokia is pushing with “PureView”, this time in a more realistic package for the mass market. This device is not the thinnest smartphone in the world – not by a long shot – but it’s certainly ready to compete against the average top-tier smartphone in its overall package delivery. Nokia is banking on the idea that the camera brand PureView technology will push the rest of their handsets into the limelight.

SIDE NOTE: There’s also the possibility here that the Nokia EOS Windows Phone spoken about recently could be connected to a real-deal high-powered PureView sensor. Think about it!

With the tip you’re seeing here about the 41-megapixel sensor coming to the standard handset, it’s much more likely that a game of “telephone” is going on. That means that the original message was likely something more like “Nokia will bring on more high-powered PureView smartphones in 2013″, translated several times to come out to “Nokia PureView smartphones (started with the 808) will come to market in 2013.” The realistic way of looking at this situation is as follows:

Nokia will continue to push forth with PureView brand camera technology in the handsets they deliver that, first and foremost, deliver an overall solid experience in and of themselves. Another possibility is that Nokia is evolving as quickly as HTC and will deliver something wild like multiple layers of lenses sandwiched together to create a camera that, in the end, works with enough sensors that they’d have otherwise created a 41-megapixel photo.

Perhaps four layers of 10 megapixel sensors to create one beast of a photo? We shall see!

Nokia tipped to bring 41 megapixel sensor to standard smartphones (again) is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This week the folks at HTC have created a rather interesting “Brief History of Photography” timeline in which they tease a “new sound and camera experience” for 2013 – but isn’t that what they did last year? Have a peek back at the original announcement of HTC ImageSense and the HTC One X to see how both photography and superior sound quality (with Beats Audio) were pushed at Mobile World Congress 2012. Fast-forward to 2013 and we’ve got HTC once again claiming to bring on both next-level sound and photography. It seemed pretty great back then, will it seem great again here one year later?

Of course that’s only one way of looking at the situation. Another would be to see that HTC’s smartphone sales didn’t exactly do as planned with the most recent quarterly earnings report showing sales down by a significant margin. HTC has even gone so far as to mention inexpensive smartphones for 2013 across markets such as China for a main strategy throughout the immediate future.

So what would HTC need to bring to the market to push their new line of high-end smartphones lead by the device known (at the moment) as the HTC M7? They’d need to deliver a rebranding of camera and sound technology as we know it. As Apple used the term “Retina” to let the world know they’d be going above and beyond the market’s then-current “best” in display resolution, so too must HTC re-brand excellence in their cameras and speakers.

The tip we heard this week about Ultrapixel cameras in smartphones from HTC may not be that far off from the truth. The tip was that HTC would bring a set of three camera sensors effectively stacked one on top of the other to create photography that has multiple sets of data for each pixel. The result would be photos more sharp and color-correct than any we’ve seen on a smartphone or tablet before.

And what about the speaker situation? It may just be that HTC has amped up their friendliness with the Beats brand or that they’ve done away with them altogether. The final result will be louder speakers, forward-facing speakers, or more “futuristic” sound delivery through wireless technology. The final result in the HTC One series over the past year was the Beats logo sitting on the back of each handset and not one whole heck of a lot more, when it came down to real-world use.

Now we wait (until the February 19th big event) to see if HTC can make another wild impact on the industry like they claim they’ve done in the camera history lineup they’ve posted today. Have a peek at the set in the gallery below and let us know how many of these devices you’ve owned or found yourself lusting over as they were released over the past several years.

HTC’s “new sound and camera experience” may be deja-vu is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

It would appear that the Samsung brand push of the name “Galaxy” associated with their Android-toting smartphones and tablets is working so extremely well that this week the hardware name has become more popular than the software. Having a peek at the findings analyst Benedict Evans has found with a few search term trends in Google’s own search engine, it’s made clear that as the Android search term has risen, so has the term Galaxy. In November of 2012 it’s shown that Galaxy was searched more than Android for the first time either term was relevant in search terms across Google’s history.

It’s important to note that the term “galaxy” does benefit in some way from the fact that it’s a non-brand word as well as a brand, but so too is the word “android.” It’s also clear that the term “galaxy” has risen along essentially the same path as “Samsung Galaxy” and right along with “android”, making non-brand searches essentially irrelevant. The eclipse (however small it may be) shows that Samsung is making a massive impact on the way people see the smartphone universe.

Below we’ve gone ahead and added the term “Droid” to the mix here instead of Evans’ chart’s term search with “iPhone”. What you’re going to see is that Verizon and Motorola’s push to turn the Android universe into a DROID brand association has been far, far less successful in the long run. Back Before 2011 rolled around, the term “DROID” was just as popular and at several points more popular than Galaxy. After July of 2010, DROID was never again as popular a search term as Galaxy.

View this information set in Google Trends now!

This sort of analysis is far from perfect, of course, and really only measures how often the average citizen looks up a term they’re interested in. That does translate quite well to the power of the brand when it comes down to it, of course, this shown in recent earnings reports from Samsung, Motorola, and Google. The big G recently purchased Motorola outright and is being tipped at the moment as working to create a new “X Phone” device to pump up the Android brand as well as the perceived power of the Motorola manufacturing process.

Now we’ve only to see how well Google is at branding Motorola and bringing Android along for the ride – soon and very soon!

Watch out Google: Samsung’s Galaxy brand has eclipsed Android is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.