It’s a sad day for fans of Android, brushed aluminum exteriors, and retina-searing AMOLED displays. Bell’s HTC Legend seems to have come to the end of its days, the provider moving the phone to “end of life” status due to “ongoing supply constraints from the manufacturer.” Phandroid speculates this is due to AMOLED shortages slowing down HTC manufacturing, and that certainly seems like a reasonable conclusion. We also checked out some other suppliers of the phone and they too are not listing it in stock, so this could be a rather abrupt end of the road for one of the best looking, though not necessarily best performing, Android handsets.
Update: David D. wrote in to point out this Forbes article pointing out that chip shortages could also be at least partly to blame here.
Hoping to spoon-feed your Droid X some Froyo before the official OTA rollout? You’d better do it now — Motorola’s sending out cease and desist emails in an attempt to shut the leaked ROM down. We can’t say whether it’s just red tape or to protect customers from a EVO 4G-like non-final build, but for whatever reason Motorola’s director of information security is asking sites like MyDroidWorld to remove the files ASAP. Given the company’s recenthistory with the mod community, however, we imagine there’s some sort of walled-garden reason behind it. [Thanks, Dustin D.]
Before the mass adoption of smartphones in the U.S., many fretted that the heavy subsidization model was feeding a free handset model that would keep Americans hopelessly addicted to basic voice plans and phones optimized for them. The price consumers paid in relation to the value of the handset, it was argued, was hopelessly out of whack. This year, a string of successful smartphones have shown that an increasing percentage of U.S. consumers are willing to pay $200 for a flagship device. On the other hand, there’s still ample evidence that price and value can remain disconnected. And the carriers aren’t making it much easier.
The smartphone surge has been driven in part by a desire to acquire the best and by a response to carrier advertising. However, a recent run-up in advanced smartphones have made it difficult to define a clear top of the line at many carriers, and carriers simply cannot promote them all with the same attention lavished on the iPhone or original Droid. Take the turn of events at Verizon, for example, which in the space of a few months has rolled out the Droid Incredible, Droid X and Droid 2, with the Samsung Fascinate in the wings. At least the first three have been all priced at $199, with strong precedent for the Fascinate coming in at that level. And while AT&T has been a bit more diverse in the operating systems of its recent spate of high-end contenders — the iPhone 4, BlackBerry Torch and Samsung Captivate — they too have all been priced at $199.
What is Motorola Kobe? The device, also known by its model number MB520, seems to be popping up on a couple of certification websites. UPnP Forum certified it on June 16, 2010 (listed as “Kobe ATT”), and additionally on July 8th the smartphone quietly got a thumbs up from the WiFi Alliance for single band (2.4GHz) 802.11b/g/n. Of course, an IEEE standard does not a phone make, and so we’ve been in touch with a trusted source who’s provided us with specifications of the device, as well as screencaps of some benchmarks results and the all-important About Phone page.
The Kobe is a slate-style smartphone currently featuring Android 2.1 with a Motoblur skin reminiscent of Droid 2 / Droid X‘s UI. We’re told it has a 3.5-inch LCD with 480 x 854 resolution, a 800MHz TI OMAP processor (either 3440 or an underclocked 3630), PowerVR SGX 530 GPU, 512MB RAM, 2GB internal storage and a bundled 2GB microSD card, and a 3 megapixel camera (without flash). It currently comes loaded with Swype, Vlingo, and DNLA support. We gotta say, camera notwithstanding, this sounds like a pretty appealing addition to AT&T’s growing Android lineup. Hit up the gallery below for benchmark scores.
Manufacturing upstart PocketBook is clearly still gung ho about e-readers, judging by the five new models it has announced will be released at IFA in September, which include a pair of entry-level ProBook 602 and 902 units, as well as the ProBook 603 and 903 premium units. The 60x designated models sport 6-inch screens, while the 90x models have a bigger 9.7-inch. All models will feature 2GB of internal storage, a Linux-based OS, and include WiFi and Bluetooth connectivity. However, the higher-end versions also gain 3G connectivity and a Wacom touchscreen. More interesting and genre-bending though is the so-called “entertainment model” PocketBook IQ that will be available in three case color options, feature a 7-inch TFT color touchscreen, WiFi, Bluetooth, and will run Android 2.0. Access to PocketBook’s own Bookland.net e-book store unfortunately rounds out all the details we know so far, but we’ll be sure to find out more once IFA gets going. Check out shots of the individual readers and get the full translated PR below.
Velocity Micro, makers of custom PCs and high-end gaming computers, announced that the Cruz line of 7-inch color touch-screen Android tablets are available to pre-order now. The Cruz comes in two flavors, the Cruz Reader and the Cruz Tablet. The Cruz Reader retails for $199.99, features a 4:3 800×600 display, and comes with a 4GB SD card in addition to its 256MB of internal storage. The Tablet retails for $299.99, features a 16:9 800×480 display, and comes with an 8GB bundled SD card in addition to its 4GB of on-board storage. Both tablets are Wi-Fi enabled, although the Reader supports 802.11 b/g and the Tablet features 802.11n.
Both tablets run Google’s Android mobile OS, although the Reader runs Android 2.0 and the Tablet runs 2.1. The Reader is designed to be primarily an eBook reader, but can also display photos, lets you surf the Web and watch Web video, and has access to the Android App Market (Velocity Micro has it branded the Cruz Market) for games and other apps. The Tablet does everything the Reader does, comes with apps to display video, and is designed to be an all-around tablet computer, complete with rich multimedia apps. Velocity Micro is accepting pre-orders now, and both units will begin shipping in September.
