Le sigh.
We actually already knew there was no copy/paste functionality in WP7S devices, but the announcement we were hoping for at MIX wasn’t “no copy/paste for real” but rather “here’s how we’ve obsoleted copy/paste.” Maybe they’ll add it later, but… really, now. Nothing at all? You guys are killing the dream.
Can you blame ‘em? If you bought into a two-year contract a little more than two years ago, possibly because of shortcomings in the first iPhone (a perfectly reasonable decision), you would have been watching with jealous eye the introduction of the 3G, the 3GS, and the launch and growth of the App Store. I wouldn’t blame you if you wanted to change horses. BlackBerry makes some excellent handsets and has a unique value proposition, but if I’m honest, I think they’ve progressed even less in the last couple years than the iPhone has. That’s hard, people! And really, even if you love BlackBerry, if you want a versatile touchscreen phone, are you really going to go with a Storm?
This is according to a study by Crowd Science, in which it is also revealed that 32% of BB users would be cool with trading in for a Nexus One. Dangerous info all around, then. Of course, that also means that 60% of BB users want to stick with RIM, which is probably more than US Symbian users or feature-phone people aching to make the jump to something cooler. Only 9% of iPhone users said they’d switch to a Nexus One, though, so I don’t think Apple is sweating it.
[via Ars Technica]
Hey, I told you MIX was going to be hot. A talk at the development conference has revealed a third flavor of Windows Phone 7 Series, though alas, it does not appear to be the third chassis style we heard exists — unless the extra-hot camera is the third style. This shiny new Samsung keeps the lozenge style but has a more rounded look than the “reference” design we saw at launch. [update: it’s just a hacked i8910]
Some other news from the conference: as we expected, Microsoft is locking down the hardware requirements for WinPho7 devices, requiring them to meet or exceed certain qualifications. And here they are:
The resolution restriction is a good move for maintaining a similar visual experience across handsets. Actually, locking stuff down like this is good across the board — it means people are free to choose whichever hardware they like without worrying about whether they run the OS well. That’s a major concern for Android buyers right now.
I’m pretty sure the Samsung is not the “third chassis” mainly because of the upcoming HVGA resolution. That suggests to me a candy bar chassis with a full QWERTY keyboard, BlackBerry style. The effectively halved resolution makes perfect sense for that. Who knows when they’ll announce it, but I feel strongly that’s the case.
[via SlashGear]
You know the good feeling you get when you think about how your computer is running Folding@home all the time, or that you’ve been careful to clip six-pack rings all your life? Well, soon you might have one more warm fuzzy feeling, if this project underway at Intel Labs Berkeley comes through. They’re designing portable air-quality sensors that monitor and sample the air around you throughout the day and allow it to be shared and analyzed later.
The current sensors are a little bigger than a phone, but one “long-term” plan is to use mobiles as sampling points; just write an app, add a sensor to the phone (could be an accessory), and let people do their thing. It could upload quality, temperature, and GPS location in real-time. Sounds good to me, I just hope it doesn’t kill my battery.
A bundle of screenshots just hit the net showing off the latest Direct3D-based mobile games running on a WinPho7 device, adn they look pretty hot. We knew that the Tegra chipset in the Zune HD and likely in several upcoming WinPho handsets (Tegra 2, to be precise) is capable of some nice 3D, but these are better than anything I’ve seen yet. The game shown is The Harvest, a dungeon crawler which, if indicative of the general quality of WinPho7 games, portends good times to be had.
In slightly less-enthralling news, it seems that the Zune HD will be sticking with XNA 3.1. Hmm. So basically the Zune HD is being abandoned as far as game development — bad news for Zune owners, since it means less value for their device and suggests an upcoming Zune HD 2 or Super HD or HDX or whatever name they come up with. Zune HD 7 Series?
[via Engadget]
Question: can you file a patent for something that’s existed for a long time? I guess the question is of implementation. While self-winding watches and shake-to-charge flashlights already harvest kinetic energy to store and later discharge, I suppose they do it in a different way than this proposed system from Nokia. Not sure I trust something sliding back and forth in my phone, either. And wouldn’t that necessitate a bunch of empty space that could be taken up with, I don’t know, a bigger battery?
Well, I shouldn’t carp at a perfectly practical idea. How often have you been stuck somewhere with a low battery, and no outlet in sight? Shake your phone a few hundred times and you’ve gained… a couple minutes of power. And a lot of weird stares.
[via Unwired View, Symbian Freaks, Slashgear]
It looks a little bit better than it did before when it’s in focus, and with a Bold for comparison. Click for the high resolution version, or head over to BlackBerry Leaks for the rest.
