Just like the old A500, Acer chose a 1 GHz dual core processor and the Honeycomb version of Android for the new A200. The device is lighter and keeps the many ports from the prior model: Full-sized USB, microSD card slot and micro USB jack to name a few. Gone is the rear camera on the A200, but it does keep a 2 megapixel front-facing sensor for video chatting or images. At this price, the A200 is surely worth a look and will be even more attractive once Acer pushes out the expected software update to Android 4.0; possibly as early as next month.

Motorola Xoom Wi-Fi tablet owners don’t have to wait for a taste of Ice Cream Sandwich, however. The company began to roll out Android 4.0.3 to the Xoom this week and will continue to push the software out in waves. The updated software could help give new life for the first Android tablet, which arrived nearly a year ago to generally mediocre reviews.

How much will Android 4.0 improve the experience on a Xoom tablet? That will vary by each individual’s needs, but overall the device is better with the updated software according to Jason Perlow of ZDNet. He used a enthusiast-created version for two weeks and then got the official upgrade a few days earlier than consumers. There are still some rough edges in the operating system, he says, but most will welcome the improved interface on their tablet.

While I wait for Android 4.0 to appear on my own 10.1-inch tablet, I’m enjoying Android 4.0 on my smartphone and this week found a new app that I consider a “must try”, if not a “must have” for Android devices. Wikipedia finally debuted its Android app this week and while you could use a browser to access the online encyclopedia, I find the free app in the Android Market much better. Simple sharing of Wikipedia entries, support for offline article reading and GPS-powered local Wikipedia results all add to the experience.

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Ever find yourself shredding the gnar and wishing you could share the breathtaking rush of scenery with others? Well, now you can, courtesy of Zeal Optics. Not content to sit on its GPS-laden laurels, the company’s added a new twist to the ‘ol polarized ski googles, embedding the iON with an HD camera for 170-degree wide angle recording. The inbuilt module, centered up top, pulls in video and audio at full 1080p and can be controlled using an array of buttons alongside the mask or via the bundled PC / Mac software. If you’re not interested in reliving your downhill trek one swoosh at a time, there’s always the 8 megapixel cam for photo-taking. Unfortunately, this high-tech eyewear can’t wirelessly transmit your captured media — at least, not this version — so you’ll have to make due with the included microSD card. Sound like a neat proposition? Good, the be prepared to cough up 9 for this high-def slope accessory. Official presser awaits you after the break.

Continue reading Zeal Optics iON goggles take full HD to the slopes, let you share the extreme thrills

Zeal Optics iON goggles take full HD to the slopes, let you share the extreme thrills originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 20 Jan 2012 04:07:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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While scouring Samsung’s booth at CES’s Digital Experience for that glorious 55-inch OLED set this evening, we came across a table full of new WiFi-enabled cameras and a camcorder. The logic behind the WiFi feature is that it enables direct access to Microsoft’s Sky Drive, E-Mail, PC Auto Backup, remote viewfinding and of course Facebook, Youtube, and Picasa right from your phone. The top of the line 9 WB850F — the F designation indicates it has WiFi — has a 16 megapixel BSI CMOS sensor, 21x optical zoom, 3-inch AMOLED display, shoots 1080p HD, and even has GPS with POI. The 16 megapixel 9 DV300F was also on hand with a 5x optical zoom, a 3-inch display and shoots 720p video. Samsung’s 14 megapixel 9 WB15F also sports a 3-inch AMOLED screen, and shoots in full HD with up to 18x optical zoom. The tied-for-least-expensive 9 ST200F still puts in a showing with a 16 megapixel shooter, 10x optical zoom while still capturing HD video at 720p. Samsung launched one HD camcorder, the 9 Q20 which packs 20x optical zoom, time lapse, and HD recording at 1080i @ 60fps. All of the cameras have a similar heft and are built with similar materials which should help narrow people’s purchase decisions to looking at what features they want and what’s affordable. On to the gallery!

