Hasta La Gadget!

In the US, the concept of a prepaid Android phone is about as foreign as the concept of an effective high-speed mass transit system, but abroad, T-Mobile is following up its Pulse with a cuter, smaller sibling in the Pulse Mini. Like the original the Pulse is sourced from China’s Huawei and offers Euro HSDPA, but the similarities end there: the new model will run Android 2.1 out of the gate, step down from an HVGA to a QVGA display, and sport a Qualcomm MSM7225 core. Look for it to launch in the UK and Germany in April; pricing will vary by market, but Britons can look forward to shelling out £99.99 (about $155) contract-free.

T-Mobile Pulse Mini does cheap, tiny, prepaid Android for Europe originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Feb 2010 12:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’re only a few breathless days away from the Devour hitting some retail locations ahead of nationwide US availability in March, so what better way to fill that gap than with an official teaser video? Moto’s Rick Osterloh is our tour guide in a seven minute hands-on demo of the device, which takes us through the major attractions on offer. He firstly calls out the Qualcomm CPU inside and points to the phone’s responsiveness, which is (quite naturally) followed by a couple of instances of perceptible lag between his input and the phone’s reaction. All the same, it does look like a sprightly little machine, and the inclusion of Blur, Google Maps Navigation with turn-by-turn voice instructions, and Moto Phone Portal makes for a compelling software package. Head past the break to see them in action and to catch another eyeful of the hardware as well.

[Thanks, Zach A.]

Continue reading Motorola Devours seven minutes of your life with a phone demo (video)

Motorola Devours seven minutes of your life with a phone demo (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 20 Feb 2010 20:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve already seen the Motorola Devour in the wild once, but with the official Verizon launch right around the corner and pre-sales underway, it looks like at least one more unit has made it out into the world. Great — but we’d like a video of this thing and its mid-range processor running Flash, please.

[Thanks, Zach]

Motorola Devour in the wild once again originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 16:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google’s Android was a major topic at this year’s Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and one of the companies taking advantage of the OS is Myriad. The Zurich-based mobile technology firm has released the Dalvik Turbo virtual machine, which can boost application execution speed by up to three times, according to exes.

Dalvik is the virtual machine that powers the Java platform on Android-based phones. Myriad’s Dalvik Turbo basically replaces the existing Dalvik engine with a more powerful version, which speeds up apps, preserves battery life, and allows for more powerful apps – like games.

I stopped by Myriad’s booth at MWC, where Gael Rosset, vice president of product management at Myriad, showed off a demo of the technology.

Rosset launched a spinning, 3D cube animation on two identical, Android-based HTC phones – one running Dalvik Turbo and the other the standard Dalvik engine. The cube on the Dalvik Turbo was spinning much faster than the cube on the other phone, as demonstrated on the video above.

Dell’s puzzled the world for quite some time with its outlandish Mini 5 — at first glance it’s just another Android-based MID, but a quick fiddle with it reveals the full-fledged 3G phone inside. So will it fit in a pocket? Can we carry it around like a normal phone? Is this the future form factor that will bring the ultimate balance between portability and practicality? With such heavy dose of curiosity, we eventually traveled all the way to Shenzhen literally just to grab this prototype. Now, before you read on, do bear in mind that some of its features — especially the OS — may not make it to the final design when it comes out later this year, nor do we know what stage this prototype was at. We good? OK.

Let’s start with the basics: the main specs on our unit include Android 1.6 (which will definitely be obsolete for the final product), five-inch 800 x 480 capacitive touchscreen, Snapdragon QSD8250 chipset (with CPU clocked at 1GHz), Bluetooth, WiFi, GPS and WCDMA radio. Sadly, we have no info on whether the Mini 5 will have other cellular radio options, but it wouldn’t hurt to send Dell a petition regarding this matter. For those who want the dimensions and weight in numbers, it’s about 152mm x 78mm x 10mm at 8 ounces (including the battery, which lasts for almost a day for normal usage on 3G). Memory-wise there’s 405MB RAM and 1.63GB of internal storage — a slight let-down for the latter, so let’s hope the retail unit will be given a more generous dose of silicon. You can add a microSD card next to the battery on the back, but it appears that the mysterious second card slot we saw in the earlier teardown only gave us false hope — we couldn’t find a way to get to it without prying open the housing. Connection to your computer relies on a proprietary port — similar but slightly larger than the iPod’s — to USB cable, which may suggest that we will see some more peripherals made for the Mini 5 and its future siblings.

Continue reading Dell Mini 5 prototype impressions

Dell Mini 5 prototype impressions originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Feb 2010 12:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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