You've heard that it was en route, and you've seen the preview. Now, it's time to enter the wild, wacky world of Android 3.0 for yourself. Honeycomb's SDK is now available for all developers to download, with the API's being deemed final and able to withstand new apps that will target the fresh platform. We'd bother spilling the beans on the added features, but we know you've already torn your left click button off in a frantic race to the source link. Simmer down, son -- the URL ain't going anywhere.
Samsung has shared some juicy info with the guys over at Pocket-Lint and it’s not your usual phone stuff. Turns out, Samsung will be taking advantage of it’s roots in the home entertainment world to enable TV like streaming on its upcoming Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet and Galaxy S II smartphone.
There’s currently no confirmation whether the technology will allow streaming over 3G or whether the two interacting devices need to be on the same WiFi network. If, however, 3G streaming is possible then Samsung just found its differentiator.
More info as and when we have it!
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The official Windows Phone Blog has confirmed that the first Windows Phone 7 update is going to be rolled out starting from today. But unfortunately, don’t expect this update to add new functionality such as copy and paste to your WP7 device. In fact this is just a small update for Windows Phones to prepare them for the first proper update which is due for release in March.
This isn’t the update you’ve probably been reading about or perhaps waiting for, the one with copy and paste (but that’s coming soon).In order to update your Windows Phone, you will need to connect it to your PC or Mac via USB cable, start Zune for Windows or the Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac, depending on the kind of computer you have, and then simply follow the onscreen instructions to update your phone.
… this update is a relatively small one.
What’s in this update?
This first update for Windows Phone is designed to improve the software update process itself. So while it might not sound exciting, it’s still important because it’s paving the way for all future goodie-filled updates to your phone, such as copy and paste or improved Marketplace search.
When will I get this update?
We’ll begin sending it out today. But to help ensure the process goes smoothly, it won’t be sent to everyone at once. So you might see an update message before your spouse, co-worker, or neighbor (or vice versa). This is a common industry practice. That said, we understand you’re eager to have the latest software on your phone, and our goal is to deliver it to you as quickly as possible.
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The SDK version of Android 3.0 Honeycomb has been ported successfully to Google Nexus One. Dubbed as Honeycomb N1 alpha v0.1, this tablet-optimized version of Android will bring all the goodness from the latest and greatest version of Android to Nexus One.
Both, the soon to be released Motorola Xoom tablet, and the upcoming Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 will be based on this version (3.0 Honeycomb) of Android.
If you are feeling adventurous, you can give Android 3.0 Honeycomb a go on your Nexus One. Beware though as not everything is said to be working. Installation instructions, and download links can be found at the XDA-Developers forum here.
Download Android 3.0 Honeycomb for Nexus One
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Indeed, the Wall Street Journal's behind-the-scenes look at how the Microsoft-Nokia alliance came to be, revealed how close it came to not being at all. Nokia seriously considered Android as the operating system of choice for its smartphones, and was only persuaded differently by a big check and an exceptional flexibility to make changes to the Windows Phone 7 operating system. Because, for all the attention around Nokia's selection of Windows Phone, it ultimately neither guarantees Nokia's success nor dooms it to failure in the US smartphone market. Here's what will:
If Nokia wants to change, it will have to differentiate in atoms as well as bits. |
Cloud services. Though the company may not have followed the fashionable form factor du jour as quickly as could be, Nokia has long understood the power of the cloud. However, despite an acquisition binge a few years ago, the Ovi message has not been communicated effectively, and now there is the chance that -- like Symbian -- it might fade into the shadow of Microsoft's offerings. Nokia has some strong Ovi services, and they could be a key differentiator. With Windows Phone, the company needs to feature them more and integrate them better.
Carrier relationships. There's been a little progress and a bit of hope as Verizon Wireless has switched to Nokia's home court of GSM-derived LTE, but there is still much progress that needs to be made if recent comments by Verizon CTO Tony Melone are indicative of US carrier feelings towards the Nokia-Microsoft alliance. However, Microsoft can be a boon in this regard: Windows Phone 7 launched with four devices on two carriers in the US -- more of a splash than Symbian ever made -- and Windows Phone's predecessor Windows Mobile continues to be sold by all four carriers in the United States. Contrary to what the company has indicated, Nokia's battle here is not one against Android, but fighting for attention versus the Windows Phones of Samsung and LG, both of which traditionally have strong carrier relationships, and HTC, which has been slowly building them.
