Hasta La Gadget!

Time for a quick memory check: remember the WP7 slider that Dell announced some months ago? That’s right, it’s the Venue Pro — the one that’s been struggling to meet demand in the US due to some mysterious reworking. Well, here’s some good news for the folks on the other side of the pond: starting today, Dell’s UK store is taking orders for this unlocked slider for a hefty £459 ($745), and the first deliveries are expected to arrive in 10 days. Man, these wicked people from Round Rock sure love making us wait, but better late than never, right?

Update: We’ve been informed by our friends over at BestBoyZ that Germany’s also getting the Venue Pro today for around €534.

Continue reading Dell Venue Pro arrives in the UK at long last: £459 off contract, shipping in 10 days (update: Germany also)

Dell Venue Pro arrives in the UK at long last: £459 off contract, shipping in 10 days (update: Germany also) originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Feb 2011 11:01:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In search for feedback on its momentous decision to dump Symbian in favor of Windows Phone, Nokia has put up the above poll on its Conversations website canvassing opinions about what users anticipate most out of the new deal. There’s no consensus choice, with the equivocation of reactions being underlined by the fact that the “Other” option was the modal response, however of the given categories, a UI refresh and Xbox-related gaming boons turned out to be most important. No surprises there, Symbian’s touchscreen UI shortcomings are well known about while the Xbox tie-up has been one of Microsoft’s big selling points for Windows Phone 7 since its start. We’d just ask Nokia to be quick about delivering on these things — spending too long in anticipation mode won’t be good for our health.

Windows Phone’s new UI and Xbox games are most exciting aspects of Microsoft deal, says Nokia poll originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 26 Feb 2011 09:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Hey, look, at this point, we just want ourselves some good, old-fashioned copy and paste — but we’ll give Microsoft some credit for looking a year (or two, or ten) beyond that watermark at what could be coming down the pike for human-machine interaction — and specifically, how phones could play a role. In a presentation and promotional video pulled together this week, Microsoft Research boss Craig Mundie shows how you could tilt your smartphone to control a bubbly, colorful look into your personal life on your desktop machine and how you could snap a photo and then drop the handset onto a Surface for instant transfer (perhaps a bit like HP’s Touch to Share), among other gems. Of course, this is all pure research at this point — it’s any guess whether these comments could make the jump to production, and if so, when — but it’s fun to watch. Follow the break for video.

[Thanks, Jake]

Continue reading Microsoft Research teases Windows Phones controlling Surfaces and crazy desktop UIs

Microsoft Research teases Windows Phones controlling Surfaces and crazy desktop UIs originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 25 Feb 2011 04:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Redmond is opening up and offering a few facts, stats, and tips around its first update to Windows Phone 7 — an update that didn’t go smoothly for everyone — and it sounds like there are at least three distinct failure modes, two of which are pretty simple to fix. The company figures that somewhere around 10 percent of users attempting the upgrade encountered a problem, but of those, “nearly half” failed because they lacked a proper internet connection or enough disk space (turns out the update process takes a backup of the phone’s contents just in case something goes horribly awry). Most of the remainder may have been swept up in the issue affecting “a small number” of Samsung devices, an issue that the company says it’s working to fix as quickly as possible — and in the meantime, they’ve turned the update off for those models.

Put simply, when you get prompted to install the update, Microsoft simply recommends that you’ve got plenty of hard drive space on your PC (you can’t do this one over the air) and a solid connection to the interwebs; some 90 percent succeeded in installing the new code, which isn’t too shabby considering this is the very first update to the platform they’ve attempted so far. Let’s just hope that brick rate is down to zero by the time the good stuff comes, right?

Microsoft details Windows Phone 7 update problem, ‘small number’ of Samsungs affected originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Feb 2011 23:41:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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How many mobile platforms can you think of that integrate “with your home game console, like Xbox?” Unless we’re completely spacing something out, the answer is one: Windows Phone 7. We’d already figured the Thursday announcement that Sprint has been teasing this week on Twitter — and that little Arrive leak all but confirmed it anyhow — but if you needed any more evidence that the phone formerly known as the HTC 7 Pro would be formally announced in CDMA guise this week, here you have it. We’ll know more tomorrow, hopefully.

Latest Sprint teaser tweet all but confirms February 24th announcement is for Windows Phone 7 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Feb 2011 13:36:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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