Posts filed under Android

The Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 is shaping up to be the killer Android device of 2009 (although the Motorola Droid would argue with that!). Knowing how hungry the world is for more details of the X10, Sony Ericsson has decided to tease us with a video showing off bits of it.

And I do mean bits – the video’s infuriating as it tantalises us with the odd glimpse of the X10 without showing use the whole.

Fortunately, we won’t have to wait to too long, as the release date of the X10 has just been announced.

Check the video out after the jump.

LG have dipped their toes into the Android market with the LG Etna, LG’s first Android-based smartphone. The Etna, or LG-GW620 to give it its less-sexy title, looks very similar to the Motorola DEXT, another new Android phone, with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard. However, the DEXT differentiates itself from the competition with Motorola’s new MOTOBlur user interface, which makes the DEXT unlike any other Android device on the market.

So what about the new LG Etna? How does it differ from other Android devices?…

Motorola have come out all guns blazing by announcing the first batch of what will be dozens of new Android phones. The Motorola DEXT and CLIQ are the first Android phones developed by Motorola, and will feature an innovative new way of integrating all your messages, emails, pictures and other forms of communication with your social media connections.

They’ll also feature MotoBlur – Motorola’s new user interface that takes Android to the next level.

Motorola aren’t seeing the two new phones as make or break – although they’re perilously close to going to the wall – but rather they’re the start of a brand new range of Android phones, which together will seal the future of Motorola’s strategy – and its overall fate.

Are the new Motorola Android devices good enough to save Motorola? Read on for more details!

Remember the HTC Touch Dual, one of the first Windows Mobile smartphones that actually looked good? The keywords here are “Windows Mobile”, as it turns out you can also run Android on it, too – and not just any old Android, but a version of Android with HTC’s own shiny new Hero interface.

These pics show just such a weird chimera, with the HTC Touch Dual booting up under Linux and then the familiar HTC Hero interface bursting into life.

Impossible? No, not a bit of it. It’s one of the benefits of the openness of Android, the hackability of HTC’s phones, and the almost obsessive devotion to getting Android on virtually every device out there by the members of XDA-Developers.

Sure, it sounds geeky, but if you have an old HTC Touch and want to put some extra life into it, go ahead and install Android on it – jusrt don’t ask me how ;)

More pics and details after the jump.

Time, at last, for an HTC Hero Review round-up. After working feverishly on the new look MobileMentalism for what seems like the past 100 years (still not finished – give me time, people, it’ll be worth the wait ;), I remembered that I said I’d do a review of HTC’s brand new Android phone, the Hero. So here it is!

For those who don’t know, the Hero is the latest Android phone from HTC, who’ve so far not only taken the lead, but seemingly cornered the market in Android phones. The Hero has been long awaited by tech lovers as its the first Android phone with a heavily-customized user interface and might, just might, actually beat the iPhone in terms of overall user interface.

So the question is: does it? Read on to find out!

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…

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.

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?…