If you like your phone with a little chin, then HTC’ latest Android device will suit you best. As expected, HTC has unveiled Hero, which is very similar to Magic but upgrades the camera to 5 megapixel with autofocus, and finally adds a regular 3.5mm jack for all your headphones, instead of having to rely on a cumbersome dongle. Full specs after the jump:
Sony Ericsson needs a touchscreen device to counter all the doom and gloom about the future of the handset manufacturer, and Satio is designed as its flagship phone for the year. Featuring a 16×9 3.5” touch screen with 12.1 megapixel camera with Xenon flash, the hardware is powered by Symbian S60 (5th edition) OS. This quad-band device won’t feature internal storage, but you could add up to 8GB with microSD cards. Set to launch in October for an unannounced price, I really hope another touchscreen device from, let’s say Apple, won’t overshadow Satio even before its launch.
iPhone (and its phoneless sibling iPod Touch) has seen its countless share of games and applications. Who knew a convenient marketplace would lead to such a development! Fieldrunners for the iPhone is a simple tower defence game where the goal is to prevent a group of nasties from reaching one end of the map by installing defence structures. The game gives you 6 types of structures: machine gun, goo that’ll slow down enemies, rocket and flamethrower with splash damage, lightning and heavy artillery. Each of these structures can be upgraded to increase the damage as well as area of effectiveness. Overall, it’s a standard gameplay with great art direction. Visuals are vibrant and the game runs pretty smoothly on your iPhone (although towards the latter stages with the map full of defensive structures, you will notice some dip in framerate.
The game’s simple nature and addictive proven gameplay of tower defence, it is no wonder that it made Time’s list of Top 10 videogames of 2008.
HTC’s new non-touchscreen smartphone with a full QWERTY keyboard is named Snap. Running on Windows Mobile 6.1 Standard and will be available this Summer in the U.K. Folks in the United States will be getting an unlocked version (as in no carrier subsidy) but availability and pricing are not available at this time.
full press release after the jump:
As expected, Microsoft has unveiled the latest upgrade to its long running Windows Mobile platform for mobile devices. Dubbed 6.5, the new revision contains a new home screen GUI featuring honeycombs, My Phone online backup solution as well as Marketplace where you can download/purchase applications directly to your phone. More details such as availability of upgrades have not been revealed.
Nokia’s flagship N-series has always crammed as much technology as possible, and the latest model N86 doesn’t buck the trend. Featuring a 8 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss Tessar lens and dual-LED flash, the new phone will retain the familiar form factor with dual slide. Other goodies include 8GB internal memory, 2.6 inch OLED screen, TV-out and microSD slot. Expect this device in Q2 in Europe. No availability was announced (as usual) for North America.
Palm’s latest device is more like the iPhone than the Treo. Opting for a touchscreen, with slide-out QWERTY keyboard, Palm has finally created a lust-worthy device, at least on specs.
Pre will feature 3.1 inch touchscreen, with a rollerball and “gesture” oriented lower part. Internal specs include wi-fi, EV-DO Rev A, Bluetooth, GPS and 8GB built-in storage. You will be able to take pictures and videos with the 3 megapixel camera. Truly innovative is the use of the wireless battery charger, first for a mainstream device. Pre will be available first on Sprint.
Nokia has finally unveiled its new flagship N97 featuring both a touchscreen and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard (just like Sony’s Xperia X1). With a 3.5 inch 640 x 360 pixel screen, its other additional features include HSDPA, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, A-GPS, 32GB onboard memory, and a 5 megapixel camera.
It is set to ship in 2009 at approximately $700 USD before subsidies.
Now that I’ve been using the iPhone 3G for a few weeks, I’ve come to grips with its many positives such as large touchscreen, wealth of programs available in one convenient online store, and the best music player in the market. However Apple still does not have a perfect device and these are some of the problems with the phone.
Reliability Issues
It’s a bit odd to hear people claim Apple’s softwares aren’t buggy, unlike Windows counterparts. In my case, iTunes clearly demonstrates Apple has a long way to go to create reliable software on the Windows platform. iTunes itself is bloaded with unappealing visuals yet surprisingly high resource usage. Sometimes it doesn’t even want to start the application.
Coupling iTunes with iPhone 3G, it occasionally causes my Vista computer to display that dreaded blue screen of death (BSOD). For the record, iTunes is the only software I’ve ever used on my computer that crashed the entire OS.
AppStore can’t update apps
This is a peculiar problem I started having after updating to 2.1 firmware. If I access the AppStore on the iPhone 3G and update the applications, it fails giving me an error message that I should connect the phone to a computer and use the AppStore from iTunes. The problem is, iTunes does not recognize that the application is supposed to be installed on the phone. In the alternative, I try to update the applications directly from iTunes, and that fails as well. Installing, updating and uninstalling applications have to be reliable. I’ve had less issues on this front with my previous phone T-Mobile Shadow and that runs on the often-derided Windows Mobile.
General lag
It is frustrating when you try to use the touchscreen (for example to scroll through the contact list) and nothing happens. Contacts and e-mails can get unresponsive every now and then, preventing you from using the phone. Making matters worse is sometimes a lag is present when you try to answer the call. Apple’s design did not afford a hardware button to answer a call, which means a finger swipe is the only way to take the call. I’ve had several calls I intended to take go to voicemail just because the phone doesn’t recognize my finger swipe to answer the call.
Organizing the applications
This isn’t really a bug in the software but it is still very annoying that there is no easy way to organize applications’ order on your home screen. The only method is this primitive icon based approach where if you move one icon, everything gets moved to create space. Windows desktop may not be the most efficient, but it lets me place icons wherever I want to, in whatever order I desire. Even worse, there is no way to create hierarchy (like you can in the menus) so you can’t really put secondary or tertiary applications away from the main home screen.
As Apple continuously puts out iPhone updates, it is only time before these issues are address (maybe with the exception of new home screen).
HTC’s latest touchscreen device sets itself apart with its gorgeous 3.8-inch 800×480 resolution screen. The rest of the specs isn’t a pushover either with a 5 megapixel camera, GPS/A-GPS, 802.11G, Bluetooth 2.0, running on Windows Mobile 6.1.
