AT&T’s LG eXpo pico projects itself right out of stock, production problems to blame?

As Windows Mobile 6.5-based handsets go, LG’s eXpo unquestionably stands near the top of the pile thanks to its WVGA display, 1GHz Snapdragon core, and optional pico projector hump for the rear — but there’s a problem: it’s really, really hard to find. Nigh impossible, actually, especially now that AT&T has pulled it off its online store altogether (it had been showing out of stock for weeks anyway). The reason for that isn’t entirely clear — LG and AT&T are happy to cite “strong demand,” naturally, but the company that supplies the eXpo’s fingerprint sensor says there are actually some outstanding antenna problems that have the production line backlogged. So when’s it coming back? “Soon,” according to LG, but in this business we’ve seen “soon” mean anything from a few minutes to a few years, so that doesn’t mean much — and in the meantime, we’re thinking T-Mobile’s HD2 stands to eat its lunch.

[Thanks, Luda]

AT&T’s LG eXpo pico projects itself right out of stock, production problems to blame? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Posted on March 8, 2010 at 8:33 pm by Chris Ziegler · Permalink · Comments Closed
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iPad trainspotters divine e-book prices, My Documents and more from Oscar night commercial

Trainspotters, eagle-eyed bloggers, and tech detectives of all stripes have had a field day with last night’s iPad commercial. At the very least, we got a pretty good look at some e-book prices, ranging from Ted Kennedy’s True Compass: A Memoir ($14.99) to Three Cups of Tea: One Man’s Journey to Change the World… One Child at a Time by Greg Mortenson and David Oliver Relin ($7.99). All gripping reads, for sure, and all more expensive than Amazon. In addition to all that, TUAW has made note of a New York Times button, possibly to bring up NYT bestsellers in the iBookstore. Delving deeper into the UI, a look at the Pages iWork app has revealed a button labeled My Documents (where have we heard that one before?). But Oscar night is not the only place for iPad leaks: according to a tipster named James Barcellano, close viewing of the iPad keynote video has revealed an “Open In…” button during the viewing of a PDF attachment in mail. Perhaps this is an indication that the device’s file system will be a tad more open than we were expecting. Or maybe not! You know how these things go. One more pic after the break.

Continue reading iPad trainspotters divine e-book prices, My Documents and more from Oscar night commercial

iPad trainspotters divine e-book prices, My Documents and more from Oscar night commercial originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 17:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Posted on March 8, 2010 at 2:51 pm by Joseph L. Flatley · Permalink · Comments Closed
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Acer working on frameless laptop with touchscreen keyboard?

Would you believe that Acer is working on a frameless laptop with touchscreen keyboard? As far-fetched as the idea might be, it’s certainly plausible, expected even. The idea, as rumored by DigiTimes, involves doing away with the display’s frame by printing colors directly onto the back of the display’s reinforced glass substrate from Corning (a la Gorilla Glass presumably). Coupled with a touchscreen keyboard, the rumored device should be impossibly thin by traditional laptop comparisons. Keep in mind that we’ve already seen this Frame Zero concept pictured above from Fujitsu and Acer’s arch-rival ASUS has been showing off its dual-display laptop prototype with touchscreen keyboard for months. Even the OLPC XO-3 plans to eschew the clickity keyboard in favor of a touchscreen version. And anyone who has ever seen a scifi movie knows that tactile keyboards and display bezels have no role to play in our computing future anyway, so we might as well get things started now — or in the second half of 2010 according to DigiTimes‘ sources.

Acer working on frameless laptop with touchscreen keyboard? originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 05:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Gigabyte ‘Codfish’ Android 1.6 handset outed

We don’t see too many Gigabyte phones in these parts, but all indications seem to suggest that the company is throwing in with Android for future handset releases (which is what we would recommend, if it ever asked us — which it doesn’t). As we wait eagerly for the GSmart Android phone to make its debut, which should happen any second now (right, guys?) we have word of a second Donut-powered device with the oh-so-unappealing name Codfish. According to PointGPhone, this bad boy is of “good manufacturing quality,” “very responsive,” and counts among its many charms a 3.2-inch display and 5 megapixel camera. We’re just hoping that Codfish is either a codename or translates into something really bad-ass in Mandarin.

Gigabyte ‘Codfish’ Android 1.6 handset outed originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 02:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Posted on March 7, 2010 at 11:20 pm by Joseph L. Flatley · Permalink · Comments Closed
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HTC HD2 breaks free in the T-Mobile USA wilds

HTC’s HD2 is a near perfect combination of physical hardware and silicon that delivers impressive performance on a device that’s surprisingly sleek given the display’s massive 4.3-inch exapanse. Even Microsoft’s much maligned Windows Mobile 6.5 is expertly masked by HTC’s Sense interface. So it’s easy to understand the anticipation felt by the HD2’s first US release, questions of a Windows Phone 7 OS upgrade path notwithstanding. T-Mobile has the release honors and is now showing the HD2 as “coming soon” in its phone inventory. We’ve also got the first “in the wild” shots courtesy of TmoNews showing that big Blockbuster shortcut linked front and center for downloading On Demand movies directly to the device. Still no firm price or date but $199.99 on contract ($449.99 unlocked) sometime around 24 March sounds about right. One more shot with official T-Mobile branding after the break; the rest at the source link below.

[Thanks Taylor]

Continue reading HTC HD2 breaks free in the T-Mobile USA wilds

HTC HD2 breaks free in the T-Mobile USA wilds originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 01:33:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Posted on March 7, 2010 at 10:33 pm by Thomas Ricker · Permalink · Comments Closed
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Palm Elan to be the next webOS smartphone, heading to AT&T?