Samsung’s WiFi-enabled cameras hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 10 Jan 2012 02:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung’s new Bada flagship has just docked into our illustrative French port. Announced back in the summer, the Wave 3 arrives on the refreshed Bada 2.0 OS, powered by a 1.4GHz processor and packing a four-inch 800 x 480 Super AMOLED display. Storage matches the watery iteration, with 3GB of memory baked-in, with expansion possible through microSD. Meanwhile, an auto-focus five megapixel shooter will do its best to fill all that space. Not content with France (where Bada-powered handsets have established a niche fanbase), the HSPA-connected smartphone is also penned to hit Germany, Russia and Italy before the end of the year.

Continue reading Samsung Wave 3 crashes onto French shores

Samsung Wave 3 crashes onto French shores originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 28 Nov 2011 15:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It seems like only yesterday that eFun was talking up its Nextbook Premium8 tablet (okay it was two weeks ago), but the company is already pitching the latest entry in the line. The Nextbook Premium9 has a nine-inch display, in keeping with the Southern California company’s fairly straight-forward naming convention. The slate runs a basic version of Android 2.3 (though the company assures us that a Honeycomb upgrade is on the way) and packs in 4GB of memory (expandable via a MicroSD slot), a built-in speaker, a two megapixel front-facing camera and, as a bit of a throwback, a mini USB port.

We had a bit of trouble on the software front — the tablet froze up on us a few times during our hands-on trial, in spite of the 1GHz processor inside. The hardware itself is a bit more promising, however. It’s actually a pretty slick little tablet that has a nice feel in hand, thanks in part to its brushed metal rear — though the tablet does feel a bit on the thick side. The asking price for the Gingerbread slate is 9, though the company made a point of letting us know that it’ll likely be a bit cheaper when it goes on sale in November / December, running consumers closer to 9 — better, sure, but perhaps still not low enough to bring too many folks over to the eFun way.

Zach Honig contributed to this report.

Continue reading eFun Nextbook Premium 9 tablet hands-on (video)

eFun Nextbook Premium 9 tablet hands-on (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 19 Oct 2011 20:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, what do we have here? According to “trusted sources” over at This Is My Next it’s a Motorola Spyder, or a Droid RAZR, or maybe even the Droid HD we peeped back in August. Whatever the name, the phone is apparently packing a first-of-its-kind 4.3-inch, 960 x 540 qHD super AMOLED display. The rumored LTE handset also supposedly contains a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM, an 8 megapixel, 1080p rear-facing camera and HD front-facing camera, and is apparently outfitted in Gorilla Glass and Kevlar. TIMN is also boasting exclusive new details for the recently outed Atrix 2. It seems the name is confirmed as well as a handful of previously identified specs. What’s more, the phone’s got a couple of accessories on board, including a laptop dock called the Lapdock 100, also rumored to play nice with the Spyder, or RAZR, or HD. More images of both devices await you at the source links below.

Motorola LTE handset emerges with qHD Super AMOLED display, questionable identity originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 24 Sep 2011 16:22:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Want to get your BBM on in style without spending a fortune on RIM’s latest trio? Say hello to the new 11mm (0.43 inch) thin BlackBerry Curve, now official in 3 variants — the dual-mode GSM / CDMA 9370, the GSM / UMTS 9360 and the CDMA-only 9350. These long rumored handsets feature an 800MHz CPU, 512MB RAM, a tiny 2.44-inch HVGA+ (480×360 pixel) display, a five megapixel EDoF camera (with LED flash and VGA video recording), Bluetooth, WiFi b/g/n with UMA, GPS / aGPS and NFC. While there’s no sign of that new-fangled touch screen technology, you’ll find BlackBerry 7 under the hood, along with a 1000mAh battery to keep it ticking all day long, 512MB of built-in storage (1GB on the 9370) and microSD card support (up to 32GB). RIM is still mum on pricing, but the new BlackBerry Curve is “expected to be available from carriers in Canada this month and from other carriers around the world beginning in September” — including Vodafone, based on the video (and PR) after the break. We’ll have a hands-on later today so stay tuned for more.

