As promised, Nokia has just released a version of the MeeGo platform for mobile phones. This is still quite an early build though, so many of the components are missing or unstable. However, the handset baseline source code is just about fine and that should be great news for the eager application developers. By releasing the early MeeGo Handset Day1 build Nokia also makes the last step to the merger of Moblin and Maemo.
Rejoice Hero owners around Europe – your time has come. After several months, a dozen of broken promises on the HTC side, the Eclair 2.1 update is finally making its way to unlocked Hero units around the old continent.
As we speak an 80 MB update is being pushed to devices purchased SIM free across Europe. Read more »
Gadget manufacturers seem to be having plenty of trouble with device shortages these days. Verizon’s Droid Incredible from HTC seems to be the latest victim – apparently, if you’ve pre-order one, you can cancel that and opt for a Motorola Droid X. Or you can wait for an Incredible if you like…
Apple’s latest phone has certainly kept many gadget-lovers awake at night. It has been an uneasy waiting for us too. Well, the iPhone 4 is finally here. And it’s here to stay obviously as my colleagues are not letting it go anytime soon.
From the brief time I managed to snatch them off their hands, I enjoyed the snappiness of the UI. While at first glance, the general UI is not much faster than the iPhone 3GS, loading times for most applications are way shorter on the iPhone 4. Read more »
Those SuperAMOLED smartphones can certainly take quite a lot of abuse before their batteries die. Even the Android-powered Samsung I9000 Galaxy S managed to live through good three and a half days of standby and some pretty extensive usage before it switched off. Yeap, the notoriously hard on the batteries Android might not be as bad as it is made out to be.
It didn’t manage to beat the S8500 Wave but the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S certainly managed to push a lot of work on a single charge. Here is what we did with it over the 84 hours from its full charge to its battery going flat. Read more »
As official Nokia blog cheekily points out, there are many way of holding your Nokia device. And none of those is right or wrong. Sarcastically clever!
These handholds are not as creative as I would have liked, but nevertheless I had a good laugh reading their semi-serious article.
If you have decided that using a five-inch device as a mobile phone is something you can live with, but hate the whole long-term carrier commitment thing, I have some good news for you. Well, starting now you can get your shiny new Dell Streak SIM free and use it with whichever operator you see fit. It will set you back exactly 449 pounds, which is about 550 euro or 680 US dollars.
Which is better – Samsung’s Super AMOLED or Apple’s Retina display? Surely that’s a much debated topic.
Engadget put those two and let them do their thing. The result turned out pretty interesting.
Symbian phones are not very big in the US, but maybe the Sony Ericsson Vivaz can win a few customers over – the 8MP cameraphone with 720p video capture powers is headed to AT&T…
Reviews of Nokia N8 are spawning all over the place as if Nokia has lifted some sort of an embargo on the N8 public appearances. We just stumbled upon a pretty nice video that offers a rare sight – the Nokia N8 Symbian ^3 UI in action, including some pinch zooming and some gaming action (the office favorite, Angry birds). Plus both – you can pinch zoom in Angry birds, too. How’s that for cool?
Update: In some quite related news, we just got that Doug Dawson, a Nokia spokesman, has confirmed for Reuters that the Nokia N8 will be the last N-series device to run Symbian OS of any kind. From now on, N-series flagships will only use MeeGo. But that doesn’t mean Nokia will drop Symbian. The company will still use it for the rest of its touch smartphones, such as the X-series and even the C-series. The rest of the smartphones will use the regular non-touch variety of Symbian S60.
You may’ve caught it on our blog – or not – but there’s no way you could’ve missed this 9.9 mm slim 4.3-incher. Motorola’s DROID X looks a deadly beast – and, sadly, nothing short of a mutant droid on our side of the pond. CDMA-only for now, the DROID X launches on Verizon in mid-July.
The Motorola DROID X is powered by a 1 GHz processor and runs Android 2.1, skinned with a new edition of Motorola’s MotoBLUR UI. The phone has a massive high-res screen at 4.3″ and 854 x 480 pixels. The top-of-the-line imaging package includes an 8 megapixel still camera with dual LED flash and a 720p camcorder. Read more »
Sony Ericsson XPERIA X8 has only recently been announced. It sits somewhere between the X10 mini and the original X10 both size and feature-wise. It’s cute, that’s for sure and it seems like a perfect mix of the two X10′s. It’s still compact and easy to handle, but visually it looks more able-bodied than the diminutive X10 mini.
For the XPERIA X8 Sony Ericsson has used the same single-widget-per-single-page homescreen layout that we saw on the X10 mini. They’ve gone for that since X8 has a relatively smallish screen. I think 3-inches is as low as Android smartphones with HVGA resoution have gone down. Read more »
We already wrote about the lucky guys who got their iPhone 4 a couple of days early, but they pre-ordered. If you didn’t but want one, well then we have some bad news – in its launch week the iPhone 4 will be rarer that unicorns in stores.
A tip dropped in our inbox says Carphone Warehouse, for instance, is rather under-stocked for launch day – they’ve got barely enough to fulfill half the reservations. As for those who didn’t even reserve one, well, we won’t lie to you – your chances don’t look good. Reports around the Internet suggest the situation is similar in other European locations and even US stores aren’t looking too good… Read more »
A pre-Alpha version of MeeGo Handheld is expected to show up in only a week’s time – on 30 June, according to Valtteri Halla, director of MeeGo software at Nokia. The full Handheld release of the Maemo reincarnation is slated for October release, but this early pre-release will include images of the user interface (perhaps mockupslike these) and an SDK for developers.
Valtteri Halla is also promising the first MeeGo handset to ship in the second half of 2010 – obviously a successor of Nokia N900.
It would be interesting to see whether the handset version will look anything close to the tablet version demoed here.
Users running the latest iOS4 on their iPhone 3G or iPod Touch 2G just got lucky. They can easily jailbreak and even hactivate their devices thanks to the newly released version of redsn0w.
Update 23 June: Pwnage Tool v.4.01 has just been released. It’s a Mac-only tool but would allow you to jailbreak iPhone 3GS too (besides iPhone 3G and iPod Touch 2G).
Read more »
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