Mobile Phones News Blog

Posts Tagged ‘Smartphone’

HTC has scheduled a huge launch event on October 6 in London to possibly introduce the first HTC Beats Audio smartphones.

Beats, a company partly owned by rapper/producer Dr.Dre, makes speakers and headphones that give studio quality sound. HTC acquired a huge stake in the company worth $300 million and promised to launch Beats powered smartphones.

Tech blog Slashgear has received an invitation for the press event to be followed by a launch party which will be open to the public.

The event, which will take place at The Roundhouse in Camden, London, will include some surprise performances by some of the hottest music artists around. The event promises to be lots of fun.  

In the invite, HTC did not mentioned the name of the device it is launching, but a Beats audio headphone is shown. Most likely, HTC will be launching the HTC Runnymede, aka the HTC Bass, which was leaked in a video last week.

The device will come heavily integrated with the Beats Audio technology and will also come with special Beats headphones for amazing sound.

Samsung Galaxy S II HD LTE is the name of the latest mobile phone announced by the company that comes packed with wide array of impressive specifications. Running on Android 2.3 Gingerbread OS, the phone is powered by Dual Core 1.5 GHz of processor so as to offer good performance.

There is wide 4.65 inches of Super AMOLED capacitive touch screen in Samsung Galaxy S II HD LTE that supports 16M colours along with 720 X 1280 pixels resolution. The display of the phone is made up of Gorilla Glass and features touch sensitive controls, TouchWiz UI 4.0, accelerometer sensor, proximity sensor, gyroscope sensor and multi touch input method.

Variety of connectivity options are present in the phone for the convenience of the users and these include GPRS, EDGE, 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth 3.0, HTML Browser and microUSB 2.0.

List of additional specifications that comes packed with Samsung Galaxy S II HD LTE  include 8 MP camera with AF and LED Flash, 2 MP secondary camera, 1080p video recording, FM Radio with RDS , TV Out, games, expandable memory up to 32GB, GPS with AGPS, multi format music player and video player, 1850 mAh battery and others.

T-Mobile has announced the arrival of the Amaze 4G, a 4.3-inch smartphone that looks like a slightly different Sensation – as it comes with a faster SoC and 4G connectivity (the Sensation 4G is an altogether different phone).

According to mobile blog Cellphonesignal, the handset packs a dual core Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC clocked at 1.5GHz, 1GB RAM, 16GB onboard storage, an eight megapixel rear camera and an additional front-facing one.

It wil be a direct replacement for the existing myTouch 4G and will run the bog standard HTC Sense user interface v3.5 on top of Android OS 2.3.5 Gingerbread, rather than any additional T-Mobile skin.

As with the Sensation, the Amaze 4G will feature a 4.3-inch qHD display (960×540 pixels), Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a microSD card slot and HSPA+ with speeds of up to 42Mbps – although real life speeds are likely to be significantly less.

We think it is unlikely that the HTC Amaze 4G smartphone will ever be launched in the UK, while US customers can expect it to be launched around the 12th of October. The handset – which unfortunately doesn’t come with HTC’s Beats Audio feature – will cost $260 following a $50 mail in rebate.

Samsung has launched a new version of the Galaxy S II called the Galaxy S II HD LTE which packs a massive 4.65-inch HD ready Super AMOLED HD display, matching Apple’s Retina Display pixel density.

The phone is a smaller and more importantly, more pocket-sized version of the Galaxy Note, albeit without the Stylus. It sports LTE and a dual core 1.5GHz SoC (unlikely to be a new version of Exynos, more like a new Qualcomm Snapdragon model).

The Galaxy S II HD also features 1GB RAM, 16GB internal storage, Wi-Fi, 4G LTE, NFC, Bluetooth 3.0, a microSD card slot, GSM/HSPA+, an eight megapixel camera with full HD recording and a two megapixel front-facing camera, a 1850mAh battery and is only 9.5mm thick.

A second version of the phone called the Galaxy S II LTE features a smaller 4.5-inch WVGA screen instead of the HD ready one and only adds to the confusion surrounding Samsung’s Galaxy line up.

The S II HD LTE will go on sale at SK Telecom, KT and LG U+ in South Korea but there are no plans to bring them to US or Europe at the moment.

The Galaxy Note will be launched in the UK before the end of the year according to the latest rumours, with one online retailer listing the device for as much as £600. We suspect that the S II HD will go for a tad less than that.

A patent filed by software giant Microsoft indicates that the company is thinking about launching a Windows Phone 7 powered gaming phone.

According to Kotaku, the patent, which was filed in 2010 but was made public last week, shows that the company has thought-up a slide out control pad for the smartphone.

The slide out component will be able to double up as a keyboard for phone functions and as a  control pad for gaming.