Continue reading RIM launches new BlackBerry Curve (video)

RIM launches new BlackBerry Curve (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 23 Aug 2011 02:49:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Not too long ago, things were pretty simple in T-Mobile’s Android land. For us (the nerds, geeks, power users, early adopters, and other misbegotten social deviants) there was the G series of phones with plain Android, culminating recently with LG’s delightful G2x. If you wanted to buy your mom an Android smartphone, you’d point her at the myTouch series of handsets with custom HTC Sense-based skins, like last winter’s myTouch 4G. Life got a bit more complicated with the introduction of LG’s Optimus T, Samsung’s Galaxy S 4G, and other devices that don’t neatly fit into the carrier’s grand branding scheme. Well, fear not! T-Mobile and HTC went ahead and refreshed last summer’s lovely myTouch 3G Slide with a dash of dual-core tech lifted right from the HTC’s Sensation flagship and a bespoke 8 megapixel shooter said to be “the most advanced camera of any smartphone”. Those are fighting words… so does the myTouch 4G Slide (as it’s called) beat the likes of Samsung’s Galaxy S II, Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Arc, and Nokia’s N8 in terms of imaging performance? Is the sliding keyboard as pleasant to use as its predecessor? And most importantly, is this your mom’s next phone? Read on for our full review.

Continue reading T-Mobile myTouch 4G Slide review

T-Mobile myTouch 4G Slide review originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 02 Aug 2011 12:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I’ve been using a review unit that T-Mobile loaned me for the past few weeks. Overall, the new myTouch 4G Slide improves upon an already solid design and offers easier-to-use software, plus better overall performance. And while I’ve seen a few cameras on phones that produce better results, images from the myTouch 4G Slide are far and away better than any prior T-Mobile-branded phone I’ve used.

Hardware

This isn’t the thinnest phone on the market, but that’s due to the slide-out QWERTY keypad. It has four rows and is backlit when needed. The slide mechanism is smooth and solid. I like the very light touch of the hardware keyboard, but others I showed the phone to felt it to be “sponge-like” and “soft.” Of course, you can always choose between the two included software keyboards: Swype and a standard keyboard.

The 3.7-inch display uses what I’d call the minimum resolution for a high-end Android phone, 800×840, but the Super LCD screen looks sharp and bright, both indoors and out. Instead of capacitive touch buttons under the display, the phone has physical buttons for home, menu, back and the Genius feature, which is used to place calls, search, send text messages and more through voice commands powered by Nuance. Between the buttons is an optical trackpad. I’m generally not a fan of these, but I like how you can wake the phone with the trackpad button. For a full overview of the hardware, see my recent video look.

Like most currently available smartphones at this price point, the myTouch 4G Slide is powered by a dual-core processor. A 1.2 GHz Qualcomm chip is the main engine and T-Mobile says the handset has 768 MB of memory to run programs. I recently reviewed the HTC Sensation 4G which has very similar components but the new myTouch feels slightly faster: No matter how many applications I ran, the phone kept up admirably.

Perhaps the biggest hardware upgrade, and the centerpiece of the new phone, is the 8-megapixel camera. HTC isn’t known for using the highest quality camera sensors, but if all of their future phones use this one, that perception will change quickly. I’ll talk more about the camera software later, but the images I captured with the myTouch 4G Slide were impressive. The phone has two LED flashes next to the camera, but in many cases you won’t need them.

The camera uses a wide aperture lens of f/2.2, which brings in more light; even in dim situations. That means better pictures at night and indoors. There is a dedicated hardware button for the camera shutter: Tap to focus if needed, and press to capture an image. Pressing the camera button at any time will quickly fire up the camera software as well.

Another key feature is the 21 Mbps mobile broadband radio that supports T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network. Various speedtests averaged around 6 Mbps download speeds and nearly 2 Mbps back up in my area. I had expected slightly higher speeds because I live near a network area that now supports 42 Mbps speeds and the phone’s radio should gain some advantage in terms of bandwidth speeds. However, for a phone, I find 6 Mbps more than adequate for most tasks.

