Hasta La Gadget!

At first glance, Bug Labs’ latest creation actually seems like a bit of a downgrade from the version it replaces — it loses the onboard LCD display and a handful of buttons, after all — but we sat down with CEO Peter Semmelhack today on the hustling, bustling floor of MWC to get the straight dope on what makes the BUGbase 2.0 a superior product. First of all, you can’t overlook the fact that they’ve moved to a Cortex A8-based OMAP3530, an appreciable boost from the ARM11 core it replaces, but it turns out there are a whole bunch of subtler changes too, like the inclusion of on-board audio out (pictured above toward the left of the base), HD video out capability through a module, and a second microSD slot. Why two, you ask? Isn’t 32GB of external storage enough? Probably, but Semmelhack points out that the second slot (covered behind a flap) is dedicated to loading the operating system, making it a trivial task to quickly switch between kernels or get unbricked.

Although the unit we saw today has functional guts, we’re told that the casing is pre-production — not to say that “production” BUGbases need to look amazing, anyway, considering that they’re frequently used for prototyping themselves. Though Android’s already been ported to the Bug platform, the company is really driving home the message in 2.0; when you think about it, this kind of makes any Android dev out there a de facto Bug dev, so that’s a nice angle to play. Look for it to ship by “early Summer,” so it’s time to scoop up that first-gen unit now if you’re jonesing for the integrated display.

Bug Labs’ BUGbase 2.0 prototype hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 12:38:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Acer took MWC rather seriously this year with no fewer than five phone intros to its name spanning the range from Android to Windows Mobile 6.5.3, so we went ahead and put our hands on all of them today. Starting at the bottom of the range, the lowly beTouch E110 is obviously designed to compete head-to-head with the likes of the HTC Tattoo — in fact, it apes the Tattoo’s design pretty closely in some respects. Unlike Acer’s higher-end Android phones, the E110 uses a custom skin that seems pretty well-suited for its QVGA resolution, and it’s still managing 3.6Mbps HSDPA in your choice of 900 / 2100 and 850 / 1900 flavors for different areas of the world. It feels as cheap as it looks, but as long as it’s priced appropriately, we still think it’s a reasonable way to get new audiences on the smartphone bandwagon.

Follow the break for more impressions, shots, and video!

Continue reading Acer Liquid e, beTouch E110 / E400, and neoTouch P300 / P400 hands-on

Acer Liquid e, beTouch E110 / E400, and neoTouch P300 / P400 hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 08:52:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We came, we saw, and we’re still scratching our heads over what Opera is up to with its Mobile World Congress demonstration of its Opera Mini browser running on the iPhone 3GS. But before we get into that, let’s talk performance: it’s fast. Opera Mini is very, very fast on the iPhone. Loading the New York Times, for example, was about 5x faster than loading the same page in the iPhone 3GS’ stock browser. Pages loaded smoothly and were interactive just as quickly as the content began to load — not unlike the Safari browsing experience. From a functionality standpoint, Opera Mini operates exactly as it does on other, less-contentious platforms. So while double-tap to zoom is supported, pinch-to-zoom is not. The iPhone version does, however, remember the state of the browser when you exit Opera Mini. As such, you’ll find your tabs and recent pages right where they were when you last used the app.

The impressive performance gain has to do with how Opera Mini works. First, it’s not doing any rendering of the pages or code processing locally. Web pages are processed by Opera’s servers before sending just the results to the iPhone. Not only does this speed up the local processing but it also limits the amount of data sent — a potential big money saver for people browsing while data roaming (like us in Barcelona) or for those without unlimited data plans.

Unfortunately, Opera refused to let us or anyone photograph the app or take any video of it in action. We couldn’t even photograph the Opera icon in the launch bar or the wallpaper adorned with the Opera logo. Why? It looks just like Opera Mini beta on any other device so it’s not like we’re exposing any competitive intelligence. And it’s not like Opera would be violating any Apple NDA related to the SDK or the app approval process. Unfortunately, Opera was unable to give us a valid reason other than, “you just can’t.”

So why is Opera making such a fuss about this before it has even submitted to Apple for approval? We have three theories that we discussed with Igor Netto, Senior Product Manager within Opera’s Mobile group. Click through if you like conspiracies.

Continue reading Opera Mini on iPhone is fast, but why?

Opera Mini on iPhone is fast, but why? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 08:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Capacity crunch, isn’t that a breakfast cereal? RIM’s Mike Lazaridis seems to have been a real grouch at MWC this week as apparently he hasn’t stopped talking about the doom and gloom awaiting mobile carriers over the next few years. Focusing on the bandwidth-hungry North American market, Lazaridis has criticized the apparently irresponsible network saturation growth, which he sees as being primarily driven by app-centric operating systems. If you’re wondering who he could possibly be referring to, let Mike clarify it — according to him, you could carry five BlackBerry devices for each iPhone on a network. As evidence of his firm’s focus on efficiency, he points us to that freshly demoed WebKit browser, which he claims uses a third of the bandwidth required by the competition from Apple and Google. If only he wasn’t implying that owning a BlackBerry would save the internet, Mike’s sales pitch would be rather compelling — those are mighty impressive numbers he is citing.

RIM CEO claims we are staring ‘down the barrel of a capacity crunch,’ should all get BlackBerrys to prevent it originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 03:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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What, you thought Home was the only project in the pipeline for these guys? The mobile UI experts at Sweden’s TAT are in the house at MWC this week showing off a couple other nifty developments that are keeping them busy these days: a dual-screen UI concept utilizing TI’s next-gen hardware, and an app that makes good on a concept it had demoed before. First up, they’ve been using a TI Blaze to demonstrate their vision of a phone with two displays, likely in a slider configuration (in fact, they showed a Droid to represent how they think the form factor could work) with a screen where you’d normally expect they physical QWERTY keyboard to be. It’s slick and wicked smooth on the brutally powerful OMAP4 core, but realistically, this is something unusual enough so that we’d need to play with a unit for a good, long while before drawing any usability conclusions. TAT believes we could see devices with this kind of setup by years’ end, but we don’t know what carriers, manufacturer, or time frames would be involved at this point.

Next up, Recognizr is the realization of the Augmented ID concept it showed off last year that lets you tag your face (it sounds weird, but it’s quite literally true) with icons representing services that you use, each of which exposes information about you that you want others to know; then, other users with the system can put you in their viewfinder and see the same icons. It’s not flawless — in fact, TAT readily admits that they probably need better camera tech before it can be commercialized, and they had quite a few issues during our demo time — but it’s a clever concept that’s better watched on video than explained, which is convenient considering that we’ve got videos of both of these goodies in action after the break. Check ’em out, won’t you?

Continue reading Hands-on with TAT’s dual-screen phone concept and augmented reality app

Hands-on with TAT’s dual-screen phone concept and augmented reality app originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 22:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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