It was all too brief, but we managed to grab a few snapshots of the Motorola CLIQ less than an arm’s length away and shoot some shakycam footage before the PR rep re-cloaked it and promised more at a later event — what a tease. Video after the break.

Continue reading Video: Motorola CLIQ quick hands-on

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Video: Motorola CLIQ quick hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 10 Sep 2009 14:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s confusing now that we have an iPod touch 3G, right? We just got done handling the new model, and really, there’s not much to say. It’s a little snappier, but we didn’t do any heavy game playing, and otherwise it’s exactly the same. We thought it seemed thinner, but the cold hard specs stopped that idea in its tracks. Want to see more? Check out the gallery and video below!

Continue reading iPod touch 3rd gen hands-on and video

Filed under: Portable Audio, Portable Video

iPod touch 3rd gen hands-on and video originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Sep 2009 14:49:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We wouldn’t want to jump to conclusions, but Archos might just be onto something with its upcoming 9pctablet, which is due to launch alongside Windows 7. The Windows 7 bit isn’t an accident, since it’s really the first OS from Microsoft that makes it conceivable to use much of the OS with a finger, rather than the stylus. It’s not all there, of course: Archos had to build its own touchscreen keyboard to replace Microsoft’s woefully inadequate implementation, and there’s an optical mouse sensor on the side of the display and a stylus buried within to pick up the slack.

Overall the hardware seems very solid and astonishingly dense, and despite the recent advancements we’ve seen in thin and light laptops, it’s pretty incredible that Archos has a full Atom-based PC running inside this thin, fanless slab. What wasn’t so incredible was the resistive touchscreen, at least on the unit we were playing with. Our touches kept getting misread inexplicably as an inch below where we were tapping, and it didn’t feel like a “light touch” resistive model at all — no confusing what we felt with capacitive, though perhaps we got a faulty unit. This is probably a scenario where resistive makes sense, but we’d say Archos has a lot of work to do on the drivers or **something to make this more usable. The good news is that there will be an optional, super-slim external keyboard, which should make input on the 9 a bit less of a chore.

Filed under: Tablet PCs

Archos 9pctablet hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 09 Sep 2009 09:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The Palm Pixi is just what you’d get when you ask your engineers to take the Pre, keep as much stuff as possible, but make it smaller. It’s a keyboarded candybar (with webOS), but it loses some vitals like Wi-Fi.

The Details

The important bits: It still runs webOS, still has a keyboard, still only for Sprint (for now) and can pretty much do everything the bigger Pre can do. There’s no Wi-Fi, but GPS and the accelerometer are still there. The Pixi is slightly lighter than the Pre, losing a lot of weight from not having to slide itself out to reveal a keyboard, but has a little bit of a lobotomized brain. Palm wouldn’t get into details, but you can make out from the hints and insinuations that the CPU and the RAM were less of what you’d get with the Pre.

What you’d miss the most is the 80 pixels they had to shave off because of the smaller display. At 2.63 inches, all the Pixi can handle is a 320×400 resolution. This translates into more work for developers, who need to somehow manage two different resolution sizes as well hardware different specs if you want your app to run on both phones. Oh, and there’s a 2-megapixel camera as opposed to the Pre’s 3-megapixel camera.

Hands-on Impressions

The Pixi’s handlers didn’t give people a chance to manhandle the phone very much, despite my attempts at charming them by both showering and brushing my teeth beforehand, so the impressions are limited to some typing, some navigating and a lot of eyeballing. What I saw was good. It’s the same OS, so you can do everything you could do before, but the ball is replaced by a touch “area”—the same area you’d use for the off-screen forward and back gestures before. Just tap it and you get the same effect as the Pre. And in all the apps I saw there wasn’t a huge difference in speed between the two devices.

What’s most surprising is that even though the keyboard is technically smaller on the Pixi than on the Pre, each key is more raised because there’s no sliding lid to maintain clearance of. So even though the keys are slightly different and smaller, I was able to thumb out words faster and with fewer errors than before. High five.

Overall, it’s definitely slimmer, lighter and more pocketable than the Pre. It has almost all the same features—no Wi-Fi won’t affect your ability to download apps or music—so you’re not missing on that much stuff if for some reason you choose the Pixi over the Pre. But when asked about whether or not you can run the same number of apps simultaneously, multitasking, as on the Pre, I was once again met with what amounted to “no comment.” Think of it like a less pricey computer.

What’s To Come

Palm is targeting the Pixi at the cheap man segment, the person for which $200 or $150 is too much for a phone, but something a little less is just right. (This person also wouldn’t recognize that any difference would be dwarfed by the monthly phone bill anyway, but that’s neither here nor there.) No concrete details on the price, but it’s definitely going to be less than the $150 of the Pre.

There was no concrete launch date yet, but Palm’s aiming for sometime “before the Holidays”. The Pixi will come loaded with a native Facebook app as well as Synergy integration with LinkedIn and Yahoo. For those of you who like customized backplates, there will be a limited edition run of five artist-designed Touchstone-compatible backs just for you, provided you’re among the people who order the limited edition backplates in time.

It’s not like we didn’t know this already, but Sony Ericsson has now officially confirmed an October UK release for its latest pair of handsets. The half-Swedish, half-Welsh mobile empire has set the seventh day of the tenth month of whatever year this is as the date for a nice little corporate get-together and unveiling of whatever little details haven’t been seen or pored over by now. The Aino slider hopes to capture fans with its slender looks and PS3 Remote Play skills, while the Satio (formerly known as the Idou, pictured) works the multimedia phone crowd with a 12.1 megapixel cam and a 3.5-inch 16:9 display. The latter was recently handled by Engadget Spanish, who found it underwhelming and somewhat sluggish — but rest assured, we’ll be getting a lot more fingerprints on these touchscreen devices in the coming weeks.

Continue reading Sony Ericsson Aino and Satio hitting the UK on October 7

Filed under: Cellphones

Sony Ericsson Aino and Satio hitting the UK on October 7 originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 08 Sep 2009 05:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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