The phone runs on a 1520 mAh battery, which will last a day for all but the highest of power users. The only time I could run the phone battery down in a single day was after watching many videos and relying on the device more than my laptop or tablet for email and browsing tasks. As a phone, the new myTouch works well with callers hearing me loudly and clearly, even in a hands-free setting.

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Software

T-Mobile is shipping the myTouch 4G Slide with the most recent version of Google’s software: Android 2.3.4. That means unlike many other smartphones, there’s no waiting months and months for the upgrade. I did notice, however, that the phone doesn’t support video calls on Google Talk, which is available for Android 2.3.4. Instead, Qik is pre-loaded for video calling through the front-facing camera.

Instead of the bland look of Android, HTC Sense 3.0 is used, making for a simple but effective user interface. This adds custom HTC widgets, five home screens that float around a 3-D-like carousel, more intuitive interfaces and smart customizations to the standard Android notification system. I’ve been impressed with HTC Sense 3.0 on other devices and it works just as well on the new myTouch. One feature I really liked in the software, however, is missing on this phone. Called the Active Lockscreen, it allows you to add up to four shortcuts to the lock screen. Dragging any one of these into a ringed area quickly unlocks the phone and opens up the application. I first saw this on the HTC Sensation 4G and wish it was on the myTouch 4G Slide.

While the standard camera software was always adequate on HTC’s phones, the myTouch adds several new functions that take full advantage of the 8-megapixel camera sensor. SweepShot is useful for taking wide panoramic images: Simply press the shutter button one time and then sweep across your image as if you were taking a video. The software processes the image into a wide view. ClearShot HDR snaps several images in a range of exposures to create high-definition range (HDR) pictures; beautiful for outdoors where the sun can overpower the foreground. And BurstShot takes five images in succession to make sure you capture the picture you want. I found it useful for fast moving objects.

For those interested in “crapware,” or the software that carriers often pre-load on handsets, T-Mobile seems to be reducing the amount; and the software it does include is fairly useful. KidZone allows for a custom configuration so that kids can’t mess up the apps and widget setup on your handset, for example. Netflix is on the phone for movie and television programming, and the new Zinio Reader app is there for magazines.

Aside from the Wi-Fi calling app — the phone supports voice over Wi-Fi without the use of voice minutes — there’s very little T-Mobile software on the device. Suprisingly, I actually liked the new Name ID service, which is like the old Caller ID of yesteryear. Smartphones can tell you who’s calling if you have the caller as a contact on your phone. But Name ID shows most every other caller name too, which I found helpful when using the phone.

Conclusion

Android fans that crave a keyboard should consider the T-Mobile myTouch 4G Slide, but test the keypad to see if they like the light touch. The phone offers solid overall performance and the camera is much improved. At 6.5 ounces, some will find the handset to be bulky or heavy, but that’s often the price one pays for a hardware keyboard. And even those that aren’t fans of HTC’s user interface could be swayed by the new Sense 3.0 software.

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Well, we’d seen plenty of pictures of T-Mobile’s new myTouch 4G Slide over the past couple of weeks, and now it’s official. T-Mo officially pulled the wraps off its newest handset, and it’s packing a 1.2 GHz dual-core Snapdragon processor and a 3.7-inch WVGA super LCD screen. As for software, the slick slider comes with some tasty Gingerbread slathered in Sense 3.0. There’s also an 8-megapixel shooter that does low-light photos with a wide-aperture lens capable of f2.2 — just like that new Nokia N9 that has us all hot and bothered. The camera also has burst mode for snapping rapid fire photos, takes HDR pictures, and does 1080p videos, too. It’s slated for a July release, so we won’t have to wait much longer until we can indulge our inner Ansel Adams. Such fantastic smartphone photography is all yours for 9.99 on a two year contract, and there’s a video of the phone and a smattering of other details in the PR after the break.

Continue reading T-Mobile announces myTouch 4G Slide, aims to take smartphone photography to new heights

T-Mobile announces myTouch 4G Slide, aims to take smartphone photography to new heights originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Jun 2011 00:34:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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