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Rogers Magic and Dream now yours for $99.99

by Chris Ziegler, posted Jul 3rd 2009 @ 11:23AM

If you're ready, willing, and able to sign up for a new three-year agreement on Rogers, HTC's two inaugural Android sets just got a good deal cheaper for you. Originally priced at $199.99 on contract, both phones are now down to $99.99, which by our very rough calculations is about half off -- a stellar deal, we think, considering you're getting 7.2Mbps HSDPA, capacitive touch, 3.2 megapixel autofocus cameras with video capture, and HTC-customized Android ROMs. Maybe Rogers is discounting so quickly because they figure the phones aren't quite as appealing in light of the recent Hero announcement -- or, more intriguingly, maybe they're prepping for an actual Hero launch of their own now that we know there's an 850 / 1900 3G version in the mix.

[Via Boy Genius Report]

Read - Dream (Black)
Read - Dream (White)
Read - Magic

HTC Hero hits FCC with US 3G

by Chris Ziegler, posted Jul 2nd 2009 @ 10:54AM

No mention was made of a Hero with 3G that'd work on Rogers or AT&T back at its announcement a few days ago, but HTC has been getting awfully good at making phones that work properly around these parts -- so we can't say we're entirely surprised to see a Hero approved for WCDMA on Bands II and V gracing the FCC today. For the record, Bands II and V are 1900 and 850MHz, respectively, which is exactly the combo AT&T subscribers would need to flip the switch on high-speed data. We're not sure if this negates rumors that the Hero would be coming to Sprint, but if we can just get this version released and in our hands, you know... maybe our minds would be operating with a little more clarity.

NVIDIA Tegra smartphone due from a "top five" manufacturer before 2010?

by Tim Stevens, posted Jun 30th 2009 @ 6:56AM

If you want to get HD in your handheld, NVIDIA's Tegra processor is the hot way to do it at the moment, and we've got reasonably concrete sounding rumors from disparate sources that a handset containing one of the chips is currently under development by a "top five" smartphone builder (we're guessing it's not Apple), and that it'll be out sometime before the end of the year, selling at T-Mobile and AT&T for just $199. The details of the device beyond that are scant, with Android being a possibility but Windows Mobile looking more likely, and a continued pledge of battery life of rated for "days and days" of mobile multimedia. We like the sound of that.

Read - NVIDIA Tegra phone due from "big five" firm
Read - Rumor: NVIDIA Tegra phones in Q409?

SciPhone Dream G2 Android charger is best ever

by Thomas Ricker, posted Jun 30th 2009 @ 1:48AM

One of our favorite intellectual property rips of recent months is without a doubt the SciPhone Dream G2 from China. Having completely missed the point of Google's open-source OS being, well, open-source and thus free for SciPhone's use, the company instead chose to hack the G2's "proprietory" OS to look like Android. The charger, however, built to look like the iconic Android mascot is pretty damn cute; enough so that the idea of paying $150 just to get our hands on the 100-240V USB charger has crossed our minds. See the Android's naughty bits after the break.

[Thanks, Steven]

Continue reading SciPhone Dream G2 Android charger is best ever

Hack: use Google Voice to add visual voicemail to your G1, Dream, or Magic

by Chris Ziegler, posted Jun 29th 2009 @ 1:15PM

With home screen widgets, an on-screen keyboard, great notification management, and hands-down the best Gmail experience of any platform, Android 1.5 finally makes it easy (or easier, anyway) to love Google's foray into the mobile world. Of course, if you're coming from an iPhone -- as some users inevitably will be -- there are a few features that'll be sorely missed as you make the transition. For us, a biggie was visual voicemail, and after a little trial and error, we found a cool way to add it into our device without even leaving the Google ecosystem -- and even better, it's totally free. Follow the break for the full story!

Continue reading Hack: use Google Voice to add visual voicemail to your G1, Dream, or Magic

HTC Hero up for pre-order on Amazon UK: £429, July 15 delivery

by Nilay Patel, posted Jun 28th 2009 @ 3:09PM

We doubt the July 15 delivery date is set in stone, but UK residents itching to get a little Hero in their lives are now able to pre-order HTC's latest for £429 ($708). That's pretty much what we'd expect for an unlocked set, but Orange is planning to offer the Hero free on contract, so we'd be inclined to hang on just a teensy bit longer. Video after the break.

[Via Phandroid]

Continue reading HTC Hero up for pre-order on Amazon UK: £429, July 15 delivery

Spanish firm GeeksPhone launches "One" Android set

by Chris Ziegler, posted Jun 27th 2009 @ 8:39PM

It looks exactly like a Samsung Omnia, but don't be fooled -- what you're actually looking at here is Spain's first go at producing an Android handset (which is especially ironic considering we just reported on the andromnia project). Our colleagues from Engadget Spanish were live in Barcelona today for the grand unveiling of the GeeksPhone One, a Cupcake-powered phone featuring a 625MHz PXA310 core, quadband EDGE plus HSDPA, WiFi, Bluetooth, AGPS, 3.2 megapixel primary camera plus a front-facing cam for video calling, and microSD expansion -- sounds great, but the package is marred a bit by the fact that it's rolling with a resistive 3.2-inch touchscreen. Hard to complain with the price, though -- GeeksPhone expects to sell the set for somewhere between €250 and €300 (about $352 to $422) unlocked when it launches this fall.