Nokia has taken on an operating system backed by a company with the financial resources to stay in the fight for the long term, a powerful lineup of integrated products and services (albeit not all equally appealing) and a focus on user experience. Yes, it will have to pay for Windows Phone licenses and work to bring Windows Phone to a wider range of architectures to meet its handset portfolio needs, but Microsoft seems to have more than offset that expense.
Most of the risk in Nokia's choice was not picking the wrong operating system, but continuing not to pick one at all. Now that it has, it needs to deliver on all three fronts to improve its smartphone standing in the United States.
Like its earlier XP3 and XP1300 Core, the XP3300 is built to withstand just about anything. You can submerge it in 6.5 feet of water and drop it from 6.5 feet onto a concrete floor without a scratch.
The fiberglass body and rubber sidings also protect it from dust, salt, fog, humidity, transport shock, thermal shock, and temperatures ranging from -4 degrees to 131 degrees Fahrenheit. What's more, Corning Gorilla Glass protects the 2-inch display.
Designed mainly for companies with a mobile workforce, the XP3330 Force offers Assisted-GPS that can relay location information at 5-minute intervals for up to 26 hours. The handset also promises up to 24 hours of talk time, a 2.0-megapixel camera with a flash and digital zoom, a speakerphone, a CityCruiser GPS apps, an Opera Mini browser, and Java support for additional applications.
The Sonim XP3300 is a quad-band world phone, but its data speeds tap out only at EDGE (2.5G). The handset will be sold unlocked; pricing and a specific availability date were not announced at the time of this writing.
Even though Apple didn’t attend MWC (Mobile World Congress) 2011, but Apple’s iPhone 4 took the top honors among all the smartphones when it was awarded “Best Mobile Device” award at the Global Mobile Awards ceremony.
The nominees for the “Best Mobile Device” award included: Apple iPhone 4, Samsung Galaxy S, HTC Desire, LG Optimus 7 (running Windows Phone 7) and BlackBerry Torch 9800.
This is what the judges had to say about iPhone 4:
Great screen, sharp design, fantastic materials, and phenomenal ecosystem for app developers. In a tight race, the iPhone 4 built on the success of its predecessors to set the pace for smart phones.HTC though on the other hand grabbed the award for “Device Manufacturer of the Year”.
The complete list of winners can be found here.
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The hardware
All those logistics aside, the true beauty of a solution like this is how it blends the responsiveness of regular finger input with an extremely accurate inking one. You'd think the screen was your typical capacitive screen, until you put the stylus to it. Unlike capacitive styli, you don't have to press extremely hard or worry about totally missing your on-screen target. And not to worry, N-Trig says the AAAA battery-powered pen battery should last about a year and a half -- so you'll have a bit of time before you have to run out to the drugstore and pick up a new pack of Energizers.
The software
It's also designed a Notes application that integrates with Evernote. You can take notes, change the color of the ink, etc. Additionally, you can scribble over images in the image gallery. In action all those things worked quite well, especially for its beta status. You will also be able to use the top button on the pen to select text and the button to erase. That's really all there is at the moment in terms of software -- or, at least, that's all HTC is demoing. We'd certainly like to see much more, including some sort of OCR software -- you know, the stuff that converts writing to editable text. Undoubtedly, that would make a ton of sense and be a great keyboard alternative on a tablet like this.
It's really too early to make a call on what HTC is doing with the stylus and Scribe -- it's certainly unique and it seems like a very useful solution for those that love to take notes with a physical pen. Ultimately, however, our concerns are centered around the fact that Android was built around a finger and that virtually no apps out there right now take advantage of the pen input. However, if HTC can manage to build out the inking software experience and integrate it throughout the OS, we're sure those who still believe in the power of the pen and want to use a tablet as a content creation device will be all over this.
The press-shots that we posted about yesterday? Yes they were real, as announced today by HTC at Mobile World Congress. The two phones namely, HTC Chacha and HTC Salsa have dedicated Facebook button, with a more customized Sense UI running on Android 2.4 to have more focus on the world’s largest social network.
