Hasta La Gadget!

If you wade through LG’s alphabet soup of upcoming WinPho 7 goodies, you might recall that several of them seem to be headed directly for AT&T later this year. Evidence for one of them in particular — the C900 landscape slider — just got a little stronger this evening on news that a phone by the very same model code has just been hooked up with FCC approval in the past few hours. Indeed, a quick look at the SAR report shows that we’ve got WCDMA bands II and V here, which means it’ll work like a champ on AT&T; unfortunately LG is (and always has been) particularly awesome at making its ID label documents useless for identifying phones, so there isn’t much other evidence to go on from this. Needless to say, though, we’re convinced it’s going to be a very interesting fourth quarter of the year for the Microsoft camp.

LG’s C900 Windows Phone 7 handset for AT&T gets FCC approval originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 23:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In case you needed any more evidence that AT&T is going all-in with Windows Phone 7, take a gander at this little beast, a phone known only as the HTC T8788 at this point (rest assured, you’ll get a snappy, memorable, trademarkable name by the time it’s on shelves). Though it’s a landscape slider, it doesn’t slide to reveal what you’d normally expect — a keyboard, that is. Instead, you get a speaker, an unusual (though not unprecedented) concept that should make this a decent media device… and the kickstand around back should help with that, too. We’d argue that this is the prettiest WinPho 7-powered device we’ve seen so far — not surprising, considering HTC’s reputation — though we’re sure plenty of folks would prefer the QWERTY. Check another shot in the gallery below!

Exclusive: HTC’s Windows Phone 7-equipped T8788 breaks cover for AT&T originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 24 Aug 2010 14:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Microsoft’s held the line since its February announce that Windows Phone 7 is going to be ready in time for the holidays this year — and from what we’ve seen recently, we believe it — so today they’re announcing another small step in the process by finalizing the dev tools that first bowed at MIX in March. Specifically, the gold build will be hitting streets on September 16, just a little under a month from today, while the Marketplace will start accepting apps sometime in early October. Now, if you want to throw a little conjecture at this and make a few assumptions along the way, you could reasonably argue that Microsoft wants a healthy catalog of apps available for purchase on launch day one and that it’ll probably take them at least a week or two to approve those first titles — which means that if everything goes perfectly, we could theoretically see retail hardware on shelves by the end of October. Again, that’s purely conjecture on our part, but it’s pretty juicy to think that we could be playing with a Cetus in around two months’ time, isn’t it?

Windows Phone 7 dev tools go gold September 16, Marketplace taking submissions in October originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 23 Aug 2010 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’re prepping for a Windows Phone 7 purchase later this year and the Cetus doesn’t really do it for you, we understand — not everyone can live without a physical keyboard, and devices like the Touch Pro2 have gotten us used to the idea that Windows Mobile and great QWERTY go hand-in-hand. To that end, we present to you the LG C900, a rounded landscape slider equipped with a four-row keyboard and a simplified two-button capacitive layout beneath the screen paired with a chrome Windows key. Notably, this is the first time we’ve seen carrier branding on Windows Phone 7’s home screen in the wild — you can see AT&T’s logo prominently displayed as a tile in one of the pictures in the gallery after the break. We’re not sure we’re digging the matte plasticky look up front, but to each his own, we suppose.

Exclusive: LG C900 for AT&T has Windows Phone 7, shows off a little carrier branding originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Aug 2010 13:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Better bring an umbrella if you’re going out, because the Windows Phone 7 hardware leaks are really starting to rain down. We’ve so far peeked pre-release handsets from ASUS, HTC (twice), and LG, and now Samsung is pitching in with what looks like a device fated to dance on retail shelves. Details are, as usual, scarce on the ground, but the angular aesthetics suggest it isn’t the AT&T-bound Cetus that recently graced the FCC. Taken together with the physical separation of the Windows-branded Start key, however, they do rather resemble what we’ve seen on ASUS’ hardware, which might suggest that there is some undercurrent of cohesive body design that Microsoft is pushing out to its hardware partners. Or maybe we’re just grasping at straws to kill the time until this OS finally launches. One more pic after the break.

Continue reading Windows Phone 7 leak mania continues with new Samsung prototype

Windows Phone 7 leak mania continues with new Samsung prototype originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 13 Aug 2010 11:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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