Saturday, February 12, 2011

Motorla Xoom Pricing Confirmed at Best Buy

12:39 PM Simranpal SIngh No comments

There’s an update to the pricing on the Motorola Xoom tablet that captured everyone’s imagination at CES.  Originally, we reported that it may comein at just under $700,  Well, it’s a bit pricer, as Droid Life has confirmed with the circular below that the price for the Xoom will be a hundred bucks more at $799,  But it gets worse as Motorola is holding customers hostage with a must have data plan to unlock WiFi …

It’s insidious, really.  Best Buy or Motorola will refuse to unlock the WiFi capabilty of the Xoom unless users sign up for the “optional” Verizon data plan at $20 a month with a one month minimum.  Users are free to cancel anytime after that first month.  But why not just charge $20 more and be done with it?  Oh yeah, because at $800 it’s an obscene price point to begin with.
The Xoom will be available at Best Buy beginning Thursday, February 24th.
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HTC Forest Concept Phone Employs Trackball and Mystery Android OS

12:34 PM Simranpal SIngh No comments

Here at Android Community, and indeed at the R3 network as a whole, we really love a good concept here and there, especially when that concept is a bit of industrial design along the lines of a smartphone. We like it DOUBLY when we find out it’s an Android phone, just like that’s happened here with the HTC Forest, a concept phone by Long-Nong Huang. Before we go any further – can you guess its prospective specs?


This HTC concept phone features a 4.1 inch SLCD display, has a 1.2 GHz mystery processor, and employs an aluminum unibody case. And incase you did not notice, it features physical capacitive touch buttons under the display as well as a trackball. A trackball! The thought of such a thing sets my ears on fire.
What do you think, ladies and gentlemen, is this a phone of the future or of the past? With trackball support we’re going to have to put our chickens in the past basked, as Android 3.0 Honeycomb and thus Android 2.4 or 2.5 Ice Cream are running in the opposite direction of physical buttons, instead relying much more heavily on controls provided by the OS inside the screen.

As far as the look of the phone, on the other hand, we’d vote future or present, as this phone looks rather like something that could very well be released with the scent of Gingerbread on it, no problem. On that note, if you know of or have made any concept phones like this one (or completely unlike this one) that are made for Android, send them our way! We’d love to make a post about them.
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Condoms Promote Smartphone “Couples” Deal for Valentine’s Day

12:31 PM Simranpal SIngh No comments

There are some methods for promotion that are so volatile that they’re just used over and over and over again without losing steam. One of these methods for money mayhem is to hand out a branded condom to your customers to promote the use of those condoms – OR, in this case, to promote a Valentine’s Day sale for a mobile company. This company is Mobilicity, they’re a Canadian group, and they’re totally brilliant.





The deal is that you can get whatever phones you like from their service so long as you and your significant other buy them at the same time and sign up on the same plan – this deal gets you a $69 a month plan for 2 lines of unlimited local talk, global text messaging, North American long distance, voicemail with caller ID, and “BONUS*” data. *We’re not sure what the bonus data consists of, but who cares?!
This same deal would normally cost you $120 from the same company, and this way you get a condom out of the deal. As one commenter has already noted, “best promotion ever, Mobilicity is literally trying to ‘make’ new customers for itself.” Brilliant.


NOTE: if anyone is in the area where these are being given out (Vancouver, Ottawa, Toronto, and Edmonton,) we’d be glad to trade you some swag and/or at least shipping and handling for you to send some promo condoms our way.
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HTC ThunderBolt Best Buy Price Confirmed

12:25 PM Simranpal SIngh No comments

Yesterday we confirmed through BGR that the HTC Thunderbolt would be arriving at Best Buy on February 24th.  And now, price details have been confirmed.  And it looks to be about what everyone expected …

According to a hasty shot of an upcoming Ad posted on Droid-Life, the Thunderbolt is being sold at Best buy for $249 on a two year contract through Verizon.  But if users wish to roll their own provider and purchase it retail, it’ll set them back $749!  Wow.  Guess they want to make sure that buyers stay in the Verizon family.  Course, that gives users 4G speeds through Verizon’s LTE network at a rumored 3G rate, which could be pretty sweet.
HTC-ThunderBolt-1-540x425 thunderolt-bby-pricing-536x600 thunderbolt-full-retail-600x176 thunderolt-bby-pricing-536x600

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Engadget Reviews the Dual Core LG Optimus 2X

12:21 PM Simranpal SIngh No comments

With the release of the LG Optimus 2X, we finally have our first dual-core Android handset on the market. While LG has graced us with some great mid-range handsets, this is their first entry into the high-end Android market. Since this is a fairly important hardware release, the good folks at Engadget have written up a fairly lengthy and comprehensive review of the phone, and for the most part liked what they saw.

