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!
We’re off to HTC’s April press event later today and, as we have done in the past, we’ll be teaming up with Paul from MoDaCo to live blog the proceedings. We’re expecting some interesting announcements today so starting at between 13:30 and 14:00 BST we’ll be live blogging. The feed below should auto update for the duration and you’ll be able to ask us questions as we go along too. After the event you’ll be able to replay the live blog as well.
Click through for the live blog page below:
Even though Nokia are adopting Windows Phone 7 in the future they are still clearly working to make Symbian a better platform. Nokia have announced an update , named Anna, that will roll out over the coming months for the N8, E7, C7 and C6-01. The forthcoming X7 and E6 will ship with the new version of the OS pre loaded.
The new stuff includes the following:
You can see a video of these below.
Over at the Carphone Warehouse the HTC Flyer is currently showing as available for pre order. Now although the site shows it as being in stock the word on the street is that the device will not be shipping until next month so don’t get too excited just yet.
Priced at £599.99 for the Wi-Fi version it doesn’t come cheap and in fact one would argue that it is massively over priced at nearly six hundred whole English pounds.
If you missed our demo video with the Flyer you can check it out here.
Head on over to Carphone Warehouse if you want to get your order in now.
For those of you that want a reminder what the HTC Flyer has to offer you can see more details below:
Some pictures have been released for what looks to be the Tablet interface. This new UI known as Immersive is a locked down feature, operating at 640×480 and cannot be resized. Something else notable is the addition of an Immersive version of Internet Explorer designed for the platform. Most of the features do not work so I think is safe to say we won’t see this for some time, or if we do it might have that rushed feel some developers like to go for.
On April 1st, Trendy Entertainment and Sony Ericsson released Dungeon Defenders: Second Wave, the player versus player, multiplayer sequel to the hit, number one Android game Dungeon Defenders: First Wave! Originally planned only for consoles, now it’s playable for the first time as it was originally meant to be played-with controls on Sony Ericsson’s new Xperia PLAY smartphone. If you love online games, then you will surely love LevelUp casino too.
Xperia PLAY, which launches this month around the world, is the must-have smart phone on the fully-featured Android 2.3 (Gingerbread) platform. It is also the world’s first PlayStation certified smartphone, offering unrivalled gaming capability with dedicated gaming controls and ultra-fast graphics based on the optimized Qualcomm Snapdragon processor and Adreno GPU.
I have no idea if this has been announced elsewhere, but here is some great news!
For Americans, one of the pleasures of the iPad has been the ability to stream movies via Netflix, in the UK we’ve been poorly served since our equivalent, LoveFilm, has been slow to get their act together. The issue has been that iPhones and iPads don’t run flash, and LoveFilm’s streaming service relies on it to work. So your LoveFilm subscription has been useless on Apple iOS devices.
Well down at the Ideal Home Show this weekend, where I often go hunting for a story (?), I brought up this issue at the large LoveFilm stand. The staff were fairly clueless but put me through to someone senior who told me that as part of their expansion plans (which recently involved streaming on the PS3 etc), they will be iPad and iPhone friendly from mid-April. He also mentioned that the number of movies available to stream is about to increase dramatically thanks to the company being bought by Amazon a few months back.
Posted by Gareth
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