There has been a second leak of Honeycomb for the Logitech Revue, apparently, and with the leak comes a juicy 8 minute video showing what to expect once the official update comes to the Revue.
If you were worried that the unit wouldn’t be powerful enough to run the update smoothly, guess again. Some have even said this thing runs smoother than the original build.
Video’s above and if you want to apply the leak manually links and instructions can be found here. (Before you go, do make sure you’re on the first leak before updating to this one – you’ll brick the thing otherwise). Anyone else suddenly wanting one of those $99 Revue units? [via Channel Android]
Apologies in advance for horrible focusing on my camera’s part and a couple of shots where the entire phone wasn’t in view while looking at the software. Also, please allow an hour or two for full HD video to process.
Our friends at Sprint dropped off a little gift for us to share with you guys. It’s the Samsung Epic 4G Touch, Sprint’s keyboard-less version of the original Epic 4G and their version of the Galaxy S II. Quick first impressions? Sure. This phone is amazingly fast. Samsung’s work on TouchWiz UI on top of Android 2.3.4 must have been long and hard because they’ve constructed arguably the smoothest and most user-friendly user interface on top of stock Android.
I’m sure a lot of that is backed by Samsung’s extremely powerful (twice as powerful as competing chipsets, apparently) dual-core 1.2Ghz Exynos processor. In my 30 minutes of gleeful playtime I was unable to produce lag, stuttering or freezing in any application. I applied a live wallpaper to see if it would fall to its knees from me flipping back and forth with an animated background, but to no avail. Needless to say, this makes me smile.
I wondered if that would be different if this had qHD resolution, but I’m not so sure that would make a huge difference. Yes, you read right - the 4.5 inch display on this phone only has WVGA (800×480) resolution.
The result of so few pixels being stuck into such a large screen is overall bigger text, icons and everything. It might be a desirable look for those who struggle to read small text without glasses, but it really disappoints me to think about how much nicer and spacier everything would look overall with qHD.
Thankfully, the display is Super AMOLED Plus so a lot of would-be negative effects that would come about with this disproportionate combination of screen size and resolution aren’t present here.
You’d have to be looking really hard to spot individual pixels, and if you’re like me and can barely see even with strong glasses, a microscope would have to do the trick. That’s backed by very deep contrasts and vibrant colors. As stretched out as everything looks, it all still looks very good.
There are other small things about the phone that make the experience that much better, too, such as motion control. It’s more than a novelty – it’s actually useful. Pinch to zoom takes a backseat to moving the phone back and forth, and panning homescreens to place a widget or icon is no longer the most painful experience ever. Pinch to zoom is still in, but I’m most certain you’ll enjoy this method a lot more.
Other goodies inside the Epic 4G Touch are its 2MP front-facing camera, 8MP rear camera with LED flash and 1080p video recording, 16GB of internal storage, 1800mAh battery and the microUSB MHL port for HDMI-out.
I had a chance to play with the camera for a quick minute. Still photos are beautiful, 1080p video is even better. The camera sensor inside picks up the color accurately and the software helps it achieve great white balance.
Playback of 1080p videos were stutter-free and you could really see the high resolution sensor at work with how crisp and clear footage was. Samsung’s on the top end of the spectrum in the camera department, we’d say.The quick hands-on video is above, but stay tuned for continued coverage in the coming days and weeks, including benchmarks, the full review and more.
A couple more things I forgot to mention in the video:
Battery is definitely removable and there’s a microSD card slot beneath the battery door.
There is an LED notification light, thankfully. Hard to see in images but it’s there.
We’ve finally got video of the Walkman Z that Sony announced earlier. We expected this thing to take cues from Sony Ericsson’s latest crop of Android phones but Sony has instead decided to go in a different direction and create the UI specifically for Walkman.
After watching the video, we’re glad they did. From this first glance, media management and playback seems robust and flexible and the UI is smooth for the most part. We’re not sure if this device will give us the genuine Android experience (homescreens with widgets) but at least Android market will be in tow. Take a look above, courtesy of DigInfo.
Needed something to convince you to buy the Samsung Galaxy S II this fall? Samsung’s got the first ad and while we’re not sure it may convince you to open your wallets, it does get us excited knowing that the launch of the first US model – Sprint’s Samsung Epic 4G Touch – will be out in 4 short days. It’s a one minute ad so take a quickie out of your day to take a look above.
