Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve just received a veritable cornucopia of information around Samsung’s supposed announcements out at CTIA this week — and seeing how this is the biggest wireless show the US has to offer, you might imagine that the reveals are fairly US-focused while still hanging onto some global relevance. Here’s what we know:

• The company’s so-called “Smart Life” philosophy for smartphone design and differentiation — something we’ve heard referred to as S Life in the past, including here at CTIA — will be formally introduced. It won’t so much be a product or a smartphone platform (as far as we can tell) so much as an overarching strategy.
• A 1GHz applications processor will be announced as the “new standard” in Sammy’s premium smartphone segment for 2010; in all likelihood, this is the Cortex A8-based core announced in the middle of last year.
• A huge content push will be announced (US market mercifully included) with full-length movies and shows that are “optimized” to take advantage of the company’s new Super AMOLED displays. You’ll also see some book and magazine deals get struck for straight-to-mobile delivery, but it sounds like we won’t get the straight dope on how it’ll all work (and who’s involved, exactly) this week.
• Kicking off S Life from the hardware side will be the Galaxy S, Samsung’s big phone announcement for the week. As far as we can tell, it’ll be an Android device taking advantage of Super AMOLED and the company’s homegrown 1GHz core — and it’ll be available in the US this year.

That’s all we’ve got so far, but Sammy’s mobile prez J.K. Shin has a keynote tomorrow morning along with an event immediately afterward, so we expect to get this fleshed out in the next day or so. Stay tuned!

Samsung to announce Galaxy S smartphone, content initiatives this week originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 22 Mar 2010 18:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Amazon has announced Kindle Apps for Tablet Computers (including Kindle for iPad), a rather polished e-reader application that both makes the Kindle itself look rather old-fashioned and explains why last week’s Mac version was so unfinished: The Amazon developers have clearly been spending all their time on this instead.

The app offers all the usual Kindle features: Whispersync to keep your bookmarks and notes in sync between devices and the ability to load up any books you have previously bought. It also adds a lot of visual polish, from the obligatory page-turn animation (you can switch it off) to a fetching, full-color grid view of your library. You can adjust “paper” color, and change screen brightness from within the app.

Most interesting, though, is the way you buy books, which circumvents Apple’s 30 percent cut of in-app purchases. When you buy books, you are sent to the Kindle store in a web browser to make your purchase (Amazon doesn’t say whether the screenshot comes from an in-app browser page, or Mobile Safari itself, but it makes no difference).

We also see a page on display which has a full-color photo. This will be ideal for cookbooks bought from Amazon, but it also sends Amazon’s own grayscale-only hardware to the back of the line. Still, the effort Amazon seems to have put in show that it is clearly focused on selling books, not the hardware the books are read on. That the app is almost certain to make it into the App store shows that the reverse is true with Apple: It wants the iPad to be the go-to media device, whatever that media may be.

Kindle Apps for Tablet Computers [Amazon]

See Also:

• Kindle for PC Ships, Hints at Future Color Kindle
• First Look: Kindle for Mac
• Amazon Brings Kindle to iPhone

When chipmaker Marvell told us its technology would power $99 smartphones, we took the company at its word. We weren’t expecting a sub-$100, 10-inch tablet PC, however — and we definitely weren’t expecting Marvell itself to build it. Marketed at students looking to lighten their textbook load, the Marvell Moby will be an “always-on, high performance multimedia tablet” capable of full Flash support and 1080p HD playback — thanks to those nifty Armada 600 series processors — and supporting WiFi, Bluetooth, FM radio, GPS and both Android and Windows Mobile platforms for maximum flexibility. No release date has yet been announced; like the OLPC, Marvell will introduce the Moby in pilot programs at participating at-risk schools. While it’s far too early to say if the Moby will be the universal educational e-reader Marvell hopes (that depends on software), it’s certainly an intriguing device for the price, and we’ll admit we’re a touch jealous of those kids who’ll first get to try one.

Marvell pitches $99 Moby Tablet as textbook alternative originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 02:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s a concept design, but as most of Tokyo Flash’s production watches are even wilder, this e-ink timepiece will probably make it almost intact into stores and onto wrists. The stainless steel bracelet covers a panel of the same e-ink “paper” found in the Kindle and other e-readers, with cut-outs to reveal several odd-shaped sections. The paper of course offers the same low-power consumption and high-readability of any e-ink display.

The watch will have a Bluetooth radio to communicate with your cellphone. It will vibrate to give “message, mail and call notifications” and these notifications will also be cryptically encoded into unreadable runes at the top of the display.

There’s no price, no launch date, and not even a picture of a prototype outside of these CAD mockups. We have a feeling that an e-ink watch would look awesome, though, and it looks like Tokyo Flash is breaking with long tradition and actually showing the time in normal numbers. Unbelievable.

E-Clock [Tokyo Flash blog via the Giz]

Well it’s about time, Spring Design! After missing its February ship date, the company is finally ready for you to whip out the plastic and pre-order its Alex — that dual-screen, Android-based ereader we liked so much at CES. While you can shell out the $399 today, you’ll still have to wait until mid-April for the mailman to drop off the package. We’d like to say the wait stops there, but we’ve also learned that early buyers won’t have access to the promised Borders eBook store until June. When we chatted with Spring Design CEO Priscilla Lu last week she confirmed that Borders will officially launch its store in the “June time frame,” which will be around the very same time that the 3G version of the Alex will be ready to hit the market — at least there’s access to Google Books and an micro-SD card slot for sideloading in the meantime. With so much coming down the pike it may be worth waiting a bit more time for this one, but our own Alex arrived just last night so no matter what it’d behoove you to wait a few days for our review before you hit the source link to pre-order.

Update: Well, this is odd. Even though this news hit the wires today, the shop page on Spring Design’s website is definitely non-functional right now. Instead, you’ll see a message to check back soon. We’ll keep doing just that until we see signs of life… or hear otherwise.

Update 2: And we’re back…the pre-order page is finally up!

Spring Design Alex finally up for pre-order, Borders eBook store launching in June originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Mar 2010 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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