Posts filed under Coming Soon

HTC will be releasing the HTC Espresso soon, possibly in time for MWC 2010 in Barcelona. The Espresso is rumoured to be the successor to the HTC Hero, featuring a QWERTY keyboard and an even better user interface.

This has led to some excitement in the mobile phone world, as HTC already make some cracking user interfaces (see the Hero and HTC HD2 for just osme examples), so the thought of a brand new one is mouth-watering!

Fortunately, we don’t need to wait! The Espresso’s user interface has already been leaked, the ROM containing it has found its way onto the Internet, and now here it sits, on a T-Mobile G1, looking for all the world like no other G1 has looked before!

More pictures of the HTC Espresso interface after the jump.

Google’s Android has been everywhere in 2010, not just thanks to Google’s own Nexus One Android phone, but also with the huge number of Android gadgets that were released at CES 2010 this week. From tablets to phone to microwaves, wherever you looked, it was powered by Android.

This might just explain why rumours of the 4th generation iPhone are now surfacing, as Apple fan boys (if not Apple themselves) seek to regain some of the hype from Google.

So what do these rumours suggest? Check them out after the jump.

If you wondered why I called the HTC HD2 the best Windows Mobile phone in the world, take a look at these leaked pics of the Sony Ericsson Faith and shudder!

The Faith hasn’t even been announed yet – these are leaked pics after all – and so it’s a phone that will be much new than the HD2 when it’s released, yet already you feel like you’re looknig at a phone from 2005!

Blimey, Windows Mobile needs updating, and fast – and Sony Ericsson needs to stop working on ugly phones and ugly OSes like this!

If you think touchscreens are old fashioned and accelerometers are so last year, then Synaptics have go the phone for you – the Synaptics Fuse, a new prototype phone with working technology that was shown off at CES 2010 this week.

The Fuse features more capacitive touchscreens in one phone than in the entire range of Nokia devices! The front display in obviously a capacitive touchscreen, but so too is the back…and the sides as well!

OK, so they’re not screens exactly, but they are capacitive and they do respond to touch to produce a responsive interactive interface unlike any ohter phone on the market today.

More details and video after the jump.

Forgive the continued teccie-ness, but straight after posting about the new dual-core Snapdragon chip promised for the end of 2010 comes news of NVIDIA’s new next-gen Tegra2 chip for smartphones, which blows the Snapdragon clean out the water!

Qualcomm’s next gen Snapdragon will be dual core and run at speeds of 1.5GHz. NVIDIA’s nexyt gen Tegra2 will also be dual-core, but although it only runs at 1GHz, it contains no less than eight independent processors, each of which is dedicated to tasks such as Web browsing, mobile 3D gaming and HD video.

What this gives you is a smartphone chipset that’s 10 times faster than anything on the market today. And unlike the Qualcomm chips, NVIDIA actually have the Tegra2 in production, and in the hands of gadget developers now!

Expect it to surface on Internet tablets first, followed swiftly by smartphones.

Phew! I think Google’s right. This really is the age of the superphone!

[Source: Engadget]

In what could be kindly described as a very technical press event at CES 2010, Qualcomm have revealed that their Snapdragon CPUs, which power smartphones such as the Nexus One and Lenovo Lephone, are set to get faster in the coming year – a lot faster!

How fast? Well, the current Snapdragon processor leasd the field, running at 1GHz. By the end of the year, Qualcomm expects to be releasing new dual-core Snapdragon processors running at 1.5GHz that include 3G and lightning fast LTE modems on the chip!

To put this in perspective, current HSDPA modems that you find on nearly all phones these days (apart from the entry level ones) will let you cruise the Internet at 3.2Mbps. LTE (Long Term Evolution) is effectively 4G, and supports download speeds of up to 100Mbps!

Add that to a chip that’s 50% faster than today’s fastest smartphone chip, plus comes with two processors rather than today’s one, and you’re set for smartphones at the end of the year that will more powerful than netbooks! Certainly, the data rate will be faster than your home broadband!

2010 is already shaping up to be a killer year for mobile phones, and yet there’s already so much more waiting in the wings!

[Source: Engadget]

Sony Ericsson are also absent from CES 2010, keeping their tinder dry for MWC no doubt, but again we’ve got another leaked photo, this time of the Sony Ericsson Robyn. The Robyn appears to be a cut-down Xperia X10 (and may eventually be called the X10 Mini), and so is another Android device featuring the same user interface as the X10, but with a smaller screen and probably no keyboard.

Nokia don’t do CES (or MWC this year – not sure if they’re going to any tech event, actually, other than their own!), so it’s nice to see a new Nokia phone pic amongst all the CES stories.

This one is of the Nokia Mystic, but mystically, it’s only a leaked pic, and even more mystically still, from Vietnam of all places!

Although it’s blurred, it’s not that blurred that you can’t see it, and it’s definitely not a Photoshop job. It looks bloody awful, though, particularly after all the superphones we’ve seen in the past few weeks.

Hopefully this is either a phone that we’ll never see in Europe and destined only for markets such as Vietnam (no offence, people of Vietnam, it just looks pants!), or else it’s an old prototype that somehow found its way to distant shores!

[Source: Engadget]

Google’s new Nexus One Android phone is set to be officially announced on January 5th. But who can wait that long? Not French bloggers Nowhereelse.fr, who not only got hold of one, they also helpfully recorded a 10 minute video review of the Nexus One.

Lovely people ;)

Details of the Nexus One are being leaked thick and fast. Now finally having had a chance to look at it, it’s looking like it really could live up to its hype. The user interface is super-slick, and the speed is simply incredible. HTC (the Nexus One’s makers) have really pushed the underlying 1GHz Snapdragon chip to the limits, letting Google’s Android team be as creative as they want with the interface.

Check out more details and the full video review of the Nexus One after the jump.

Samsung announced the Samsung Bada platform last week, a bold move designed to move Samsung phones firmly into the smartphone space. Bada is a whole new mobile technology from Samsung that takes on the iPhone and Android in a head to head battle.

Bada is a mobile operating system designed for smartphones, with support for everything you’d expect from an iPhone-equivalent device: GPS, Web browsing, touchscreen support, and all sorts of sensors, including tilt, GPS, proximity, and even weather!

Better still is Samsung’s strategy – virtually all of their new phones from 2010 onwards will feature Bada, meaning all of Samsung’s range of phones will be smartphones. As Samsung say, Bada will be the basis for a “smartphone for everyone”

Just one problem though – despite a lengthy presentation, Samsung didn’t actually show a Bada phone in action!

Fortunately, we can now put this to rights with these new pics of the Bada interface that have just been unearthed.

More pics after the jump.