Hasta La Gadget!

LAS VEGAS — Another day at CES 2011, another 4G smartphone announcement. HTC debuted three new 4G mobile devices last week: the Thunderbolt, the Inspire and the EVO Shift.

Release date and price points on the Thunderbolt and the Inspire were murky. As in, HTC didn’t have any. But that’s been par for the course on a lot of smartphones announced at CES thus far. We do know the EVO Shift will be dropping Jan. 9, the last day of CES. All three phones will be running Android version 2.2 (Froyo).

I got to spend some time playing around with the Thunderbolt at the trade show. Here are a few first impressions, broken down by category:

Screen

It’s been a big year for big screens at CES, and the Thunderbolt doesn’t stray far from what’s been debuting. At 4.3 inches, it’s a sizable display equal to that of Motorola’s new Droid Bionic, last summer’s EVO 4G and the Thunderbolt’s sister product that debuted alongside it: the AT&T-carried Inspire.

All the advantages of such a large screen come through when using the back-facing 8-megapixel camera. It’s got a nice array of filters to tweak your photos, including the “vintage warm” filter (aka the Instagram effect). And sadly, I didn’t have anyone to video-chat with, but it’s nice to know I can, with the 1.3-megapixel front facing camera.

The haptic feedback on the Thunderbolt’s capacitive touchscreen is a nice touch, but I had a bit of difficulty with pressure sensitivity when trying to scroll through menu screens. On occasion I’d require a little extra effort to choose a widget. This was not a huge deal, but was still noticeable.

The sausage-fingered shopper need not worry. Where the spaciousness of the screen shines is in typing on the Thunderbolt’s keyboard. It’s easy to compose texts fairly quickly, and I made relatively few errors during test texts.

Browsing and Performance

We’ve been hearing lots about 4G network capability lately, and the Thunderbolt is HTC’s Verizon-carried contender. From the bit I did, the phone’s browsing speed is indeed ample. A quick Google search for Wired.com brought our site up in about five seconds. Scrolling downward on the page was fairly smooth, with only minimal clipping.

Under the hood, the Thunderbolt runs on a 1-GHz Snapdragon processor, with 768 MB of RAM and 8 GB of internal storage. It moved along through the menus speedily, and it pulled up video and pictures without much lag. There’s also a microSD card slot with a 32-GB card included.

Feel

The back of the Thunderbolt has a matte finish to it, somewhat akin to HTC’s unsuccessful Nexus One. With the Thunderbolt’s finish, it doesn’t seem like it would lend itself to slipping from the hand that easily.

The little Google-branded kickstand on the back is a nice flourish, especially when you want to watch video on the phone’s large screen. And the metal finish of the kickstand just looks cool.

Overall, I dug the Thunderbolt well enough upon first glance. We’ll have to see how it and Verizon’s 4G network perform when the phone is eventually launched.

Photos: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Looking down at gauges? Officially passe. Check out Pioneer‘s vision of the future, a prototype that uses an embedded laser projector (a Microvision, as it were). They showed it a little earlier in Japan but this is the first time we’ve seen it in the US, and we got a chance to try it out. Right now it’s just running a static demo, but the idea is that a virtual concierge (represented by our favorite mascot pops up to give you information, and you could also get streaming video from traffic cameras, all without you having to look down. The information is supposed to come via a smartphone, we learned later an Android one at that, though things are a little vague. A release date is a little vague too, sometime in 2012, though we’re told the company is working with car companies. But could we get this by next year? We’ll see.

Continue reading Pioneer prototype laser-based heads-up display with Android hands-on (video)

Pioneer prototype laser-based heads-up display with Android hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 09 Jan 2011 23:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In case you’re not already sick of tablets, here’s another one that we spotted at a small Taiwanese booth at CES. Sure, this Anadem Q07 — a rebadged Quanta device — was just a dummy, but even this could easily beat the lot of cheap Android slates in a beauty contest. Encased within the chrome bezel and silver body will be a 7-inch 800 x 480 display (which is slightly underwhelming), along with a Samsung S5PV210 processor — essentially the Hummingbird chip but in a different package — underclocked to 800MHz, but still capable of handling 1080p video playback. There’s not much else on the spec sheet, but we did see a micro-USB port, HDMI mini connector, microSD slot, SIM card slot, and stereo speakers on the Q07. Naturally, you’ll hear from us when we stumble upon this Froyo tablet again.

Quanta’s 7-inch Android tablet dummy spotted at CES originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 09 Jan 2011 17:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Okay, now this is getting ridiculous. It’s been literally less than 48 hours since we saw the first in-depth Chinese-language preview of Sony’s still yet-to-be-confirmed PlayStation Phone, and believe it or not, we’ve got another one. (Our resident translator Richard Lai suggests this might be the same PS Phone just being passed around the various websites.) It’s just as long and arguably just as in-depth with an absolute ton of comparison pics with the PSP Go, the Xperia lineup, a DSi, a Droid… the list goes on. Much of what’s written is the same, and the PlayStation Pocket app is still a mystery. The preview does say a third-party emulator was downloaded and tested, with 70 percent success, but that doesn’t actually tell us anything. Anyway, even if you don’t know Chinese, hit up the source and bask in the glory of a ton more pics.

[Thanks, Shaun]

PlayStation Phone sized up with numerous devices in another in-depth Chinese preview originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 08 Jan 2011 23:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Acer’s 4.8-inch phoneblet will head to a US carrier this year originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 08 Jan 2011 20:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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