Though it was technically announced back at CES, T-Mobile just barely talked about the LG G-Slate there, spending more time chatting up Dell’s Streak 7 and letting Motorola’s Xoom get virtually all of the Honeycomb attention. Well, that’s changed today with a handful of official new details: turns out the G-Slate features a 1GHz dual-core Tegra 2 processor, 32GB of internal storage, both a gyroscope and accelerometer, and — this is key — stereoscopic rear-facing video cameras capable of 1080p 3D capture, one of which doubles as a 5 megapixel still camera with LED flash. There’s also a third 2 megapixel camera up front for video chat over T-Mobile’s HSPA+ network or WiFi. Going back to that 3D business for a moment, you’ll need glasses (it’s unclear if they’re active or passive) to enjoy recorded or downloaded 3D content on the G-Slate’s 8.9-inch display — but you’ll also be able to output 1080p video over HDMI to the external display of your choice. Pricing is still an open question, but the companies are now comfortable enough to say that we can expect it “this spring,” so go ahead and start thinking about all the blooming springtime plant life you’ll be filming in three glorious dimensions. Follow the break for the full press release.
Thought Honeycomb was just for tablets? Well, it’s not! Sure, tablets might be Google’s main thrust with the release, but we’ve been able to dig up enough evidence in the preview SDK’s emulator released yesterday to suggest that these guys are still keeping their eyes on the smartphone prize.
Here’s how it works: the emulator can be set to load at an arbitrary screen resolution. By default, that’s WXGA, 1280 x 768 — perfect for tablets, but obviously a wee bit large for even the biggest smartphones. Well, it turns out that setting the emulator to WVGA (like you might find on a modern mid- to high-end smartphone) triggers a moderately different shell UI that lacks most of the whiz-bang home screen stuff Google’s shown on the Honeycomb tablets. In fact, the default launcher crashes out entirely, which means you need to install a replacement (Launcher Pro works nicely) just to play around.
Once you get in, it’s pretty raw, but you immediately notice that the emulator’s got some traces of smartphone support. Notably, the status bar reverts to a more smartphone-friendly form, albeit one with pre-Gingerbread background coloration and incorrectly-inverted font colors. The lock screen (pictured above) is back to its old form, not the webOS-esque circular lock in the Honeycomb tablet UI. The browser — which has been completely revamped in Honeycomb — works, though without visible tabs; Google might be thinking that they’d take up too much real estate on a screen this small.
Again, you can’t glean much here, but it’s interesting primarily because the emulator knows to revert to a smartphone UI layout at the lower resolution — a possible sign that Honeycomb will be a true dual-mode, dual-purpose platform from day one. And even if it isn’t, it looks like they’re setting themselves up for a two-UI strategy down the road.
Stephen Elop’s first quarterly results as Nokia CEO have just come out, and while the company’s still growing, others seem to be speeding ahead of it. Nokia’s reporting its converged mobile devices (smartphones, to you and us) reached volumes of 28.3 million during Q4 2010, which is a neat bump from 20.8 million at the same time last year and 26.5 million in the previous quarter. However, in the context of the broader smartphone marketplace, that figure now amounts to only a 31 percent share, according to Nokia’s own estimates, which is a major dip relative to its 40 percent slice in Q4 2009 and 38 percent in Q3 2010. Elop’s perspective on the matter is as follows:
“In Q4 we delivered solid performance across all three of our businesses, and generated outstanding cash flow. Additionally, growth trends in the mobile devices market continue to be encouraging. Yet, Nokia faces some significant challenges in our competitiveness and our execution. In short, the industry changed, and now it’s time for Nokia to change faster.”
When your operating profit goes from €1.47b (€950m net) a year ago to €1.09b (€745m net) this year, the response should indeed be to change and to change fast. Nokia’s still not disclosing sales figures of the N8, but given that this was the first full reporting period where the company’s Symbian flagship has been on sale, it doesn’t seem to have had quite the impact Espoo will have hoped for. Wanna try again with the N9?
Update: Nokia’s investor relations call has borne a few more interesting tidbits from the new man in charge. Elop is quoted as saying Nokia must “build or join a competitive ecosystem,” with the latter verb in that sentence sure to renew discussions of why the Finnish company should / shouldn’t switch to an OS such as Android or Windows Phone 7. We still think that’ll be the very last resort over in Espoo, but Elop apparently believes Nokia has the brand recognition and operator relationships to make such a move if it wanted to. Which of course it doesn’t. Or does it? Let’s wait for Nokia’s Strategy and Financial Briefing in London on February 11th — Mr. Elop’s expected to be a lot more specific about his company’s roadmap going forward on that day.
Sony just dropped a bomb on the Japanese stage — not a single PlayStation Phone, but a PlayStation Phone experience for everybody. The company unveiled a cross-platform software framework called PlayStation Suite, which sounds rather boring in those words, but what it amounts to is an official PlayStation Store filled with games for your Android tablets and cellphones. Sound familiar? Sony’s starting with an emulator for existing PSOne titles and is promising an Android game store later this year, but soon it might be much, much more: the company’s calling PlayStation Suite a “hardware-neutral” development framework to make games portable for all sorts of handhelds, and says that “new and exciting content” is also on the way.