[Via Engadget Spanish]

Android lovingly, painstakingly ported to Samsung's Omnia

by Chris Ziegler, posted Jun 26th 2009 @ 9:53PM

This project's a few days old, but it's so cool that we wanted to bring it to your attention anyway: "andromnia." From the name, you might be able to gather that this is all about porting Android to the Samsung Omnia, which represents the marriage of one awesome piece of hardware with one very awesome platform, as far as we're concerned. Of course, a project of this magnitude requires hackery of the highest order, and the going's not easy -- things like "calling" don't readily work at the moment -- but it appears to be actively developing, so if you've got an Omnia handy and WinMo isn't really your bag, we'd recommend keeping an eye on this.

HTC's Sense UI not coming to any "Google" branded phones

by Ross Miller, posted Jun 25th 2009 @ 10:31PM

We've got some good and bad news... mostly bad, though. First, the good news: HTC is looking into finding a way to bring its new Sense UI -- the one featured prominently in the new Hero -- to its non-Google branded Android devices, such as Canadian carrier Roger Wireless' Magic. Unfortunately, and this is the bad news, even that's not a sure thing, and as you can probably guess from the wording, any phone that's got the "with Google" branding, like T-Mobile USA's G1 and myTouch 3G, won't be getting a chance at all due to the same licensing terms that prevented Microsoft Exchange clients on those same phones. Them's the breaks, folks, but we're sure some hacker with enough know-how will bypass the silly restrictions and do it anyway.

Android 1.5 gets official SDK for native development

by Chris Ziegler, posted Jun 25th 2009 @ 5:31PM

Java-based development within a specialized, optimized virtual machine is one of the founding principles of the platform that makes Android what it is -- but sometimes, you need a little more oomph and you've got to bend the rules to make that happen. Google's totally cool with that, it turns out, and today they've released the Android 1.5 Native Development Kit (NDK) that allows developers to generate C and C++ libraries that run directly on the platform rather than being routed through Dalvik. The Android team pulls no punches that devs should be careful when going native, saying "your application will be more complicated, have reduced compatibility, have no access to framework APIs, and be harder to debug" -- but as they note, there'll be times when the improved performance and deeper access to hardware will be a boon. As with HTC's Sense, it'll be interesting to see how this affects the platform going forward.

Samsung Galaxy now available from O2 Germany

by Chris Ziegler, posted Jun 24th 2009 @ 6:35PM

The big Android news today is all out of London and New York today, but if we move a bit eastward, there's some cool stuff going on in Deutschland, too: Samsung's i7500 Galaxy is now available. The beastly smartphone immediately becomes the highest-end Android device to date and will have a little while to enjoy the top of the hill until the Hero drops, thanks in no small part to its 5 megapixel cam, support for 7.2Mbps HSDPA, 8GB of internal storage, and a 3.2-inch AMOLED display. Looks like it's yours for €69.99 (about $98) on contract, so count us in -- and how about some time on the Nürburgring while we're at it?

[Thanks, Jon]

HTC Hero hands-on: Flash, keyboard and ruminations (updated!)

by Thomas Ricker, posted Jun 24th 2009 @ 11:56AM

We're going to need some real time with the device to make a final opinion, but we're cautiously optimistic that HTC has a winner with its new Hero. Here's what we've got from our first looks at the phone in London and NY:

