Hasta La Gadget!

Okay, so a couple of weeks back, we wouldn’t have cared if Best Buy was willing to give us money to carry the Xperia X10, we still would have steered clear of its flawed UI and outdated software. But Sony Ericsson did a funny thing last Friday by promising to slap Gingerbread on this 4-inch sucker, which makes its current $1 contract price an eminently more intriguing proposition. We scouted out Best Buy’s web outlet and couldn’t find the X10 listed at all, so this could very well be a final stock clearance of the handset available on a store-by-store basis. If you’re tempted to jump on what’s looking like one of the cheapest Gingerbread devices for a while, you should be aware that the Android 2.3 update won’t be dropping until the end of Q2 at the earliest, so there will be a modicum of patience required.

[Thanks, Adam]

Xperia X10 goes on sale for just a dollar on contract, Gingerbread-flavored future makes it appealing originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 03 Apr 2011 09:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The new dual-core Snapdragon chip by Qualcomm will make your smartphone jealous. Judging by benchmarks conducted by AnandTech, the new MSM 8×60 absolutely blows away the competition, scoring almost double the Google-flagship Nexus S in GLBenchmark, a standardized method of testing graphics performance. This makes due on both the company’s claim to put together a dual-core Snapdragon and to push the system’s clock speed to 1.5 Ghz The blog was given a developer phone containing the new chipset, clocked to full speed at 1.5 Ghz. The system also runs at a more modest 1.2 Ghz, a variant that seems more likely to appear in handsets in the near future given battery-life constraints.

One of the most important factors in the chip’s performance is a new graphics core, an updated version of the Adreno core that accompanies the HTC Inspire 4G and MyTouch 4G. This new Adreno, the 220, is roughly two to three times faster than the previous Adreno 205. Perfect for the boost in performance you need for the smoothest Quake fragging around. No word on when this chipset will appear in actual phones, but the system seems ready to dominate whenever handset makers decide they’re good to go.

[via Engadget, AnandTech]

Well, would you look at that? The planet’s first GLONASS phone is now available, but it looks as if you’ll need to soar over to Russia in order to use it. Of course, if you’ve followed the GLONASS story at all you wouldn’t find that shocking in the least, and if you choose to pick up the ZTE-built MTS GLONASS 945 on your next trip, you’ll be treated to full-on GPS support back in the States. It’s a Froyo-based device with a 3.2-inch capacitive touchpanel, 2 megapixel camera, 130MB of memory, Bluetooth / WiFi and a price tag of just under 11,000 Rubles. That’s around $400 in real money, which you’ll probably find suits you best in your wallet if you’ve already picked up the all-too-similar Vodafone 945. Here’s hoping the world’s second GLONASS phone is a bit more compelling in the design and feature standpoint, yeah?

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

World’s first GLONASS-enabled smartphone ships in Russia, GPS ponders a recalculation originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 01 Apr 2011 23:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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April Fool’s Day: The perfect time to pre-order a phone that already looks just a little bit crazy. The dual-screen Kyocera Echo, soon to come to Sprint, is now available for pre-order on RadioShack’s website and in stores. Running Android 2.2 (Froyo), the Echo can use one screen as a keyboard or run two apps at once with one on each screen. It can also combine the two into one 4.7 inch super-screen. Other than the fact that it has two independent displays, the rest of the phone’s features are pretty standard, with a 5 megapixel camera, 720p camcorder and wifi hotspot mode.

RadioShack is selling the phone, which costs $199 on contract, on its site with free shipping. You can also pre-order in RadioShack stores, but that will require the purchase of a $50 gift card, applied to the purchase of the phone when it comes out on April 17th.

[via BGR, RadioShack]

Before the Gadget Lab crew dives into this week’s tech news, we raise our phones to celebrate the removal of Twitter’s god-awful QuickBar — that annoying black bar that appears at the top of your Twitter feed to show advertising and trending topics.

It was so putrid that people called it the “DickBar.” Fortunately, Twitter took the feedback to heart and abolished the QuickBar in its latest software update.

In other news, some customers have found that their brand-new “4G-capable” phones (such as the Motorola Atrix and the HTC Inspire) aren’t actually uploading data at 4G speeds. In fact, some of their speeds are even slower than existing 3G phones. The problem? AT&T just hasn’t flipped the switch yet to enable 4G speeds on these phones. Talk about lame.

We’re disappointed that there likely won’t be an iPhone 5 from Apple this summer, even though we’ve gotten a new iPhone every summer for the past four years. We’re guessing it’s because the white iPhone 4 still hasn’t shipped due to production problems, and Apple wants to give that model some shelf life before introducing an iPhone 5. Plus, a Verizon iPhone only just came out recently.

On the Android front, Amazon opened an Android Appstore last week, and many people probably don’t realize the security risks involved in shopping in Amazon’s store. Getting apps from a third-party app store such as Amazon’s requires checking off an option to enable installations from unknown sources, which can subject you to harmful malware, just like a Windows PC browsing the web.

Already this week, we’ve seen a trojan horse appear inside third-party app stores threatening to infect Android phones allowing installations from unknown sources.

Like the show? You can also get the Gadget Lab video podcast on iTunes, or if you don’t want to be distracted by our ugly mugs, check out the Gadget Lab audio podcast. Prefer RSS? You can subscribe to the Gadget Lab video or audio podcast feeds. Thanks for listening and watching!

Or listen to the audio here:

Gadget Lab audio podcast No. 110

http://downloads.wired.com/podcasts/assets/gadgetlabaudio/GadgetLabAudio0110.mp3