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FCC Fridays

We here at Engadget Mobile tend to spend a lot of way too much time poring over the latest FCC filings, be it on the net or directly on the ol' Federal Communications Commission's site. Since we couldn't possibly (want to) cover all the stuff that goes down there, we've gathered up all the raw info you may want (but probably don't need). Enjoy!

Phones
Read - Samsung SCH-B119
Read - Samsung SGH-T469
Read - Samsung SCH-F699
Read - Samsung E1085L
Read - Samsung E1107L
Read - Samsung B7620
Read - Samsung SCH-W820
Read - Samsung S5600T
Read - Samsung S5603T
Read - Kyocera M1400
Read - Sharp 832SH
Read - ZTE R232
Read - ZTE CORAL200 FM
Read - LG GW300

Peripherals
Read - Alcatel One Touch X060
Read - Huawei E182E
Read - MobiFren GBH-S100plus

Verizon BlackBerry Tour unboxing


You might say that Verizon's brand new BlackBerry Tour 9630... ahem, took a "tour" through our offices this morning, gracing us with its QWERTY-having, global-roaming, 8830-killing presence. There's absolutely no question it's the best-looking CDMA BlackBerry to date and we also think you'll be able to stop Bold owners in their tracks as you flash this thing around town; we'd argue that the Curve 8900 is still a cuter handset when you take the company's lineup as a whole, but then again, the 8900 lacks 3G, and the Tour's keyboard might just be the best RIM's ever crafted for a phone. Bottom line, owners of any BlackBerry on Verizon or Sprint should be salivating at the sight of this thing -- and if they're not, honestly, they need their salivary glands checked. Stay tuned for our full review, but in the meantime, enjoy an unboxing and a few quick shots of the Tour taking its first breaths!

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


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!

FCC Fridays

We here at Engadget Mobile tend to spend a lot of way too much time poring over the latest FCC filings, be it on the net or directly on the ol' Federal Communications Commission's site. Since we couldn't possibly (want to) cover all the stuff that goes down there, we've gathered up all the raw info you may want (but probably don't need). Enjoy!

Phones
Read - Huawei U9105
Read - Huawei G3500
Read - Samsung SGH-A887
Read - Samsung S6700C
Read - Samsung SCH-W920
Read - Samsung SCH-i920
Read - Samsung SCH-U450
Read - ZTE S131-T
Read - LG AX310

Peripherals
Read - Option GI0452
Read - LG HBM-580
Read - LG HFB-510
Read - Huawei K3715

BlackBerry Tour hands-on, wild sibling confrontation with Curve and Bold


While some interesting things may or may not be happening under the hood, the freshly announced BlackBerry Tour for Verizon and Sprint (pictured in Verizon garb on the left) is hardly a departure on the surface. It mostly appears to be a minor modification to the Curve (right), though it does seem inexplicably thicker. The Bold seems positively overwrought in comparison. We didn't get much time to play with the OS, but the screen and the keyboard are pure new-generation BlackBerry charm.

Motorola Endeavor HX1 ears-on


We've been playing with Motorola's recently-announced Endeavor HX1 for the past few hours, and we're just going to come right out with it: this is the best Bluetooth headset we've ever used. Moto claims that the HX1 is the world's first consumer headset to use "true bone conduction technology," a veiled (but obvious) reference to the external cheek-resting sensor found on Jawbone's devices -- and indeed, the Jawbone Prime is the most obvious direct competitor to the HX1. Both devices offer decent styling, feature optional earloops and a selection of earbuds for a tighter fit, are being positioned as premium headsets, and -- most importantly -- pack a ton of innovative circuitry all in the name of cutting noise in harsh surroundings. Follow the break for our quick impressions!

Engadget Mobile Podcast 023 - 06.24.2009



It's been a little while since we've taken listener questions, so they finally take a top priority in this week's cast -- over 90 minutes of them, in fact. Buckle up and tune in!

Hosts: Chris Ziegler and Sean Cooper
Producer: Trent Wolbe
Music: Solvent - Devices and Strategies (Ghostly International)


Subscribe to the podcast

[iTunes] Subscribe to the Podcast directly in iTunes
[RSS MP3] Add the Engadget Mobile Podcast feed (in MP3) to your RSS aggregator and have the show delivered automatically
[RSS AAC] Add the Engadget Mobile Podcast feed (in enhanced AAC) to your RSS aggregator
[Zune] Subscribe to the Podcast directly in the Zune Marketplace

Download the podcast

LISTEN (MP3)
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Contact the podcast


podcast (at) engadgetmobile (dot) com.

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

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.

Nokia N97 review: a tale of two bloggers


Thomas Ricker and Chris Ziegler came away from their N97s with very different opinions of Nokia's premier superphone -- and they weren't afraid to let those opinions be known in a series of vicious verbal volleys. Head on over to Engadget for all the drama!