The beveled edges along the back makes the handset sit comfortably in the hand, and while the teflon coat doesn't necessarily feel revolutionary, it's going to make a world of difference after a couple of months riding in our grubby pockets. It's certainly solid, but much more so than other "brick" phones.
The Sense UI (or as HTC terms it, "user experience") riding a capacitive touchscreen offers a people-centric approach to managing your information that is absolutely dreamy at first blush -- though it shares a lot of TouchFLO heritage. In fact, HTC promises to have a very similar Sense-branded experience for Windows Mobile.
The on-screen keyboard also seems quite useable with a nice simulated haptic forced-feedback bounce when you strike each key in either landscape or portrait mode (which can naturally be deactivated). HTC has built its own touch keyboard from the ground up, and in our brief couple of tests we'd say it's probably the best touchscreen typing experience we've ever felt. It never lags behind, and has great colorful visual cues for its auto-corrected words -- green means it's suggesting a correctly spelled word, red means we've gone off the beaten path, and the T9-style multiple suggestions are heavenly.
This intuitive one-hander isn't shy with the specs either as we've already seen in the official press release. Our only concern is possible sluggishness from the Qualcomm processor that cause the graphic transitions to stutter a bit and results in screen rotations that feel dangerously uncomfortable.
We were told that the device we saw was running pre-production firmware so there's still time to tweak -- though not much with a July European launch.
The Hero is not a "Google Experience" device. As such, you won't find the Google logo anywhere (no big deal) but you also won't be downloading any firmware updates over the air -- sideloading only kids. Not a deal breaker but an annoying and seemingly arbitrary limitation nonetheless. There's still a small lack of clarity of how updates will work with HTC's "mods" living on top of basic Android -- even if they're able to port in new Android versions seamlessly, we imagine there will be some breakage.
For a device without a physical keyboard, the Hero seems a little thick up against its HTC Magic, Nokia N97, and iPhone 3G counterparts, but not overly so.
HTC has confirmed that whichever (unspecified) carrier gets the phone in the US will have a modified version, both in software (carrier-specific services) and in hardware chassis tweaks. Just don't take our teflon away, ok HTC?
Battery is the same larger slab that's in the myTouch, and HTC also claims to have done some vague, unspecified things OS-side to improve battery life as well. "Heavy users will be able to get through a day."
The camera is responsive and seems to do a fine job at autofocus, but wasn't astonishingly great at first glance.
The phone will be available for free on T-Mobile UK -- if only we could be so subsidy lucky in the US.

There are four videos for you after the break. The first shows Flash running at full screen on the HTC Hero courtesy of YouTube. The second, however, shows it failing when running a trailer from Yahoo Movies, just like Adobe did -- in fact, it crashed all four times that we tried it on what we were told was a Hero running the final build of the OS. Third one is a quickie showing the on-screen keyboard rotating from portrait to landscape and back. Lastly, we demonstrate the hardware a little bit and show off our lightning speed at typing. For the real completists, there's also a new gallery of hands-on shots from the NY launch event right below.

Gallery: HTC Hero hands-on

Gallery: HTC Hero additional hands-on

Continue reading HTC Hero hands-on: Flash, keyboard and ruminations (updated!)

Adobe demos Flash on the HTC Hero

by Joshua Topolsky, posted Jun 24th 2009 @ 10:09AM

Been hankering to see what Flash -- via the Open Screen Project -- actually looks like on an Android (or any modern mobile) device? Well hanker no more, ya'll. Adobe has helpfully dropped a video on us which has Flash team member Adrian Ludwig demo'ing the newly minted HTC Hero (multitouch gestures included). Once the content loads up, it seems to run at a pretty snappy rate, though waiting on Flash content to appear doesn't look encouraging if you're in the midst of casual browsing (or on a weak connection). We'll be interested to see what this is like in the real world -- and for platforms beyond Android -- but for now at least we've got something to go on.

Read - HTC Hero: The first Android device with Flash
Read - New HTC Hero Delivers More Complete Web Browsing Experience with Adobe Flash Technology

Verizon's CEO sidesteps questions on iPhone, Android handset

by Darren Murph, posted Jun 24th 2009 @ 7:58AM

The last time we heard from Ivan Seidenberg, he was letting Sprint know precisely what he thought of it. This go 'round, in a new 'Charlie Rose' interview, the Verizon chief is being entirely more coy. In speaking to recent political happenings, he mentions that the communication coming from the citizens of Iran is "a great thing," and he also notes that attempts to block internet use "can't work long term" as the "power of the people will override that without any question." Sort of comical given VZW's prior persistence to cripple phones in spite of consumer backlash, but we digress. He also dodged (with great skill, might we add) questions on whether Verizon Wireless would carry the iPhone, noting that it was "Apple's decision" on whether it would build one to support the company's forthcoming LTE network. As for Android? He did confess that recent reports of a Motorola handset coming its way "might be true," which is CEO speak for "oh, that's absolutely happening." Hop on past the break for a video of the whole shakedown.

Continue reading Verizon's CEO sidesteps questions on iPhone, Android handset

HTC launching new Android phone in London tomorrow? We'll be there!

by Chris Ziegler, posted Jun 23rd 2009 @ 9:41PM

We'd already pretty much figured that HTC's London event tomorrow would have something to do with Android -- the invite for the shindig playfully teases us with a rose in the picture, after all, which is probably a reference to HTC's Rosie UI that's been circulating in leaked ROM form for a while now. Indeed, Pocket-lint points to a fellow journalist whose "colleague" has apparently played with the new hardware and gives it a "rave review," so we're excited to find out what it is exactly that HTC's got brewing -- and as we've said before, it certainly lines up nicely with T-Mobile UK's promise of more G1 Touch details "soon." At any rate, we'll be on hand to find out what's good as it happens, so stay tuned for all the HTC news that's fit to print starting at 6:30AM ET, 11:30AM London time.