Hasta La Gadget!

If you’ve got enough time to breathe, you’re not doing it right. Our crazy tour through Windows Phone 7 land is continuing at full pelt with the LG Optimus 7. We must admit we were very pleasantly surprised by this handset. The 3.8-inch display is a mere LCD and the construction seems to be wholly plastic, but both seem to be punching well above the weight of their constituent elements. It’s a well chiselled, handsome, and light phone, with a trio of physical buttons at the bottom. Whether you like those will really depend on personal preference, we tend to like the clicky tactile feedback of real buttons more than the stillness of touch-sensitive capacitive keys. LG has outfitted the handset with the bone stock WP7 interface, but has augmented the offering with its own apps, namely Play-To for getting friendly with your TV over DLNA and Voice-to-Text for easing your textual inputs. We’re definitely fancying the general build quality and design, tell us what you think after checking out the pics below!

Update: Video now embedded after the break.

Continue reading LG Optimus 7 first hands-on (update: video!)

LG Optimus 7 first hands-on (update: video!) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Oct 2010 11:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The party starts soon! We’re at the venue and about to get going, so tune back in at the times below!

03:30AM – Hawaii
06:30AM – Pacific
07:30AM – Mountain
08:30AM – Central
09:30AM – Eastern
02:30PM – London
03:30PM – Paris
05:30PM – Moscow
10:30PM – Tokyo

Continue reading Live from Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 launch event

Live from Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 launch event originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Oct 2010 10:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It may have “Windows” in the branding, but Windows Phone 7 is not the desktop PC experience shoehorned into a cellphone. Microsoft tried that with Windows Mobile… and we all know how that turned out. Today, eight months after the Windows Phone 7 OS unveiling in Barcelona, we’re finally seeing the official launch of the retail hardware: nine new WP7 handsets, some available October 21 in select European and Asian markets and others from early November in the US. The phones will find their way to over 60 cellphone operators in more than 30 countries this year. Microsoft tapped Dell, HTC, LG, and Samsung to deliver the Snapdragon-based handsets with a carrier list that includes AT&T, T-Mobile USA, Vodafone, TELUS, América Móvil, Deutsche Telekom AG, Movistar, O2, Orange, SFR, SingTel, and Telstra. And that’s just for the first wave — Microsoft has even more handsets coming in 2011 including the first for Sprint and Verizon in the US. Here’s the lineup of 480 x 800 pixel (WVGA) phones announced today:

• HTC 7 Surround — The 3.8-inch T8788 with slideout speaker for AT&T and Telus
• HTC HD7 — Schubert comes of age as a 4.3-inch HD2 cousin for T-Mobile and beyond
• HTC 7 Trophy — the 3.8-inch Spark headed to international carriers
• HTC 7 Mozart — another heavily leaked int’l player with 3.7-inch display
• Dell Venue Pro — 4.1-inch portrait QWERTY slider for T-Mobile we broke as Lightning
• Samsung Focus — AT&T’s 4-inch Super AMOLED slate we broke as Cetus
• Samsung Omnia 7 — the i8700 is a 4-inch Super AMOLED jobbie for Europe
• LG Optimus 7/7Q — the E900 is the official 3.8-inch global workhorse
• LG Quantum — AT&T’s 3.5-inch landscape slider first seen as the C900

• HTC 7 Pro — a 3.6-inch QWERTY slider for Sprint (2011)

“Glance and Go,” is the slogan Microsoft is using to differentiate itself from an already crowded smartphone market. Something we’ve already seen alluded to in that leaked AT&T ad. As Ballmer notes, “Microsoft and its partners are delivering a different kind of mobile phone and experience – one that makes everyday tasks faster by getting more done in fewer steps and providing timely information in a ‘glance and go’ format.” He’s referring to WP7’s customizable Live Tiles, of course. Xbox Live integration is another biggie with EA Games just announcing its first Xbox Live-enabled wares coming to Windows Phone 7 in the fall including “Need for Speed Undercover,” “Tetris,” “Monopoly,” and “The Sims 3.” The other big differentiators are the slick Metro UI, integrated support for Zune media and Zune Pass subscriptions, Bing search and maps, Windows Live including the free Find My Phone service, and Microsoft Office Mobile.

Now quit stalling and jump past the break for the full list of handsets per carrier and country.

Update: Added the official WP7 overview videos after the break.

Continue reading Microsoft announces ten Windows Phone 7 handsets for 30 countries: October 21 in Europe and Asia, 8 November in US (Update: Video!)

Microsoft announces ten Windows Phone 7 handsets for 30 countries: October 21 in Europe and Asia, 8 November in US (Update: Video!) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Oct 2010 09:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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These details aren’t supposed to be live yet, we presume, but AT&T’s just posted full information on its Windows Phone 7 lineup over on its site. We’ve got the Surround from HTC, the Samsung Focus, and the LG Quantum — and as expected, they’re a slider (sorta), a slate, and a full QWERTY slider, respectively. The Surround is touted as featuring Yamaha speakers in its slide-out surround sound arrangement with 16GB of onboard storage, the Focus is “slender and light” with a 4-inch Super AMOLED display that we imagine is ripped straight out of its Captivate stablemate, and the Quantum’s listed with a 5 megapixel camera. All three are listed as “coming soon,” so we’ll have to hold tight and see whether we get any release dates today.

[Thanks, Shane C.]

Samsung Focus, HTC Surround, and LG Quantum all outed a bit early on AT&T’s Windows Phone 7 site originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Oct 2010 09:06:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft’s been really keen to keep all the Windows Phone 7 fanfare to itself, but LG’s equally zealous official UK blog has just thwarted that effort by posting both details and a gallery of images of the company’s Optimus 7 (aka E900) handset online. To be fair to them, it’s nothing a ton of leaks haven’t already revealed: the Optimus 7 will be a 3.8-inch touchscreen device, sporting WVGA (800 x 480) resolution, 16GB of onboard storage, a 5 megapixel camera with a 720p video mode, Bluetooth 2.1, WiFi, a digital compass, and your usual proximity and ambient light sensors. Also present will be that DLNA streaming functionality we saw at IFA, officially titled Play-To, which will be exclusive to LG’s phones along with Voice-to-Text and Scansearch, the former being a message transcriber and the latter acting as an augmented reality real-time search service. Intriguing.

LG Optimus 7 made official ahead of Windows Phone 7 launch, quickly yanked originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 11 Oct 2010 05:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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