Last we saw of this thing, it was also being called the Galaxy 7, but all of the specs were already in place. Well, Asus has finally granted the P835’s wish and made it a real boy. Wait, no — they’ve just made an official announcement.
We knew all this stuff months ago, but it’s good to check in: last-minute tweaks to the UI or, say, built-in storage can have a serious effect on price and availability. It looks like nothing has been changed this time, but if you don’t believe us, feel free to compare this Russian review with the official spec sheet or the phone’s page.
The iPhone is like the bacon-wrapped scallop of the mobile world. Both are quite visually pleasing relative to their peers, easy to use, and generally liked by the masses. Spend a little too much time with either, however, and you start to see the flaws. With the scallops, the grease and animal fat that was oh-so delicious on the way down begins to clog your arteries and slow your saunter. With the iPhone, the interface that seemed oh-so-polished when it first met your fingertips begins to show signs of oversight and imperfection.
We’ve been using the iPhone for just a few months shy of two years now, and a few things that once seemed trivial have come to drive us up the wall. You’ll find no mention of the glaring faults (The lack of MMS, Copy and Paste, etc) in this list – we’re talking about the stuff that we just can’t believe made it through Apple’s user experience team. Read More
Carrying around a little screen at all times means — what else? — that you can read comics all over the place while looking as if you’re checking your email. The iVerse app, for both iPhone and Android, lets you read comics that have been customized for viewing on a small screen. Instead of having you zoom around a full-sized page, they’ve cut the pages into smaller, screen-size chunks. Not the best for full-page art and the like, but much more convenient and natural to read.
BG just dropped a bomb about the 8230 that’s actually the 9630, but has the codename Niagara. It’s still going to be a World Edition, which means it will support CDMA 1x, EV-DO Rev. A, GSM, GPRS, EDGE and UMTS. No Wi-Fi, but that’s what you should expect from Verizon by now. The 9630 may or may not have a camera, but if it does it’ll be a 3.2-megapixel shooter. And the browser will support JavaScript 1.6. There’s no launch date, but BG thinks May or June.
You remember those 1 million 5800 XpressMusic handsets that Nokia proudly announced they’d shipped back in January? Yeah, most of those are probably going to break.
We still think the Pearl Flip is the ugliest phone to ever rear its head from Waterloo – but it’s a butt-dial-free BlackBerry, and that’s worth something, we suppose. When the CDMA variant made its way to the FCC’s testing dungeons, they were able to look past the Pearl Flip’s unsightly hinge and remember that it’s what’s inside that counts – and what’s inside passed their tests without a hitch.
If you packed your picnic basket, loaded the family into the car, and hauled over to the Nokia flagship store yesterday as a result of our post yesterday on the Nokia 5800 going on sale, we officially apologize. Chances are, you were turned away. As of this morning, Nokia 5800s aren’t actually on the shelves; they have them in stock, mind you – they just can’t sell them yet.
Update: Nokia has issued a press release indicating that the 5800 is indeed on the shelves and for sale now. We’re still looking into whether or not the North American 5800 has that nasty speaker issue. Full release after the jump.
Somewhere out there there is someone lusting after the N85. For some reason the rest of the world loves these lumpen little phones. Perhaps the Nokia N-series calls up memories of the old phones that we once clung to in the dark ages of cellular communication. The Nokia is the ur-phone, the manufacturer of dreams, the Campbellian original Hero With a Thousand Faces. It can do anything, given enough care and attention.
We at CG love Nokia, we support them, but that love is scarcely returned when they release phones like the N85 onto an unsuspecting populace.
Well, well, well. Yesterday I mentioned that Japanese telecom NTT DoCoMo had begun selling the BlackBerry Bold last week and today there are reports that they’ve pulled the device due to overheating. Approximately 4,000 Bolds have been sold with 30 reports of the keyboard area getting a little too hot while it’s being charged. RIM doesn’t think it’s a battery issue, but the root cause has not been identified and don’t worry, it’s only the Japanese variant that has the issue.
While there may still be a lot of confusion surrounding the future of AOL, that didn’t stop the folks in Northern Virginia from recently overhauling their popular AIM instant messaging app for iPhone (and iPod touch).
Available in two tasty flavors, free (”AIM Free”) and paid (”AIM Paid”), AIM 2.0 for iPhone now provides SMS notifications, has location-aware services, and supports multiple accounts (among other updates). It appears as though all of the application updates have been included in both the free and paid versions, with the major (and obvious) difference being the inclusion of ads in the buddy list of the AIM Free app.
