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- Hands-Off Video Demo: The HTC Flyer Android Tablet
- Hands-On Gallery: The HTC Desire S, Wildfire S, and Incredible S
- Longphone Is Long: The Acer Iconia Smart
- Synaptics’ New Touchscreens Can Detect The Head Of A Pin
- HTC Announces The Desire S, Wildfire S, and Incredible S
- Meet HTC’s Facebook Phones: The ChaCha, and the Salsa
- HTC Announces Their First Android Tablet (And It’s Not On Honeycomb): The HTC Flyer
- Deloitte: Text Messaging Still Far More Popular Than Mobile Twitter, Other Social Networks
- Coming Soon: Kinect-Windows Phone 7 Mashups
- Windows Phone 7′s Copy & Paste Update Coming In First Two Weeks Of March
- Windows Phone 7 To Get Internet Explorer 9 and Third Party Multi-Tasking Later This Year
| Hands-Off Video Demo: The HTC Flyer Android Tablet Posted: 15 Feb 2011 03:29 AM PST There she is, folks: HTC’s brand new, all-aluminum Android 2.4 tablet, the Flyer. Alas, as is somewhat standard protocol with ultra-early hardware, HTC wouldn’t let us actually touch the thing. They were more then willing to give us a quick tour around the device, though! High fives to the lady at the end who decides the perfect place for her camera (holder of the Guinness’ Book’s record for Largest Camera On Earth) is directly in front of mine.
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| Hands-On Gallery: The HTC Desire S, Wildfire S, and Incredible S Posted: 15 Feb 2011 03:20 AM PST
Phew! Though the cat got let out of the bag a bit early (seriously guys, stop putting cats in bags. It’s a terrible way to keep a cat contained, and kind of cruel), HTC just announced a trio of new smartphones: the Desire S, the Wildfire S, and the Incredible S. We’re not going to pretend we got enough time with these devices to really weigh in on them with our first impressions — they were tied to the table with MASSIVE security clips (making it quite hard to get a real good feel for the hardware), and they were mobbed with people long before the announcement was even over. Anyone who really says much more than “The UI was pretty responsive!” and “Er, they felt like phones!” is making stuff up. With that said, we battled the crowd to bring back a bucket of pictures — check’em out after the jump.
The Desire S: The Wildfire S: What do you think? Any of these callin’ your name?
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| Longphone Is Long: The Acer Iconia Smart Posted: 15 Feb 2011 01:26 AM PST
The good news is it’s running Android 2.3 (with a slightly awkward, in my opinion, Acer skin over it) and it has powerful guts, plus a big 8-megapixel camera on the back and gyros inside for gaming. Still, though, I just can’t imagine using this thing. Just get a tablet!
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| Synaptics’ New Touchscreens Can Detect The Head Of A Pin Posted: 15 Feb 2011 01:03 AM PST
Could this be the tech behind your next handset’s killer features?
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| HTC Announces The Desire S, Wildfire S, and Incredible S Posted: 15 Feb 2011 12:04 AM PST
We’re camped outside of HTC’s event at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where a handful of broken embargoes have just spoiled the mood a bit. Fortunately, the leaked news is probably good enough to make up for it. HTC’s taken just about each one of their greatest phones — the Desire, the Wildfire, the Incredible — and given’em a refresh. The new names? The Desire S, the Wildfire S, and the — wait for it! — Incredible S! Update: Check out our hands on gallery of all three devices here! Desire S: Pictured above. Built using the same machining techniques as the unibody HTC Legend, the Desire S is sculpted out of a block of aluminum. It’s got a 1Ghz Snapdragon CPU (MSM8255), 5 megapixel camera, 1.1 GB of RAM, GPS, and Bluetooth 2.1 radio tucked behind a 3.7″ WVGA (480×800) Display.
Wildfire S: At just 10.13cm long and 5.94cm wide, the Wildfire S is one of HTC’s smallest phones yet. It’s got a 3.2″ HVGA Display, and a 5 megapixel camera around the back.
Incredible S: The beast of this batch. It’s got a 4″ WVGA Super LCD, 8 megapixel rear camera with dual flash, 1.3 megapixel front-facing camera with built-in video calling functionality (though we’re not sure which video chat tech they’re using), 1Ghz CPU, Bluetooth 2.1, and 768 MB of RAM. Oddly it’s only got 1.1 GB of internal storage — but, of course, there’s always the microSD slot. Update: Check out our hands on gallery of all three devices here!
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| Meet HTC’s Facebook Phones: The ChaCha, and the Salsa Posted: 14 Feb 2011 11:50 PM PST
Are you addicted to Facebook? (Or, as they say on the streets: are you hooked on the ‘book?) Has your inner urge to look at drunk pictures of your friends grown to the point that you need a phone with a one-touch, dedicated Facebook button? You might want to get help — or you could just get one of HTC’s two just-announced “social phones”: the ChaCha and the Salsa
The ChaCha: Pictured on left. Man, I can guess someone who’s going to be pretty annoyed with this name — way to mess with their search engine results for months, HTC. This one has 2.6″, 480×320 display, a 5-megapixel rear camera with LED Flash, VGA front-facing camera, and a full QWERTY keyboard built in. The candy bar design has an ever-so-subtle bend that puts the screen at a slightly forward angle, which HTC says makes it “easy to view and comfortable to type”. The Salsa: What goes better with the ChaCha than a bit of Salsa? This ones got a 3.4″ 480×320 display, a rear 5-megapixel camera, and a VGA front-facing camera. The main bullet point of both phones — or at least, the thing that HTC’s pushing the hardest — is definitely that whacky little Facebook button. It’s context sensitive, lighting up “whenever there is an opportunity to share content or updates through Facebook”. Tap it while looking at a photo, and you’ll be able to upload that photo immediately — tap it while you’re on a site, and you can post that site to your wall. Listening to music? Tap the button, and it’ll send out a status update letting your friends know what track you’re jamming. Expect these phones to hit Europe and Asia in Q2 of this year, and on AT&T here in the states at some point after that.
