The Buzz on new Cell Phones

Suspense! Drama! Surprises! Unrealistic expectations! It’s always a veritable roller coaster of emotions whenever Apple gets around to cutting a new SDK build — and without a doubt, iPhone SDK 3.2 beta 4 is no exception. We don’t yet have a good read on what’s new here, so if you’re a member of Apple’s $99 dev program and happen to get it downloaded and installed, let us know if you find anything awesome, like an iPhone 4 or iPad 2. Or, you know, anything else. Have fun!

All credits and information was found on engadget.com

There’s a lot of rumbling in Project Pink land today, as Microsoft is seemingly nearing that magical time where its much-leaked Sidekick followup can finally see the light of day. First off, we’re hearing from a tipster that the phones (we’ve seen ‘Turtle’ and ‘Pure’ so far) will be exclusive to Verizon, at least at the outset — makes sense, given the CDMA radios we saw at the FCC. He calls the UI “hectic and colorful,” and also says that there’s still some serious cloud backup reliance, along with some desktop software to sync up with the cloud as well, and data plans that including a certain quantity of app downloads a month.

This is all fine and exciting, but it’s helped along by a couple of image leaks. Conflipper, well known among the xda-dev crowd, is teasing the Twitter world with some screenshots of the emergency dialer (which also mention Verizon Wireless), and a Facebook upload from the device, which can be found in the gallery below. The dialer is about as barebones as it gets right now, but there’s a bit of a hint of Windows Phone 7 Series in there to be sure. Finally, Gizmodo hit upon the hardware jackpot with a Mr. Blurrycam capture of the bigscreen ‘Pure’ QWERTY slider (pictured up above).

All credits and information was found on engadget.com

Today Nokia announced its new Symbian S60 3rd Edition powered C5 smartphone, a device with a focus on social networking and sharing.

The 12.3mm x 46mm x 112mm (0.48in x 1.81in x 4.4in) C5 has a 2.2-inch 320 x 240 pixel display, a 1050mAh battery, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. It allows you view your social networks, like Facebook and MySpace, from the homescreen. It also comes with Ovi Mail, Nokia Messaging, a 3.2 megapixel camera, 2GB of storage, and Ovi Maps for free voice-guided turn-by-turn directions.

With a goal of making the C5 a mass market smartphone, Nokia set the price at EUR 135 ($182).The C5 will be available in select markets during the second quarter of 2010..

All credits and information was found on mobileburn.com

We’ve just taken delivery of an AT&T-branded Motorola Backflip — the carrier’s very first Android device — and we wanted to share with you our magical first moments putting the phone through its paces. Here’s a quick rundown of our first impressions:

• It feels solidly-built — probably a notch better than the CLIQ. There’s no wiggle or weirdness in the hinge whatsoever. Of course, we know from personal experience that “feels solidly-built” doesn’t necessarily mean it is solidly-built, so the jury’s still out on how it’ll hold up with regular use, especially with the keyboard exposed full-time.
• Opening and closing the phone isn’t a natural one-handed operation, unless you’re comfortable putting it at extreme risk of an unfortunate tumble.
• It’s laggy right out of the box, which doesn’t bode well for usability once you load it up with your own apps. Of course, it uses exactly the same processor as the CLIQ, so that doesn’t come as a surprise.
• It’s filled to the brim with pre-loaded AT&T stuff: AllSport GPS, AT&T Maps, AT&T Music (which takes the place of the standard Music app), AT&T Navigator, AT&T Wi-Fi Hotspots, Mobile Banking, MobiTV, MusicID, Where, and YPmobile. We strongly prefer the approach of offering a special branded Android Market portal where you can download your carrier’s recommended apps.
• Blur looks and feels the same as it does on the CLIQ, though the main Blur widgets — Social Status, Messages, and Happenings — have been moved one home screen left of the main one (we prefer this configuration anyhow).
• Yahoo has replaced Google as the default search provider throughout the phone. It’s crazy: the home screen widget, the browser, everything’s been programmed to use Yahoo. We love us some irony, but golly, we’d prefer Google searches most of the time.

It spontaneously rebooted for us once in about an hour of use — a concerning sign, particularly considering Motorola’s inability to pump out a solid firmware for the CLIQ — but we’ll need a little more time with it. Want more right now? Follow the break for some more impressions, video, and a sample shot from the camera.

all credits and information was found on engadget.com

Microsoft’s Aaron Woodman just pulled off a little surprise here at The Engadget Show: he brought out LG’s Windows Phone 7 Series pre-production prototype! The QWERTY slider is the first branded Windows Phone 7 Series device the world’s ever seen, and while the hardware and software are both obviously early, we can tell you a few things about it: it’s just a hair thicker than an iPhone or Nexus One, there are dedicated hardware camera, volume, and power buttons in addition to the back, home, and search buttons dictated by Windows Phone 7 Series, and we noticed a five megapixel camera with a flash on the back, along with a headphone jack. Can’t say much apart from that right now, since things are so early and everything is subject to change, but things are certainly moving along.

