Hasta La Gadget!

Some two years after its release, there are still plenty of people who’ll swear up and down that the E71 is the finest phone Nokia has ever produced — and for good reason. As a platform, S60 was the product of a simpler time when the smartphone market was dominated not by touchscreens, but by numeric keypads, and the E71 was arguably the last of a string of bona fide successes that Nokia enjoyed in the platform’s heyday alongside pioneering handsets like the N82 and N95. Thing is, the E71 was different than those other models in a very important way: it was elegant. Historically, Nokias have typically favored function over form and saved the highest-quality materials for the Vertu line, but the E71 bucked that trend — it was slim, sexy, chock-full of metal, and curved in all the right places. In fact, to this day, it remains one of the best-looking, best-feeling smartphones ever made.

Customers (and reviewers) made their love for the E71 clear, and Nokia sought to recapture the glory with the introduction of the refined, upgraded E72. For Americans, of course, the biggest problem with the E72 was that you couldn’t buy it from a carrier — and unlike the E71, it never got much traction as an unlocked purchase. That’s where the E73 Mode comes into play, a mildly reworked version of the E72 with T-Mobile branding and, of course, support for 3G on T-Mobile’s AWS bands. Put bluntly, though, this is still just a warmed-over E71 — and in 2010, is there a market for that? Let’s have a look.

Continue reading Nokia E73 Mode review

Nokia E73 Mode review originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 14 Jun 2010 09:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Say what you will about Nokia’s software, there’s no faulting the E70-series of QWERTY candybars, which marry delectable keyboards with thin, classy, and surprisingly rugged design — and of course top it off with an almost-just-too-small screen. The latest of these is the new Nokia E73 Mode for T-Mobile US (that’s right, a Nokia phone on a US carrier!), which will start shipping on June 16th. The S60 handset has a 5 megapixel camera with flash and autofocus, WiFi, free turn by turn Ovi Maps, and not much more to speak of to set it apart from its predecessors, which is a good or bad thing depending upon what you want out of a phone. The best news, however, is that it’s retailing for $69.99 on a two year contract. PR is after the break.

Continue reading Nokia E73 Mode brings a familiar form factor to T-Mobile US on the cheap

Nokia E73 Mode brings a familiar form factor to T-Mobile US on the cheap originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 03 Jun 2010 09:15:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Don’t look for any crazy Android hardware here, but these three dumbphones are more notable than you might think: they mark the first time LG has hooked up with T-Mobile USA, believe it or not. The Sentio (pictured left) is the most interesting of the trio, featuring a 3-inch touchscreen, 3 megapixel cam with video capture, and support for visual voicemail. The dLite flip (middle) offers a nifty concealed LED array upfront — a feature you see occasionally on Japanese and domestic Korean handsets, but rarely on American models — along with a 2.8-inch display and a pair of color choices (“bubblegum” and “electric blue”). Both the Sentio and dLite also feature T-Mobile’s Social Buzz app for aggregating social network status updates, a helpful feature that’s quickly becoming the norm in this class of device. Finally, you’ve got the GS170 flip — a phone so basic that LG apparently didn’t deem it worthy of a proper name — offering a VGA cam, Bluetooth 2.1, and “large visible keys.” All three phones will be available this Summer for yet-to-be-disclosed prices. Follow the break for LG’s press release.

Continue reading LG kicks off T-Mobile relationship with Sentio, dLite, and GS170

LG kicks off T-Mobile relationship with Sentio, dLite, and GS170 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Jun 2010 07:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Remember the good ol’ days when companies were honest to their customers? Aw, who are we kidding — those days never actually existed, so it’s good to see Samsung carrying on the time-honored tradition of playing the CYA game by belting out a bald-faced lie or two. So the Behold II for T-Mobile USA has been the subject of some serious buzz the past few days as buyers have grown weary of the lack of new builds, all while the Android world has passed them by with not one, not two, not three, but four major updates. Samsung Mobile finally broke the silence today on a forum — good on them — saying that there’s a Donut update in the works featuring “Swype, an improved Media Player, updated core Android applications and improved Bluetooth capabilities.”

That’s all well and good, but Samsung goes on to say that “the Behold II is not upgradeable beyond Android 1.6” — and we’ve got a serious problem with that wording. We know (and Samsung knows) damn well that they could upgrade the Behold II beyond Android 1.6, considering that the community has managed to shoehorn even Froyo onto prehistoric devices like the Dream; rather, Samsung chooses not to upgrade it beyond Android 1.6. That’s a business decision that Samsung has to make, and far be it from us to try to push Sammy into continuing to sink cash into a phone that didn’t sell very well — but the least these guys could do is be honest, face the music, and tell us that’s what’s going on rather than insulting our collective intelligence and insisting that there’s some cosmic force preventing Eclair or Froyo from loading onto a phone that was just released a few months ago. Seriously though, Sammy — thanks for the Donut, we guess.

Update: We’ve now received Samsung’s official response independently and have it for you after the break.

Continue reading Samsung planning Android 1.6 update for Behold II — but that’s it

Samsung planning Android 1.6 update for Behold II — but that’s it originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 May 2010 01:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Alright, you can go ahead and book up your June 2nd with other plans, because we’ve just heard straight from T-Mobile that the Garminfone has been confirmed for a June 9 launch “at select T-Mobile retail stores, select authorized dealers, and online” for the same $199.99 after $50 mail-in rebate on contract that we’d already known. We’ll admit, we’d secretly been hoping that T-Mobile would’ve wowed everyone and dropped the launch price by $50 or $100 considering its midrange specs and the fact that you’ll have to drop an astounding $250 in-store to take the thing home, but it’s not to be; in a few months, perhaps?

T-Mobile Garminfone confirmed for June 9 launch, still a whopping $200 after rebate originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 26 May 2010 16:32:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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