Hasta La Gadget!

As expected, HTC has dropped the details on a new Android phone—the leaked-to-all-hell Hero, no less. And HTC’s fantastic, also-leaked Android interface overhaul is here, too: it’s called Sense, and it’s deep. Oh, and it’s got Flash support.

Yes, it’s the first Android phone with Flash—and it’ll come out more than two months before Adobe’s solution is set for wide release. Some specs: We’ve got a 3.2-inch HVGA (480×320) screen, coated with some kind of anti-print treatment; a five megapixel camera with autofocus; AGPS; a digital compass; a gravity sensor; a 3.5mm headphone jack (seriously!) and a dedicated search button. On the brains’n’guts front, we’ve got 512MB of storage, expandable by microSD, 288MB of RAM, and a 528MHz Qualcomm processor. Powering the handset is a 1350 mAh battery.

The Hero will be available later this summer in Europe in July and Asia later in the summer, but US availability won’t come until “later this year.”

[HTC]

HTC SENSE™ DEBUTS ON NEW HTC HERO™

HTC Hero is the world’s first Android-based phone with a
customized user interface

HTC Sense to be integrated across a portfolio of
phones beginning with HTC Hero

LONDON – June 24, 2009 – HTC Corporation, a global designer of mobile phones, today debuted HTC Sense™, an intuitive and seamless experience that will be introduced across a portfolio of phones beginning with the new HTC Hero™. With its distinct design and powerful capabilities fully integrated with HTC Sense, Hero introduces a unique blend of form and function that takes Android to new heights.
HTC Sense is focused on putting people at the centre by making your phone work in a more simple and natural way. This experience revolves around three fundamental principles that were designed by quietly listening and observing how people live and communicate.
“HTC Hero introduces a more natural way for reaching out to the people and accessing your important information, not by following the status quo of today’s phones, but by following how you communicate and live your life,” said Peter Chou, Chief Executive Officer, HTC Corporation. “HTC Sense is a distinct experience created to make HTC phones more simple for people to use, leaving them saying, ‘it just makes sense.'”

HTC Hero
HTC Hero continues HTC’s leadership in cutting-edge design that focuses on introducing a variety of distinct devices to represent your own individuality. Boasting bevelled edges and an angled bottom, the HTC Hero is contoured to fit comfortably in your hand and against your face while you’re on a call. The HTC Hero is built to last beginning with an anti-fingerprint screen coating for improved smudge resistance and a longer lasting, clearer display. The white HTC Hero includes an industry-first, Teflon coating, resulting in an improved, durable white surface that is soft to the touch.
With its 3.2-inch HVGA display, the HTC Hero is optimized for Web, multimedia and other content while maintaining a small size and weight that fits comfortably in your hand. It also boasts a broad variety of hardware features including a GPS, digital compass, gravity-sensor, 3.5mm stereo headset jack, a 5 mega-pixel autofocus camera and expandable MicroSD memory. HTC Hero also includes a dedicated Search button that goes beyond basic search, providing you with a more natural, contextual search experience that enables you to search through Twitter, locate people in your contact list, find emails in your inbox or search in any other area in Hero.

HTC Sense
Built on a culture of innovation and a passion to enhance people’s lives, HTC shapes the mobile experience around the individual. Debuting on the HTC Hero and available on all new HTC devices moving forward, Sense delivers on three basic principles: Make it Mine, Stay Close and Discover the Unexpected.

Make It Mine
Make It Mine, is about feeling your HTC phone was created for and by you. To do this, HTC encourages you to dictate and organize how you want to access the people and content in your life in a way that fits best for you. For some, this means adding glance view widgets that push content like twitter feeds, weather and other content to the surface while others may want quick access to business-focused information like email, calendar and world-times. HTC is also introducing a new profile feature called ‘scenes’ that enables you to create different customized content profiles around specific functions or times in your life.