The dedicated Facebook button on both the portrait QWERTY based ChaCha and the 3.4-inch touchscreen based Salsa is context-aware, which means that it will gently pulse “with light whenever there is an opportunity to share content or updates through Facebook”.
HTC Unveils Two Social Phones With One-touch Facebook® AccessYou can follow us on Twitter or join our Facebook fanpage to keep yourself updated on all the latest from Microsoft, Google and Apple.
HTC raises the bar for mobile social phones with HTC ChaChaTM and HTC SalsaTM
BARCELONA, SPAIN – Mobile World Congress – February 15, 2011 – HTC Corporation, a global designer of smartphones, today announced two new phones built entirely to be social, combining the simplicity, ease-of-use and depth of HTC SenseTM with the power and connectivity of Facebook®. As part of an extended portfolio of six new HTC Sense-based devices being unveiled at Mobile World Congress, HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa feature a dedicated Facebook® button for one-touch access to the key functions of the Facebook service that are integrated throughout the HTC Sense experience.
“HTC has always understood that different people want different things and the new HTC ChaCha and Salsa offer special new ways to experience Facebook on a mobile device,” said Peter Chou, CEO of HTC Corporation. “With more than 500 million active users worldwide, Facebook has become synonymous with the social web and we wanted to create the ultimate socially connected phones with mass market appeal.”
“We have worked closely with HTC for several years on bringing Facebook to their devices and HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa are the next stage,” said Henri Moissinac, Head of Mobile Business for Facebook. “HTC has brought Facebook to these two new devices in an innovative way enabling people to connect and share easily whenever they want, wherever they are.”
The Facebook button on HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa is context-aware, gently pulsing with light whenever there is an opportunity to share content or updates through Facebook. With a single press of the button, you can update your status, upload a photo, share a Website, post what song you are listening to, ‘check in’ to a location and more. For example, you can take a photograph of friends on your phone and upload it instantly to Facebook by simply pressing the button. Or let your friends know what song you’re listening to by pressing the button while listening to music on the phone. The track is automatically identified and shared on Facebook.
The new devices feature Android Gingerbread 2.3.3, the latest version, and use the latest iteration of HTC Sense to integrate Facebook throughout the HTC Sense experience. When you make a phone call, the dialer screen displays your friend’s latest status and photos, and even tells you if their birthday is approaching. The same updates are also displayed when you receive a call from a Facebook friend. You can also use your phone’s existing contacts to help you connect with them on Facebook or personalize your handset further with a number of new, Facebook-branded widgets.
The HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa smartphones make it simple to stay in touch with your friends using Facebook Chat and Messages on your phone. Your Facebook messages and conversations are integrated within your phone and appear within your text and email inboxes alongside your regular conversations.
Stay connected with the smartphone for the Facebook generation – HTC ChaCha The HTC ChaCha smartphone is designed to provide a seamless, social experience by enabling you to stay in touch with your friends anytime, anywhere. The unique tilt design shapes the display and physical QWERTY keyboard so it is easy to view and comfortable to type. Capture special moments in crisp, High-Definition detail or video chat with your friends using the dual cameras, including a 5-megapixel color camera with auto focus and LED flash and a VGA front-facing camera. The ChaCha smartphone also brings the Internet to your fingertips with a 2.6-inch, 480 x 320 resolution landscape touch screen.
Your Facebook friends never felt closer – HTC Salsa
Boasting the same deep Facebook integration as the HTC ChaCha smartphone, the HTC Salsa smartphone provides a fast, high-performance smartphone experience. Capture the moment in high-resolution stills or video with the 5-megapixel camera and immediately share it with friends on the generous 3.4-inch, 480 x 320 resolution touch display. Upload your photos to Facebook at the touch of a button. For face-to-face conversations on the move, the VGA forward-facing camera enables high-quality video calling.
Availability
The HTC ChaCha and HTC Salsa smartphones will be available to customers across major European and Asian markets during Q2 2011. In the United States, HTC plans to bring this unique user experience to market later this year exclusively with AT&T.
