Hasta La Gadget!

It’s only been a few weeks since the Optimus 2X crossed the desk of our European review bureau as the first known dual-core smartphone in the universe. Now LG’s wunderkind has made its way across the pond and landed on US soil to be reborn as the G2x on T-Mobile. While the hardware remains the same elegant Tegra 2-infused slab of glass, metal and plastic, the software has been liberated from the shackles of LG’s UI customizations into a serving of vanilla Froyo — the exact same approach T-Mobile took when it introduced the Desire Z as the G2 without HTC’s custom Sense skin last fall. Unlike previous G-series phones, the G2x ditches the physical keyboard for a 4-inch WVGA display with HDMI output and an 8 megapixel camera with 1080p video capture. Beyond the transition from messaging-centric device to multimedia powerhouse, what else is different about the hardware? Is plain Android a vast improvement over the lackluster software that shipped on the Optimus 2X? How does the G2x fare against T-Mobile’s current flagship, the Samsung Galaxy S 4G? Find out in our full review after the break.

Continue reading T-Mobile G2x review

T-Mobile G2x review originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 20 Apr 2011 11:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The world’s love affair with tablets may have been bubbling along under the surface for a while, but it really got started in earnest during CES 2010. Back in those wild days, you could see 15-inch jumbo screens, TV tuners, and even hybrid pseudo-laptops stalking the tablet area of your favorite trade show. ASUS was there too, of course, though it still believed in the upstart smartbook category — a modernized take on the netbook that relied on an ARM CPU and a mobile OS to extract more battery life out of a lighter, thinner device — and was busy showing off a seductively slim prototype of just such a machine. Alas, nothing came of that Neo concept, most likely because it was relying on Android 1.6 and a Tegra 2 system-on-chip that was then still months away from hitting the market.

Today, however, is a different day. The 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 is finally being produced in volume, Google has evolved Android to version 3.0, specifically targeting higher-resolution displays, and ASUS has abandoned the idea that a keyboard is crucial to mobile computing. No, wait, that last bit’s still there. The Eee Pad Transformer is a 10.1-inch Honeycomb tablet very much in keeping with the current trend, but it also has an optional keyboard dock that turns it into a, you guessed it, instant smartbook. So, does that mean you’ll get two devices in one or has ASUS been overly ambitious and compromised too much? We got to grips with the £380 16GB WiFi-only model and its keyboard buddy (£430 when bought as a pair) in an effort to find out. Answers await just past the break.

Continue reading ASUS Eee Pad Transformer (UK edition) review

ASUS Eee Pad Transformer (UK edition) review originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Apr 2011 14:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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ASUS Eee Pad Slider making the jump from Tegra 2 to Atom Z670? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 17 Apr 2011 18:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Feel free to ingest this with a healthy helping of salt for now, but if a spate of Newegg product listings are to be believed, Toshiba’s heretofore unnamed Honeycomb tablet will boast a tremendously unflattering moniker: ANT. Priced at $449.99, $499.99 and $579.99, the Tegra 2-powered slate is seemingly dubbed ANT-100, ANT-102 and ANT-104. Each one includes Android 3.0, a 10.1-inch panel (1280 x 800) and NVIDIA silicon, with the extra dollars on the latter two changing that 8GB of internal storage to 16GB or 32GB. There’s still no hard release date promised, but surely the shot above is proof that the day is near, right? Right?

Toshiba’s Honeycomb tablet to be dubbed ANT, start at $450? originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 16 Apr 2011 00:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We got to feeling a bit curious about how exactly HTC’s latest Android superphone, the Sensation 4G, stacks up against its fellow dual-core competition, so we did what every geek does in such situations, we compiled a chart. Included in this list are the finest and brightest Android handsets from each of the major manufacturers that have gone dual-core so far: the Galaxy S II, the Atrix 4G, the Optimus 2X / G2X, and HTC’s own EVO 3D. As it turns out, there are quite a few commonalities among these phones (besides the benchmark-crushing performance). They all boast screens of either 4 or 4.3 inches in size, the minimum amount of RAM among them is 512MB, the smallest battery is 1500mAh, and yes, they all have front-facing video cameras. Basically, it’s the future of smartphones, reduced to a stat sheet. As such, it must also come with the warning that specs aren’t everything, and user experience will most often depend on the software available on each device and on the preferences of the human holding it. With that proviso fully digested, join us after the break for the data.

Continue reading HTC Sensation versus the rest of the dual-core world: smartphone spec sheet smackdown

HTC Sensation versus the rest of the dual-core world: smartphone spec sheet smackdown originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Apr 2011 09:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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