Author Archive: Gareth

Acer shows new Windows Mobile 6.5 handsets

Acer  has shown off prototypes of its next slew of smartphones at an event in London, with the pick being F1, a full touchscreen costing up to £445 and released in the second half of 2009.

The F1 (its codename, with the proper title to be applied closer to launch) will sport a high resolution screen (which we assume will be HVGA) with home screen widgets and gaming capabilities.

It will also use a 5MP camera with LED flash, and has four simple buttons at the base of the screen for navigation, including call / reject and a home screen link. More details after the break.

O2 helps busy family lives with O2 Joggler

Press Release: O2 today announces the O2 Joggler, a first-of-its-kind device which will transform the way families manage their busy lives. Taking the place of all the notes traditionally placed on the fridge door, the O2 Joggler is always on and can be used by the entire family. It sends text message reminders which mean every family member will know who needs to be where by when. The O2 Joggler launches in early April.

The O2 Joggler has been built on the insight that family life is hectic and can be difficult to manage. Appointments, birthdays, school runs, work deadlines and more can all be stored on the O2 Joggler’s calendar, which will text handy reminders to family members’ O2 mobile phones.

BlackBerry App World, an App store for Blackberries

You can now register for the Blackberry App World which is the name that they have come up with for their incarnation of the application store. This is what they have to say about it, Coming soon, Find tons of great applications designed for your BlackBerry® smartphone in one convenient place – BlackBerry App World™. Personalize your BlackBerry smartphone with games, social networks, personal productivity applications and so much more. Message your best friend, track the stock market, or channel your inner rock god. Sign up for BlackBerry App World today and discover how to put more of your life on your BlackBerry smartphone.

So we now have app stores for the iPhone, Symbian and Blackberry, Windows Mobile version is coming, but as usual last again.

• Register now for BlackBerry App World and be the first to know when it is available!
• Set up your PayPal® account now to download applications from BlackBerry App World

Palm Pre release could be getting near

According to Crunchgear, starting next week, Sprint and Palm are inviting press to a series of webcasts to showcase the Palm Pre.  Fared Adib, Vice President, Device Operations & Logistics for Sprint, and Matt Crowley, Product Line Manager at Palm, will be the ‘hosts’ for the webcasts and they promise to show the three key differentiators that Sprint and Palm can offer with the Pre.

Still no mention of any European availability or network choices so the best guess right now is that we will not see the Pre launched outside of the USA for quite some time yet.

Pre-order Android Laptop

News of new Android phones seems to be fairly sparse however I notices this article over at Android and Me.

Who will be first to market with an Android powered netbook?  According to Always Innovating, their first Touch Book will become available between May and June 2009 and will run Android.  While it will ship with a custom version of Windows called Touch Book OS, the device will be capable of running many other OSes, including Google Android, Ubuntu, Angstrom, and Windows CE.

HTC Magic appears on Vodafone, arriving in April

The recently announced HTC Magic Android powered phone manufactured by HTC and sold exclusively in the UK on the Vodafone network has just appeared as a coming soon device with an April availability. They describe the phone as everything you love about the internet, exactly how you want it. The HTC Magic will keep you entertained and up to date wherever you are.

Sleek, stylish and exclusive to Vodafone, the Magic is powered by cutting edge technology. So web essentials like Google Maps and Google Search work brilliantly. You can create shortcuts to your favourite sites and download fun games, news feeds and widgets. Then decide where everything goes – so you can get to it all easily. Love putting friends in the picture? The HTC Magic’s 3.2 megapixel camera shoots photos in sharp focus. You can admire the results on its extra large high-resolution screen. Or upload your photos for your friends to see – with superfast internet, they’ll upload in a flash.

You can register for updates from Vodafone on the exact launch date here.

Sprint get Treo Pro with IE6 on March 15th

The Treo Pro will make its debut on Sprint’s Mobile Broadband Network on March 15. The Treo Pro — running on Microsoft Windows Mobile 6.1 — is a proven and reliable tool for mobile enterprise customers. And the Sprint Treo Pro adds some new elements that make it even more powerful.

The Sprint Treo Pro is the first Palm phone available with Internet Explorer Mobile 6, providing users with a more robust mobile browser. With Wi-Fi, GPS, a full keyboard and touch screen, all available for $199 (after the requisite rebates and agreements), the Treo Pro packs about as much bang for its buck as you can fit into a sleek form factor. Perhaps that’s why Tom Swift, EVP at Primerica, a financial services company, encourages his over 100,000 agents to adopt the Treo Pro:

HTC product roadmap gets some specs at last

We have managed to get hold of some specifications at long last of the leaked HTC Roadmap images that we saw way back in the beginning of January. Some interesting devices but nothing too amazing to get us fired up. The Thor which will be the successor to the large Athena will sport a 1Ghz Qualcomm processor which is quite interesting but not much else. Take a look for yourself after the break.

IE6 Mobile video preview

Brandon over at Pocketnow has got a Windows Mobile 6.5 Rom running on a HTC Touch HD and has put together a short video looking at the new IE6 for mobile. This new browser will ship with future Windows Mobile 6.5 devices and should provide a much richer web browsing experience on Windows Mobile devices. The current version of Pocket Internet Explorer is a fast browsing experience and is good for quickly finding bits of information however the rendering and page layouts is a joke.

The new version Microsoft claim will offer desktop class rendering with full flash support all designed for finger use, we will see if it lives up to that. For now though you can have a look at the video after the break but bare in mind this is not the finished version.