Hardware
Like most slate phones, the front of the device is nearly all screen, save for the familiar Android buttons along the bottom, and the front-facing camera and earpiece up top. Along the top rear of the phone is a power / sleep button which just happens to be a fingerprint scanner too, and the 3.5mm headphone jack. Along the right side of the phone is the volume rocker (easily accessible with your thumb during calls if you're right handed). On the left side you'll find the Micro USB and HDMI ports. Around back, the stylishly patterned casing is broken by the 5 megapixel camera with LED flash, and a speaker along the bottom of the phone.
As far as truly unique hardware goes, the fingerprint scanner seems fairly novel -- but in practice it's a little frustrating. It does work as advertised, but being told to re-swipe your finger if it doesn't take when you're trying to get into the phone quickly can be a little bothersome. Unless you really need the high security, a standard passcode will suffice for most people.
Fingerprint scanner quibbles aside, the Atrix 4G is one of the better looking Android devices we've had a chance to use. We would have liked to see higher quality materials in play here, but despite the housing, the phone comes off as both sleek and rugged -- a great combo for something that will likely be doing double (if not triple) duty in your connected world. From an industrial design standpoint, this device more than holds its own against the the best of the best on the market right now.
Internals / display / battery life
To put it simply, this is one of the fastest (if not the fastest) Android phones we've ever used. Getting around the phone doing even complex tasks was insanely speedy, and we rarely if ever found ourselves waiting for something to load. Scrolling between homescreens or managing apps and widgets was silky smooth, and feels competitive with the likes of the iPhone 4 or EVO 4G. The phone absolutely blazes as a standalone handset, and we were consistently impressed with how deftly it was able to take on whatever we threw at it; even when playing new 3D game titles like Gun Bros, we didn't see a hint of lag.
As far as the display goes, we're extremely excited to see new Android phones taking higher resolution screens. With the added real estate the qHD provides, we were able to get a lot more utility out of Gmail, the browser, and a handful of other content-heavy applications, and text and images looked crystal clear on the display. There were some issues with Android applications that don't properly take advantage of increased resolution, but they were few and far between -- for the vast majority of software we used, the display worked beautifully. Touch response was also excellent, though we can't say if that's due to the screen technology at play here, or that super fast CPU. One item of note -- the display is difficult to see in bright daylight, and the automatic brightness adjustment didn't quite do the trick.
On the battery side, the Atrix 4G packs an impressive 1930mAh battery inside, and even though Android is data intensive, we found ourselves squeezing more than 24 hours out of the device on a single charge with fairly heavy use. You can probably get more time out of the device if you avoid calls when possible and keep your brightness settings in check, but we were pleasantly surprised by the performance we saw.
Cameras
On the still shot front, we were impressed by the macro capabilities of the camera, but found that some of the images had a purpleish hue that was slightly worrisome. It's not a dealbreaker, but we didn't think that the color quality or saturation was exactly what it could be. As far as video goes, we were impressed with the lack of shake even when walking briskly, though we're disappointed that the device goes into a fixed-focus mode when capturing video (see in action below), which makes it difficult to shoot a variety of subjects at once.
There's also a VGA camera on the front of the device. As you'd expect the results with that shooter aren't anything to write home about, but it more than did the trick when using it for video calls (or hair styling).
Regardless of some minor complaints, the camera on the back of the Atrix 4G is more than good enough to replace your basic point and shoot, and we'd have zero reservations about leaving the house with only this phone in our pocket.
Phone / sound quality
We've come to expect a certainly level of audio quality when it comes to Motorola handsets, and the Atrix does not disappoint. Not only is the earpiece on this phone loud and exceptionally clear, but the speaker on the back delivers crisp, full-bodied audio when listening to music or on a speakerphone call. The Atrix 4G offers variable levels of noise reduction on the earpiece, but we didn't seem to have to tweak anything beyond the "normal" setting for great results. Callers we spoke to said we sounded clear, which is always nice to hear while testing a phone.
As far as dropped calls go, we would say that we experienced a handful, though less than what we typically witness on our iPhone 4 on AT&T. The network is far from perfect, but we didn't see an intolerable amount of call issues.
Software
Now, before you get all let down and mopey, we'd like to say that the software side of the Atrix is actually quite good, and there are lots of little improvements the company has made to bring Android together in a bit more of a cohesive manner. It also helps that Google has begun to independently update its core apps (such as Gmail and Maps) outside of system updates, which means you'll get the same experience in many places that you would on an untainted Nexus S running Gingerbread.