“A mobile communication device comprises a first device with a first display and multiple second devices. The second devices are releasably attachable to the first device and are interchangeable with each other. The mobile device can operate as a mobile cell phone with one or more second devices operable as a mobile phone hand set,” the Microsoft patent reads.

Microsoft is already planning to integrate Xbox Live with its Windows Phone 7 platform. Therefore, the company might be planning to launch Xbox branded gaming phone that makes the Xbox Live integration its USP.

Microsoft will be in direct competition, if it indeed launches such a phone, with the Sony’s PlayStation branded Xperia Play device.

Traditional gaming is being threatened by the rise of social and mobile gaming, so Microsoft and Sony are coming up with their own strategies to either counter the rising trend or jump in the bandwagon.

Chinese telecommunications giant Huawei has announced the (paper) launch of its latest smartphone, the Honor (note the American spelling), which packs some significant firepower and marks the first time the company has launched a device capable of competing at the top end of the market.

The Honor comes with an unknown 1.4GHz SoC (we suspect that it is a single core Qualcomm Snapdragon SoC but hopefully we’re wrong), an unknown amount of system memory and storage (1GB and 8GB would be the sweet spots), plus a 4-inch capacitive touchscreen.

We’re not sure at this point about the screen resolution; Huawei’s press release mentions HD but then follows that statement with FWVGA (that’s 854×480 pixels), which is what the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 has.

Interestingly, the screen is also said to have a 16:9 screen ratio and 24-bit colour resolution. Other features include a 1900mAh battery, the second highest of its category behind the Motorola Atrix, one which allows it to top three days of standby.

Huawei also included an eight megapixel camera with HDR and a front facing two megapixel one. The phone is also powered by Android OS 2.3.5 Gingerbread, is only 11mm thick and weighs a mere 140g. The Honor will be commercially available in the UK in 2012 with timing and pricing available then.

Microsoft Corp.’s Windows Phone 7 has been tracking and collecting location based data without notifying the user.

Worse even, the lawsuit filed against the company states that the WP7 device(s) in question were collecting and sending geo-location data to its servers even after users had declined authorisation to indulge in such practice.

Similar accusations were brought against other two big names in the smartphone market – Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone. The intensity of the controversy at the time was so high that both Google and Apple eventually had to offer assurances that no such activities would continue in the future.

According to the lawsuit filed against the Windows maker, geo-location data are sent to inference.location.live.net, a Microsoft service. Microsoft denied the charges during the initial phases of the trial.

According to the Windows Phone 7 jailbreaker Rafael Rivera, the collected location based data, which he described as “pin point accurate” are sent to agps.location.live.net and inference.location.live.net.

If Rivera’s findings are fount to be correct, the lawsuit against the technology giant will be strengthened further, thus making it tougher for the company to deflect the charges.

Software giant Microsoft is planning to offer Xbox 360 games for smartphone devices as social and mobile gaming threaten to eat into the traditional console gaming market.

According to Market Watch, the company plans to launch the online gaming service for smartphone, most probably Windows Phone 7 devices, sometime early next year.

Apart from offering old Xbox 360 games, the platform will feature new gaming titles exclusively designed for smartphones and tablet devices, which will be based on its recently unveiled Windows 8 operating system. Users will also be able to access additional content like movies and other digital content.

Microsoft is also planning to create tie-ins that will enable users to continue playing their Xbox 360 games on their smartphones and tablets when they move around. The smartphone will also be able to double up as an Xbox 360 controller.

Microsoft’s plans of integrating Xbox with Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 have been speculated for a while, and now, it seems that the company is ready to use the popularity of its gaming platform to boost the popularity of its smartphone and desktop operating system platforms.

Finnish mobile phone maker Nokia is optimistic about the release of first Nokia Windows Phone 7 device, code-named Sea Ray, by the end of this year but some sources claim that the launch will be delayed to early 2012.

Nokia is currently transitioning from Symbian to Windows Phone 7 as its primary platform amidst drop in its share in the smartphone market.

The Street, citing unnamed sources, informed that the device will be launched in 2012, not the end-2011 that Nokia has been claiming.

On the other hand, top Nokia executives are clinging to their claims, that the device will be launched in time for the Holiday season or by the end of 2011 but not in 2012.

“As we stated previously, we have increased confidence we will ship our first Windows Phone product this year,” Nokia spokesperson Doug Dawson told CNBC.

Microsoft has announced that the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango update will be dished out within the next two weeks, giving rise to rumours that Nokia might launch the Sea Ray somewhere around that time.

Recently, Microsoft fired a software engineer after he tweeted about Nokia’s upcoming Windows Phone device, informing that the device would do well with a bigger screen.