Hasta La Gadget!

We’ve just swooped our way through the Fulton Innovation stand here at MWC and found, sat next to the familiar light-up cereal box, a peculiar version of the Verizon LTE network-riding LG Revolution. Thicker than its CES-announced counterpart (by only 1.5mm, if the Fulton reps are to be believed), this Revolution features a Qi wireless charging-compatible back, which happens to go very nicely with a Verizon-branded inductive charging station. You can scope those out in the gallery below. We’re told the back cover that makes this possible will be available as an accessory in the next 30 to 60 days, but the excitement for us was in hearing that Samsung also has an unannounced handset that will feature a similar add-on, which will be landing in the same timespan. While at the stand, we were also shown the back cover of an HTC Thunderbolt — we weren’t told the Thunderbolt will be making like the Revolution and getting its own chunky wireless charging adapter, but don’t be surprised if it does.

Continue reading LG Revolution gets Fulton inductive charging back, HTC and Samsung handsets joining the party soon

LG Revolution gets Fulton inductive charging back, HTC and Samsung handsets joining the party soon originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 Feb 2011 15:11:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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BARCELONA — Unlike its underwhelming Optimus Pad tablet, LG’s Optimus 3D cellphone is rather impressive. Its 4.3-inch screen is capable of displaying 3-D without the need for a pair of 3D glasses.

The Optimus runs Android 2.2 (which is user-upgradeable to 2.3), and the screen runs at 480 x 800 resolution. This is, according to the rather hopeful person who wrote the spec-card that accompanies the phone, enough for 1080p video. To be fair, this more likely refers to the HDMI-out capability, which will deliver 3-D video at 720p and regular 2-D at 1080p.

3-D images can be captured via the pair of cameras on the back, just like the Optimus Pad, but you can also view it right there on the phone. The display works a lot like the Nintendo 3DS, using lens-based trickery to send different images to each eye. The effect is surprisingly convincing, although it oddly seems to make the screen seem smaller. While I can become engrossed in a movie on an tablet set a few feet in front of me, to the extent that I forget I’m looking at such a small screen, the 3-D display is looked at, rather than looked into. Still, the 3-D-ness is convincing, and it will surely be great for gaming.

When looking at the screen from anywhere but close up, it looks like one of those novelty lenticular postcards from a museum gift-shop. This worried me for a moment, but it only happens in 3-D mode. When you return to normal phone use, the screen looks no different from any other.

Like the Optimus Pad, the Optimus 3D is built on a gimmick. And while shooting poor-quality 3-D video might be fun, it’s the games that will make or break this device. And my guess is “break:” Android is fragmented enough as it is. How many developers are going to make 3-D versions of their games, just for this phone?

See Also:

• Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Hands-On: A Plastic Toy With a Gorgeous …
• Hands-On With Samsung’s Five-Inch iPod Touch Rival
• Hands-On With LG’s Eye-Crossing 3D Optimus Pad

BARCELONA — Tablets are what we wanted to see at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and tablets are what we’ve got. They all have their gimmicks, and LG’s Optimus Pad has 3-D. It also has a new screen size of 8.9 inches.

First, the 3-D. The Optimus has a pair of cameras in the back for shooting stereoscopic 1080p video. This footage can be played back later on a big TV (the Optimus has an HDMI-out port) or piped direct to a big screen as you shoot (as you see in the picture above). I jammed a pair of 3D glasses over my regular glasses, held the camera in my other hand and tried to snap a picture whilst balancing on my crutches. Despite these various handicaps, the picture is a pretty good representation of the headache-inducing footage you’ll see without the 3-D specs.

Put the glasses on and things don’t get much better. The 3-D effect is there, but it has none of the slick smoothness you’ll see from a properly-shot clip. There’s no way you’ll ever mistake the footage for anything but cellphone video, even though both cameras are 5MP.

