Hasta La Gadget!

After several leaks Verizon and Motorola have finally gotten their act together — Droid X owners, get ready for a little love in the form of Blurified Gingerbread. Verizon just reached out to let us know that Android 2.3 will start hitting the big-screened phones on Friday. You can find a full list of new features that it and the latest version of Blur bring to the party, along with instructions for downloading and installing. A Motorola employee also let slip in the company’s support forums that other devices may soon follow suit: “other [Gingerbread] updates are currently scheduled to be released before the end of the third quarter.” While he wouldn’t name specific handsets, it seems safe to assume that the Droid 2 (including the Global version) and possibly the Droid Pro will be included.

Gingerbread finally coming to Droid X Friday, Droid 2 and Pro to follow? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 25 May 2011 11:54:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Motorola and Verizon have finally stopped teasing us and have made the Droid X2 official. This is a 4.3-inch Android (2.2, to be upgraded to 2.3) smartphone with a qHD screen resolution and a dual-core 1GHz processor. An 8 megapixel camera with continuous autofocus and HD video recording graces the back. The X2 will cost the usual $200 on contract and will be available to buy online tomorrow, May 19th, before making its way out to stores a week later, on May 26th. Leap past the break for the full PR.

Interestingly, we’ve also spotted the close proximity of the USB and HDMI ports on the side of the new X2. That arrangement is reminiscent of the one on Motorola’s Atrix, where the two connectors served to hook that handset up to its laptop and multimedia docks. We don’t know whether the Droid X2 will fit into the accessories designed for the Atrix, but it looks sure to be strapping itself into a dock of some description in the near future.

Update: NVIDIA has confirmed that its Tegra 2 chip is the heretofore unnamed 1GHz dual-core chip inside the Droid X2, which just happens to be Verizon’s first dual-core smartphone.

Update 2: A little birdie tells us you may be able to pick up this bad boy in person in some stores as soon as tomorrow (May 19th). Your mileage may vary, but let us know in the comments if you manage to buy one.

Continue reading Motorola Droid X2 official at $200: launching online May 19th, in stores May 26th (update: in some stores on 19th)

Motorola Droid X2 official at $200: launching online May 19th, in stores May 26th (update: in some stores on 19th) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 May 2011 20:51:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Motorola’s Droid X2 features Nvidia’s dual-core processor, the Tegra 2. Photo courtesy of Motorola

Good news for Verizon customers waiting for powerful hardware: Dual-core is coming to town.

Motorola’s Droid X2 smartphone hits stores on May 26, and you’ll be able to pre-order it online beginning May 19. The phone is powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 2 dual-core 1 GHz processor, the powerful chip found in a number of recent tablet and smartphone releases. It’s the first Verizon-carried phone to include a dual-core chip.

Like its predecessor, the Droid X2 will flaunt a 4.3-inch screen, just big enough to watch HD video on without having to squint. It also has HDMI-mirroring capabilities, which means you can watch those videos on your big screen via HDMI output.

The phone only comes running Android version 2.2 (Froyo), but Motorola says it will be upgrading the software to 2.3 (Gingerbread) soon. Of course, we can’t speak to what “soon” actually translates to in actual, real-world wait time.

A big bummer: the Droid X2 only runs on Verizon’s 3G network. That means if you’re tethering up to five Wi-Fi enabled devices using it as a mobile hotspot, you won’t be getting 4G speeds. And from our time spent on the network with the Thunderbolt, we’re digging Verizon’s flavor of 4G.

LG was the first phone manufacturer to release a dual-core phone this year with its Optimus 2X, which initially dropped in Europe before the U.S. version (the G2X) was released in April on T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network. Motorola was soon to follow with its Atrix on AT&T’s 4G network. All three phones run on the Tegra 2 processor.

Out of the big four U.S. telecommunications companies, Sprint is the only carrier not offering a dual-core smartphone.

The Droid X2 will be available in Verizon Wireless stores for $200 with a two-year Verizon Wireless contract beginning May 26.