People are falling over themselves trying to decide whether this is going to be Bold-branded or Storm-branded. I see no reason why they shouldn’t launch as a whole different line — a tweener model. I mean, you’ve got keyboard-on-face, you’ve got no keyboard, and now you’ve got keyboard-underneath. What could be a clearer three-pronged attack on the mobile world? A budget Bold, a sweet all-purpose Storm 3, and then something in between, for wafflers. Lots of wafflers out there.
I’m posting these out of a sort of philosophical curiousity. Why would you take spy shots of an upcoming device that has been thoroughly pictured, in high resolution, in focus even, with interface shots and everything? It’s a bit like getting spy shots of the Eiffel Tower.
Well, I guess the previous pictures didn’t have a white G1 in them. That’s something, anyway.
Are you psyched for Windows Phone 7 Series development? Why not? Damn your eyes! Well, I guess I can understand a little “once bitten, twice shy” attitude after Windows Mobile’s slow-motion flaming zeppelin trajectory during the last couple years. But be honest: WinPho7 looks pretty awesome, and there might be some opportunities for some pretty bad-ass stuff that Apple won’t allow, and Google… well, you could probably do it for Android right now, but maybe you have a good reason not to.
In that case, take a look at this blog post where Charlie Kindel explains why development for WinPho7 is going to be different. He’s bolded almost every instance of the word “different,” so you know it’s about to get unbelievably real at MIX.
I can’t be the only one that thinks this alleged leaked BlackBerry slider is butt ugly. Am I right? Shades of old-school Palm Pilots. It’s like they took the Pre and gave it shoulder pads. Landscape QWERTY is the way to go, my friends.
Woo! Man, that thing is not looking good. At least the Storm 2 is a good-looking piece of hardware.
Well – not entirely. After all, it’s bright, responsive, and has a much higher resolution. But there is a lot more to making a good screen, and under a detailed analysis it’s far from a rout when you pit HTC’s bleeding-edge OLED screen against the old-school LCD of the iPhone.
Apologies if it gets a bit technical. Here is the basic list of complaints, as investigated here:
So: strong words, but they seem to be backed up by real data (the shootout’s index page is here; the final part will run on March 1st). Remember that the Nexus One’s display is also going to be used in a number of other HTC products, like its twin the Desire and likely any other handset they put out with an 800×480 OLED display.
The fact is, though, that LCD is an end-of-run technology that has been honed to as close to perfection as it’s ever likely to get. LCDs that cost $200 now would have cost thousands just a few years ago. OLED is the future — there’s no doubt about that. But in the present, devices like the Nexus One and Zune HD qualify as early adopters. While they impress in some areas, namely those in which the OLEDs outshine LCDs fundamentally (black levels and consequent contrast; power draw), there are still plenty of points on the LCD side of the board.
It won’t be long before we start seeing much improved OLED displays — we are seeing them already in the form of Samsung’s simplified “Super AMOLED” in the Wave, which omits a piece of the display “layer cake,” allowing for better brightness and less reflectance. This rapid gaining of OLED on LCD has led to rumors that Apple will be adopting the technology for the next iPhone, which really is a pretty reasonable speculation.
I haven’t personally inspected the Nexus One’s screen for more than minute total, and I don’t spend a lot of time around iPhones, so I can’t add any anecdotal evidence to this little duel. And it goes almost without saying that if the display works for you, then there’s nothing to worry about; this is purely an academic conflict for most. But go ahead and add your data point below.
Update: People are noting that the Gallery app has some really bad compression when it loads pictures not at full rez, which would be the source of some of the banding for sure. As I noted, bad picture quality can result very easily from bad software, scaling, and so on. This is stuff Google tends to fix. So much for the banding, which appears to be a software issue, but that’s not the only piece of the puzzle. Thanks for adding that info.
[via OLED-display.net; painting by Antonio Fontanesi]
What with tablets looming large on the horizon, one could be forgiven for thinking MIDs might be reaching the end of their usefulness. But when you put something like this in front of me, I can’t help but get excited. ABXY buttons and a real D-pad? Yes please. 4″ 800×480 screen, 8GB of built-in storage, 600MHz ARM A8 processor? Man, this thing will be a mobile gaming powerhouse if it isn’t super expensive.
The Moblic E7 is still pretty much a cryptogadget right now, though. No pricing or availability is indicated on the Moblic page, so I’m just going to guess randomly. I’m going to say… $600 and available in the Summer, probably not in the US. Doesn’t that sound realistic?
