Hasta La Gadget!

Microsoft’s mansion at Mobile World Congress contains — among other things — a playground of recent Windows Mobile-powered models designed to show off its licensees’ collective design and manufacturing prowess. By and large, the models were nothing we haven’t known about for days, months, or years, but one stood out for us: this here Samsung Valencia. We’ve heard of this sucker through Expansys as the C6625 with a $365 sticker price — but Samsung doesn’t seem to know anything about it and it’s only being shown by Microsoft, so we suppose they’ve opted against an unveiling here at the show. Microsoft’s spec sheet indicates that it’s got 3G (which jibes with Expansys’ details), GPS, 128MB each of RAM and ROM, a totally pedestrian QVGA display, and a 393MHz processor — slow for a Professional device, yes, but this sucker’s Standard with some minor UI mods. One thing that’s got us a little confused is the line item indicating 20GB of storage — something tells us that a phone with these kinds of specs wouldn’t be packing 20GB on board, so it might refer to a theoretical max of 20GB with the microSD maxed out. We’re not losing sleep over the missing announcement with this one, guys, so don’t sweat it or anything.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

Samsung Valencia outed by Microsoft, not Samsung originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Feb 2009 16:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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As is so often the case, details are scarce here, but Engadget Spanish got word from LG that, as expected, they’re planning to put out an Android phone by June, and two more of ’em by the end of the year. 2009 is certainly looking to be the year of the Android, and it seems like every month that goes by without Windows Mobile 6.5 on the market gives truly finger-friendly OSes like Android a chance to shine — now to see what a manufacturer that isn’t HTC can make of it.

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

LG plans Android phone by June, two more by end of year originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Feb 2009 15:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Right around this time last year, Texas Instruments was busy showing off its OMAP 3 platform, which enabled 720p playback from a mobile phone. At this year’s MWC, we’ve got a real live handset recording 720p, and TI upping the ante once more with a chip that handles 1080p. For those still with us after being blasted with resolutions, the predictably titled OMAP 4 aims to bring 1080p support, 20 megapixel imaging and “approximately a week of audio play time” to mobiles and MIDs that house it. Granted, TI also calls this stuff “future-proof,” so don’t believe it’s totally incapable of uttering some pretty outlandish stuff. At the heart of the platform is a dual-core ARM Cortex A9 chip, a programmable multimedia engine based on TI’s C64x DSP and a POWERVR SGX540 graphics engine. We’re told that it’ll play nice with Linux variants such as Android and LiMo, Symbian and Windows Mobile, though it’ll have to be mighty impressive to outgun NVIDIA’s Tegra. Battle on, we say.

[Via Linux Devices]

Filed under: Cellphones, Handhelds

TI’s OMAP 4 bringing 1080p support to smartphones and MIDs originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Feb 2009 13:59:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We associate the Hyundai name more closely with cars and ten-year warranties than we do phones in these parts of the world, but Hyundai Mobile does a little business selling low-cost phones in parts of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia (cars… phones… right, makes sense). We had a chance to check out some of the offerings today, and yeah, let’s just put it this way: some of these devices are a bit off the beaten path. Pictured above from left to right are the MB-400 (bearing absolutely no resemblance to any existing device), the MB-910 touchscreen watch phone, and the lovely MB-105 “Chico” (which — interesting fact — features a whopping 50-message SMS storage capacity). The Chico wasn’t functional for us, but follow the break for some hands-on time with the unfortunate iPod rip and one of the nicer watch phones we’ve seen come to market. Odd couple, isn’t it?

Continue reading Hyundai’s phones are creatively ridiculous

Filed under: Cellphones

Hyundai’s phones are creatively ridiculous originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Feb 2009 13:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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LG was all too happy to show this one off at CES in January, but it wasn’t quite ready to talk about it any sort of official manner, though it has now finally rectified that situation more than a month later at MWC. From the looks of it, the netbook seems to be unchanged from its CES iteration, with it packing a 160GB hard drive, the Splashtop-powered LG “Smart On” quick-boot interface and, we presume, the same 10-inch WSVGA display and de rigeur 1.6GHz Atom processor as before. Most notably, LG has also now confirmed that the X120 will indeed come equipped with standard 3G HSPA connectivity, which is no doubt why LG took advantage of MWC to finally get official with it. If you missed it the first time around, be sure to check out our CES hands-on for plenty of pics and a video of that quick-boot in action.

[Via Liliputing]

Filed under: Laptops

LG gets official with 3G-equipped X120 netbook originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Feb 2009 12:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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