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| HTC Announces Their First Android Tablet (And It’s Not On Honeycomb): The HTC Flyer Posted: 14 Feb 2011 11:42 PM PST
Tablets, tablets, tablets, tablets. iPads! Touchpads! Playbooks! G-Slates! These days, it seems like you’re not one of the cool kids unless you’ve got your own tablet. As of this morning, HTC’s able to sit themselves at the cool table. In other words, HTC’s got themselves a tablet now: the HTC Flyer.
Here’s what we know so far, on the spec front:
So it’s pretty much in line with the specs we heard from supplier reports over the last couple months. Oh, and perhaps the oddest bullet point of all: It comes… with a stylus. But don’t panic! The stylus is mostly purposed for things like doodling, or for use with HTC’s new handwriting/note-taking system, Scribe (which explains that trademark). As far as we can tell from the cursory glance we got during the announcement, HTC’s kept the interface nice and finger-friendly. Look for this one to launch in Q2.
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| Deloitte: Text Messaging Still Far More Popular Than Mobile Twitter, Other Social Networks Posted: 14 Feb 2011 11:30 AM PST
Don’t tell Twitter’s Dick Costolo, but it seems everyday users are completely content with the ability to SMS their friends. So says a recent Deloitte study , which found that 90 percent of smartphone users send at least one text message per day. Compare that to only 40 percent of smartphone users who "hit up" their social networks, including Twitter and Facebook, at least once per day. In other words, reports of the text message’s demise have been grossly exaggerated. All of this is on the same day that Dick Costolo, the Twitter chief operating officer, said at the Mobile World Congress, in Barcelona, that he envisions a world in which Twitter is available for every platform, for every device, and for every person. The Deloitte study says that plain ol’ text messages are still so popular because they’re "more immediate and more personal." (Costolo actually alluded to that in his MWC presentation, saying that Twitter needed to become more ubiquitous — you shouldn’t have to launch a separate application to tweet your friends.) That text messaging is so profitable to wireless providers appears to be a happy accident, seeing as they were initially developed as a service to the hearing impaired.
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| Coming Soon: Kinect-Windows Phone 7 Mashups Posted: 14 Feb 2011 07:53 AM PST
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| Windows Phone 7′s Copy & Paste Update Coming In First Two Weeks Of March Posted: 14 Feb 2011 07:25 AM PST
Just a quick one for those keeping track (read: Windows Phone 7 handset owners): According to the mighty word of Ballmer himself, WP7′s first big update (the one containing copy-and-paste functionality) will be hitting sometime in “the first two weeks of March”. This is a separate update from the other one that Microsoft detailed today, which will bring third-party multitasking functionality and Internet Explorer 9.
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| Windows Phone 7 To Get Internet Explorer 9 and Third Party Multi-Tasking Later This Year Posted: 14 Feb 2011 07:16 AM PST
Boom! Though it’s day 2 or 3 or so (we’ve sort of lost track) of Mobile World Congress events for us, it’s technically Day 1 of the conference — and Microsoft just kicked things off with a lil’ announcement at Steve Ballmer’s keynote. Thus far, they’ve mentioned two big changes: Internet Explorer 9, and improved multi-tasking. Microsoft says IE9 for mobile brings a “dramatically enhanced Web browser experience” to the device, with things like hardware-acceleration and HTML5 in tow.
Microsoft also demonstrated their new third-party multi-tasking system. If you’re running an application and need to do something else, just hit the handset’s back button. The app will pause, and you’ll be dropped onto the homescreen. Tap back again, and you’re back in the (now unpaused) app. Hold the back button, and it’ll bring up a webOS-esque app-by-app view of all the apps you’ve currently got paused in the background. Certain apps, such as music apps, will be allowed to continue running behind the scenes without pausing. Additionally, Microsoft’s People Hub will be getting integrated Twitter support, so all of your tweets and twoots and whatnots will be included right in your device’s “What’s New” stream along with all As far as Windows Phone 7 sales go: Microsoft’s still wording themselves pretty carefully here. As they did at CES, they’re mainly pushing the fact that they sold 2 million Windows Phone Licenses in the first 2 months of its life. That doesn’t mean that they sold 2 million phones to the end-user, of course — just that third-party manufacturers paid for the right to make 2 million phones.
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Synaptics is the company whose products you probably interact with every day without knowing. They’re always advancing the science of haptics and touch-detection, and their latest work is the most impressive yet. What they’ve done is integrate the touch controller (basically, the tiny chip that detects and reports touch activity) with the display driver. This means they can rule out a lot of the noise that the display creates with the touch sensors — the result is vastly improved sensitivity, even when using something non-conductive like a glove or stylus.
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