For positives, they liked the solid build quality of the phone, which had a durable and simplistic styling to it that belied the power of the hardware beneath. The performance of the Tegra 2 chip — with its two CPU cores and eight GPU cores — was very impressive, boasting great gaming, 1080p video playback and multitasking performance, in which didn’t even break a sweat.
They also liked the eight megapixel camera, which took very detailed pictures, and thought the sound quality was very good. The LG Optimus 2X also boasted good battery life given the power of the hardware, thanks to the Tegra 2’s efficient power usage especially when in idle. Given that it had battery life that was on par, and even in some cases better than, many single core CPU phones on the market today, this is a pretty good achievement.
In the middling department, they thought that the camera, while excellent, washed out colors a bit, making their pictures of London look more dreary than London actually appeared. They also thought the screen, while very nice, wasn’t anything overtly special. They didn’t seem too impressed with the capacitive buttons either, but that seems a matter of personal taste than anything else.
In the negatives department, they seemed really let down by LG’s implementation of Android, which was pretty laggy even on this dual-core monster, in which they compared the performance to an “18-month old HTC Hero”. They were also shocked at how much system resources the software used, around 300MB of the internal 512MB of memory, leaving little left for installing apps. Worse yet, some apps like the music app can’t be shut down due to its integration into Android’s slide down menu. The best thing they could say about it is that “it doesn’t crash too often”, which is really damning praise.
Overall, they thought the LG Optimus 2X is a great piece of hardware brought down by laggy and buggy software that hampers it from achieving its full potential. It’s hoped that with software updates and custom ROM’s, it will achieve that potential, but right now it’s a great foundation and benchmark phone, giving us a glimpse at the future of our Android handsets.

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Samsung Gives Word on Which European Carriers Will Offer the Nexus S

12:19 PM Simranpal SIngh No comments


We know that Vodafone will be carrying the Nexus S in Europe in Australia, but that’s pretty much all we know about the Nexus S so far. Until today, nothing else had been announced about where we might see the new Nexus flagship device. But word is dropping now that the following carriers will supply it in the following markets:
  • Germany: The Phone House
  • Switzerland: Swisscom – the price starts from 49 CHF
  • Austria: A1
  • France: SFR – which is co-owned by Vodafone and Vivendi
  • Russia: Available mid-March on unknown carrier for around 27,990 rubles
If you live in one of those countries and you’re looking to snag a Nexus S, keep watch on these carriers in the next few months and you should see them become available.
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Rumor: Samsung’s new 10 inch Galaxy Tab will be announced this Sunday

12:17 PM Simranpal SIngh No comments

New reports have surfaced which claim that Samsung will be kicking off Mobile World congress by unveiling their new 10.1 inch Honeycomb (Android 3.0) powered tablet on Sunday night.  The new tablet is rumored to feature a dual-core Qualcomm processor, 8 mega-pixel camera, and will be trading in the Galaxy Tab’s white back panel for a black one.
The unnamed Android tablet from Samsung will be thinner and lighter than the original Galaxy Tab and physically smaller than the Apple iPad, despite having a slightly larger display.  It’s obvious that a 10.1 inch device is aimed at competing with the Motorola XOOM, and the Apple iPad, but we’re still hoping that Samsung will be unveiling something new in the 7 inch category during Mobile World Congress.
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Sports Illustrated Releases Android App, Will Cost $4/Month Subscription

12:15 PM Simranpal SIngh No comments


Sports fans, rejoice!! Sports Illustrated, the most popular and well-known sports publication…well, ever…is now on Android.  You can now have access to all the latest and greatest sports info right from the palm of your hand.  There is, of course, a monthly fee of $4, but it will get you access to the full gamut of sports info you’ve come to desire from SI.  For an extra dollar a month, you can add the print version as well, and if you’re one of the 3 million print subscribers, you can add the digital version at no charge.  According to SI’s Mark Ford:
“This is a significant step in delivering Sports Illustrated’s award-winning journalism to sports fans everywhere and in any way they want it,” said Mark Ford, Time Inc. EVP and President of its Sports Group. “The new subscription options give consumers flexibility and convenience they desire and ensures that our multiple revenue streams continue to grow.”
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Android tablets built into Indian buses

11:54 AM Simranpal SIngh No comments

Lookout dub rolling Escalades and high class airliner planes cause it looks like buses are going to be the new mode of transportation to have integrated screens in their headrests.  And not just any screen, but an Android tablet screen!  That’s right, buses in India are now sporting 7″ touch screens that run their own customized Android interface that allows users to login and do the normal things you would do on an Android tablet, such as view maps, watch video, listen to music, or log into your bank account (although I highly discourage the latter).  What’s nice is that it’s a free service, and I’ll give you 1 guess how it’s all possible…  by serving your advertising!
Still, this is a nice addition to your morning commute should you use the bus, and as long as people don’t hack them out of the headrests or hack the system itself, I can see this as a great use of Android in the future for public transportation.  Hit the jump to see some additional video footage of it in action.


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