It's a week of Google Android related news out of AT&T with announcement of two new smartphones coming out, both of which run on the Google Android mobile operating system. The first of these to be released, and in fact now available for purchase is the HTC Aria, and as such, it is officially the first AT&T Google phone.
The HTC Aria is on sale now in the U.S. for $129.99 with 2-year contract. A nice added touch is that the price comes with the contract, meaning no mail-rebate required.
The HTC Aria is 3G HSPA device with Wi-Fi connectivity. It has a 3.2" HVGA touch screen display, and features a 5 megapixel camera with camcorder and auto-focus. The battery life on the HTC Aria is 6 hours of talk time and 15 1/2 days on standby.
The other AT&T smartphone coming out shortly on the Google Android OS is the Samsung Captivate.
Motorola has just revealed its latest smartphone designed for business users, the Motorola ES400 Enterprise Digital Assistant (EDA). The Motorola ES400 EDA will run on the Windows 6.5 operating system and be carried by the Sprint wireless network.
The ES400 EDA will be targeted at sales and field service workers along with business is the retail, manufacturing, and health care sectors. It will be used to get remote access to applications, to make transactions, and to take inventory.
Previously, the latest Motorola EDA is the MC75A, a 3.5G device, which has a more rugged appearance, a WWAN antenna, and a 3.5" display screen. But this new device, the Motorol ES400 EDA has more sleek appearance with a 3" touchscreen display and no external antenna.
Highlighted features on Motorola's new EDA device include the state-of-the-art MEUI interface, with its one-touch application access, a digital camera app, easier setting-adjustments with device management tabs, and a one-touch barcode scanner.
The public can soon expect to see an even newer iPhone from Apple than the 3GS, that being the 4G. Although Apple has not released much information concerning the new iPhone, there are some clues as to when the big day will be, with estimates at around July 2010, and the 4G user can be assured of a few improvements and upgrades.
According to "unofficial" sneak previews, the case back will be available in glass, shiny plastic or ceramic, and is completely flat. 3 grams have been added to the weight of the device, and the display has been upgraded to a squarer, fingerprint resistant screen offering a higher resolution, at some reports 960 x 640.
iPhone 4G users can enjoy the addition of split volume buttons, a secondary mic for noise-canceling purposes, and a Micro-SIM card instead of a standard SIM.
This smartphone offers both a 16Gb, and a whopping 32Gb, depending on the price. The camera has changed, adding a flash, a larger lens, and a front facing chat cam. The battery should finally be replaceable, and will hold a longer charge to boot, has more memory, and faster CPU - all of which will no doubt help to bolster the new multitasking capabilities expected from this device.
In the recent release of the latest Droid phone from Verizon, “The Droid Incredible”, HTC delivers an array of improvements, not least of which is the super-fast one gigahertz Snapdragon processor. This faster processor will allow more apps, and the ability to create high level gaming graphics, which were slower in the other versions of the Droid using the older processors.
The availability of The Incredible will create competition in a market where the most popular smartphones, like the Apple iPhone 3GS, and soon to be released, iPhone 4G, are accessible from one carrier only, that being AT&T, of course. Verizon can expect to see this Droid Incredible, and future prototypes, offered through a wider range of carriers (while iPhone users can also look forward to a Verizon iPhone in the not-so-distant future).
Along with running the latest 2.1 version of the original Google Android OS, the HTC Droid Incredible boasts an amazing 8 megapixel camera.
The next Verizon phone on the Google Android platform may be coming from manufacturer LG, known for the LG Chocolate and more recently the LG Dare, among others.
This new Verizon LG model Google phone will be a 3.5" 800 x 480 WVGA AMOLED touchscreen device with a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.
One of the expected highlights of this new device will be a 5.0 megapixel camera able to record in HD video. It will also have the usual Wi-Fi, GPS, and 3G network capability.
If can get a look at the LG SU2300, released only in LG's home country of Korea, then you can see what this new device, which is slated for a US release, is modeled after.
Previous rumors about the release of an LG Google phone on Verizon reported that the phone's name was going to be the LG Aloha, but it now looks like it is poised to be the LG Ally.
There’s so much going on in smartphone news these days that we could hardly focus on a single story for the subject of today’s post. Instead, here’s an overview of the smartphone buzz this week:
Mobile gaming is more popular than ever, continuing to skyrocket even as the economy continues to linger in the doldrums.
The long-awaited arrival of Adobe Flash technology to the smartphone world is now imminent, with the company now saying Flash 10.1 should be avilable on smartphones by the end of 2010. The technology is currently being demonstrated on the Google Nexus One.