Stay Close
Today, staying in touch with the people in your life means managing a variety of communication channels and applications ranging from phone calls, emails, texts, photos, status updates and more. HTC Sense takes a different approach by integrating these communication channels and applications into one single view enabling you to stay closer to your important people. With HTC Sense, friends’ Facebook status updates and photos along with their Flickr photos are included along side their text messages, emails and call history in a single view.

Discover the Unexpected
Many of the most memorable moments in your life are experienced, not explained. HTC Sense is focused on providing a variety of these simple yet innovative experiences on your HTC phone that will sometimes bring you moments of joy and delight. It can be something as basic as turning the phone over to silence a ring or as simple as improving the smart dialler for making calls quicker. HTC Sense also includes perspectives, a new way for viewing your content such as email, photos, Twitter, music and more in different ways.

Availability
The HTC Hero will be available to people across Europe in July and in Asia later in the summer. A distinct North American version will be available later in 2009.

Can’t wait until July to check out every nook and cranny of T-Mobile‘s version of the Ion / Magic? A couple of tipsters, including one anonymously, have lent us a hand in that department with pictures of an apparent myTouch 3G unboxing, as well as an entire user guide dating back to May 19th. We’re still rummaging through it ourselves, but so far we’re not seeing anything we didn’t already know or see for ourselves with the phone’s many other releases. Completionists can hit up the 113-page manual in the gallery below.

[Thanks, Derek]

Filed under: Cellphones

T-Mobile myTouch 3G gets unboxed, user guide outed originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Jun 2009 19:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Details are still a little light on this one, but The Wall Street Journal is reporting that both T-Mobile and Verizon will be offering Android-based phones from Motorola before the end of the year, according to “people familiar with the matter.” While the Verizon phone is still a bit iffy, the T-Mobile offering seems to almost certainly be the Motorola Morrision which, as you can see above, is already pretty well acquainted with T-Mo branding. According to one of those people familiar with the matter, Verizon’s Moto phone will have “similar hardware to the T-Mobile one,” including a touchscreen and a slide-out keyboard, which doesn’t exactly rule out Motorola’s rumored Calgary slider, even if “similar” isn’t the first word that springs to mind when discussing the two.

[Via Electronista]

Filed under: Cellphones

T-Mobile, Verizon set to offer Android-based Motorola phones this year originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Jun 2009 16:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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T-Mobile announced their second Android phone, the MyTouch 3G, today. Based on the Google Ion/HTC Magic platform, the MyTouch 3G is a touch-screen, slab-style smart phone with improved multimedia features, Microsoft Exchange support, and some applications that will be exclusive to T-Mobile.

“This is our next Android phone. It continues our leadership with Android and the partnership that we’ve established with Google,” T-Mobile CTO Cole Brodman said.

The MyTouch 3G will come in black, white and red. It has no physical keyboard, relying instead on the Android 1.5 OS’s virtual keyboard for entering data. It features a 3.2″, 320×480 touch screen, 3.2-megapixal camera, MicroSD memory card slot, and built-in video recording and playback capabilities. The phone connects to the Internet via T-Mobile’s 2G and 3G networks, foreign 2G or 3G networks or Wi-Fi.

T-Mobile’s pitch for the MyTouch 3G centers around the phone’s customizability, focusing on features like the phone’s wide range of available home screen widgets.  While the phone will have access to the 5,000 applications in the current Android Market app store, Brodman said T-Mobile will offer some exclusive apps as well. One of them is Sherpa, a local search and recommendation engine that improves its recommendations based on a user’s past history of requests.

T-Mobile’s close relationship with Google also let them put Microsoft Exchange support into the phone while keeping the “with Google” moniker that signifies full Google approval of the device, Brodman said.

T-Mobile’s second Android phone, the myTouch 3G (previously known as the HTC Magic which we reviewed here), has finally been announced in an official capacity for $200. Its official official name is the “T-Mobile myTouch 3G with Google”.

It’s basically the same specs as we’ve seen in other incarnations, and it’ll work with T-Mobile’s 3G frequencies. We’ll take a look at what customizations T-Mobile has put on the phone, but for a general idea of what to expect of this one over the original T-Mobile G1, take a look at our review of the Google Ion.