Garmin-ASUS nuvifone M20 and G60 shipping to Singapore in August

After a patently absurd amount of delays, it actually feels like the Garmin-ASUS nüvifone tandem is approaching a proper launch. Whether or not anyone actually cares anymore, however, remains to be seen. Across the sea over in Malaysia, one particularly lucky soul seems to have stumbled upon both the Linux-based nüvifone G60 and the WinMo-powered nüvifone M20, and he claims that both handsets will be shipping en masse to the region “within 30 days.” Best of all, that totally jibes with what we’ve heard directly from Garmin today, which has informed us that the smartphone will be in Singaporean stores in August, with a few other Asian nations seeing it in late July. Now, if only North Americans could look forward to the same…

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Garmin-ASUS nuvifone M20 and G60 shipping to Singapore in August originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 17 Jul 2009 21:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Windows Marketplace taking app submissions on July 27, coming to WinMo 6.0 and 6.1 later this year

Windows Mobile devs should start dotting their I’s and crossing their T’s, because Microsoft’s going to be ready to take a good, hard look at their latest and greatest apps come the 27th of this month when the company finally swings open the doors to the submission processes for inclusion in the Windows Marketplace. The announcement has been made at Microsoft’s Worldwide Partner Conference this week as it gears up for an onslaught of devices running WinMo 6.5 at retail later this year, though the retail channel might not be where much of the action lies; unlike the Apple App Store, the Android Market, Palm’s App Catalog and others, Microsoft is putting major emphasis on a segment of Windows Marketplace it’s calling the Business Center where corporate-focused apps and utilities will have a place to live. Boring, yes — but probably also very profitable in the business fleet market segment where WinMo tends to thrive.

Though the company had previously indicated that Windows Marketplace would be a 6.5 exclusive, we’ve got great news for legacy device owners who don’t expect to get an upgrade: Microsoft has also announced today that the Marketplace will be coming to WinMo 6.0 and 6.1 before the year’s out. Considering that 6.5 won’t be hitting the street until fall, that’s not too bad of a wait; now all it needs is a rich catalog of great software to go along with the great hardware some of its partners are producing, right?

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Windows Marketplace taking app submissions on July 27, coming to WinMo 6.0 and 6.1 later this year originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Jul 2009 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Verizon to its smartphones: thou shalt have no other app store before mine

Verizon’s getting very keen on entering the app store industry, but not without some rough decrees to its smartphone partners. According to GigaOm, VP Partner Management Ryan Hughes said in an interview Friday that its VZW-branded shop will house content from all the major platforms under one roof, with purchases being billed through the customer’s Verizon account and not requiring a separate signup / credit card entry. Convenient for consumers, and devs are also being promised a more streamlined approval process and a “competitive” revenue-sharing program, but here’s where things take a turn for the worse: according to Hughes, non-VZW app stores like BlackBerry App World or Windows Mobile Marketplace won’t be bundled with the smartphones out of the box, meaning consumers will have to take the initiative to download those portals for themselves. An incredibly jerk move, and an extra burden on developers who’ll be having to submit two approval applications if they want inclusion on Verizon’s own store. Of course, that large subscriber base is the reason it can get away with it, but let’s hope we hear some better justifications other than “because we can” when the full details are rolled out at the Verizon Developer Community Conference on July 28th.

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Verizon to its smartphones: thou shalt have no other app store before mine originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Jul 2009 20:23:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Entelligence: Why the pen isn’t mightier than the keyboard

Entelligence is a column by technology strategist and author Michael Gartenberg, a man whose desire for a delicious cup of coffee and a quality New York bagel is dwarfed only by his passion for tech. In these articles, he’ll explore where our industry is and where it’s going — on both micro and macro levels — with the unique wit and insight only he can provide.

When it comes to futuristic concepts, few ideas have captured the imagination like pen-based computing. The idea of doing away with a cumbersome keyboard for navigating and entering information has been a Holy Grail ever since Captain Kirk signed his first digital clipboard in space, but here in our century the concept has met with little success. Most recently, Microsoft’s Tablet PC operating system has failed to take the world by storm, and lots of platforms, from the Momenta PC and Pen Windows, to the Newton and the PalmPilot, have come and gone while failing to shift the masses from their keyboards. Even smart phones, led by the iPhone, have shifted from being poster children for pen-based platforms to adopting finger touch and virtual keyboards for text entry.

Continue reading Entelligence: Why the pen isn’t mightier than the keyboard

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Entelligence: Why the pen isn’t mightier than the keyboard originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 13 Jul 2009 13:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Video: Toshiba TG01 gets UK launch, we handle it again

It may have already been teased, poked and prodded, but the TG01 from Toshiba still insisted on making a big splash on its arrival to the UK and we were only too happy to oblige and join in on its launch event in London. As you should know by now, this is Toshiba’s most significant attempt to date at penetrating the consumer smartphone market, and it’s coming equipped with a battering ram named Snapdragon. Head over to Engadget Mobile for the juicy details on the UI, construction and general feel, as well as a neat stash of images and videos of the phone in action.