Sony Ericsson, which is about to release a WinMo 7 smartphone soon, has hinted that even with their new software upgrade on the Xperia X10 from Google Android 1.6 to Android 2.1 it still won’t have multi-touch capabilities, but according to the rumor mill, that isn’t the case, and the device should have 2.1 and multi-touch by September.
Could the battlefield for the smartphone wars get any more crowded? Apparently, it can—as Microsoft has so brazenly proven once again. The company that most recently tried to beat Google at its own game with Bing! is now out to take the Google phone and the iPhone down in one fell swoop with Windows Phone 7.
This past week was the Mobile World Congress, the annual event where pretty much everything mobile for the next year gets introduced. For Micorosft it was the new mobile OS, the successor to WinMo6 and WinMo6.5, Windows Phone 7.
Apparently in contrast to the clunky and overstuffed earlier WinMo attempts to pack a PC into a handheld device, Windows Phone 7 honed its efforts on two prime areas: a hip interface concentrating on games, photos, messaging, and music, and a suite of business and productivity features, like mobile Outlook email and Office.
In addition to Microsoft’s new Windows Phone 7, Nokia and Intel announced the merging of Nokia’s Maemo OS with Intel’s Moblin OS to create the MeeGo mobile OS.
Among the master innovators of our era, Google, has just revealed one of the next big projects on its plate, and as would be appropriate for a company that just launched its own smartphone, the Google Nexus One, it’s a smartphone-related project. It is, in essence, a “universal translator” for smartphones.
The “universal translator” terminology is more a Gene Rodenberry term than Google’s, but the idea is the same – a piece of software (whether an app or a program built into a smartphone’s operating system) that automatically translates the words a person is speaking into the mic on a smartphone into the language understood best by the party listening on the receiving end of the line.
The promise for this type of technology is astounding, bringing the global community closer together than ever before conceivable.
Text translation and voice commands have long (in smartphone years) been a staple of the industry. So speech-to-speech translation shouldn’t be too tough to work out. At least so say the tireless innovators at Google.
Don’t get too excited, though. It’ll still probably take a couple years to iron the kinks out.
So apparently Microsoft has made a half-billion dollar deal with Verizon to have its Bing search engine be the exclusive search application for Verizon smartphones. And just when we were starting to like Verizon!
Verizon's latest software update apparently auto-sets devices' default search applications to Bing. But if it were just a default setting, that would be one thing. Removing the sub-menu of alternative default choices is another. Apparently you can still search Google, Yahoo!, Wikipedia et al. You just can't set it as your default search engine. What a pain! And an affront.
With AT&T angering customers left and right, you'd think Verizon would welcome all defectors with open arms, excluding no one. But now, unless you want to accept Bing as your sole search provider, you'll no longer want to get a Verizon smartphone either.
The change is most notable in the latest from RIM, the Blackberry Storm2, but expect all other Verizon Blackberry models to fall in line soon enough.
Information Week just put out an interesting story about the "Top 10 Smartphone Advances of 2009" - a look back before we take a look at the year ahead.
The article spoke of Motorola's comeback on the coattails of the Linux-based Google Android mobile OS, with the two highlights of Motorola's year being the eminently customizable Motorol Cliq and the Motorola Droid.
Speaking of which, Google's Android rollout was probably the headline stealer of the smartphone year.
It spoke of Blackberry's jaunt over from the enterprise market into the mainstream consumer market with features in the coming BB Storm 2 that include WiFi and a boosted 2 GB onboard memory.
Meanwhile Microsoft (especially with its WinMo 6.5 Mobile OS) and Palm (particularly with its webOS smartphones the Palm Pre and its follow-up the Palm Pixi) both companies have been scrambling to get their footing as they keep losing ground to all the newer, younger, better competitors on the field. Surprisingly, and thanks to those newest release, the both don't same too far behind to stay in the game.
Apple's overhaul of the iPhone was a welcome highlight of the smartphone year, with issues like copy and paste and 3G network access being finally being addressed, as well as improvements in its digital camera, processor, storage space, even GPS and a digital compass.
And of course, 2009 saw the explosion of the mobile app market, across all platforms, as every smartphone maker scrambled to offer more and better and (when they're on their toes) more relevant apps to their user base, with the iTunes App Store leading the way and Blackberry App World nipping at its heels.
The list rounded out with Apple's lockout of Google Voice, Symbian's move to Nokia (and beyond), and PC makers, like Dell, staking their claim on a piece of the smartphone pie.
