"18 remarkable facts and 15 amazing phones from MWC 2010"

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]

Samsung are another company with a thin presence at CES 2010, but they are at least there and have been showing off the Samsung W9600. This little beauty isn’t a smarpthone and certainly isn’t a superphone, but it does have one neat trick up it’s sleeve – a built-in projector.

Now projector phones aren’t new, but the technology is clearly getting smaller and better. The W9600 no longer looks an unholy fusion of phone and pico projector (as they’re called) it just looks like a phone.

You can beam anything from the phone onto a suitable surface (i.e. a wall). Not just pics, but even the phone’s user interface.

More pics of the Samsung W9600 after the jump.

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 glorious Nexus One, still the most hotly anticipated phone of 2010 (OK, so we’re only a week into the new year, but we’re in the middle of CES, and nothing has trumped it yet!), will feature multi-touch when released in the UK on Vodafone next month.

So if you’re jealous of the iPhone’s pinch zooming abilities, don’t be. Buy a UK Nexus On, and you too can be pinching and zooming to your heart’s content!

More pics of the Nexus One after the jump.

Ignroing the superphones that have been announced at CES 2010, LG has decided to go big – really big! Step forward the LG GW990, a new phone (at least I think you can call it that!) with a huge 4.8″ widescreen display.

So big is the screen, in fact, that you can fit three different apps side by side. Just check out the pic – contacts, calendar and map, all side by side.

Palm have announced two new devices at CES 2010 – the Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus.

The Pre Plus comes with 16GB of RAM, Adobe Flash (and “real Flash – the first time real Flash has been available on a mobile device”, apparently), WiFi, and a new app called the Palm Mobile Hotspot.

This is a cracking new app that not only allows tethering (i.e. turns your mobile into a modem so you can use the 3G network with your laptop), it supports up to 5 simultaneous connections.

The Palm Pre Plus and Pixi Plus release date is set for January 25th 2010.

More details after the jump

Lenovo have been showing off the Lenovo Lephone at CES 2010. The Lephone is a brand new Android handset that has a new user interface designed by the company. When I first heard about the Lephone yesterday, I didn’t pay it much attention. Lenovo aren’t exactly known for developing cutting edge smartphones, so I thought it would be just another run of the mill Android phone.

Boy was I wrong?! As the video shows, the Lephone is leagues ahead of “standard” Android phones, and its new user interface looks at least as good as the Nexus One’s.

The list of phones vying for the “world’s best smartphone” title just grew by one!

More details and video of the Lenovo Lephone after the jump.

Just in case you haven’t had enough yet, here are the official Nexus One Videos, plus the official YouTube channel.

It’s not often that I get excited by new mobile phones – well, it is, as I’m a big fan of them in general! But I mean super-excited – like I’ve just seen the start of something new, something really big.

With the Nexus One, I’ve got that sense of excitement. It’s not quite as amazing as the iPhon, which really was the most disruptive mobile technology of the last decade. But as a harbinger of what this new decade will be all about, the Nexus One is pointing the way more clearly than any other phone on the market.

The perfect marriage of Web and mobile combined with a truly open philosophy. Not a bad way to start the new decade!

Check out the videos after the jump, or have a look at the official Nexus One YouTube channel.