Author: Marc Flores

Well that didn’t take too long at all. Just this morning, the Motorola DEVOUR with MOTOBLUR was announced, and now in-the-wild pics and hands on impressions are surfacing on the web. Pictured next to the Nexus One, the DEVOUR looks much smaller than it does in press images. So how does it feel and what can be expected from the device?

It was hard to tell from prevoius leaked images and from the press pics, but the DEVOUR pictured above is made of metal. It’s hard to say whether the final release product will be the same, but we sure hope so. AndroidSPIN, the folks that got hold of the device, says “it feels very solid.” Judging from the image above, the DEVOUR is going to be relatively chunky (compared to slimmer devices like the Nexus One or HTC Hero), but the screen is significantly smaller.

It’s also rumored that Motorola will be launching future devices with infrared to control home media devices, such as Blu-ray players, and that some of their future gadgets are like “nothing we’ve ever seen.” We like the direction Motorola is taking with its handsets, but we’re not going to get too excited until we see the coming line-up.

[AndroidSPIN via EngadgetMobile]

Before you start scrambling for your phone, laptop and data cable, just relax for a second. The latest update to the iPhone software, version 3.1.3, is a minor one. A quick glance at the changelog shows that the update will improve accuracy on the reported battery level on the 3GS, which is a huge help because we’ve sometimes seen it go from 20% to dead in just seconds. The launching of third-party apps should no longer lead to any weird crashes and the Japanese Kana keyboard is fixed. Happy downloading!

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I begged and pleaded with Greg, editor of MobileCrunch, not to make me write this, but it looks like I’m stuck introducing myself to you all. So in my best Troy McClure voice let me say: Hi, my name is Marc Flores. You might remember me from such popular sites as Boy Genius Report or True/Slant.

I’m really passionate about technology and I’m a tinkerer, which means there are lots of broken gadgets and gadget parts scattered around my place. When I’m not writing about shiny objects, I’m usually trolling the streets of L.A. looking for good food or great beer.

If you want to shoot me a message, feel free to do so at marc at crunchgear dot com. And if you’re interested in what I snack on throughout the day or the other minutiae of my life, follow me on Twitter @mdflores.

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There is nothing more satisfying than claiming to be the first at anything, and so far this week, Samsung must be pretty happy with itself. After announcing its plans to mass produce AMOLED touchscreens, the first to include built-in touch functions, Samsung’s S8500 will be the first consumer handset to feature Bluetooth 3.0. The Bluetooth Special Interest Group, or SIG, has approved version 3.0 for the handset and also slipped out a few details on the phone.

The Bluetooth SIG says the S8500 is a “stylish phone reinforced with featurs,” but there really isn’t much we can see so far that wows us. It has a high-resolution 3.1″ OLED screen which has an anti-glare coating for high outdoor visibility. The quad-band GSM handset is also said to be compact and slim, but that could mean anything, and it will come in a variety of different colors. Exciting? Hardly, but these specs may not be final and we’ve yet to see what the device actually looks like.

[Bluetooth SIG via PhoneScoop]

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Standard, boring LED screens: your days are numbered! Samsung announced today that it will begin mass producing AMOLED displays with touch functions built right in. The displays will be 3.3″ WVGA touchscreens that will be, thanks to the AMOLED technology, much thinner than your average touchscreen display on current phones. The beauty of this technology is that it produces thinner, brighter and more vivid displays because it doesn’t require the additional touch input layer on top of the screen. Samsung managed to place a touch sensor over the mirror display and made it evaporate, leaving just a 0.001mm thick sensor over the display.

Thanks to this method of manufacturing displays, Samsung can happily claim to be the world’s first in creating an AMOLED display with touch function. Now we can look forward to thinner devices, the vividness of AMOLED screens and, because it doesn’t need a backlight, much longer battery life. A Samsung rep says, “Through mass production, we want to make this touch embedded AMOLED panel number one in the LCD and AMOLED market.” Well, getting a head start and being the world’s first certainly puts Sammy in a position to be where it wants.

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