We got a big fuzzy feeling when we first saw stills of the Oregon Trail port coming to the iPhone, so seeing it in smooth, buttery action is like being hugged by the physical embodiment of pure nostalgia and happiness.
It looks like they’ve captured the original spirit of the game pretty well, building up the foundation rather than just tearing it all down and exploiting the name for all its worth. Everything we know and love makes an appearance. I want it now.
If things are still on schedule from what we’d heard before, look for it to hit the app store sometime in the next week or so.
Looks like Google is now preventing anyone with an unlocked G1 from downloading for-pay applications from the Android Market. Google says this is to prevent piracy (but only in the most abstract sense, in my [worthless] opinion), but some developers don’t like the idea. Welcome to the Situation Room, I’m Wolf Blitzer.
There are no official statistics available as how well the iPhone sells after Apple started offering it in the Japanese market. Now Softbank Mobile, one of Asia’s biggest tech companies and the exclusive carrier for the iPhone in Japan, thinks sales need a boost and decided to give away the hardware basically for free.
Guess what fellow T-Mobile subscribers?! Japanese DoCoMo subscribers just got themselves a quad-band BlackBerry Bold. Sure, we’ve got ourselves UMA on the 8900, but who needs 3G speeds when Wi-Fi is readily available EVERYWHERE.
I guess Versa stands for versatility since the latest LG phone has an attachable QWERTY keyboard. So clever Verizon and LG are.
Today, VZW announced that the touchscreen LG Versa would be available on March 1. This, too, has the fancy new 3D interface, but the most exciting feature is the detachable keyboard. The 3-inch screen is nice, I guess. But is it plastic or glass? Probably plastic. It also comes with a 2-megapixel AF camera with flash, a music player, Bluetooth 2.1+EDR, visual voice mail, microSD, 2.5mm jack and a slew of other whatever features. Read More
Earlier this morning on Finland’s YLE (think BBC, but Finnish), Nokia CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo was asked if the company had plans to expand into the laptop market. Sure enough, his response:
“We are looking very actively also at this opportunity.”
Yeah. Weird, right? Nokia, making laptops? It seemed strange to us at first, too. Then we thought about it a bit more – and it kind of made sense. Read More
Disclaimer: The following information is based on “popularity,” as in not cold hard sales stats since that info is not made available by either mobile carriers or manufacturers (and therefore, the rankings below are subjective). The ranking information (below) is provided by AvianResearch L.L.C. and is culled from its Monthly Retail Store Survey where it surveys 100 service reps and store mgrs from across the four major U.S. wireless carriers (AT&T, Verizon Wireless, Sprint, and T-Mobile) – though we’re not sure how asking 100 retail employees about their favorite phones is really indicative of anything. According to AvianResearch, these four carriers represent 85% of all U.S. mobile subscribers. Read More
It’s been a long time since we saw the Nokia 5800 XpressMusic sneak into 10 seconds of The Dark Knight. At long last, Morgan Freeman isn’t the only North American who can get one. As expected, the North American model (with the proper 3G bands, of course) of Nokia’s first touchscreen has hit US soil.
While it’ll likely trickle out to other retailers in the coming weeks, it’s available immediately at the Nokia flagship stores in New York City and Chicago. It’ll set you back 399 bucks before Uncle Sam throws in his fees.
A few days ago, we found out that AT&T had decided to pull all of their Sidekicktastic Quickfire units from the shelves, citing a failure to meet “performance expectations” as the sole (and rather ambiguous) reason. While we’d gone ahead and assumed they’d come to the shocking revelation that the Quickfire was painted with pure lead or the radiation levels were causing people to grow extra limbs, the real reason isn’t quite as exciting: people couldn’t figure out how to plug in the charger properly, and jamming it in the wrong way caused the units to overheat.
Last we saw of this thing, it was also being called the Galaxy 7, but all of the specs were already in place. Well, Asus has finally granted the P835’s wish and made it a real boy. Wait, no — they’ve just made an official announcement.
While there may still be a lot of confusion surrounding the future of AOL, that didn’t stop the folks in Northern Virginia from recently overhauling their popular AIM instant messaging app for iPhone (and iPod touch).
I guess Versa stands for versatility since the latest LG phone has an attachable QWERTY keyboard. So clever Verizon and LG are. 