Since this isn't exactly a new version of the software, we're only going to delve into a few points that we think are notable.
For starters, we're a little disappointed by the fact that Motorola and AT&T are loading up the Atrix with a considerable amount of bloatware. Vlingo, a handful of AT&T apps, Blockbuster, and a smattering of other programs all ship on the handset
Update: Some of the pre-installed apps can be deleted, but not all.
On the bright side, there are lots of good pieces to find in this OS, like the inclusion of QuickOffice for dealing with documents and PDFs (which it handled speedily), and some of Moto's own embellishments, such as the ability to use the keypad dialer to find specific names or numbers (which greatly sped up call-making), and the company's Mobile Hotspot feature. The latter was easy as pie to set up, though didn't deliver any mind-blowing downloads speeds in use (more on that in the data section).
We're not the biggest fans of Motoblur or its widgets, but luckily the vast majority of stock Android widgets are present here, allowing for customization that gets you close to a pure experience. Of course, the big difference with this phone isn't widgets or bundled apps -- it's the device's ability to function as a full blown computer when used with one of its dock accessories, and that brings us to...
Accessories / Webtop
At any rate, while in the environment Motorola does provide, you can make and receive calls and use all of your phone's software while running the browser or standalone web apps in separate windows. If you open an app on the phone, it creates a tab in the phone window. It's hard to fully describe how it works, but it's an unusual combo. Separate phone apps can't be run in their own windows, and while they can be scaled to fit a larger window (or the whole screen), they're simply zoomed in (not reformatted). The Webtop environment provides Growl-like notifications for things like new emails, and also offers a representation of phone notifications along the status bar which can quickly jump you to your notification window on the phone. If you're interested to know what's happening on the Firefox side, you'll be disappointed to discover that the browser is sluggish by most standards, not even coming close to the performance seen on most modern netbooks or cheaper laptops. In place of actual applications, you can create web app shortcuts, but in our experience running even just a couple of separate browser instances can bog down the system to a point of frustration. You can run Flash content in the browser, though performance was choppy at best -- providing a barely watchable experience for something like Hulu at its lowest bitrate setting. If you're hoping to use this for video or audio streaming (even over WiFi), you may find yourself disappointed.
In all, the software story in the Webtop environment is not all that pleasant. It's a sluggish, somewhat sloppy experience that's difficult to enjoy, even though the basic premise driving this technology is really exciting. We love the idea... but the execution leaves much to be desired. The software experience is further hampered by some missteps on the hardware front, starting with...
Laptop dock
The laptop does nothing without a phone plugged in, but once you seat the Atrix 4G, it almost immediately fires up the Webtop OS, which will look pretty familiar if you've ever used Ubuntu. Since the dock is mostly just battery, it does double duty as laptop and charger -- even when not plugged in somewhere, it will recharge your phone's battery while it's being used. Motorola says you can expect about eight to ten hours of battery life from the dock, and those numbers seemed pretty accurate during our testing. It was quite impressive.
While the laptop dock is handsomely designed and solidly built, in use it was quite frustrating. Putting aside our complaints about the Webtop environment, the laptop dock creates some pretty major issues of its own. First and foremost is the fact that the trackpad, while spacious, is single touch only, meaning no two finger scrolling (or even single finger scrolling like many PC trackpads). That means that navigation of webpages is a huge hassle as you're forced to manually grab the scroll bar to move through pages. For an environment built around the "web as app" concept, this stuck us as incredibly shortsighted. Furthermore, the trackpad buttons are stiff enough that we found ourselves missing presses on a fairly regular basis. Weirdly it's as if Motorola built this dock for use with a mouse -- and in fact, company reps were demoing the setup with a mouse when we picked up our review unit.
We wanted to love this dock, but at the price Motorola is asking and for the small amount of utility it actually provides, it seems clear to us that your money would be better spent on a tablet or decent netbook.
HD / desktop dock
As you might guess, the desktop / HD dock doesn't fare much better when it comes to standing in for a computer, though thanks to the pricing here, it's a little more viable of a choice, since you're unlikely to purchase a decent desktop for $129. Then again -- do you need a desktop computer? Because if you do, you'll probably want something a bit more powerful than what the Webtop offers.
