Hasta La Gadget!

Sprint will apparently be offering preorders of its HTC 7 Pro — the only CDMA Windows Phone 7 device to be announced so far — in just a few days’ time on November 8th, but there’s a fairly big catch: you’ve got to be a Microsoft employee to get in on the action. Redmond has been great about seeding WP7 models to its staff so far, so it’s definitely possible that Sprint is working with Microsoft in some capacity to get 7 Pros to its folks a little early in an effort to smooth out last-minute bugs and get feedback… either that, or it’s just doing them a solid by letting ’em preorder a few days before everyone else. Last we’d heard, the 7 Pro won’t be coming until 2011 (despite the fact that there’s already an FCC certification ready to roll), so if we were to see a few of the things floating around campus before January, we certainly wouldn’t be surprised. Pricing is yet to be announced.

HTC 7 Pro going on preorder for Microsoft employees November 8th originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Nov 2010 18:13:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A Nokia tablet running MeeGo has been churning through the rumor mills since early summer. Speculation, however, began as soon as Nokia and Intel joined forces on the open source OS back in February. Eldar Murtazin, the ultimate Nokia insider, was first to give the Nokia tablet a name: Z500. Fast forward to yesterday, when reports first surfaced of people successfully replacing valid handset names in the store’s URL with “Z500.” Instead of being rejected as an unsupported device, the store seemingly accepted the Z500 device name as you can see in the screenshot above (the Ovi store now rejects the modified terminal ID string). Eldar had this to say on Twitter in response:

Rumour mill. As far as I know Nokia Z500 (Nokia Meego tablet) is under question. Nokia arent happy with price/features.

So now we have a name and with any luck, we’ll see a MeeGo-based Nokia tablet sometime in 2011 as followup to its Windows-based Booklet. If not, then we’ll always have the WeTab.

Nokia Z500 MeeGo tablet leaked on Ovi Store? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 01 Nov 2010 07:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Though Verizon famously turned down the original iPhone before Apple ultimately signed a deal with AT&T, the company’s outspoken CEO — Ivan Seidenberg — has been very careful over the past couple years to note that he’d love to eventually have an iPhone in his lineup. With Verizon Wireless boss Lowell McAdam tapped to take over the top job next year, what’d be a better swan song for Seidenberg than to finally pull it off? Fortune‘s new profile of the longstanding chief exec and elder statesman is reporting in very matter-of-fact terms that a CDMA version of the iPhone 4 will be a reality on Verizon in “early 2011,” lining up with most of the rumors the interwebs has been generating over the past few months.

The piece details the phone as the culmination of literally years of careful discussions between Seidenberg, McAdams, and Steve Jobs; Verizon’s guys claim that Jobs acknowledged in late 2007 that the two companies had “missed something” by failing to partner up. The first visible fruit of those talks is the MiFi-bundled iPad that just launched, but that’s clearly a minor stepping stone on the way to an actual handset. Fortune reports that Jobs has voiced his concerns over CDMA in the past and the fact that it doesn’t work in nearly as many countries as GSM does, but the story goes on to say that the first model on Verizon’s shelves “probably” won’t be dual-mode and presumably won’t have compatibility with the company’s shiny new LTE network, either. If true, that’ll make for an interesting battle for the spotlight in the first few months of 2011 as an EV-DO iPhone wages war with a number of LTE phones — some of which look downright gorgeous — and might put Verizon in the awkward position of having to heavily push two almost diametrically opposed handset and platform initiatives. Furthermore, it’s hard to deny that a Verizon iPhone would stress the carrier’s network in ways it’s never been stressed before; they may be prepared for it, but there’s no way of knowing until it all goes down and they get a sense for uptake and conquests from AT&T. Translation: McAdam looks to have a busy 2011 ahead of him as he transitions into the new office.

iPhone locked for early 2011 on Verizon, says Fortune originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Oct 2010 16:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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After going most of the year with very little noise on the Nexus One’s successor — a phone Google has never committed to making, by the way — we’ve gotten a handful of conflicting rumors about this thing in the past few days. Let’s take a swipe at the buzz that’s circulating this week:

• British publication City A.M. says the Nexus Two is a Carphone Warehouse exclusive, will be released in time for the holidays, and probably won’t be made by Samsung.
• Android and Me is convinced that the Nexus Two will in fact be a Samsung product, will be announced at its November 8th press conference, will ship with Android 2.3 Gingerbread (assuming 3.0 is Honeycomb), and will be available on multiple carriers.

Meanwhile, a quote from Google CEO Eric Schmidt from back in July may suggest there will be no Nexus One successor at all:

“The idea a year and a half ago was to do the Nexus One to try to move the phone platform hardware business forward. It clearly did. It was so successful, we didn’t have to do a second one.”

Of course, he goes on to say that the Nexus One’s sudden sunset was a shining example of Google’s “nimbleness” — and since the quote is from nearly four months ago, there’s little reason to doubt that the company could’ve easily done a 180 since then, particularly since we’re sure they’d like to have a clean, skin-free, and possibly carrier-free device to showcase Gingerbread. At any rate, time’s running out to get a product advertised and available in time to catch holiday buyers… so this’ll all have to shake out pretty quickly.

Update: Gizmodo says “a friend of [theirs] got to play with it,” and they describe it as basically a Samsung Galaxy S with a front-facing camera and a stock build of Gingerbread that’s still “really buggy.” Is that really what you want to bring to the table as your Gingerbread flagship, Google?

Nexus Two does (or doesn’t) exist, is (or isn’t) being released this year originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 28 Oct 2010 13:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A bumper crop of circumstantial evidence surrounding the Android-based PlayStation Phone is starting to come together today — when it rains, it pours, as they say — and one particularly interesting thread suggests that the ecosystem surrounding the device might be called “Z-System.” An astute tipster notes that the term appears in the upper left of one of our shots, which maps to a domain — z-system.com, naturally — that’s owned by Sony Ericsson. Turns out the company also holds trademarks for Z-System in the US and Benelux trademark offices (among others, presumably) that were filed (and approved) this year, and the filing category includes “software for interacting or playing with electronic or video games,” not hardware, so that strongly suggests we’re looking at a platform here. We suppose it’s possible that this specific device will be called Z-System, but we’re going to float the theory that its actually underlying gaming platform that’ll bear that name — possibly a premium game store and set of software libraries that together will earn a device the Z-System badge. As we already saw with the BlackPad / SurfBook / PlayBook fiasco, trademarks don’t mean much until a device is actually announced — but it’s something to keep an eye on.

[Thanks, Andrew]

Sony Ericsson Z-System: the PlayStation Phone’s gaming platform? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 27 Oct 2010 18:26:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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