If you have an Android mobile and currently living in the United States of America (Howdeee Pardners!) then you might be interested to know that you can pick up the Mobile Tech Addicts Podcast application from the Amazon App Store. If you search for Mobile Tech Addicts anywhere on the site you will find the app, or if you don’t like all that mucking around with typing you could click here.
Posted by: Gareth
With yesterday being BlackBerry PlayBook launch day in North America and Canada, Phones 4U have conformed they will stock the PlayBook from day one here in the UK. They have not however confirmed when the UK launch date will be. That one is still a mystery. The good news though is that we will have a PlayBook pretty soon for review and clearly as soon as we get the nod from RIM we will let you all know the launch details.
Phones 4U marketing director Russell Braterman said in-house research collected by the retailer showed 69 per cent of 16-25 year olds currently owned a BlackBerry handset and said the arrival of the PlayBook in the UK would increase the over BlackBerry user experience.
“We’re thrilled to be offering a professional-grade tablet device that will enhance the user’s mobile experience,” Braterman said.
Our customers are always after the latest and greatest in technology, and the BlackBerry PlayBook is setting a new standard for the tablet category.”
Personally I am pulling my hair out waiting for the BlackBerry PlayBook to arrive here. Well I would if I had any hair!
Posted by: James
In contrast to the recent post of the pricing for the HTC Flyer, PC World have listed the price for the HTC Flyer without the 3G aspect, the Wifi one. Loosing the 3G modem will drop the price from £599.99 to a bargain basement £479.99. This takes into account the drop is storage size also. The 3G listed on PC World’s site is 32GB, whereas the wifi is left with a little 16GB chip in there.
The HTC Flyer is a strong and exciting product but HTC have really pushed the boat out when it comes to the pricing. The Galaxy Tab was also guilty of this and soon we will see Motorola, Acer and LG entering the same price range with their offerings, however the latter three are better spec’d and running a more appropriate operating system. Oh, but they don’t have a stylus.
Posted by: Gareth
According to Reuters, Apple Inc are suing Samsung over the look of the Galaxy line. Mobile and tablets “slavishly” copying iPhone and iPad design. According to Apple "This kind of blatant copying is wrong."
To mark this occasion of momentous nonsense I am launching a competition. The person who can identify the most differences in the devices after the break will receive a special mention on the podcast on just what a keen attention to detail they have.
Another week, another release of a 2.3 update to one of the many Galaxy phones. Samsung seem to be making good on these updates and it’s a very welcome announcement. The Galaxy S 2.3 Gingerbread update will start rolling out this weekend. I’m guessing that users of other phones and tablets in the Galaxy range will see a release for their device in the near future.
To download the source, head over to the Open Source Developers Center, search for "GT-I9000_OpenSource_GB.zip," download, and enjoy.
Posted by: Gareth
Hopefully many of you already tune in to our weekly podcast and may have heard Gareth mention that the Mobile Tech Addicts podcast has been nominated in the “Best use of social media by broadcast media” section of the Northern Ireland Social Media Awards.
We are up against some very stiff competition from the big local media however! UTV, CoolFM, City Beat and Talkback are some of the most popular local broadcasters in NI so the fact that we are alongside them is pretty cool.
So to those of you that tune in and enjoy our podcast (and even if you don’t) I’d like to ask you to please consider voting for us. You can find us under category 6 and all you have to do to place your vote is go to the Northern Ireland Social Media Awards voting site, put in an email address and tick the box next to our name. Simples!
Thanks so much to those of you that already voted and to those of you about to do so. We’ll let you know how we get on! 🙂
Posted by: Gareth
Something a little light hearted for you. I just stumbled on a great little video on YouTube which contains two of my favorite things, BlackBerry and The Foo Fighters. It looks like RIM have been doing a bit of sponsorship with the FF’s which if you ask me makes one cool combination.
Need I say more. See the video below.
