Hasta La Gadget!

LG’s Ally might be scratching at the boring end of the Android landscape right now, but LG certainly isn’t stopping with one smartphone on the market in 2010. LG stated on Wednesday that it’s pouring some mega cash on R&D and marketing to play catch up, and it plans to release a whopping 10 smartphones by the end of the year, projecting sales of 5 million units in that time. The low-end Optimus One kicks things off in September with a whopping 120 carriers globally, but LG also said it has a dual-core Tegra based handset in the works for the performance minded. It’s unclear if this is a replacement chip for the supposedly Snapdragon LU2300 Optimus Q (pictured) or the innards for another handset entirely, but 10 phones is a big quota to fill (at least for anyone who isn’t LG or Samsung), so hopefully it’s the latter. Finally, LG reiterated that it’s working on a tablet for Q4. “It’s going to be surprisingly productive,” said LG’s Chang Ma, attempting to set it apart from the iPad in that regard. So, LG’s for-serious about Android, but is it too late? According to Mr. Ma, who may or may not have slowly donning a pair of really hip sunglasses at the moment, “The race hasn’t started yet.”

LG talks up Optimus smartphone line: 10 devices by year end, NVIDIA’s Tegra for high-end model, tablet will be ‘productive’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 19 Aug 2010 08:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Practically everything we’ve heard — both officially and through tipsters — lines up with information coming out of Phone Arena this week detailing a truly Google-heavy upcoming Fall and Winter release schedule for our friends at Big Red. Starting next month, it seems that we’ll see a global version of the just-launched Droid 2, possibly with a white option (though it seems this could also be the R2-D2 model), and the Motorola WX455 we’d leaked has been named “Citrus” and will (as you probably could’ve guessed) target the low end of the market and the young’uns who are looking for an affordable way to get into Android; as WWAN-enabled laptops go, they’ll be picking up the Dell Vostro V13 and the HP Pavilion DM1.

Follow the break for the rest of the action!

[Thanks, Steven C.]

Continue reading Verizon’s remaining 2010 roadmap to be an Android-fest of phones and tablets?

Verizon’s remaining 2010 roadmap to be an Android-fest of phones and tablets? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Aug 2010 16:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Dell’s Android-powered Streak is an intriguing device. Billed as a tablet but priced and sold like a phone, the Streak has more in common with the HTC Evo and Droid X than it does with the iPad.

Teardown specialists iFixit decided to drill into the Streak to see what its internals look like.

Dell has designed the device so that a mechanical engineering degree is not required for a successful disassembly, says iFixit, which was able to reverse engineer the assembly process within minutes.

The Streak’s 5-inch LCD screen has a layer called ‘Gorilla Glass’ on top that is scratch resistant and durable. The LCD is bonded to the front panel glass to increase the strength of the device, as well as the sensitivity of the capacitive touch panel. But that is also likely to increase the cost of fixing the device if you break just the glass.

The front panel’s construction means the device should be able to withstand drops from above waist height, says iFixit.

The 1530 mAh battery on the Streak is easily replaceable and is covered with a sheet of steel, rather than plastic, to decrease its overall thickness.

Streak has a second 2 GB microSD card near the top of the motherboard that holds system and applications files.

The “C”-shaped motherboard of the device comes out easily after disconnecting some cables, says iFixit, and all components are attached to this motherboard.

Overall, the Streak rates high for the ease with which its battery can be replaced and the use of standard connectors for the cables.

But the rear panel feels cheap, says iFixit, and deforms easily. That’s disappointing for a device that costs nearly $600.

Story continues.

We’ve been waiting on pins and needles for Google to announce some official Android tablet plans for so long we’d almost forgotten about Mountain View’s other operating system — but from what we’re hearing, Chrome OS is about to jump to center stage with a tablet debut on Verizon just before the holidays. Our friends at Download Squad are told by a reliable tipster that HTC is building a Tegra 2-based Chrome OS tablet for Google with a 1280 x 720 multitouch display, 2GB of RAM, at least 32GB of storage with the possibility of expansion, GPS, a webcam, and the usual wireless connectivity, including a 3G radio. Launch is pegged for Black Friday on November 26, and apparently the plan is to offer the device for extremely cheap or free on subsidy, which makes sense — it is just a browser, after all, and “free” sounds mighty nice compared to the iPad’s $499 entry point. (Of course, you’ll undoubtedly be tied to a Verizon contract, but we’ll just let that slide for now.) We’ll see how much of this comes true in the next few months — we’re certainly intrigued.

Update: The author of the Download Squad post, Lee Matthews, apparently fabricated all these specs — in comments, he confirms that they’re “pure speculation,” and this his source only provided the launch date and Verizon partnership. That part certainly seems plausible, but we wouldn’t necessarily believe any of this — it’s pretty suspect to just make things up.

Update 2: One of our own actually proven tipsters just hit us to say this whole thing — including launch date — sounds suspect, and that ARM-based Chrome OS tablets won’t hit until late 2011 at least. It’ll be Atom-based netbooks until then, we’re told. That lines up with everything else we’ve ever heard from Google and its partners, so we’re calling this entirely bunk until we actually see some hardware.

Chrome OS tablet coming from Google and Verizon on Black Friday? (update: probably not) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 18 Aug 2010 11:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The 7-inch iPad rumors are suddenly hot and heavy. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen a series of reports claiming that Apple was working on a smaller iPad (or bigger iPod touch?) set for release between the end of 2010 or early 2011. A DigiTimes piece, sourcing its own “analyst,” claimed that the device would be making a jump to the Cortex A9 processor core, 512MB of RAM like the iPhone 4, and a 1,024 x 768 pixel IPS panel — the same resolution as the 9.7-inch iPad giving the new model a better pixel density. Now we’ve got Taiwan’s Economic Daily News saying that Chi Mei will join LG in supplying the new 7-inch IPS panels with AUO joining Sintek to provide the digitizer. EDN also claims that either Compal or Pegatron may join Foxconn in the assembly. Remember, even with hints of a new iPad model in Apple’s own code this is all just rumor for now. Besides, we’re still waiting for those Xbox 360 Blu-ray drives that the Economic Daily News assured us were coming in Q3 of 2008.

7-inch iPad tattle churns through Taiwanese rumor mills originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 17 Aug 2010 07:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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