Hasta La Gadget!

The original Droid made a powerful statement. Actually, make that statements, plural: for Motorola, it was the largest single affirmation that it was going all-in with Android (after having already released the far less memorable midrange CLIQ on T-Mobile) and that it could play in the very highest rungs of the smartphone elite. For Verizon, the Droid was the carrier’s very first Android device, period — announced to great fanfare in collaboration with Eric Schmidt and crew — serving as a pretty spectacular exit from the Windows Mobile / BlackBerry doldrums that the carrier’s smartphone lineup had historically suffered. By almost any measure, the phone went on to serve its purpose; it let customers (and potential customers) know that Verizon could release a “cool” phone, and they responded. The Droid’s an unqualified success. Today, Verizon’s involvement in Android has never been greater, and Motorola — by all appearances, anyway — seems to be on its way back from the brink.

Time stops for no phone, though, and we’re now halfway through 2010. Motorola’s success as a competitive phone manufacturer is ultimately going to depend not on its ability to produce a single hit, but to produce a never-ending string of hits, each better than the one before it. It’s a tall order — and that’s exactly where the Droid X comes into play. Featuring a 4.3-inch WVGA display, 8 megapixel camera with 720p video capture, a reworked user interface, and a significantly improved processor, this phone apes the first Droid in at least one critical aspect: its ability to immediately steal the spotlight from anything else in Verizon’s lineup. Specs don’t tell the whole story, though, so let’s dig in and see what this beast is all about.

Continue reading Motorola Droid X review

Motorola Droid X review originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 01 Jul 2010 12:40:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung’s US team held a swanky event in NYC this evening to launch all four of its new US-spec Galaxy S phones in style. If you haven’t been brought up to speed on Samsung’s stateside Android invasion, the Captivate is headed to AT&T, the Fascinate to Verizon, the Epic 4G to Sprint and the Vibrant to T-Mobile. Each of the phones have 4-inch Super AMOLED screens, 1GHz Hummingbird Cortex A8 CPUs, and cams that can capture 720p video. We’ve already got detailed hands on impressions of the Captivate and Epic 4G, but stay tuned for Fascinate and Vibrant previews tonight. In the meantime, check out the family all together in the pictures in the gallery below.

Samsung’s American Galaxy S phones pose for family portrait originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:18:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Stop us if you’ve heard this one before: Bloomberg says Verizon will get the iPhone… sometime in January. Yep, it’s another fuzzy rumor sourced from “two people familiar with the plans,” and while we really do believe Big Red will eventually get the iPhone in our lifetimes, at this point we’re beyond cynical about pieces like this — chatter about a Verizon iPhone now regularly reaches deafening levels before crashing down in yet another cloud of AT&T-exclusive dust. However, if you must insist on living this impossible dream, Bloomy’s latest rumor does at least line up with the piece from the Wall Street Journal in March claiming that CDMA iPhone would begin production in September, giving Apple plenty of time to ramp up for a January launch.

Of course, we have to wonder if it’s the smartest move to announce the hotly-anticipated Verizon iPhone right after the holiday buying season, and we can’t imagine all those iPhone 4 buyers who were just enticed into signing new two-year AT&T contracts are going to be happy to discover they could have waited and escaped the Blue, but we’ll have to wait and see — Apple just told us that they “don’t comment on rumors and speculation” when we pinged them and asked for comment. Fingers crossed, we suppose.

Verizon iPhone in January, claims Bloomberg originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 29 Jun 2010 15:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Verizon Wireless has quietly cut the price of both of Microsoft’s Kin phones, possibly to spur sales.

Verizon has now priced the Kin One at $29.99 after a $100 discount and agreeing to a two-year contract. The Kin Two, meanwhile, is now $49.99. Previously, the Kin One and Kin Two were priced at $49.99 and $99.99, respectively.

Microsoft launched the Kin One and Kin Two this past May, not as social networking phones, but as “underpowered smartphones,” in the words of the PCMag.com review. Both phones mark Microsoft’s first foray into the phone hardware arena, where far more established players such as Motorola and HTC have held sway.

Still, the phones are uniquely designed, boxy sliders designed to put one’s social ephemera right up front, before more traditional indicators such as the time, or even weather.

Verizon spokeswoman Brenda Raney told Bloomberg that the new
pricing is part of a broader set of price reductions and that it is
“comfortable” with the way the Kin is being accepted.

Scoring the top four US carriers plus a top-tier regional with a single family of smartphones in one fell swoop is a major achievement for any manufacturer — a feat memorably pulled off by the HTC Touch Pro2 — so you can officially color us impressed now that Samsung has unveiled the Fascinate for Verizon plus an unnamed device for US Cellular, both variants of the Galaxy S (generic version pictured). As a refresher, this is the same phone family coming to Sprint as the Epic 4G, T-Mobile as the Vibrant, and AT&T as the Captivate, so these guys have a bit of an Android coup on their hands. Like the others (Epic 4G notably excepted), the Fascinate is a non-keyboard Android slate and features the usual 4-inch Super AMOLED display, 1GHz Hummingbird silicon, and 5 megapixel camera with 720p video recording; US Cellular’s phone looks to be roughly the same thing, though it seems they’ve yet to choose a retail name for it. Both will be available on an unannounced date for an unannounced price — but if the market is any indication, $199.99 on contract seems like a good bet. More on these models as we have it.

Verizon ropes in Samsung Fascinate, US Cellular gets a Galaxy S too originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Jun 2010 00:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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