The leaks just keep on coming for the next batch of BlackBerry Smartphones we can expect to see hopefully this summer. This new collection of leaks comes once again from N4BB and we have promo videos for both the BlackBerry Bold 9900 and the BlackBerry Touch 9860.
With BlackBerry World just around the corner in early May it is looking more and more likely that these two new devices along with the Torch 2 will be announced.
I’m pretty excited about all three. If the rumored specs are correct it looks like RIM are catching up with the rest of the industry and using 1.2 GHz processors. That will make one nippy BlackBerry.
You can see both the video promos below.
If you are a BlackBerry user and like to use Twitter, you may want to check out Twitter for BlackBerry if you have not done so before as it now has some rather cool new features.
First up, and in my opinion most important, is the introduction of push mentions and messages. There is nothing more frustrating than waiting for a Twitter app to refresh, so now as soon as someone mentions you the message will be pushed to your BlackBerry. I have been using this feature for some time as a beta zone member and if you use Twitter a lot once you have ‘push’ you can never go back. Try it. It rocks!
Tweet location is another new feature. Once set up within the options of the app you will notice a compass logo sitting next to the camera icon. Here you can choose to add your location to tweets. Viewing someone else’s location – if they have enabled this feature – is really easy too! All you need to do is select the location icon that appears in the bottom right corner of their tweet and a map view will open, allowing you to see where they were when they submitted that Tweet.
The next time you Retweet something, it will appear in your Home timeline as ‘Retweeted by You’, to quickly alert you that your Retweet was sent successfully.
Today at a press conference in London HTC have officially announced their latest flagship smartphone, the HTC Sensation. The Sensation will be HTC’s first dual-core smartphone.
I’ve been lucky enough to play with the HTC Sensation already and can tell you it really is an awesome phone. The screen is a 4.3" super-LCD capacitive touchscreen running at QHD, 540×960 resolution. This is a true 16:9 aspect ratio which is great for watching movies. The screen is slightly recessed with interesting curved edges. This doesn’t just look good but also protects the screen when the handset is placed face down. However, the screen is made from Gorilla Glass so damage should not be a big problem.
The Sensation has an ultra thin form factor and despite the 4.3" screen is physically slightly smaller and lighter than the Desire HD.
The processor is a dual-core Qualcomm MSM8260 running at 1.2ghz, this coupled with 768MB RAM, 4GB ROM and Gingerbread 2.3.3 should keep things running pretty smoothly.
The latest version of HTC Sense, 3.0, has new 3D and cube-like widgets. This is a great effect and really adds some visual interest to the home screen. It certainly helps to show off the QHD screen too.
There’s a new 8 megapixel camera and an all new ‘enhanced camera experience’. The main new feature here is the instant capture function, the photo is taken the instant you press the button so that you don’t miss those precious moments.
Thanks to the improved power of dual-core video can be captured in HD at 1080p resolution while the live touch focus allows you to get creative by touching on the area of the screen that you want to be in focus while recording is in progress. HTC also include a basic video editing application so that you can crop/trim you video before sharing via YouTube etc.
HTC have made enhancements to the lock screen too. Rather than just simply unlocking the phone and opening at the home screen there’s a new feature that allows you to unlock and launch one of four specific applications. You can customise which applications live there but you could for example unlock straight to the camera app or maybe to your email account.
Also on the lock screen you can place live widgets so you can have Twitter updates, email or weather updated live on the lock screen if you so desire.
HTC Watch is HTC’s movie delivery service. You can buy or rent movies from within the Watch application and once download starts you can commence watching the movie within 10 seconds while the rest of the content downloads in the background. In practice I guess this will be dependent upon connection speeds. Movies will can either be purchased in-app or via carrier billing depending upon the carrier setup.
There’s obviously so much more to talk about with the HTC Sensation so I hope to have some hands on video online shortly after the press conference finishes.
The full specification and more images can be found below. We’ll have our HTC Sensation Review online as soon as we can get our hands on one. I can’t wait!
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