All credits and information was found on boygeniusreport.com

Microsoft don’t want to repeat the previous mistake of letting any kind of phones to run its Mobile Operating system and cause some problems because of insufficient hardware resources. Well, the majority of the problems are definitely because of the bugs of Windows Mobile (I bet nobody would disagree with me on this), but difference of hardware specifications is also one big headache problem for mobile OS developers. Hence, Microsoft set some tough standards for phones that would run Windows Mobile 7, which was announced at MWC 2010 a week ago. The detailed specs of the phones are still not clear, but Microsoft did clearly mention that there will be only tree chassis models that Microsoft allows. Below are the chassis types.

Chassis 1: Meant for “big touchscreen phones”; they will be only touchscreens and have at least a 1 GHz processor such as Snapdragon, and will need its own dedicated graphics processor. Chassis 1 will be the first ones out of the gate for this holiday season.

Chassis 2: Slide-out keyboards will be added on alongside touchscreens.We assume the processor specs will be roughly similar to that of Chassis 1.

Chassis 3: There are no certain details on 3, though they are suspected to be candybar devices. No word on when 2 or 3 will be ready.

Microsoft looks like is ready to mount a serious challenge on iPhone and Google Android.

All credits and information was found on handcellphone.com

If we had it boil it down, the singular image burned in our brains of Windows Phone 7 Series so far is that of a large, nondescript slate — the so-called “dogfood” device being passed around internally for the platform’s development — and although Microsoft isn’t talking specs at this point, it’s widely believed that this phone roughly represents the Chassis 1 spec that Redmond is passing around to hardware partners. Is this the only way you’ll be able to get your WinPho 7 served to you, though? We might yet be months away from an official answer, but a pair of Microsoft developer evangelists on an Australian podcast are saying that Chassis 1 (full touchscreen, gigahertz processor, and dedicated graphics acceleration) will be the sole option at launch, with Chassis 2 and 3 following on after that. 2 is said to be “more like a Palm Treo” with a dedicated QWERTY keyboard, while 3 remains a mystery, though there’s some speculation on the podcast that it could be a candybar — a form factor that’s becoming something of a lost art these days, particularly among smartphones. The speakers note that there’s a lot of value in offering some form factor variety — not everyone wants a keyboardless slate, after all — so the real question might be how quickly after initial launch we’ll see some of these other chassis filter down to retail.

All credits and information was found on engadget.com

Today Amazon announced its new Kindle for BlackBerry application. The free app allows BlackBerry owners access to over 420,000 books on their phone, most of which cost $9.99 or less. Kindle owners will also be able to read titles they’ve purchased in the past. You can download the application by visiting amazon on your BlackBerry.

All credits and information was found on mobileburn.com

Even on the latest round of Snapdragon-powered models, Android apps don’t typically seem to exhibit the same level of buttery-smooth prowess as their iPhone equivalents. There are a variety of reasons for that, but the most damning seems to stem from Google’s choice of the Dalvik Java runtime, which — to put it simply — trades performance for diminutive processor and memory footprints. You may not have ever heard of Swiss company (and OHA member) Myriad, but it sprung to life through the merger of Esmertec and Purple Labs and claims to have software running on an astounding 2 billion phones worldwide — in other words, these guys know a thing or two about phones — and they’ve applied their expertise to tighten up Dalvik and make it burn rubber.

All credits and information was found on engadget.com

One of our connects hit us up with information on a new Verizon Wireless Buy One, Get One Free promotion. The BOGO this time around sweetens the deal by including all of Big Red’s Android and Palm webOS handsets. That means if you buy a Motorola DROID, a HTC DROID Eris, a Palm Pre Plus or a Pixi Plus you are eligible for a second handset of equal or lesser value for free. You can mix and match the above handsets with each other or step outside your comfort zone and pick up a Windows Mobile phone or a feature phone for free. The promotion starts tomorrow on the 16th, so if you are looking to score the latest Android or webOS handset from Verizon you may want to wait a day and find a friend who wants to go in with you on this offer. Like all BOGO offers, two year agreements are required.

All credits and information was found on boygeniusreport.com