[Image and find: CarryPad; via Engadget]
I don’t know about you guys, but playing a complicated fighting game like Street Fighter 4 on the iPhone just sounds like a losing proposition. I mean, your fingers cover up a bunch of the screen, you’re going to be hitting the wrong buttons all the time, and the screen isn’t high-resolution enough to really show off the art. Whose idea was this?
I guess it’s really just a stripped-down version of the real game, with less characters and simplified controls. Yeah, that’s what people want!
There are plenty of games that are suited to the iPhone (and now, as I am contractually obligated to add, the iPad), but this is not one of them. It’s hardly even suited to regular controllers — I seriously messed up my thumb the other day playing SF II Turbo on my SNES — I can only imagine the amount of frustration and pain that would result from this ridiculous thing.
So the next generation of Windows Mobile, now Windows Phone, has been unveiled at MWC in Barcelona. Greg has already gotten his mitts all over it, and has posted his in-depth impressions over at MobileCrunch, but we thought it was worthwhile to post our thoughts on Microsoft’s new look and feel. Beautiful? Ugly? Too little, too late? Feel free to add your opinions to the pile.
Read the rest of this post at CrunchGear…
This isn’t official or anything, just a concept that happens to use some Microsoft assets, but what it Windows Mobile 7 looked like this? I think we all know it will not, but until the hammer actually falls at MWC, hope springs eternal. The “location-based desktops” idea is a good one for a MID or powerful smartphone that acts alternately as your email client, GPS device, and TV.
While pundits were arguing about whether Doom was damaging to us kids, we were busy having our sensibilities shocked by the phenomenally violent Rise of the Triad. While it wasn’t as flashy as Doom (it was Wolf3D-based), it had crazy weapons, fire, and enemies that would beg for their lives. So ahead of its time! At any rate, it was a fun game and I played through the demo a million times. And it’s coming to iPhone (yes, and iPad).
1up reports that it’s coming “soon” and will be a full port with all the levels of the commercial game. I’m not really a big fan of iPhone shooters like this, but the old, simple ones fare pretty well with the new control schemes. It might be that an iPad will be a great old school game platform — can you imagine playing X-COM on one? I got goosebumps!
I saw a few of these pictures floating around a little while ago, when Gigabyte was announcing it was putting out an Android handset. “Good for them,” I thought, “but they couldn’t come up with something a little more original?” As it turns out — they might have. Because it turns out those pictures were fakeity-fake. I mean, the pictures themselves were real pictures, but they did not depict an actual Gigabyte handset. Seems weird that there would be this amount of intrigue associated with something as un-exciting as a phone launch by a relatively minor player, but hey. I don’t make the news, I just report it.
The GSmart PR person added that the phone they’re working on is totally different, and likely won’t be seen until late 2010. You’d think they would hurry — by late 2010 we’re going to be swimming in Android devices.
[via Phandroid]
Chances are you’ve heard of the text-to-donate system set up by the Red Cross to provide relief to quake-devastated Haiti. It seems that the ease of donating and the immediacy of the disaster have prompted a response far beyond what the Red Cross anticipated. I can understand why: I used the system to donate $10 (not to toot my own horn), and found it as easy as dropping a quarter in a slot at the grocery store. So: good work everyone, and if you haven’t donated yet, give it a shot or check out Google’s catchall page for Haiti relief efforts.
The success of this campaign raises some questions about the way this sort of thing should be handled by the telecoms. A $10 charge will appear on my T-Mobile bill, I’m assuming; they volunteered to support this effort, so I think that’ll be the end of it, but now that I’ve gotten a taste of it, I want more. Not necessarily just for donations, but for mobile charging in general.
We can all agree it’s a nice phone, but customer service problems and reception issues have made the Nexus One’s launch a little rocky. It seems that people don’t feel they’re getting their $379 worth, and Google, apparently sympathizes. They’ve lowered the upgrade price (non-unlocked, non-new-contract) by a hundred bucks and will be sending out $100 rebate forms to those among you who paid the first amount. This is basically Google giving the rest of us puppy dog eyes, and we all know you can’t stay mad at Google for… aw! So cute!
[via Engadget]
Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0
What’s so hard about this, guys? I mean, obviously you can’t make a controller that works with all the games out there, but if you make a good, cheap, basic one, plenty of developers will add a control option that accommodates it. Instead, we get garbage like the Game Grip and this plastic Batarang-looking thing.
Look. You have a handle, some buttons… here, I’ll save you the trouble of hiring a designer:
How’s that look? Doable? My god, can it really have taken three years for something like this to come out?
[via Engadget]
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