News

Samsung announce the Galaxy S WiFi 4.0 Smart Player

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., a leading provider of smart mobile devices, today announced the Samsung Galaxy S WiFi 4.0 Smart Player, the latest addition to its expanding range of Android-powered Galaxy products. Available with a 4″ Super Clear LCD display, the Galaxy S WiFi 4.0 delivers apps and entertainment, powered by Android.

Following the global success of the Samsung Galaxy S smartphone, Samsung has created the Samsung Galaxy S WiFi 4.0 that delivers all the features of the original, such as video communications via VoIP services, and video and music entertainment with multi-codec support, without the need for an operator contract.

HTC announce the HTC Wildfire S

The HTC Wildfire was launched last year and since then its popularity here in the UK cannot be denied. Many of the UK operators offer the handset and even its SIM-free pricing is pretty aggressive.

This latest version, the HTC Wildfire S, is a nice progression offering HVGA rather than QVGA and adding a 5 Megapixel camera with flash and 720P video recording, GPS, WiFi all in a 105 gram package.

At launch there will be 4 colours available, silver, black, purple and white but we can probably expect the range to expand throughout the year.

Having played with this one last week I was impressed with the build quality and feel of this little handset.

Building on the popularity of the HTC Wildfire smartphone, the HTC Wildfire S smartphone is an affordable, compact and playful device that packs a powerful smartphone experience. It enables people to maintain and build connections and friendships through popular sites like Facebook, as well as through voice and text messaging. You can instantly tag your friends in photos before posting them on Facebook, or share your latest discoveries from the Android Market at the touch of a button.

HTC Wildfire S is one of HTC’s smallest phones ever – measuring just 10.13cm long and 5.94cm wide – and boasts a distinctive 3.2 inch, HVGA display.

Celebrate your individuality and choose from a wide variety of colours including black, purple and white. The phone’s home screen is fully customizable with your favourite apps, widgets and content, while a 5-megapixel colour camera with auto focus, expandable microSD memory and support for a variety of audio and video formats make a great all-around multimedia device that slips easily into any pocket.

More pictures and full specification can be found below.

HTC announce the HTC Salsa and HTC ChaCha

HTC have a lot to talk about this year at MWC but that’s ok as they’ve just annouced a couple of new social networking handsets that’ll help them get the message across.

These two ‘Facebook’ phones have been rumoured for a while, we spoke about the HTC Salsa back in December but the name of the other handset, pictured below, had an unknown name. You’ll either think the names are fun or silly but the ChaCha and Salsa started out as HTC internal names (for two other devices as it happens) but HTC though the fun names suited this type of product.

You’ll notice a Facebook key on both of these handsets which allows you to get instant access to HTC’s Friendstream application to share your thoughts with your friends on Facebook or Twitter. A long-press of this key allows you to announce where you are and to check in on Facebook with places integration.

The HTC ChaCha has some nice colour accents, the one we saw last week was white with a blue inlay around the edges but expect to see lots of colour combinations over the coming months. Both devices launch at the end of Q2 2011.

Press release and photos follow.

HTC announce the HTC Incredible S

Busy times for MWC and the third of their new ‘Evolution’ products to be announced today at MWC is the HTC Incredible S. The incredible was a US-only handset but the new ‘S’ version will be available pretty much everywhere.

I was lucky enough to have a meeting with Phil Blair and Drew Banford from HTC last week and get to have a little play with the Incredible S and this is definitely the one to have as far as I am concerned. It really does take the inside-out, physical-mechanical approach to a new level with its unibody design it looks quite different and has a truly wonderful screen. This one really does stand out. I’m looking forward to doing this review!

The alluring HTC Incredible S smartphone combines cutting-edge design with a premium mobile experience for those who dare to be different. Showing what can be achieved when engineers and designers work together to raise the bar for mobile phone design, the HTC Incredible S smartphone features a stunning, contoured body that highlights the internal hardware components of the device. Capturing and viewing video in crystal clear High-Definition has never been so easy and a bright 4-inch WVGA Super LCD display and stereo surround sound bring a vibrant cinematic experience to the palm of your hand.

HTC Incredible S also takes high quality pictures with its 8-megapixel camera with dual flash, and it easily enables videos, photos and music to be shared from the handset direct to a TV using DLNA® technology. Thanks to the HTC Incredible S’s front facing camera and video call functionality, users will constantly be able to chat with their friends face-to-face.

