Hasta La Gadget!

This is the future, we tell ya! Not the immediate future, mind you, as it’s a humble prototype with no commercial intentions behind it, but it sure looks like the right direction for us to be moving in. SK Telecom has somehow fit a processing chip, memory, a gigabyte of flash storage and Google’s Android OS onto the SIM you see above. The concept is pure genius — you store your entire mobile environment on the SIM card, including your contacts, operating system and customizations, which should then allow you to switch up your handset hardware as often as you like without the need to set it up anew each and every time. We’ll head to SK Telecom’s booth at MWC later today for a closer look, but for now you should click past the break for a video.

Continue reading SK Telecom’s Android SIM prototype combines CPU, storage and OS into one (video)

SK Telecom’s Android SIM prototype combines CPU, storage and OS into one (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 17 Feb 2010 08:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  PC World  | Email this | Comments

Barcelona — HTC has launched three new phones at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona: The Nexus-alike Desire, the aluminum Legend and the Windows Mobile HD Mini. This morning I took them all for a spin.

First, forget about the HD Mini. It is indeed mini, but the HD part of the name certainly doesn’t mean high-def. At just 320 X 480 the capacitive touch-screen is just plain normal, and the rest of the phone is ho-hum next to the other two Android handsets. We should face it: Windows Mobile 6.5 is dead.

The Desire is much nicer, although the one I tested didn’t yet have the pinch-to-zoom of the Nexus (although it is running Android 2.1, and the specs say it has it — this is most likely a demo-unit issue). If you have used a Nexus, also made by HTC, you’ll be instantly at home. The screen is bright, sharp and colorful, the capacitive AMOLED touch-screen is responsive and the thing fairly whips along thanks to the 1GHz processor. It is, in short, a very good phone.

But it’s the aluminum Legend which stands out. Although the case is only a touch smaller than that of the Desire, it feels a lot more compact, and very solid in the hand. It’s like going from the old plastic MacBooks to the stiff and chunky unibody MacBooks. The screen is smaller, at 3.2-inches (vs. 3.7) and it has a much lower resolution of 320 X 480 instead of 480 X 800. Even the CPU is worse, clocking in at just 600 MHz. But to read the numbers is to miss the point. The Legend feels classy, and those specs are all good enough. Browsing, maps and typing on screen are all responsive and quick. It could stand to lose the stupid nubbin optical “trackball”, though, as could the Desire. Alongside the touch-screen it is quite useless.

If I was in the market for an Android cellphone, I’d probably choose the Legend. Oh, and one more thing: The cameras in all of these phones are terrible. More photos below.

See Also:

• HTC Clones Nexus One, Launches 3 New Phones

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.

Permalink 9to5Mac  |  Daily Telegraph, Economic Times  | Email this | Comments

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.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Continue reading Commodore PET caught running Windows Phone 7 Series?

Commodore PET caught running Windows Phone 7 Series? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 16 Feb 2010 14:54:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments