Mobile, Internet, etc

Filed under: Handsets, Motorola, ATT, Android

Industry analyst Tero Kuittinen of MKM Partners is reporting that that AT&T has nixed plans to bring on Motorola’s Sawgrass and Heron later this year as part of its first volley of Android devices because the pair looked “dated.” Judging from the shots we have of the Heron, we can’t say we necessarily agree — and that’s not the only hole in the story. We broke the news on these two devices earlier this year; the beefier of the two, the Heron, was pictured running Windows Mobile but it was indicated in the slide deck we had that it’d be ported to Android prior to release. Kuittinen indicates that the phones were prototyped with WinMo but would be moved to Android, so everything checks out so far. Here’s the problem, though: the Sawgrass ended up becoming the Karma, a phone that is very much released and available on AT&T today — so there goes the “dated” argument. What’s more, it doesn’t run Windows Mobile and it never has, even back when it was being pitched in an internal meeting the better part of a year ago. It’s possible the dude just has his codenames mixed up here and Moto really had proposed two Android-powered sets to AT&T all along — and any way you slice it, the Morrison and the Sholes for T-Mobile and Verizon respectively are still the odds-on favorites to be the first Moto Android sets out of the door anyhow. As for AT&T’s current Android strategy, well, that remains to be seen.

[Via FierceWireless]

Rumor has AT&T’s Heron and Sawgrass from Moto canceled, but something’s amiss originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Thu, 27 Aug 2009 22:08:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Handsets, Apple

Streaming and subscription music services are a dime a dozen on iPhone, and they seem to get past Apple’s app store approval hurdles with relative ease. But Spotify was one whose fate wasn’t so clear cut, given its offline playlist function — which as the name suggests downloads songs ahead of time for you to listen to when there’s no WiFi or phone service to stream from — could very easily fall into the category of “duplication of core iPhone functionality” and get deep-sixed at the drop of a hat. Turns out that’s not the case here, as an Apple spokesperson has told paidContent UK that the app’s been given the metaphorical stamp of approval and would be hitting the store “very soon.” A premium subscription will run about £9.99 ($16.20) per month, with an option to pay annually coming at a later date. Of course, there’s a catch, as Spotify’s service is only available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France and Spain for now. The company expects to invade America sometime later this year, but that means another round of app store approvals — and with Apple’s track record on consistency, there’s no telling how that’ll turn out.

Spotify for iPhone gets thumbs up from Apple, subscription music with offline playlists is a go originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:31:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Telus Mobility, HSDPA, UMTS, HSUPA

We can imagine the phone call now:

“GSM Association, how can I help you?”
“Yo, this is Telus… where’d you hear September for our HSPA launch? What are you smoking?”
“But we…”
“Yeah, ‘but you’ nothing. October, broham… you heard it here first. Telus out.” (click)

[Thanks, Alex]

GSMA backpedals, changes Telus’ HSPA launch window to October originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Thu, 27 Aug 2009 17:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Features, Podcasts

That’s right, ladies and gentlemen: we’re back! This is a pretty short one as we get back into the swing of things and reintroduce ourselves, but we hope you enjoy it — and get ready for a whole lot more where that came from. For serious.

Hosts: Chris Ziegler and Sean Cooper
Producer: Trent Wolbe
Music: Solvent - Devices and Strategies (Ghostly International)

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Engadget Mobile Podcast 024 - 08.27.2009 originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: ATT, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless, Misc

Well, we can’t say we didn’t see this one coming. At today’s meeting, the FCC has said that it will be launching a formal inquiry into the wireless industry and specifically into certain business practices of the big four: AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile USA , and Verizon Wireless. The commission hasn’t yet detailed exactly how they’re going to go about this, but you can bet they’ll be looking into exclusivity deals between handset manufacturers and carriers. And who knows? They might be interested in the whole iPhone / AT&T / Google Voice conundrum, especially if it turns out that AT&T had a hand in dissing the app. According to Reuters, the agency is looking into “how competition affects consumers,” with an eye towards further investigations into other areas, including cable and broadband.

[Via Phone Scoop]

FCC formally launches inquiry into wireless competition originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Thu, 27 Aug 2009 15:28:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Handsets, Samsung, Sprint

We’ve already seen one exceedingly blurry image of Samsung’s Sprint-bound Instinct HD, and one seemingly official image courtesy of Best Buy, but Phone Arena has now gotten its hands on what looks to be the most complete set of pics to date. That includes a peek at the phone’s mostly familiar-looking interface, a quick comparison with some of its predecessors, and a look at some curiously repositioned Sprint and Samsung logos, which now match the Instinct S30 (whatever that may signify). Hit up the link below to check out the whole set for yourself.

Samsung Instinct HD spotted in the wild, powered on originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Thu, 27 Aug 2009 14:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Handsets, HTC, China Mobile

HTC’s got a super-tight relationship with Qualcomm, a relationship that they’ve gone to the mat to defend on many occasions — most recently with the Hero, which uses essentially the same 528MHz MSM7201a chipset as pretty much every other notable HTC in recent memory. Thing is, this is 2009 and there now are better, faster processors out there, even within the ARM family; take TI’s Cortex A8-based OMAP3, for example, which very effectively powers some of the most media-centric, UI eye candy-heavy devices on the market. That’s not to say that the MSM7200 series can’t hold its own — one look at TouchFLO 3D gliding along smoothly on a Touch Pro2 will tell you that — but why not throw more horsepower under the hood if you can still get a full days’ worth of use on battery power? We’ve been able to confirm a wmpoweruser.com report that HTC’s upcoming Qilin for China Mobile will be underpinned by an honest-to-goodness OMAP3, which you’d think might rock the Qualcomm boat but HTC’s decision was actually very easy: the fully-integrated MSM7200 isn’t available in a TD-SCDMA configuration. That’s good for Qilin, good for China Mobile, bad for customers of every other Whitestone variant in the world. If there’s a silver lining here, it’s that HTC’s leaked roadmaps seem to indicate that Snapdragon-powered gear will happen sooner rather than later, but at this point, it can’t happen soon enough.

Confirmed: HTC Qilin uses OMAP3 — out of necessity originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Thu, 27 Aug 2009 12:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Handsets, Samsung, Verizon Wireless

Continue reading Jitterbug comes to Verizon’s network, ‘Can you hear me now’ guy replaced by Wilford Brimley

Jitterbug comes to Verizon’s network, ‘Can you hear me now’ guy replaced by Wilford Brimley originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Thu, 27 Aug 2009 10:56:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Handsets, Nokia, Misc

Do you remember the Mobira Talkman? No? That’s okay, you may not have been born yet. In 1984 this was what all the sierra hotel financial traders had glued to their faces — and clutched to their hips, since the thing was as big as a briefcase. 25 years later skilled modder Jani ‘Japala’ Pönkkö came across a free (and fully-functional) example and set upon completing his dream of turning it into an HTPC, which he has called the Dataman. Inside he managed to pack an Intel T5500 Core 2 Duo processor, 1GB of DDR2 memory, a 32GB SSD, and a wireless network card. The 40-hour mod is laboriously detailed in photos at the read link, while the fruits of all that labor are shown in videos after the break, the first showing the pre-mod phone still working perfectly — but complaining about the lack of network (like the Russian Empire’s rule of Finland, the NMT network is long gone) — and the second showing that green LCD replaced by a rather more colorful OLED one.

[Via The UberReview]

Continue reading Man turns luggable 25-year-old cellphone into OLED-packing HTPC

Man turns luggable 25-year-old cellphone into OLED-packing HTPC originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Thu, 27 Aug 2009 09:46:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Handsets, LG, Virgin Mobile, CDMA

We guess we can probably start to expect a lot of “synergies” between Sprint’s lineup and Virgin’s now that the two companies are in the process of uniting in holy matrimony, so here’s a little sneak preview of what’s to come. The Rumor 2 from LG — which Sprint has had in the lineup for a few months now — is coming to Virgin Mobile next, a tidbit revealed only by reading the fine print in its “Twitter Rumors” giveaway. Actually, you really didn’t have to read that hard at all; you could’ve seen the “Twitter Rumor2 Giveaway Description” text at the top or made a simple deduction from the use of the word “rumor” in the contest’s name, but anyhow, yeah, it’s on the way. No word on price or date, but this particular contest ends on the 29th, so it’s conceivable we could see an announcement before the month’s out.

[Thanks, Stephen]

Contest rules reveal LG Rumor 2 coming to Virgin Mobile USA originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Thu, 27 Aug 2009 09:16:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Handsets, LG

If you’ve been drooling and pining and otherwise adoring LG’s GD910 watchphone from afar, wanting to add one to your wrist, hopefully you found your way down to the Orange shop at Bond Street Station in London this morning, as that’s where and when they went on sale — and we wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where they promptly sold out. The folks at Electricpig managed to scoop one up and took a suite of pictures of the phone, its box, its UI, and even its gigantic (decidedly non-folding) AC adapter. Initial impressions are good, tempered only by a seemingly great amount of shame felt when wearing this in public. We suffer from no such misgivings.

LG GD910 watchphone unboxed, adored, smudged originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Thu, 27 Aug 2009 07:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Handsets, Nokia, T-Mobile, Linux, GSM, EDGE, HSDPA, UMTS

In backwards order, Nokia has finally launched the N900 after we’ve already seen a review and countless leaks. Nevertheless, it’s good to have the new Maemo 5 Internet Tablet out in the open and official-like. The specs include a 3.5-inch 800×480 pixel (resistive) touchscreen, sliding QWERTY, 32GB of on-board storage expandable to 48GB via microSD, GPS/A-GPS, FM transmitter, TV-out, Bluetooth 2.1, WiFi, 1320mAh battery, and 5 megapixel camera with Carl Zeiss optics and dual-LED flash. Better yet, this monster MID brings the power of the ARM Cortex-A8, up to 1GB of application memory, and OpenGL ES 2.0 graphics acceleration to make quick work of polygons and what Nokia promises will be a “PC-like experience on a handset-sized device.” It also brings a Mozilla-based Maemo browser with Adobe Flash 9.4 support. As expected, it’ll be on display at Nokia World next week before this quad-band GSM/EDGE, 900/1700/2100MHz UMTS/HSPA handset heads to select markets in October for €500 (pre tax and pre carrier subsidy). And by the looks of that 1700MHz band, this baby’s heading to T-Mobile USA.

