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Continue reading Compaq AirLife 100 hands-on

Compaq AirLife 100 hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 17:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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General Mobile — maker of the DSTL1 dual-SIM Android phone — has always walked a fine line between KIRF and originality with its phones, and its latest batch is no different. Normally it’s easy to resist a device widely regarded as a knockoff (for most of us, anyhow), but in the case of the newest model here, General Mobile’s actually managed to answer a question HTC’s failed to so far: where the hell is the HD2 with Android? The so-called “Touch Stone” (deep breaths, Palm) rings true to many of the actual HD2’s specs, from the 5 megapixel camera to the 4.3-inch capacitive WVGA display, but this sucker adds an “optional” analog TV tuner (which won’t do countries with digital transitions any good) and Android 2.0 atop an ARM9-based PXA935 core. Sadly, this phone doesn’t quite exist yet — we were shown a dummy model today with the promise of retail toward the end of the year, at which point HTC and others will undoubtedly have phones like the Supersonic on the shelf. If you’ll excuse us, we need a cold shower, but you’ll find more shots of the Touch Stone along with the Cosmos (launching soon) and Cosmos 2 dummy (launching… well, eventually) in the gallery.

General Mobile’s Touch Stone: how can something so wrong be so right? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 16:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Acer took MWC rather seriously this year with no fewer than five phone intros to its name spanning the range from Android to Windows Mobile 6.5.3, so we went ahead and put our hands on all of them today. Starting at the bottom of the range, the lowly beTouch E110 is obviously designed to compete head-to-head with the likes of the HTC Tattoo — in fact, it apes the Tattoo’s design pretty closely in some respects. Unlike Acer’s higher-end Android phones, the E110 uses a custom skin that seems pretty well-suited for its QVGA resolution, and it’s still managing 3.6Mbps HSDPA in your choice of 900 / 2100 and 850 / 1900 flavors for different areas of the world. It feels as cheap as it looks, but as long as it’s priced appropriately, we still think it’s a reasonable way to get new audiences on the smartphone bandwagon.

Follow the break for more impressions, shots, and video!

Continue reading Acer Liquid e, beTouch E110 / E400, and neoTouch P300 / P400 hands-on

Acer Liquid e, beTouch E110 / E400, and neoTouch P300 / P400 hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 08:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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BARCELONA — This year at the Mobile World Congress is the year of Android. Google’s operating system debuted here two years ago. Last year we expected a slew of handsets, and saw just a trickle. This year, Android is everywhere, on handsets from HTC, Motorola, Sony Ericsson, and even Garmin-Asus. If this were the world of computers, Android would be in a similar position to Windows: Pretty much every manufacturer puts it on its machines.

This is great news for us, the consumer. Android is stable, powerful and now it even runs Flash (I got a sneak peek of Flash running on a Motorola handset here at the show. It crashed). It’s even better for the manufacturers, as — unlike Windows Mobile — Android is free. It’s also open, so the phone makers can tweak it and trick it out as much as they like.

And they do like. Most of the Android phones here at Mobile World Congress are running custom versions of Android, which differentiates them and, in theory at least, makes them easier to use, hiding the complexities of a proper multitasking OS from the user.

HTC has its Sense UI, which organizes the functions into three areas: the terribly named Make It Mine, Stay Close and Discover the Unexpected. In time, we’re sure you could get used to it, but in testing the HTC phones are just confusing.

Better is Motorola’s Blur concept, which organizes everything for you. When you first use a Blur phone, you give it all your logins: e-mail, Twitter, Flickr and everything else. It then pulls in all this information and puts it together for you, grouping the contact details, photos and, say, Tweets from one person all in one place.

These updates then sit on the home screen, similar to what Windows Mobile 7 will do, and let you get to what you need fast.

Others just add eye-candy. Sony Ericsson’s Rachel UI does little more than organize lists as floating pieces of translucent paper. It looks good, but it’s not really usable.

One of the criticisms of Android is that it is already fragmenting into various ghettos, and software made for one handset may or may not work on another. This is true even of the central Android Marketplace. But this is to miss the point of Android. Geeks like you and me will be buying the cutting edge Droids and Nexus Ones and loading them up with applications.

But the general consumer doesn’t care. They just buy the phone and get apps from either the handset maker or their carrier (if they add apps at all). They probably don’t even know they have an “Android phone”.

The real customer for Android? It’s the handset manufacturers. They have been given a customizable, powerful and actively developed OS, and they get it free. Better, they can put in on any device they like. And this is what Microsoft is up against with its fussy new Windows Mobile 7, which has the cheek to specify minimum hardware requirements. Forget about the iPhone. Microsoft is in a death-match with Google and its free OS.

See Also:

• Android Army Pumped for All-Out Attack on iPhone
• Google Debuts Android-Powered Nexus One ‘Superphone’
• Android’s Rapid Growth Has Some Developers Worried

Barcelona — HTC has launched three new phones at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona: The Nexus-alike Desire, the aluminum Legend and the Windows Mobile HD Mini. This morning I took them all for a spin.

First, forget about the HD Mini. It is indeed mini, but the HD part of the name certainly doesn’t mean high-def. At just 320 X 480 the capacitive touch-screen is just plain normal, and the rest of the phone is ho-hum next to the other two Android handsets. We should face it: Windows Mobile 6.5 is dead.

The Desire is much nicer, although the one I tested didn’t yet have the pinch-to-zoom of the Nexus (although it is running Android 2.1, and the specs say it has it — this is most likely a demo-unit issue). If you have used a Nexus, also made by HTC, you’ll be instantly at home. The screen is bright, sharp and colorful, the capacitive AMOLED touch-screen is responsive and the thing fairly whips along thanks to the 1GHz processor. It is, in short, a very good phone.

But it’s the aluminum Legend which stands out. Although the case is only a touch smaller than that of the Desire, it feels a lot more compact, and very solid in the hand. It’s like going from the old plastic MacBooks to the stiff and chunky unibody MacBooks. The screen is smaller, at 3.2-inches (vs. 3.7) and it has a much lower resolution of 320 X 480 instead of 480 X 800. Even the CPU is worse, clocking in at just 600 MHz. But to read the numbers is to miss the point. The Legend feels classy, and those specs are all good enough. Browsing, maps and typing on screen are all responsive and quick. It could stand to lose the stupid nubbin optical “trackball”, though, as could the Desire. Alongside the touch-screen it is quite useless.

If I was in the market for an Android cellphone, I’d probably choose the Legend. Oh, and one more thing: The cameras in all of these phones are terrible. More photos below.

See Also:

• HTC Clones Nexus One, Launches 3 New Phones