FCC Fridays

We here at Engadget Mobile tend to spend a lot of way too much time poring over the latest FCC filings, be it on the net or directly on the ol' Federal Communications Commission's site. Since we couldn't possibly (want to) cover all the stuff that goes down there, we've gathered up all the raw info you may want (but probably don't need). Enjoy!

Phones
Read - Huawei U9107
Read - Huawei U7510
Read - ZTE S315 / S315+
Read - ZTE S130
Read - ZTE S302
Read - ZTE R220
Read - LG GD710
Read - LG GW525
Read - LG GT950
Read - Sharp E06SH
Read - Samsung B7320L
Read - Samsung i6220

Peripherals
Read - Samsung WEP301
Read - ZTE MF210

Engadget Mobile Podcast 022 - 06.17.2009




Did you hear? There are a bunch of blockbuster launches this month, and we wanted to talk about them -- because, you know, that's what we do. Sean's out this week, so Chris holds it down for a solid 40-plus minutes without taking a single breath. Seriously. New world record, you can look it up.

Hosts: Chris Ziegler
Producer: Trent Wolbe
Music: Solvent - Devices and Strategies (Ghostly International)



Subscribe to the podcast

[iTunes] Subscribe to the Podcast directly in iTunes
[RSS MP3] Add the Engadget Mobile Podcast feed (in MP3) to your RSS aggregator and have the show delivered automatically
[RSS AAC] Add the Engadget Mobile Podcast feed (in enhanced AAC) to your RSS aggregator
[Zune] Subscribe to the Podcast directly in the Zune Marketplace

Download the podcast

LISTEN (MP3)
LISTEN (AAC)

Contact the podcast


podcast (at) engadgetmobile (dot) com.

iPhone 3G S review


As we know from its WWDC unveiling, the iPhone 3G S is basically a 3G with some faster bits, more memory, and a better camera -- but is it worth the price of admission? Head on over to our full review for the answers you seek (and maybe some you don't)!

Samsung's Omnia family hands-on, Samsung Jet and Pixon 12 come along for the ride


Samsung just pulled a bit of a "Samsung" and completely blew out its Omnia lineup. We just got some face time with the new Omnia II, Omnia Pro, Omnia Lite and the Omnia-inspired Jet, along with the Pixon 12 -- which runs the same in-house Samsung OS as the Jet, but packs a 12 megapixel camera. It's hard not to notice the stunning AMOLED screens on these phones, especially up against the dull-by-comparison Omnia Lite with its petty LCD. Unfortunately, while the build quality is good and the specs are certainly all there, all the phones were fairly slow in regular operation. The Jet and Pixon were passable (and the Jet certainly ought to be, with an 800MHz "application processor"), but we can't imagine anybody finding any pleasure in the molasses Windows Mobile 6.1 experiences on the Omnia trio. The Jet has a fun little 3D UI "cube" gimmick, which involves the pointless spinning of a cube to access different media apps, but most of what we saw was pretty standard TouchWiz. We did like the speed of Pixon's camera, which does a Pre-style trick of sending photo processing duties to the background so you can snap another photo with little delay in between -- it's also pretty good at auto focus and color accuracy for a phone, but we won't be trading in our regular point and shoot in the near term. None of the phones we looked at had network access, so we weren't able to test out the WebKit browsers, but it sounds like a major win for the Jet and Pixon. Let's just work on that Omnia responsiveness a bit, yeah Samsung? Perhaps Windows Mobile 6.5 (the Omnia II and Omnia Pro are 6.5-ready) will help.

Quickoffice for iPhone impressions

Quickoffice is no stranger to the mobile Office space. Indeed, the software itself has been around in one form or another since 1998. Most recently, however, the app has strolled into Apple's App Store, and we'll be taking a closer look at what may possibly be the most serious productivity app to sashay over to the iPhone OS. Priced at $19.99, the app certainly isn't inexpensive, but it offers a few luxuries that businesspeople and Office mavens alike may not be able to live without. We're talking real, unadulterated editing of Excel spreadsheets, Word documents and text files, not to mention a fairly robust file management system as well as a PDF and JPEG viewer. Care to find out what we thought after taking it for a spin? Hop on past the break.

FCC Fridays

We here at Engadget Mobile tend to spend a lot of way too much time poring over the latest FCC filings, be it on the net or directly on the ol' Federal Communications Commission's site. Since we couldn't possibly (want to) cover all the stuff that goes down there, we've gathered up all the raw info you may want (but probably don't need). Enjoy!

Phones
Read - ZTE A292
Read - ZTE A712+
Read - ZTE S315
Read - Samsung SCH-U640
Read - Samsung SCH-R350
Read - Samsung SCH-R451
Read - Samsung SPH-M560
Read - Samsung S6700
Read - Samsung S5630C
Read - LG GW820

Peripherals
Read - ZTE AC2746
Read - Huawei ETS1360
Read - Pantech UMW190




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