Sony will sponsor a first-party licensing and quality-assurance scheme called PlayStation Certified, and provide the marketplace as well, likely hoping to attract major game developers to build top-tier titles for mobile and get a piece of the action too. If your device doesn’t have a pop-out gamepad handy, it looks like PlayStation Suite will emulate touchscreen controls, and you won’t necessarily need a phone to get in on the action, as Sony says the next-generation PlayStation Portable will be compatible with games developed for PlayStation Suite right off the bat. Doesn’t look like we’re getting any details on game prices or compatible devices, but we imagine one particular phone will change all that at Mobile World Congress next month.
Update: Looks like PlayStation Suite requires Android 2.3 at a minimum, and it’s PSOne, not PlayStation Portable titles that will be emulated here, despite Kaz Hirai’s quote during the festivities. PR after the break!
Yes, we are deep in Q4 2010 financial reporting season, and Motorola’s freshly independent Mobility arm is latest to step up and deliver its figures. Total revenue over the past three months reached $3.4 billion, marking a 21 percent increase year-on-year, net revenue from mobile devices was $2.4 billion, up by 33 percent year-on-year, and handset shipments were a seemingly healthy 4.9 million. That figure’s disappointed Wall Street estimates, however — the collective expectation, according to MarketWatch, was 5.2 million — and the net profit of $80 million is barely (for a company of this size) in the black. More doom and gloom is cast by Motorola itself, which is predicting a difficult first quarter of 2011 that will end with the company losing between 9 and 21 cents per share in net terms. Ah well, let’s try to enjoy the sunshine of Moto making money today and forget the rainclouds of tomorrow.
Motorola had one of the best CES showings of any company in recent memory, and now we’ve got some rough ship dates for all that new gear: CEO Sanjay Jha just announced on the company’s earnings call that the Atrix 4G for AT&T and 3G Xoom for Verizon will arrive at “the end of February,” while the LTE-enabled Droid Bionic and LTE Xoom will arrive at “the end of the second quarter” as previously promised. That sounds good to us — and with that earlier Best Buy leak suggesting the Xoom will hit on February 17, we’re hoping that Moto’s taking a long view of when the end of February actually begins. Even better, a late February Xoom release supports those rumors that Honeycomb will be generally released in March, which is when the real Android tablet invasion will begin. It’s all happening, folks.
Update: Oh boy. Jha followed up his Xoom comments in the Q&A portion by hinting that the Xoom might slip to March, but that he’s very confident they’ll make their timeline. Fingers crossed.
It’s still going to be a little bit before you can get your hands on a Xoom, but if you’d like to start playing with the Honeycomb SDK right now — and hey, developers, we’d encourage you to do just that — Google’s now made it possible. A version of the Android 3.0 SDK billed as a “preview” is now available for download, featuring “non-final” APIs and system images that will help would-be Android tablet devs get their feet wet as they prepare for an inevitable onslaught of these things over the next few months. So go on, get it while the gettin’s good.
Among the more delicious promises from Google are tablet-specific UI elements like “richer” widgets and notifications, a built-in GL renderer that permits GPU acceleration of both 2D and 3D visuals, and support for multicore processor architectures. Yay for making the most out of the available hardware.
Microsoft just dropped a few tidbits of knowledge on us regarding Windows Phone 7′s performance in the marketplace so far. Here’s what we’ve got:
‘Early research’ says 93 percent of WP7 customers are ‘satisfied’ and 90 percent would recommend the platform to others. We don’t know details about the research, though — number of customers polled, time frame, so on.
Average of 100 new apps in the Marketplace per day, and over 6,500 total are available right now.
Most importantly, “over 2 million” licenses have been sold to OEMs around the world.
What does that tell us? Well, let’s get the elephant in the room out of the way: the iPhone 4 sold 3 million units in a little under a month after its launch, so Microsoft clearly has plenty of room to catch up — but that comes as no surprise to us, analysts, or Microsoft itself. Furthermore, selling a license to an OEM isn’t the same as selling a phone to a customer, since many of these manufactured devices are sitting on store shelves; it’s unclear exactly how many WP7 devices are actually in users’ pockets right now, but the number is certainly less than “over 2 million.”
Microsoft’s earnings call is tomorrow where we expect to get more detail on the platform’s performance, but the company is saying today that it sees plenty of reasons to be “bullish about the foundation for long-term success” here — and considering that they simply can’t afford to fail in the mobile game, we hope they’re right.
Embarrassing SMS misdirect bug on your Android device? Nexus S owners should start checking their phones now for an over-the-air update that’s supposed to fix the problem. It’s being rolled out gradually, so just be patient if it’s not there yet. How will we know the problem’s gone for good? We’ll just assume so until we find out otherwise, in some unfortunate manner.
Verizon’s gone to the US Court of Appeals in Washington, DC today to officially take issue with the net neutrality policy that the FCC laid out in the waning moments of 2010, saying that it’s “deeply concerned by the FCC’s assertion of broad authority for sweeping new regulation of broadband networks and the Internet itself.” The company’s extremely brief press release on the matter doesn’t detail where their issues lie, specifically, but they’d said back in December that they had concerns, so the move doesn’t come as a terribly big surprise. If we had to guess, the no-blocking rules surrounding wireless networks are certainly high on that list of concerns — Verizon and others have long said that wireless needs to be left largely out of the net neutrality debate — but we won’t know until we’re able to dig into the court case. Follow the break for the press release.