Update: Videos added after the break.

Continue reading Nokia N900 running Maemo 5 officially €500 in October (update: video!)

Nokia N900 running Maemo 5 officially €500 in October (update: video!) originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Thu, 27 Aug 2009 07:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Handsets, Palm, Bell Mobility, Palm OS, EV-DO, CDMA

Right on schedule, the Palm Pre has started shipping to Bell Mobility customers. The Bell exclusive marks the first international launch of Palm’s little savior and to celebrate, we’ve got commercials — a pair of knee-slappers featuring real live Canadians. And you thought that the mirror on the back of the Pre was only for the ladies.

Continue reading Video: Palm Pre jumps the border, now shipping on Bell

Video: Palm Pre jumps the border, now shipping on Bell originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Thu, 27 Aug 2009 04:21:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Handsets, HTC, Sprint, Windows Mobile, GSM, EDGE, EV-DO, CDMA

Aiming a cameraphone at a computer monitor conveniently display names, dates, and prices of upcoming products always seems to end in sweet, sweet leakage, doesn’t it? New shots over at SprintUsers are showing some low-end noise in the mix like an orange Rumor 2 and a pair of Sammies apparently too lowly to get actual names, but the real news has to be that the long-awaited Touch Pro2 (Sprint should know better than to question HTC’s wisdom in nixing the space between “Pro” and “2″ here) looks finalized for a September 8 launch. We wouldn’t freak out at the $599.99 retail price, necessarily — bear in mind that’s a totally unsubsidized, rebate-free price that few customers will actually be paying.

Interestingly, the screencap is accompanied by a PDF identified as an internal “Quick Reference Brief” for the Touch Pro2; part of the doc includes a comparison chart that pits the phone against AT&T’s LG Monaco and HTC Warhawk along with Verizon’s Omnia II, all phones that have yet to be released. Wondering where they’d get the lowdown on unannounced competitive hardware? Us, it turns out — zoom in on the chart for a good look at a super low-res Engadget logo watermarked across the Warhawk. You’re most welcome, Sprint — buy us a drink sometime and we’re square.

[Via wmpoweruser.com]

HTC Touch Pro2 looking good for September 8 launch on Sprint originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Thu, 27 Aug 2009 02:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Handsets, HTC, Sprint, Windows Mobile, GSM, EDGE, EV-DO, CDMA

Aiming a cameraphone at a computer monitor conveniently displaying names, dates, and prices of upcoming products always seems to end in sweet, sweet leakage, doesn’t it? New shots over at SprintUsers are showing some low-end noise in the mix like an orange Rumor 2 and a pair of Sammies apparently too lowly to get actual names, but the real news has to be that the long-awaited Touch Pro2 (Sprint should know better than to question HTC’s wisdom in nixing the space between “Pro” and “2″ here) looks finalized for a September 8 launch. We wouldn’t freak out at the $599.99 retail price, necessarily — bear in mind that’s a totally unsubsidized, rebate-free price that few customers will actually be paying.

Interestingly, the screencap is accompanied by a PDF identified as an internal “Quick Reference Brief” for the Touch Pro2; part of the doc includes a comparison chart that pits the phone against AT&T’s LG Monaco and HTC Warhawk along with Verizon’s Omnia II, all phones that have yet to be released. Wondering where they’d get the lowdown on unannounced competitive hardware? Us, it turns out — zoom in on the chart for a good look at a super low-res Engadget logo watermarked across the Warhawk. You’re most welcome, Sprint — buy us a drink sometime and we’re square.

[Via wmpoweruser.com]

HTC Touch Pro2 looking good for September 8 launch on Sprint originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Thu, 27 Aug 2009 02:12:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Handsets, HTC, Sprint, EV-DO, CDMA, Android

Alright, look, we seriously have enough evidence here on our desk to put Sprint away for life convince even the most jaded naysayer that Sprint’s got a Hero on the way. It’s happening, end of story — but when, where, and how much? We don’t have the complete picture yet beyond suggestions of an October window, but we’ve just been tipped off here that Best Buy Mobile locations will be taking $50 deposits for the phone starting on September 13 with an SKU of 9510013. Whether the phone will be popular enough to warrant relieving yourself of $50 a month (or more) ahead of time is unclear — especially with the InstinctQ in the pipe — but at least it looks like you’ll have the option.

[Thanks, anonymous tipster]

Sprint’s HTC Hero getting Best Buy presale on September 13? originally appeared on Engadget Mobile on Wed, 26 Aug 2009 23:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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