Full specs can be found below:

HTC announce the Desire S

There really is no denying the popularity of the HTC Desire range. First announced at MWC this time last year the original HTC Desire built upon the Nexus One (the two handsets virtually the same hardware) but added to that HTC’s own Sense user interface making the Android operating system a lot less stark and arguably more accessibly to more potential customers.

The desire was so popular in fact that HTC couldn’t make them fast enough in the summer of last year. Problems with the supply of the AMOLED display from Samsung further added to the issues and led HTC to change the Desire to SuperLCD displays instead.

There have been a couple of other ‘variants’ of the Desire, the Desire Z and the Desire HD. HTC are now making the most of their investment in that name and are bringing us the HTC Desire S. I’m not sure why all new products seem to be getting the ‘S’ suffix this year but here’s another. Is it like car registration numbers??

Today in Barcelona, Spain HTC have announced their new flagship Smartphone, the Desire S. As a successor to the popular and award winning HTC Desire, the new HTC Desire S blends stunning design with power and speed. Inspired by the HTC Legend’s aluminum design, the HTC Desire S is sculpted out of a single block of aluminum making it feel solid and natural in your hand. With Qualcomm’s new 1GHz 8255 Snapdragon processor the HTC Desire S offers snappy performance and power. It offers front and back camera, High Definition video recording and the 3.7 inch WVGA display presents multimedia content brilliantly.

See the full spec and more images below:

HTC announce the HTC Flyer (tablet)

Well we were pretty sure it was about to happen but just moments ago HTC made their first tablet device official. It’s called the HTC Flyer. The name has been out there for a while but the exact specification has been a matter of speculation for a while. Fortunately you can take a look at the full spec further down this post.

In essence the HTC Flyer is a 7" Android tablet running, at launch, with 2.4 Gingerbread. The screen is 600×1024, good for web browsing in landscape and it has a new HTC Sense overlay designed specifically for this tablet.

There’s also a special stylus for precision entry so you’ll be able to write on the screen or use your fingers, the UI will know the difference between the pen and your fingers.

Of the 7″ tablets we’ve seen so far this one is the most attractive and with HTC Sense is stands out from the rest of the Android tablets.

More details follow:

HTC announce 6 new products at MWC

Last year at MWC HTC announced three new handsets, the HTC Legend and HTC Desire went on to be extremely popular devices. This year though, HTC have literally doubled their efforts in announcing 6 new devices at MWC 2011.

The new products fall in to three categories:

• Evolution products that build upon existing platforms and take them to a new level. These include the HTC Desire S, HTC Incredible S and HTC Wildfire S.
• Social products; the HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa billed by many as the ‘Facebook phones’
• Finally the HTC Flyer, HTC’s first entry in to the Tablet market.

There will be a full press conference held at MWC at 8:45am today, these handsets were all under embargo until that time but a few naughty people have broken that embargo so it’s go, go, go!

We’ve got full details of each new products coming up in individual posts so keep your eyes peeled!

Posted by: Matt

HTC’s press event tomorrow

Tomorrow is the day that all you HTC fans have been waiting for. At around 08.45, GMT, HTC kick of their press conference at Mobile Word Congress in Barcelona. Our man Gareth will be at the event to get the low down and some hands on time with the new devices that are being announced.

There has been much speculation about what HTC has up its sleeves for us this year and without giving anything away i will just urge you to keep an eye on the site tomorrow morning.

Full details from the press event will be live at 08.45 UK time.

Posted by: James

Qualcomm announces Snapdragon superchip

It wasn’t long ago that the latest dual-core processor to join the Snapdragon family was announced – the APQ8060 was revealed to be the brains behind the new HP webOS TouchPad. Their newest chip though is an entirely different beast; the APQ8064 is a quad-core processor capable of scaling up to 2.5GHz! That’s not all – the 28nm design also includes a quad-core Adreno 320 graphics processor, which apparently has 15 times the performance.

That might already be jawdropping, but this is the real kick – the APQ8064 has 12 times the overall performance while drawing 75% less power than the original Snapdragons. Qualcomm have also thrown in some extras too – support for dual 20MP cameras, 3D displays and video recording, PCIe, USB, WiFi, GPS, NFC and almost every other technological acronym you can think of.

The expected launch date of mid 2012 is a long way away, so keep dreaming for now!

Posted by: Vince

Acer’s ICONIA TAB A500

Mobility and innovation, which have always been part of Acer’s DNA, now find a new form of expression in the new Acer ICONIA TAB A500, a 10.1-inch tablet designed to maximize content enjoyment, providing the same rich multimedia, gaming and Web experience you can enjoy on your home PC with the added user-friendliness of multi-touch technology.