Think you love Android more than this guy? Guess again. In a video about brand loyalty, a narrator backdrops the scene of a Phandroid reader named Steve who loves Android so much that he’s willing to get it tattooed on his leg. It’s a real tattoo, too – no rub on here. Our mascot is highly detailed and looks to be cruising on a skateboard, something I’m sure many Cyanogen users have seen time and time again. I say kudos to Steve and the awesome tattooist who got Andy down perfectly. Check the video out above! [The Brand Show, Thanks Steve!]
This is it, folks! The time is here. As of 12AM EST, the Motorola DROID BIONIC is now available from Verizon Wireless. For only $300 and a 2-year agreement ($600 without), you can grab yourself the biggest and baddest Android has to offer with this top of the line 4G LTE equipped superphone featuring a 4.3-inch qHD display, new (surprisingly impressive) version of Motoblur, 1GHz TI OMAP4 processor, 1 “Gligabyte” (GB) of RAM, 16GB internal and 8MP camera capable of 1080p HD video recording. Anyone out there grabbing one of these tonight or possibly first thing in the morning? Find any great deals? Post ‘em in the comments!
Yesterday came word that Team-Touchpad had delivered 10-point multitouch to their under-development Gingerbread ROM for the HP TouchPad, but we get the feeling the CyanogenMod 7 build currently in the works might steal its thunder. Ironically, the CyanogenMod team is claiming that the drivers used by the TouchDroid group were actually stolen from from an earlier build of CM7. Appropriately, multitouch is fully enabled in the latest TouchPad CM7 ROM along with hardware graphics acceleration. Still missing, however, is one rather important element: functional WiFi. The eventual plan is to work the hacked version of Android into an easily dual-bootable format along with the TouchPad’s native webOS. But don’t get too excited just yet, there is still much work to be done. A public build is not available at this time, but you can check out the above video to see how things are progressing.
Make your picks NOW for the chance to win $7,000+ in prizes. Weekly winners get $100 Amazon Gift Cards, Season Winner gets $500 Amazon Gift Card, and Playoff Winner gets 2 Tickets to the Big Game!
Tonight we hope to allow for online account creation and picking so your non-android, football-loving friends and family members can join in the fun. Over the next week or two we’ll be rolling out lots of additional features including Facebook integration, fan forums, and a whole lot more.
We’ve put a lot of time and effort into this app but it’s a test run of sorts. It’s a FREE app and we’re giving away huge prizes, so we’ve dedicated a lot of resources to this project. Our goal is to create a truly unique portal where football fans can share their ideas and predictions while rooting for their team and competing in a fun game for prizes.
If you have friends and family who would be interested, we would LOVE for you to share this info with them – it’ll help us to continue building apps and services that we think people would really enjoy!
Now for a bit of fun… who do you think will win the first game of the season?
And just for giggles, since I’m a huge BMORE fan and I know there are huge PITT fans out there… who will win that game? It’s arguably the most exciting rivalry matchup of Week 1:
Thanks for playing folks and we hope to see you on the FootballBeast Forums soon!
At the Dreamforce conference held in San Francisco last week, Eric Schmidt continued to emphasize some of his favorite talking points, from cloud computing to the future of the web with HTML5. He also touched briefly upon Google’s mobile platform, confirming the launch of Ice Cream Sandwich for sometime in October or November. His exact words:
“We have a new operating system, internally known as Ice Cream Sandwich for some reason, which is being released in October/November, which everyone’s really excited about.”
Google has only ever officially mentioned a Q4 release, though rumors have recently point to the operating system coming to market as soon as October, coinciding with the launch of a new Nexus-branded device. From Schmidt’s wording, it seems a late October/early November release is most probable, though most likely as an exclusive to the aforementioned handset. It could take additional months before the OS will start trickling out to other non-Nexus handsets. But that’s the word from the horse’s mouth, and seeing as September is already speeding along we don’t have much longer to wait at all to get our hands on a bit of this nice cool Ice Cream Sandwich treat. Check out the embed of the keynote below, the juicy bit comes at 30:25.
We have finally got our hands on the Motorola DROID BIONIC for Verizon Wireless which goes on sale September 8th for $299.99 along with a swarm of accessories. Here it is!
I’ve been particularly excited about this phone because of it’s “future proof” characteristics: it’s Verizon’s first phone to have both 4G LTE connectivity and a dual-core processor, ensuring you get maximum speeds and a processor that can handle future updates to the Android OS. Friends and family asking which phone to get on Verizon have been met with a “wait for the Bionic” for some time now… they’ve been waiting for awhile but it’s finally here.
Was it worth the wait? We’ll find out in our Droid Bionic review, coming soon. Stay tuned!