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Video: Toshiba TG01 gets UK launch, we handle it again originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Jul 2009 08:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Toshiba’s TG01 outed on Orange UK

Well, well, there it is. The world’s first and only Snapdragon phone available for retail, Toshiba’s TG01, is up and dancing on Orange’s UK site with a “coming soon” badge. Soon meaning the July 9th London press event, presumably, where this 9.9-mm slate running WinMo on a 4.1-inch 800×480 pixel display should get a shove out the retail door. Yes, Windows Mobile 6.1, why do you ask?

[Via CoolSmartPhone]

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Toshiba’s TG01 outed on Orange UK originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 02 Jul 2009 06:41:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft’s “Pink” smartphone to be Microsoft-branded?

Ready for even more rumors about Windows Mobile 7 and Microsoft’s mysterious “Pink” smartphone project? Good, cause we’ve got a few — and the first is potentially huge. ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley says her best understanding of “Pink” is now that it’s a Microsoft-branded phone running a custom UI on top of Windows Mobile 7, developed by what’s left of the Danger team and targeted at the Sidekick market. Yep, Microsoft-branded — as in, the exact thing Microsoft has been denying for ages now. What’s more, Redmond wouldn’t be letting third parties use this new UI — Pink would be manufactured only by Sharp or Motorola, who’ve made Sidekicks in the past. It all makes sense, even if it does feel a bit like MS is knifing its partners in the back — companies like HTC and Samsung have been equally aggressive in layering their own UIs like TouchFLO 3D and TouchWiz on top of WinMo, but it’s another thing entirely to compete against Microsoft itself, especially now that AdWeek says Microsoft’s selected an agency to develop a Pink ad campaign. Yeah, things are starting to get a little wild — we haven’t even mentioned the open questions of whether the Zune HD is running Tegra because it’s based on Windows Mobile 7 Chassis 1, or whether Pink will launch on Verizon, or whether Zune will appear on other phones, or… you get the idea. Hey Microsoft — you want to clear any of this up by shipping some products?

Read – ZDNet
Read – AdWeek

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Microsoft’s “Pink” smartphone to be Microsoft-branded? originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 15:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Toshiba’s TG01 stepping out in London on July 9th

It’s already out in Japan and a few select countries in Europe, now Toshiba’s skinny TG01 is hitting London on Thursday, July 9th. Presumably the invite will be met with an official UK launch of Tosh’s deftly skinned Snapdragon handset with a Windows Mobile 6.1 core. Then again, it could be a lot of tech reporters eating mini triangular sandwiches slathered with pickle spread discussing the HTC Hero for four hours. We’ll let you know next week.

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Toshiba’s TG01 stepping out in London on July 9th originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 01 Jul 2009 07:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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NVIDIA Tegra smartphone due from a “top five” manufacturer before 2010?

NVIDIA Tegra smartphone due from a

If you want to get HD in your handheld, NVIDIA’s Tegra processor is the hot way to do it at the moment, and we’ve got reasonably concrete sounding rumors from disparate sources that a handset containing one of the chips is currently under development by a “top five” smartphone builder (we’re guessing it’s not Apple), and that it’ll be out sometime before the end of the year, selling at T-Mobile and AT&T for just $199. The details of the device beyond that are scant, with Android being a possibility but Windows Mobile looking more likely, and a continued pledge of battery life of rated for “days and days” of mobile multimedia. We like the sound of that.

Read – NVIDIA Tegra phone due from “big five” firm
Read – Rumor: NVIDIA Tegra phones in Q409?

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NVIDIA Tegra smartphone due from a “top five” manufacturer before 2010? originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 30 Jun 2009 06:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Windows Marketplace launching with 600 apps, or one bazillion times what the App Catalog has

So Microsoft France’s product manager for Windows Mobile, Audrey Zolghadr, is saying that the company’s upcoming Windows Marketplace launch will be accompanied by around 600 apps certified and available on day one. Depending on your perspective, that’s either ridiculously anemic — the iPhone’s App Store has a couple orders of magnitude more currently available, for example — or a veritable cornucopia. Though the Ovi Store has no shortage of “items” to buy, an overwhelming majority of those are currently wallpapers, ringtones, and the like, and Palm’s App Catalog launched with so few apps that many folks (we’re not naming names) literally had every app installed within a few minutes of buying the phone. At the end of the day, it’s all about signal-to-noise ratio; if Microsoft can deliver 600 apps and half of those are terrific, they’re on the right track — though at this point, we’re thinking the next battle in Smartphone Platform Wars doesn’t really kick off until WinMo 7 swings by anyway.

[Via PhoneArena and WMExperts]

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Windows Marketplace launching with 600 apps, or one bazillion times what the App Catalog has originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 28 Jun 2009 13:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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