First News About Android On This Blog
Eventually I was making this blog to post news about Windows Mobile phones, iPhone and Android news. But as long as Android hasn’t much to shine right now, this is the post about android here. And it’s a good news! There will be a store, where Android users will be able to get their applications, and developers sell their stuff. Just like upcoming iPhone App Store. This is pretty amazing, i guess after success of both of them, microsoft will lauch their app store for Windows Mobile users. Here is the quote by Andy Rubin, project leader:
“It would be a great benefit to the Android community to provide a place where people can go to safely and securely download content and where a billing system would allow developers to get paid for their effort…We wouldn’t have done our job if we didn’t provide something that helps developers get distribution.”
This is pretty good, because developers are not limited with as much as iPhone app developers are. While Android is not avaliable in the market, we are looking forward to touch it and visit the App Store for Android users.
Sony’s Xperia X1 will come to America, too!
Xperia is one hard to wait phone I have to say. I think Sony made it wrong to start promoting it so early, because it’s no going to release until Q4 this year, it was annoucned a while ago. So some people may consider it has became old. New whitepaper shows us that X1 will be released in 2 variations, for America and for other countries. The difference between them is just some tri-band connection stuff, nothing special. It’s pretty sure they made this clear beause there were not so many Sony Ericsson’s smartphones coming to US. We also have an information about talk time, it’s 10 hours over GMS and 6,5 hours over 3G.
Vista is now with Carrier!
Rogers officially launched HTC Shift, and unique mobile phone / computer that supports Windows Vista. It has a 7 inch touchscreen, 40 Gb HDD, and other stuff that almost all mobiles have, maybe I only have to say about GPS. It’s $1599.99 with 3-year contract. If you consider getting this phone, I would suggest you get an unclocked version over eBay, it will cost you less, but you won’t get GPS and Data support from Carrier.
iControlPad for the iPhone, it’s now iPSPhone
iControlPad is now alive. There are plenty of emulators for the iPhone, but playing without real controls sometimes is a problem, so guys at iControlPad decided to make an addon. It works very well (as they say :) ), you have to do nothing to install it, just put your iPhone in it. It’s a little smaller than a PSP, and they are going to release iPod Touch version too!
Flashback: Apple’s First Appearance In The Phone Industry
This is Motorola ROKR, first phone to have iTunes synchronization. It was available with Cingular. You can get up to 100 songs on it, pretty cool huh? The interesting part is that it was $249.99 with 2-year contract with Cingular. Let’s do the math, it’s $2.5 a song. Now we can get an iPhone for 25 cents a song (8GB) or 18 cents a song (16GB). And you won’t only get more songs per dollar, you will also get video and ass-kicking user interface on your phone, internet browsing and much more useful and useless stuff. Two Steve Jobs quotes:
We’ve worked closely with Motorola to deliver the world’s best music experience on a mobile phone,
We’re also thrilled to be working with Cingular, the largest wireless carrier in the US, to bring this pioneering phone to market.
I don’t know if this was a mistake for Apple to do so, because Motorola is still successfully doing that ROKR mobile phone line, which is labelled as music phone. Maybe some disagreements caused Apple to do their own mobile phone?
IntelliScreen, a very nice iPhone app released, Beta.
Well, when I saw this app, my thoughts were, wow. Well it’s very cool, you can guess it’s feature from the image to the left. It places usefull information on Locked Screen of your iPhone. It’s very usefull, now you don’t need to unlock it, you can read recent news, email, check weather and see calendar events right there. Well, it’s very usefull. I won’t place here the information how to install it, or more features, because you can find it all here. Attention! It’s in Beta yet, so I don’t suggest you to install it. I will place a little review of mine here.
Well I have installed it right when I first heard of it. Firs thing that bumped in my eyes, was a Pop-up of this program, “Read Before Purchasing”, and I wasn’t promted to purchase anything. This means the program is commercial, and it will cost some money and be avaliable in the App Store. Secondly, it fetches weather from some shitty weater network that doesn’t have my town (well most likely this means that my town is shitty :)) The program is usefull, but lets face it - it will consume more battery. If it will check for news feeds, sports feed, e-mail and weather, on the background, it will consume your power. If not then you will have to wait for it to load the data, in the mean time you could just unlock you phone and do it yourself.
Official specs of Xenium aka X800 aka iPhone by Philips.
Do you remember that iPhone Clone, Xenium by Philips? Well it was in the Rumors category, now it’s offcial. No price yet, neither release date. And again it’s Called iPhone Killer, but not by RIM now, by Philips (when will the kill the iPhone by the way? They never tell…). So let’s look at the specs now:
Display: Type TFT touchscreen supports 256K colors, 240 x 400 pixels, 2.9 inches
Ringtones: Polyphonic (64 channels) or MP3, Vibration
Memory Expansion: MicroSD
Data: GPRS Class 10 (32 - 48 kbps)Connectivity: Bluetooth v2, USB,
Messaging: SMS, EMS, MMS
WAP 2.0, XHTML Browser
Appearance: Black Color, Customizable themes.Entertainment: 2 MP Camera with Autofocus and Video, JAVA, Media Player, Office Document Viewer, Organizer, Loudspeaker
Battery: Stand-by Up to 850 h, Talk time Up to 8 h
Now, let me ask the question, how are they gonna kill the iPhone with no EDGE and no 3G? Crazy guys. Well if you are reading this, then most likely you are from US, so let me tell you that what concers mibile phones, Philips is oriented to Asian market, so you won’t have the chance to kill the iPhone :)
New Jawbone, 2 times smaller and better!
Jawbone, probably world’s best Bluetooth headset manufacturer, has just released their second version oh their most famous headset. And if the first one was small, solid, noise-deductive, and slim, it’s now twice as that! It beats the pre-version in sound quality, size and weight. It’s comfortable and barely touches face! The new one has only 4 hours of talk time, despite of six hours talk time of previous model, but it has much better stand-by time, it’s 8 days! Wow! Well if you are more into headsets, you can read a great review on Gizmodo here.
And, The BlackBerry Storm, Oops, THUNDER Goes To Verizon!
Do you remember that Apple Killer by RIM? So, as Boy Genius says, this new touchscreen phone will go out with Verizon. So to you all who love Verizon, and already have contracts with it, and want an Apple iPhone, but don’t want to be AT&T and in a crowd with 100 million iPhone owners of 2008, you may wait for, hmm… for August, to get your BlackBerry Thunder! Yeah, smoking hot phone by RIM, it’s gonna kick iPhone in the nuts. Well that’s a pretty smooth move of RIM. They are betting on getting sales from guys not who like their phones, but the carrier. Because if there would be choice of iPhone and BlackBerry, phones with slightly the same features, iPhone would win. I think it’s not because iPhone will be cheaper, it’s something esle, like, brand? :) I don’t know let’s wait for the keynote from Steve Jobs on 9th of June.
Breaking News, Rumors Are True, 3G iPhone Will Come In Two Colors!
iPhone Black is now appearing in the model selection popdown menu on AT&T’s customer screen. Must be this one slipped just like AT&T free WiFi for iPhones last week. There is alot of mess in AT&T. Spokesperson declined to comment this. There is no other information than this screenshot, but I’m pretty sure this means iPhone will come in two colors and will be in plastic body. However, this is pretty sad that iPhone won’t come in red color, which also has been rumored by casing layouts.