And if you want to view your 3-D video on the screen, good luck. LG touts the Optimus Pad as able to display 3-D, but see it you’ll need to travel back to 1955. The “3-D” image is displayed as red and blue anaglyph, the kind which you need colored glasses to look at. Given that any color screen, ever, can do this, LG is pushing the truth a little here.

The rest of the Optimus Pad is sweet enough, with dual-core Tegra 2 chip, 32GB storage, 3G radio, 2MP front-facing camera (even worse than the other two) and Android 3.0 Honeycomb. The 8.9-inch size is actually pretty good, although all the cameras seemingly bring the weight up to an iPad-like 630-grams. Take a closer look and you’ll see LG has opted to make the screen long and thin. That’s great for wide-screen movies, terrible for everything else (except, surprisingly, two-pane horizontal e-book reading). Finally, the 1280 x 768 pixel screen sounds good, but in practice it isn’t so great. Samsung’s Tab displays are way nicer.

My prediction for the Optimus Pad? Lots of (digital) ink spilled by hacks like me during the MWC this week, followed by terrible sales and a quiet death. You heard it here first, folks!

See Also:

• Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 Hands-On: A Plastic Toy With a Gorgeous …
• Hands-On With Samsung’s Five-Inch iPod Touch Rival

Yikes. We just finished getting our fingerprints all over LG’s Optimus Pad (aka the G-Slate), and now we’re thinking we should have been wearing white gloves while doing so. The tablet is coming in March to the US, but we didn’t know a price. Now we do — in Germany, at least, and get ready to wince: €999. That’s about $1,350 if you do a straight conversion, out-classing even the Xoom‘s eye-wateringly high $1,199 pre-order price, which we’re still holding out hope is a misprint. Maybe the golden goo in Honeycomb really is gold.

Update: Roland wrote in to remind us that German prices include a 19 percent VAT, which would drop this price down to a mere $1,075 if you’re into the conversion game. Well within pocket change territory.

[Thanks, Enzo]

LG Optimus Pad priced at €999 in Germany originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 Feb 2011 07:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We’ve just gotten back from playing around with LG’s 8.9-inch, 3D-friendly Optimus Pad (known as the G-Slate in the US). This Android Honeycomb tablets sports a dual-core CPU inside and a dual-camera array outside, giving you both the optical and processing capabilities to produce 3D video. Its screen cannot actually play back glasses-free 3D, but if you really have to have that third dimension on the move, you’ll be able to buy a set of glasses to recreate the effect. The Optimus Pad is slim, though we couldn’t get a great feel for its ergonomics with all the wiring attached to it, has nicely curved corners, a matte black back cover that’s pleasant to the touch and seemingly durable, and an extremely glossy screen up front.

We likened the Pad to the Optimus 2X in an earlier post and it carries over a lot of industrial design elements from its smartphone sibling, including the metallic strip down the middle of its rear branded with a “with Google” logo. That’s actually meaningful this time — the Optimus 2X wasn’t a stock Android installation, it was subjected to LG’s (not entirely successful tweaks), however the Pad looks to be a straight Google Experience Device, in much the same vein as the Motorola Xoom and Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1, its nearest and most direct competitors. That being said, the code on the device we handled still wasn’t up to scratch on the software front, as evidenced by us managing to crash both the browser and Google Maps within a few minutes of putting down our first fingerprints on the tablet. The 3D camcorder also seems like a memory hog, we weren’t able to get it started up initially because of the number of apps that were already open (which at the time was no more than four). Let’s remain optimistic, though, this wasn’t exactly a slate we snatched off a retail shelf and LG has time to optimize and spruce things up before shipping this thing out. We’ve got pictures for you below and a press release after the break. Video is incoming at the very fastest speed our wireless connection can carry it.

Update: Video is now in, get to the ogling!

Continue reading LG Optimus Pad first hands-on! (video)

LG Optimus Pad first hands-on! (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 Feb 2011 05:24:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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