Posts filed under Coming Soon

Seems the Android bandwagon just can’t stop rolling! Panasonic is the latest company to jump on board with plans for a new Android phone. Unlike other Panasonic phones, though, this one will be sold outside of Japan.

According to Panasonic’s Keisuke Ishii, Director of the Mobile Terminal Business Unit , “We are seriously considering developing an Android-based handset and entering overseas mobile phone markets in fiscal 2010.”

This is great news…

T-Mobile CTO, Cole Brodman, has revealed in an interview with GigaOm that the company is banking heavily on a mobile future filled with Android devices of all shapes and sizes.

In particular, he revealed that T-Mobile will “…follow up G1 this year with multiple Android devices in the second half that we’ll be launching with at least three partners,” and that “we will see Android [netbooks] …from different nontraditional partners, maybe HP or Dell or others.”

More details of T-Mobile’s future plans after the jump.

Researchers at Intel are working on a new way of speeding up smartphones such as Android and the iPhone using the concept of Cloud Computing. Called CloneCloud, Intel’s research literally creates a clone of a smartphone on a server. When the smartphone needs to perform CPU-intensive tasks or tasks that drain the battery, it connects to its clone on the server, and lets the clone do the heavy lifting. All the smartphone has to do is to wait for the results to be returned.

The advantage of this is obvious. Servers are orders of magnitude faster than smartphones, and they don’t rely on batteries either! Not only does the CloneCloud concept speed up execution, therefore, it should also lead to significantly longer battery life as well as enabling the use of much more complex applications such as face recognition.

More details after the jump.

The Android news is coming thick and fast these past few weeks, with more detailed info being leaked on Android phones from both Samsung and Motorola. I’ve already discussed Samsung’s Android phone, the Samsung I7500, but now we’ve got more pictures of the device. As you can see, it literally looks like a G1 bolted onto a classic Samsung handset. Clearly Samsung haven’t exactly gone to town in differentiating their Android phone from the competition’s.

We’re also got leaked pics of Motorola’s new Android devices, which are set to launch in quarter 4 2009. More pics and details of these Android phones after the jump.

Samsung have been rumoured to be working on a new Android phone for some time now, and at last, we’ve got details and pictures of it. Called the Samsung I7500, it looks pretty much what you’d expect: a T-Mobile G1 inside a Samsung body!

The reason for this is that Samsung have done very little to the Android user interface, so it looks pretty much like every other Android phone at the moment. What they have done, though, in true Samsung style, is beef up the hardware feature set.

More details and pictures after the jump.

A new video of the Sony Ericsson Idou has been released from Russian site Mobile Mail. Quite why the Russians seem to get advanced previews of the latest phones I’m not sure, but they do seem to get a heads up before the rest of us.

Whatever, the Idou is looking like one tasty new phone. Its main claim to fame is that it’s a 12 megapixel camera phone with a plethora of camera-oriented features. Not only will it be the best camera phone on the market in terms of megapixellage, it should also take the best pictures, and will certainly give the low-end dedicated digital cameras a run for their money.

What the specs don’t reveal, though, is what the phone is like up close – its overall size, usability and all round user experience. Fortunately, the video gives us some idea of what we can expect when the Idou is released in the second half of 2009.

More details, plus the video after the jump.

In an effort to prove that the words “Sony” and “Ericsson” are synonymous with “arse” and “elbow”, and that the two are on as intimate terms with each other as that well-worn phrase would imply, a new rumour has emerged that Sony Ericsson is working on a new Android smartphone just days after the Chief Executive, Hideki Komiyama, told Reuters that it would be “some time” before such a phone was launched.

“It does require a lot of evaluation, as well as a lot of testing, a lot of acceptance from a consumer viewpoint, and there is still some time to go,” he said.

If Sony Ericsson’s latest results are any indicator (a loss of ovr $300 million in the last 3 months), there clearly isn’t “some time to go”, so the latest news that a new Android phone is on its way this year should be cause for some relief for Sony Ericsson fans.

So what will this new phone offer?…

One of the surprises of this year’s Mobile World Congress even was Toshiba’s TG01 smartphone. Not only did it feature an innovative new user interface, it also ran on the brand new Windows Mobile 6.5 and came with a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, making it the fastest smartphone on the market.

Well, it seems Toshiba are not happy on resting on their laurels, and so are busy working on another five new smartphones, each of which feature the same 1GHz Snapdragon processor, and many of which are even more fully featured than the original TG01.

Full details of Toshiba’s new smartphones after the jump.

Samsung have a new touchscreen phone in the works in the shape fo the Samsung S8000 Cubic. It’s called the Cubic because it comes with a fancy new user interface that features a 3D cube that you slide around to reach different apps on different sides of the cube – similar in operation to the LG Arena.

The S8000 doesn’t look all that different from your average touchscreen phone, but looks can be deceiving, and the specs of the S8000 Cubic, which have just been leaked, show it to be quite a capable smartphone.

More details of the Samsung S8000 Cubic after the jump.

2009 is shaping up to be a promising year for Android lovers, as now fewer than five new devices are set to be released. One of them, the HTC Magic, will be released in just a month’s time, while the other three, from Samsung and a new entrant to the mobile phone space called Amico, will be following along shortly after.

As developers get more used to the Android OS, there are also plenty of new and innovative apps that are being created, including a new interface for the device that has been designed to be used without looking at the screen.

More details of all this Androidy goodness after the jump.