We know it’s tough for the little guys to get great handsets without a top-tier carrier’s exclusivity agreement getting in the way, but goodness — launching an Android 2.1 device in early 2011 for nearly $100 on contract seems odd, doesn’t it? That said, the few wireless markets that remain under the Alltel brand (they’re down to around 800,000 customers in six states now) are nabbing a device called the Axis this week, featuring a 3.2 megapixel camera along with a 3.2-inch WVGA display — specs that put it roughly in line with the Ally found on Verizon. Want it? It should be available to you now for $89.99 after a $50 mail-in rebate on a two-year contract; follow the break for the full press release.
We were wandering the floor at CES just before the end of the show when we stumbled upon this oddly familiar device. It’s the Aigo A8 — néeAltek Leo — an Android cameraphone (more like a phonecamera, really) destined for China Unicom that sports a 14 megapixel autofocus camera with a CCD sensor, xenon flash, 3x optical zoom, and support for 720p HD video recording. Of course, we wasted no time taking this rare beast for a spin, even going so far as to sample the camera. Take a look at the pictures below, followed by more information — and videos — after the break.
The farce that has been Sony Ericsson’s bungled, delayed, and deservedly maligned Android upgrade story for the Xperia X10 family is coming to a fittingly silly end. Questioned by Android Community on the possibility of a Froyo (Android 2.2) upgrade for its initial set of Android handsets, the SE team has just come out and admitted that there’ll be no future OS upgrades, at least in terms of Android iterations. The X10, X10 Mini and X10 Mini Pro are not being abandoned, not at all, but the only software enhancements you can look forward to will come directly from Sony Ericsson. The company hardly sees that as a bad thing, however, judging by a recent tweet announcing its belief that an SE-customized Eclair tastes better than Google’s untouched Froyo. We’d protest, but what’s the use?
We’re not totally sure that Android 2.1 users will be happy to be bundled in with 2.2 consumers — after all, there’s plenty in Froyo that’s not available on Eclair — but the fact remains that a cool 83 percent of actively used Android phones right now run one of the two latest iterations. A reminder is merited to say that by “active” we mean those that accessed the Android Market over the foregoing two weeks — which might have a slight bias toward over-representing the newer phones with folks either abandoning their Cupcake and Donut handsets or simply not searching for new apps for them. Either way, we reckon it’s good to see such nice big slices taken up by Android’s most advanced versions, it seems almost a shame that Gingerbread’s arrival will soon disrupt things all over again. For now, we’re off to our delicatessen, all this food talk’s given us the munchies.
If you were going to make a “mini” version of something else you’d probably want it to be significantly smaller. However, this “i9000 Mini” smartphone, cheekily adorned with both Samsung and Galaxy S branding, isn’t any more svelte than the phone it is most certainly trying to be. If our eyes don’t deceive us it’s even fatter, though the capacitive touchscreen is indeed a half-inch smaller, down to 3.5-inches, and rather than being wide VGA it is instead half VGA — doing with a measly 320 x 480 pixels. And no, it sure isn’t AMOLED. Other specs include a five megapixel camera, 512MB of ROM and RAM, and dual SIM support. Roll with this 1,480 yuan (about $200) phone and you’ll be rolling with Android 2.1, but the manufacturers promise it’ll be updated to 2.2 in just a few weeks. If you can’t trust a company that steals another company’s design, logo, and trademarks, who can you trust?
Here’s an extra bonus for those of you who snapped up an unlocked Xperia X8 on a frosty Friday morn — Sony Ericsson is starting to push Android 2.1 to the handset right now. Thirty-two tasty batches of Eclair are already in the oven, and you can easily check to see if you’re a likely candidate for upgrade by scanning the back of your phone. If your eight-digit “SI-number” (e.g. 1242-4859) matches any of those on the list at our source link, your 720p video recording mode, enhanced social networking integration and five homescreens are on the way. Just don’t necessarily expect to see them anytime soon on AT&T.
We think this is a veiled way of passing the buck to AT&T — but whatever it is, Sony Ericsson USA has extended an old, crusty, TimeScape-enabled olive branch to Xperia X10 owners in the States by attempting to explain what’s going on with the Eclair update ’round these parts. Basically, the company says that getting an update out in the US is way harder than it is elsewhere because of “the technical requirements that must be met” over which Sony Ericsson has “no control.” The blame is levied on an “especially rigorous” testing cycle that can (and presumably, often does) take several months, which is why they’ve thus far refused to offer guidance on when the update will be released. Honestly, is there any way we can trade in our warranty card to get on the fast track with this stuff? And more importantly, would us bleeding-edge types be willing to take that risk on a wide scale?
The Android landscape’s certainly getting crowded, isn’t it? We can still vividly remember the days when the T-Mobile G1 was the only game in town, and now here we are — just two years later — flush with options covering virtually every market segment from the ultra-high end to the ultra-low and everything in between. One niche market that’s usually underserved, though, is the beat-the-crap-out-of-your-phone market. You know who you are: you work hard, you play hard, or you’ve just got an incurable case of butterfingers — but whatever the case, you need a phone that you aren’t breaking, bricking, melting, freezing, or otherwise destroying every few weeks.
It’s not that rugged phones haven’t existed, of course. Far from it: Nextel and Motorola practically invented (and thrived off of) the concept, and options like AT&T’s Samsung Rugby and Verizon’s Casio G’zOne series have been available for some time. By and large, though, it’s been a field devoid of smartphones — and these days, that’s just not going to cut it. The kinds of people that need a phone that can take a few knocks don’t necessarily want to buy them at the expense of power or capability anymore. On that note, Motorola’s new Android-powered Defy for T-Mobile USA (and other carriers abroad) is one of the few to take a shot at elegantly combining environmental resistance with a no-compromise smartphone experience, featuring Blur atop Android 2.1 with a 5 megapixel autofocus cam, LED flash, 800MHz TI OMAP3610 core, and a 3.7-inch 854 x 480 display. In other words, on paper, it’s no slouch — but can it hang? Let’s find out.
This is no photoshop — it really is an Android browser that lets you tilt web pages, but there’s more than meets the eye. The folks at Access have just launched this free NetFront Life Browser, which packs a few interesting features that caught our attention. Let’s hold hands and walk through them together. Upon launching the app for the first time, we were taken to a “unified navigation” landing page that consists of two sections: the top half displays live thumbnails of opened windows, and swiping left or right gives you a smooth 3D transition between them; whereas the bottom half shows you stacks of pages à la Apple Time Machine for history, bookmarks, and scrapbooks. Speaking of which, the scrapbook feature is also one of the main — and probably the funnest — highlights here: this is where you can store virtual cut-outs using the scissors tool at the bottom right of the browser, thus creating pictorial bookmarks. If you want to mark something specific on a page, then you can use the checkmarking tool — located right next to the scissors — to do so, but bear in mind that the marks will disappear if you close the page’s window (so it’s fine as long as you keep it in the background).
Not much of a surprise at this point, but Verizon has now confirmed that it will be launching the Android-based Motorola Citrus tomorrow, November 11th, and that it will be offering it for just $50 on the usual two-year contract (after a $100 mail-in rebate). Of course, that still doesn’t make it the cheapest Android handset around, and that low-end price comes with some specs to match, including a sluggish 528MHz Qualcomm MSM7225 processor, a low-res 3-inch screen, and just Android 2.1 with some Blur customizations. Full press release is after the break.