Here’s a little spicy rumor for you Palm fans on this tranquil Sunday: according to TopTongueBarry who claims to work for AT&T, his company has just finished certification tests with GSM flavors of the Pre Plus and Pixi Plus ahead of a possible April 26th launch — a date not far from what we’ve heard earlier. However, the bigger news from Barry is that the big A will soon be testing a third mysterious webOS device by the name of Palm Elan, which may greet us mere mortals on May 10th (but possibly in Europe first). Another forum member Shadow-360 also dug up some cached pages that claimed to have accessories for the non-existent device, as pictured above. Of course, this could be just a crude joke for a keyboard-less Palm device that many of us seem to desire — as reminded by the good folks at PreCentral, Elan is also the name of the company that sued Apple over multitouch patents last April. So, any thoughts on this leak? Are we all ready for a new webOS phone?

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Palm Elan to be the next webOS smartphone, heading to AT&T? originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 07 Mar 2010 16:20:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Posted on March 7, 2010 at 1:20 pm by Richard Lai · Permalink · Comments Closed
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Motorola i1: we’ve seen it, it runs Blur, and it’ll likely be out soon

Well, that was quick: thanks to some new information we’ve received, we’re now able to confirm that the Motorola i1 is indeed the so-called Opus One that the company has been rumored to preparing for its iDEN carrier partners with Android on board — and it’s exactly the leaked device we saw back in December. We don’t know much in the way of specs, but it sounds like we should expect Blur running atop Android 1.5 (sigh), a 3 megapixel cam, and a possible announcement within a couple weeks — a time frame that would line up splendidly with CTIA toward the end of the month. Naturally, you can bet your little green robot we’ll be there.

[Image via BGR; thanks, Gus N.]

Motorola i1: we’ve seen it, it runs Blur, and it’ll likely be out soon originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Mar 2010 20:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Posted on March 5, 2010 at 5:03 pm by Chris Ziegler · Permalink · Comments Closed
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Microsoft’s Courier ‘digital journal’: exclusive pictures and details (update: video!)

digg_url = ‘http://digg.com/gadgets/Exclusive_pictures_of_Microsoft_Courier’; We’ve been dying to know more about Microsoft’s Courier tablet / e-book device ever since we first caught wind of it last September, and while our entreaties to Mr. Ballmer went unanswered, we just learned some very interesting information from an extremely trusted source. We’re told Courier will function as a “digital journal,” and it’s designed to be seriously portable: it’s under an inch thick, weighs a little over a pound, and isn’t much bigger than a 5×7 photo when closed. That’s a lot smaller than we expected — this new picture really puts it into perspective — and the internals apparently reflect that emphasis on mobility: rather than Windows 7, we’re told the Courier is built on Tegra 2 and runs on the same OS as the Zune HD, Pink, and Windows Mobile 7 Series, which we’re taking to mean Windows CE 6.

As we’ve heard, the interface appears to be pen-based and centered around drawing and writing, with built-in handwriting recognition and a corresponding web site that allows access to everything entered into the device in a blog-like format complete with comments. We’re also hearing that there will be a built-in camera, and there’s a headphone jack for media playback. Most interestingly, it looks like the Courier will also serve as Microsoft’s e-book device, with a dedicated ecosystem centered around reading. It all sounds spectacular, but all we have for a launch date is “Q3 / Q4″, and we have no idea how much it’s going to cost, so we’re trying to maintain a healthy skepticism until any of this gets official — call us any time, Microsoft. One more pic showing the interface after the break.

Update: We’ve added a gallery of user interface shots — some of which we’ve seen and some of which are new.

Update 2: We’ve just gotten two full-length HD videos of the interface in action. We’ve seen parts of these before, but there’s some new stuff here that’s quite interesting. Check it below.

Continue reading Microsoft’s Courier ‘digital journal’: exclusive pictures and details (update: video!)

Microsoft’s Courier ‘digital journal’: exclusive pictures and details (update: video!) originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Mar 2010 13:44:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Posted on March 5, 2010 at 10:44 am by Nilay Patel · Permalink · Comments Closed
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Leak: Microsoft Pink phones coming to Verizon, on shelves April 20th?

Details on Microsoft’s Pink phones seem to be leaking all over the place this week, and we just got a huge piece of the puzzle: an extremely reliable source just told us the two Sharp-made devices will launch exclusively on Verizon, with a possible street date of April 20th. We’ve also got two more photos of the Pure and Turtle — which are legit, as far as we can tell — and some info on the Pink ad campaign, which will indeed be targeted at teens and twentysomethings and centered around that “truly madly deeply” line Microsoft employees have been tossing around lately. (Sort of explains that 4/20 launch date, right?) Whether any of this is good enough to overcome the fact that Pink seems to be a limited featurephone platform launching into a world of cheap smartphones remains to be seen, but this thing is definitely happening. New pic of the Turtle after the break.

Update: We’ve just heard that Pink will be coming to Vodafone internationally as well — which explains why we’ve heard of both CDMA and GSM variants of the two devices.

Continue reading Leak: Microsoft Pink phones coming to Verizon, on shelves April 20th?

Leak: Microsoft Pink phones coming to Verizon, on shelves April 20th? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 05 Mar 2010 11:55:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Posted on March 5, 2010 at 8:55 am by Nilay Patel · Permalink · Comments Closed
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Project Pink QWERTY slider ‘Pure’ found in the wild, headed for Verizon?

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). If you really squint your eyes you can make out some of that “hectic and colorful” UI we’re hearing about.

Project Pink QWERTY slider ‘Pure’ found in the wild, headed for Verizon? originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 04 Mar 2010 14:51:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Posted on March 4, 2010 at 11:51 am by Paul Miller · Permalink · Comments Closed
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