Hasta La Gadget!

Samsung hasn’t been shy about their Android ambitions, but they have been extremely vague. Well, here’s their first handset, the I7500. With a capacitive AMOLED touchscreen, clean styling, and larger-than-average battery, it looks fantastic. UPDATED

Here’s the spec breakdown: HSDPA at 7.2Mbps, GPRS/EDGE on 850/900/1800/1900 frequencies, a 3.2″, 320×480 AMOLED screen, a 5-megapixel camera, 1500mAh battery (to the G1’s 1200mAh), and 8GB of internal memory (with support for 32GB of additional SDHC expansion), 802.11b/g Wi-Fi, GPS and a 3.5mm headphone jack. It’s about 12mm thick, which is a hair slimmer than the HTC Magic, its obvious rival.

This contradicts rumors rumors that the S8000 would be Sammy’s first foray into Android handsettery, but only sort of: the handsets are styled differently, but share almost identical guts. In that sense, this handset isn’t much of a surprise, unlike the release date, which will fall somewhere in June for European carriers. There’s no US release date, nor is there any sign of a US release at all, so we’ll just have to hope that the I7500 will eventually trod the same transatlantic path as the HTC Magic. Full release below.

UPDATE: Mobile Review has a few hands-on shots that give us a nice view of the device in profile, and from the back:

Samsung launches I7500, The Company’s First Android-Powered Mobile Phone
Seoul (Korea Newswire) April 27, 2009 05:08 PM — Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., a leading mobile phone provider, today unveiled the I7500, its first Android-powered mobile phone. With a launch of I7500, Samsung became the first company among the global top three mobile phone manufacturers to unveil an Android-powered phone.

“Samsung is among the earliest members of the Open Handset Alliance and has been actively moving forward to introduce the most innovative Android mobile phone,” said JK Shin, Executive Vice President and Head of Mobile Communication Division in Samsung Electronics. “With Samsung’s accumulated technology leadership in mobile phone industry and our consistent strategy to support every existing operating system, I believe that Samsung provides the better choices and benefits to our consumers” he added.

The Samsung I7500 is a cutting-edge smartphone, featuring a 3.2″ AMOLED full touch screen and 7.2Mbps HSDPA and WiFi connectivity, giving users access to Google™ Mobile services and full web browsing at blazing speeds.

The Samsung I7500 offers users access to the full suite of Google services, including Google Search™, Google Maps™, Gmail™, YouTube™, Google Calendar™, and Google Talk™. The integrated GPS receiver enables the comprehensive use of Google Maps features, such as My Location, Google Latitude, Street View, local search and detailed route description. Hundreds of other applications are available in Android Market. For example, the application Wikitude, a mobile travel guide, allows consumers to access details of unknown sights via location-based Wikipedia articles.

Based on Samsung’s proven product leadership, Samsung I7500 comes with latest multimedia features. The large and vivid 3.2″AMOLED display ensures the brilliant representation of multimedia content and enjoyable full touch mobile experience. Along with supporting a 5-megapixel camera and various multimedia codec formats, the I7500 also provides a long enough battery life (1500mAh) and generous memory capacity up to 40GB (Internal memory: 8GB, External memory: Up to 32GB) to enjoy all the applications and multimedia content. The phone also boasts its slim and compact design with mere 11.9mm thickness.

The Samsung I7500 will be available in major European countries from June, 2009.

News Source: Samsung Electronics

Guangzhou Skytone Transmission Technologies Company, which we will absolutely never call by its full name again, has just dropped a juicy nugget about its forthcoming netbook. If you’ll recall, we recently caught wind of the ARM-based, Android-powered rig (the Alpha 680), which is expected to be a stripped down portable useful for web surfing and light duty Office use. Nixon Wu, Skytone’s co-founder, recently confessed that it’s aiming to sell the machine for around $250, and if all goes well, it should have prototypes ready by June and final products ready for consumption a month or two after that. Call us crazy (or just greedy, really), but we were totally hoping for this to ring up at $199 or less.

Filed under: Laptops

Skytone’s Android-powered netbook to cost around $250 originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 26 Apr 2009 02:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s not exactly a huge surprise considering that the Cupcake-powered HTC Magic is confirmed to be coming out May 5th, but T-Mobile Germany’s website now looks to have also confirmed that the Cupcake update itself will also be rolling out to G1 users sometime the same month — in Germany, at least. That’ll of course bring with it the much-desired on-screen keyboard, along with video recording, stereo Bluetooth support, and some new integration with Picasa and YouTube, among other fixes and additions. As you can see above, the update will “skillfully” install itself on your G1 as soon as it’s available, so you needn’t do anything except go on about your daily business in the meantime, or check the interwebs furiously for a means of jumping the cue.

[Via Talk Android]

Filed under: Cellphones

T-Mobile Germany website indicates May launch for Cupcake originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 24 Apr 2009 13:18:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We don’t know why T-Mobile isn’t trumpeting this, but Deutsche Telekom’s Q1 results are out, and the multinational carrier says that over one million G1s have been sold in the US, making up a majority of the 1.5 million 3G devices currently active on T-Mo’s network. That’s quite an accomplishment in just six months, considering the Android handset launched without nationwide 3G coverage — it’s better now, but we’re talking just 21 cities back in October. Of course, a million’s just a drop in the bucked compared to the number of Blackberrys, iPhones, and Windows Mobile devices out there, but we’ve got enough of a soft spot for Android to overlook it — now let’s get some more devices out the door and really boost that marketshare number, shall we?

[Via Electronista]

Filed under: Cellphones

T-Mobile sells a million G1s in the US originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Apr 2009 12:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Skytone’s Android-based netbook is either bunk or junk. The specs of the Chinese company’s Alpha 680 read as if they are either made up or just plain weird. Take this, for example: “Internet Connection (Optional): ADSL, WiFi,（ GPRS, CDMA,EDGE,WCDMA”

What? The big news is that the OS is listed as being “Google Android”, and the product page is indeed peppered with pictures of the Android logo. But if we delve closer into the specs we see hardware that has more in common with a cellphone than even a modest netbook. The CPU is a slow 533MHz ARM-11, RAM is a ridiculous 128 MB and storage is poor even for a pen-drive at just 1GB (apparently upgradeable to a whole 4GB). There is, though, a trio of USB ports and an SD card slot, and flipping to a second spec page tells us that the Alpha actually comes with Wi-Fi and ethernet.

A webcam is optional, and the “User Interface” consists of “built-in keboard and mouser pad”. Finally, the netbook kicks it Eee-Old-Style with a little 7” display, although it does spin to make a tablet-style unit without, it seems, an actual touch screen.

Weirdest of all is the inclusion of a couple of gaming controls, a D-pad and four buttons, on either side of the screen. This machine is nothing if not schizophrenic. Finally, the talk says that this could cost as little as $100, which would firmly kick the ass of the OLPC. The inclusion of Android and these low, low specs make us think that this has more in common with an old Psion Series 5 than with a modern netbook. If Skytone gets the keyboard and battery life right, this could actually be a surprise hit.

Product page [Skytone via Laptop Mag and Liliputing]