Well, that was fast. Almost immediately after Google unveiled Android 3.1, Motorola was first out of the gate with an update, and now, not even a week later, Acer and ASUS are following suit with plans to freshen up their respective tablets with the newly minted software. To recap, 3.1’s benefits include resizeable widgets, support for USB peripherals, and new Movies and Books apps, among other perks. Acer confirmed to us that it aims to start selling the Iconia Tab A500 with 3.1 next month, as well as upgrade existing units running Android 3.0. ASUS, meanwhile, has been touting the impending update for the Eee Pad Transformer on its Italian Facebook page. To which we say, grazie!

Acer Iconia Tab A500 and ASUS Eee Pad Transformer getting Android 3.1 updates in June originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 May 2011 15:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Motorola's Xoom — the first Honeycomb-powered tablet device to hit the market — isn't selling as well as Apple's iPad. Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Nvidia’s head honcho knows that sluggish sales of Android tablets are a problem, but says it won’t be that way forever.

“I think that the vast majority of tablet users are actually buying from retail, and Wi-Fi only,” said Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang on a quarterly earnings conference call with reporters, explaining why sales for Android-powered tablets have been lackluster so far. But, he explained, you couldn’t buy Wi-Fi-only versions at retail outlets. “The first generation of tablets initially came out from our carriers, and with 3G,” said Huang, whose Nvidia Tegra 2 processors can be found inside multiple Android tablets currently on the market.

Despite a wealth of options from different hardware manufacturers, Android-powered tablets don’t have the same momentum as the iPad. Apple’s tablet still accounts for 82 percent of the tablet market, according to Nielsen.

Huang’s statement places much of the blame squarely on Motorola’s release strategy for the Xoom, Google’s flagship tablet product running Android’s tablet-optimized version 3.0 (Honeycomb) software. The Xoom debuted on Verizon’s 3G network in February for $600 with a two-year Verizon contract, or without a contract for a whopping $800.

And some say that’s not the way we want to buy our tablets. “Our data shows that [people] don’t want to be tied in to a fixed data contract, and they don’t want to buy from a carrier,” wrote Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps in a blog post. “Meaning that pricing strategies that work for mobile phones won’t work for tablets.”

Apple’s baseline, Wi-Fi only version of the iPad 2 costs just $500.

Take a look at some of the raw numbers for the sake of perspective: In the first weekend of the original iPad’s release, Apple sold more than 1 million devices. Compare that to the 220,000 units shipped in the Xoom’s first month of release.

Last month, Motorola’s CEO Sanjay Jha cited a different reason for the Xoom’s relatively poor sales: Android’s app ecosystem. “Consumers want more apps for Android tablets,” Jha said during the company’s quarterly earnings call in April.

Huang agreed with Jha to a degree. “It’s a software richness-of-content problem,” Huang said in an interview with Cnet.

The forecast for Android-powered tablets to come in 2011 isn’t entirely grim. Huang — whose company certainly has skin in the game — remains optimistic. “We’re going to expect another wave of tablets that are coming out to the marketplace now. Ones that are even thinner and even lighter than the best offerings from any place,” Huang said, most likely referring to Samsung’s soon-to-debut Galaxy Tab 10.1.

Huang is also betting big on the new version of Honeycomb released for Android tablets (3.1), currently available only for the Motorola Xoom tablets but will roll out to other Android tablets in the next few weeks. The update includes support for peripheral USB devices and user-interface enhancements, among other improvements.

And finally, Huang hinted at Nvidia’s integration with Google’s software: “We’re working very closely with [Google’s] teams on the Ice Cream Sandwich,” Huang said, though he wouldn’t go into further detail. Google teased details of the upcoming Android software version, codenamed “Ice Cream Sandwich,” at its I/O developer conference in San Francisco last week.

As for issues with Android’s app ecosystem, Google seems to be trying to remedy the situation. The company recently added a number of lists and sections highlighting the most popular apps across specific categories — gross sales, number of downloads over a seven-day period, top free apps downloaded — in an attempt to make the market easier to browse for consumers, as well as a more lucrative venue for developers who want to sell their apps.