Hasta La Gadget!

Let’s be honest: with the size of a brick and a relatively short battery life, it’s no surprise that ITG’s xpPhone hasn’t quite dominated the smartphone market since its launch back in November. In fact, we haven’t even seen one in the wild, and we certainly wouldn’t have missed it if there ever was one on the street. That said, ITG hasn’t given up, as the company’s just announced its second-generation Windows-powered smartphone. The reason? Well, interestingly enough, ITG prefers Windows’ greater range of compatible software compared to those of mobile OSes, namely Android and iOS. Let’s just leave it at that for now.

Simply dubbed the xpPhone 2, this beast of a QWERTY slider packs a 1.6GHz Intel Atom Z530 chip, along with 2GB RAM, up to 112GB of SSD storage, 4.3-inch display and compatibility with both Windows 7 and Windows 8 — obviously the latter OS will depend on its final release date. Not only has battery life been bumped up to around 18 hours of call time or 46 days on standby, but the phone’s also been slimmed down to 140mm x 73mm x 17.5mm, which is a huge improvement compared to its bulky predecessor. With the touch-friendly Windows 8 on board along with a non-underclocked CPU, we have a feeling that the xpPhone 2 will at least fare much better than Fujitsu’s F-07C; as for the rest, we shall see when it comes out in January next year. And no, it probably won’t run Crysis.

Update: Looks like we were misled by the company’s other promotional photos and thus mistakenly thought the xpPhone 2 will have a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. This would explain the slimmer body then.

ITG xpPhone 2 to get some Windows 8 love, starts living large in January originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Oct 2011 07:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Chalk one up for the chatterboxes. In a study spanning 18 years and more than 350,000 test subjects, researchers in Denmark have found no connection between cellphone usage and brain cancer. The landmark project, carried out by Denmark’s Institute of Cancer Epidemiology, was published online last week in the British Medical Journal, and is just the latest in a series of similarly optimistic studies. Of the 358,403 cellphone owners examined, only 356 were found to have a brain tumor, while 856 were diagnosed with cancer of the central nervous system — percentages that are comparable to those seen among non-mobile users. Even among long-term cellphone owners (13 years or more), incidence rates were not significantly higher than those observed among the general population. Hazel Nunn, head of evidence and health information at Cancer Research UK, described the study as “the strongest evidence yet that using a mobile phone does not seem to increase the risk of cancers of the brain or central nervous system in adults.” The study’s authors, however, acknowledge some shortcomings in their work, including the exclusion of “corporate subscriptions” — people who use their mobile devices for work, and who probably use them more heavily than the average consumer. They also recognized the need for longer-term research and for more child-specific studies. You can check out the article in full, at the coverage link below.

Cellphones are dangerous / not dangerous: Danish study tilts toward the latter originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Oct 2011 06:20:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Either these posters are extremely elaborate fakes, or NTT DoCoMo is really bad at keeping secrets. Just hours after it prematurely tweeted a November release for the Galaxy Nexus (aka the Nexus Prime), we now have what appears to be a full spec list and comparison with the other handsets in the Japanese carrier’s range. The details are nearly all familiar from previous suspected leaks, including the dual-core 1.2GHz Texas Instruments processor, 720p Super AMOLED curved glass display, five megapixel camera with 1080p video recording and 32GB of storage (plus 1GB RAM). Now, it’s entirely possible that the fakers are all singing from the same dodgy hymn sheet — but if that’s true, then they’ve also been busily submitting forged benchmarks to GLBenchmark, which displays results from a ‘Galaxy Nexus’ that include the same 1.2GHz clock speed and HD screen (albeit listed as 1196×720, supposedly due to the onscreen buttons). We’ll know the truth soon enough — the full fandango is but hours away.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Galaxy Nexus images, specs and benchmarks apparently leaked originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Oct 2011 10:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While we’re only five days away from finding out the true appearance of the next-generation iPhone, our good friends over at BENM.AT went ahead and crafted their very own unibody dummy using CAD drawings, CNC tools and a block of aluminum — seriously, that’s how they roll! Granted, this work’s only based on various data and rumor gathered across the web, but it’s still a pretty convincing presentation — the ultra slim teardrop design and elongated home button from previous reports are taken into account, and the mute switch has been relocated from the top left to the top right. BENM.AT told us that this dummy fits nicely into the supposed iPhone 5 cases that they obtained. Speaking of which, we also found some of these cases too — read on to find out what they’re like.

Continue reading iPhone 5 cases and realistic unibody dummy show off incredible slimness

iPhone 5 cases and realistic unibody dummy show off incredible slimness originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 29 Sep 2011 15:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If this hodgepodge of sorta, kinda official confirmation is to be believed, Windows Phone users can look forward to deeper integration of voice command functionality built-in to the Apollo update. Nokia US’ CEO, Chris Weber, first spilled the speech recognition beans in an interview with VentureBeat back in early August, referring to the tech as a killer WP feature. Now, a report over on ZDNet backs up that leaked info with resume tidbits from former MS Windows Phone / Mobile Communications team members that had a hand in creating the so-called “Voice-Compose” and “Read-Aloud” features for native email clients– even tipping us off to a possible Windows 8 and WP 8 convergence. There’s also mention (gleaned from a company job listing) of MS’ lower-end mobile OS splitting into two separate versions — Tango1 and Tango2. We know what you’re thinking. It’s hard to get excited about far-off OS updates when we’re still waiting on Mango’s release. Still, it’s good to know Ballmer and co. aren’t just resting on their Windows laurels.

Filed under: Cellphones, Software

Windows Phone Apollo to feature speech-to-text for email, low-end Tango gets split in two originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 13 Sep 2011 22:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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