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We waited and waited for a Palm Pre and finally those nice folks at Palm have kindly sent us one!
I have completed the review and it will be here in the next day or so, but in the meantime here is a little teaser in the form of a video. Like we have done with a few other popular devices, below you will find a short video of me showing a few of the Palm Pre’s features and apps, as well as comparing the Pre with a couple of other Palm devices. I think this follows on nicely from Matt’s Pre unboxing video that you may have already seen.
Did I like the Pre?
Well, you will just have to keep an eye on the site to see the review! If you don’t follow us on Twitter please do so and we will tweet as soon as the full review is live. http://twitter.com/tracyandmatt
I’m sure that I wont have to remind anyone that Windows Phone 7 Series (what we all thought would be Windows Mobile 7) was announced just last in a Microsoft press conference held at MWC in Barcelona.
Personally I’m really looking forward to seeing Windows Phone 7 Series for myself, particularly the ‘Live Tiles’ and the 5 hubs.
Now I bet you have a lot of questions about Windows Phone 7 Series which is great because Microsoft have granted us an exclusive Twitter interview this week. We’ll be talking to Alex Reeve, Director of Mobile Business Group in the UK, via the Windows Phone twitter account. The interview will take place on Thursday 25th February at 12 Noon. I will be asking the questions and Alex will reply in real time.
So follow me on Twitter @TRACYANDMATT and the Windows Phone Twitter account @WINDOWSPHONEUK to see both sides of the conversation.
Please submit your questions via This Forum Thread and we’ll ask Alex Reeve the most appropriate ones during the interview. If you miss the session live we’ll also post a copy here after the fact.
Posted by: Matt
[ Post Tags: Windows Mobile 7, Windows Phone 7 Series, MWC, Microsoft ]
It was a few weeks ago now that we first saw the Sony Ericsson Aspen (aka Sony Ericsson Faith) in an official press release from Sony Ericsson. At the time I think there was perhaps more of a buzz around the fact that it had been announced with Windows Mobile 6.5.3 than the actual device itself but I could be wrong!
Personally I was quite interest in the hardware, there aren’t too many Windows Mobile devices with a fixed forward-facing QWERTY keyboard and there are even fewer to also have a touchscreen even if it is only QVGA.
As I’ve already mentioned, the Aspen has WinMo 6.5.3 and was the first to be announced with the latest incarnation of Windows Mobile and also the first to actually go on sale with the new OS. A few other handsets have since been announced with 6.5.3 but no other on sale as yet.
As you know, James was at MWC last week and not only was he able to have a look at the Aspen but he was also allowed to bring one home for us to review. I’m starting off here with a preview video which is in place of our normal unboxing video but as there is no proper box with this prototype unit I wonder if we can really call it an unboxing video!? In either case you can find the video below where I’ll show you around the device as well as booting up in to Windows Mobile and have an poke around with the user interface.
Following on from the Sony Ericsson press conference held in Barcelona just before the official start of MWC a week ago James managed to track down a couple of the new handset announced by Sony Ericsson, namely the X10 Mini and the X10 Mini PRO.
These are two handsets that really surprised me, I didn’t expect Sony Ericsson to actually announce these. Both new handset have run on Android 1.6 but have a heavily customised user interface. In fact when I saw them in action earlier this week they were almost unrecognisable as being Android.
As you’ll see in the video both the X10 Mini and the Mini PRO have a footprint not much larger than a credit card but still manage to pack in plenty of cool features and what impressed me so was just how usable the QWERTY keyboard is on the Mini PRO, I expected it to be far too cramped to be viable for everyday use but I think it works pretty well!
We’ll be pushing Sony Ericsson hard to get our hands on these ASAP for a full review, but have a look at the demo video that James recorded at MWC where a nice lady from Sony Ericsson takes us on a quick tour. Video, photos and press release follow.
As I mentioned the other day, one of the handsets to get quite a lot of attention at MWC was the new Samsung Wave.
The Wave is the first Samsung device to have the new Bada operating system and the new TouchWiz 3.0 user interface. On top of that it’s also the first handset to incorporate Super AMOLED technology and DNIe. DNIe technology is proven display technology which incorporated to Samsung’s LCD TV and LED TV lineups.
James popped over to see the folks on the Samsung stand at MWC and got them to give him a quick demo of the Wave. I think James was quite impressed with the clarity of the display and the responsiveness of the touchscreen on the Wave.
We hope to get our hands on the Wave over the next few weeks for a full review but until then have a look at the demo video, photos and full press release after the break.
So you have probably seen our video coverage of the new device from HTC, the Legend, Desire and HD mini that we’re announced at MWC this week. Now that James has returned from Barcelona we can start to upload some more of the video content that James recorded while he was there.
So lets start more or less at the beginning with the press conference from HTC. This is virtually the full press conference as recorded by James. It’s a pretty long video, around 20 minutes, so probably worth making yourself comfortable before you start watching.
Don’t forget to also have a look at our video demo of the HTC Legend, HTC Desire and HTC HD mini also recorded at MWC. We still have more MWC coverage to upload and we’ll be doing so over the next couple of days.
Video after the break.
Just a few days ago HTC and O2 held a joint press conference at MWC in Barcelona. The main announcement was the O2 have partnered with HTC and that the HTC Smart will be available on the O2 network throughout Europe, and yes here in the UK, within just a few months. It does look like it will be an O2 exclusive though and we don’t think there will be a SIM-free version either.
The HTC Smart has been designed as a mass-market handset and brings features that you would typically associate with a smartphone to a more ‘mainstream’ feature phone.
James managed to get his hands on the HTC Smart while in Barcelona this week and recorded a brief video ok the user interface. HTC seem to have done a good job with the Brew platform, and you’ll probably notice that the UI looks a lot like the Sense UI that we see on many other HTC devices, nice to see some consistency.
Well it certainly was a hectic few days at MWC and I wasn’t even there! James is on the late flight home from Barcelona and has all the good stuff on his laptop so we should have plenty of photos, video and write-ups for you over the next few days and that’s before we start looking at some of the review devices that James brought back with him and the ones that should be arriving over the next few days!
Just to whet your appetite a little and because it’s a question that we’ve heard asked a lot over the past few days we have a few photos of the new HTC Legend, announced a few days ago, next to the HTC Hero which has been around for a little while. The Legend is widely regarded as the ‘replacement’ for the HTC Hero although it is our understanding that the Hero will remain as part of the HTC product catalogue.
So have a quick look at the images after the break which should give you some idea of the size differences between the two devices. We’ll have plenty more content like this for you tomorrow and over the next few days.
It’s a device we’ve known about for a while but that we’ve struggle to find out much about, however, at a joint press conference at MWC this morning HTC and O2 have announced that the HTC Smart will be coming to Europe.
The headlines from the announcement then:
- HTC Smart – bringing Smartphone features to more people.
- HTC Smart to be half the cost of a ‘smartphone’
- HTC Smart will be in UK, Ireland and Germany in April.
- HTC want more and more people to be using social networking apps. Then they can buy a HTC Smart!
- O2 will be adding 1500 cell masts in the UK this year to help cope with the increase in data users.
Full press release and some nice images follow after the break.
We waited and waited for a Palm Pre and finally those nice folks at Palm have kindly sent us one! 
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