The Nexus One retail situation has been pretty dire since Google humanely put down its own online store, leaving only paid developers with an easy option to get an unlocked unit (and only an AWS 3G version at that). Now, even that’s been taken away — at least temporarily — thanks to unexpectedly strong demand that left Google to “blow through the (substantial) initial inventory in almost no time” and run up a backorder with HTC. Interestingly, Google specifically points out that HTC is doing a good job with manufacturing despite the AMOLED shortage, which leads us to wonder whether the SLCD version is shipping in quantity yet — and considering how the Nexus One and Desire are well into midlife, we wonder whether it makes sense to even bother at this point when we’ve got next-gen products just around the corner. Good news is that Google still seems committed to getting Nexus Ones back in stock for developers, we just don’t know when that’s going to happen.
There’s an app for almost everything. Now add one that can run calculations from a supercomputer on a Nexus One phone in real time and without the need for internet connectivity.
Researchers at Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Texas Advanced Computing Center have created an Android app that can take simulations from the powerful Ranger supercomputer and solve them further on the mobile phone.
“The idea of using a phone is to show we can take a device with one chip and low power to compute a solution so it comes as close to the one solved on a supercomputer,” John Peterson, a research associate at the Texas Advanced Computing Center, told Wired.com.
Many researchers depend heavily on supercomputers capable of millions of calculations per second to simulate problems and advance their studies. Texas Computing Center’s Ranger supercomputer went live in 2008 with 62,976 CPU cores, 123 terabytes of memory, 1.73 petabytes of disk space and 579.4 teraflops of performance.
But massive machines such as the Ranger are not easily available. Researchers have to book time on them and they aren’t available for computations that need to be done quickly. Supercomputers also can’t be carried into field experiments. Having a device in hand that could help solve a problem quickly can be handy.
That’s where a technique called “certified reduced basis approximation” comes into play. The method lets researchers take a complex problem, define the values that are most relevant to the problem and set the upper and lower bounds. David Knezevic, a post-doctoral associate at MIT and Anthony Patera, a professor at the school, refined the technique to make it work on a smartphone. They did it by including strong error bounds that show how close they are to an actual supercomputer solution.
“It’s demonstrating that with a small processor, you can still get a meaningful answer to a big problem,” says Peterson.
The app is just one half of the solution, though. A supercomputer still has to create the reduced model that can be transferred to the phone as an app. When outside the office, researchers can enter values into the app to find answers quickly or visualize data.
For instance, for a problem in fluid dynamics, researchers will spend a day or two simulating a model using a supercomputer like Ranger. Of that computation, they will take a small amount of data and store it on a server as a reduced model.
This reduced model can be used to perform simulations on a cellphone, offering answers near instantaneously for use in real-world applications.
“The payoff for model reduction is large when you can go from an expensive supercomputer solution to a calculation that takes a couple of seconds on a smart phone,” Knezevic told a writer at the Texas Advanced Computing Center. “That’s a speed up of orders of magnitude.”
There’s one disadvantage though. The smartphone app has to be customized for the problem it is solving, so it’s not universal.
“If a researcher came along with a problem, he would have to code up his own equation within the framework to represent it on the phone,” says Peterson. “What he would develop would be specific to the problem.”
For now, the researchers have made their app available through files on SourceForge.
Dell’ mobile division can’t seem to keep a secret so get ready for a peek into the company’s next Android phone codenamed ‘Thunder.’
‘Engadget got its hands on two prototype Thunder phones, the yet to be released smartphone that Dell is working on. The phones have a 4.1-inch OLED touch display, a 1 GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and a 8-megapixel camera. One of the phones runs Android 2.1 and the other has version 1.6 of the Android operating system.
Despite being an early engineering unit, the hardware is impressive in its finish, says Engadget.
Dell got into the smartphone business last year with the launch of its first Android phone in Brazil and China. This year, the company struck a deal with AT&T in the U.S. to introduce its phone called ‘Aero.’ So far, AT&T and Dell have not announced a launch date for the Aero. Meanwhile, Dell has launched the Streak, a device with a 5-inch screen that it bills as a ‘tablet.’ The Streak will cost $300 with a two-year contract on AT&T and $560 without one.
Thunder could help Dell move deeper into the smartphone business. The leaked Thunder prototypes, though, don’t deliver a complete sense of what could be on the phone. For instance, the bootloader and debug software on the prototype units reference features such as FM radio support, dual microphones, HDMI output and a hardware dock connector that aren’t there on the early units.
Dell is also reportedly testing both GSM and CDMA versions so it’s not clear who will eventually steal the Thunder.
Meanwhile, if you want to see how the Thunder prototype works and get all the details, check out the video.
So we just got a second batch of T-Mobile G2 shots dropped in our mailbox — and this time, you can get a much better look at the inner workings of the carrier’s version of the upcoming HTC Vision. Looks like this bad boy slides and tilts, which eliminates the need for a kickstand and is very likely causing you to breathe an audible sigh of relief right about now. Meanwhile, the backside reveals that HTC looks ready to really get into this asymmetrical design concept — something we’ve definitely seen on the Schubert / Mozart — and realistically, it’s probably going to polarize some buyers. Check out the gallery for a few more shots!
Update: We hate to be the bearer of bad news, but we’ve just been told that the G2 doesn’t have a tilting screen, despite what you see up there — it’s just the inner workings of the slide being pulled up. Our hearts have been ripped from our chests on this one, rest assured.
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Velocity Micro, makers of custom PCs and high-end gaming computers, announced that the Cruz line of 7-inch color touch-screen Android tablets are available to pre-order now. The Cruz comes in two flavors, the 