As an set top box, we have slightly better news to report. Motorola has come up with a really sleek and clean interface through which you can access your video, music, and photos, but the remote which is included to navigate your content seems to be hit or miss. When we had our dock about 5 feet away from where we were seated, the remote was sometimes non-functional when scrolling through menus and making selections, causing us to double and sometimes triple tap to get it to register. Motorola provides an interface on the phone in the dock to control what's happening on screen, but that only makes sense if you have your dock next to where you're sitting, which is likely on the other side of your room (at the very least, you're sitting opposite the TV, which is where you're going to have this plugged in).
As far as the software is concerned, we like the sleek, clean interface that Motorola has come up with for getting at your videos, pics, and music, but there were some issues with playback. Notably, we could get some .M4V files to play, while others would not, and the only error we received was vague at best. Most files worked without a hitch, however. In particular, 720p content we'd shot on the phone looked really quite nice on a big screen, and the playback didn't so much as stutter.
We're not sure we really see a huge market for this dock, unfortunately. There are much better ways to get your content onto a television screen, and in fact you can simply plug an HDMI cable into the phone and use the same features that the dock provides (sans remote... though using the phone to control the app is actually preferable as far as we're concerned).
Mouse / keyboard
Both products work wirelessly via Bluetooth, and we had no trouble pairing them with our setup. In particular, we like the mouse because it closely matches the Logitech M555b (a favorite) in size and functionality. The keyboard, meanwhile, is styled somewhere between an Apple wireless keyboard and BlackBerrys of years past -- as in, we're not crazy about the font choice. Still, it's a solid, chicklet style keyboard that conserves desk space and has a handful of custom Android keys, which make jumping into specific apps like Gmail or the browser really speedy. We're not sure if you need to shell out the extra cash on these, but they make fine partners to the rest of Moto's offerings.
Data
In comparison to other handsets we've tested on the network in the same spots, the Atrix 4G actually got lower speed rankings on both downstream and upstream tests. In general, we saw an average download speed of around 1.5 Mbps, while uploads were even worse at just about 0.15 Mbps. We did see download speeds spike occasionally into 2.2 Mbps territory, but that wasn't the norm. During the testing, the phone had four or five bars, and was clearly displaying the HSPA+ icon.
The odd thing is that if you compare the device against the iPhone 4 on AT&T's network -- tested in exactly the same locations -- you see much different results. On the iPhone, data speeds were consistently in the 2 or 3 Mbps range for downloads, and hovering around 1 Mbps for uploads.
We're not sure what the issue is with data, but we're not seeing anything resembling 4G on these tests. If AT&T was hoping to impress with its speeds on the HSPA+ network, it still has a lot of work to do.
Pricing
Simply put, to leave an AT&T store (or its website) with just the phone and the laptop dock, you're dropping $653 and then waiting for that $100 back in the mail. Now that's a lot of cash for a phone and what amounts to half of a laptop -- even if you can impress friends with it. And don't forget, AT&T insists that you have a tethering data plan, which will run you $45 a month -- and that's a tethering plan you could be using with your phone's hotspot feature and any other device you want... like a netbook.
In all, it's not a great value if you're springing for the laptop dock, the desktop dock, and some accessories -- in fact, it's not any kind of value at all.
Wrap-up
The bigger question you have to ask yourself is whether or not you should spring for the accessories, and our answer to that is closer to something like "probably not." We want to love the HD dock and the laptop dock (the laptop dock especially!), but it's hard to warm up to these devices when they don't really deliver on the experience you're paying for. Our advice? Skip the laptop dock and get a good netbook (there are tons of options) and spring for the tethering plan so you can use the "4G" you're paying for (check your area for coverage, of course). If you absolutely need your phone to pull double duty as an entertainment dock, just get a long HDMI cable -- you, and your wallet, will thank us later.
Gemalto, a firm known for digital security, has released it’s SIM card which allows all the GSM phones to have a built-in Facebook client. This allows all phones with minimal features to have access to Facebook, an effort to make the social network a standard on GSM. It is obvious that SIM based client won’t provide as much features as clients on smart-phones do but it will provide you text based menus which will let you carry out basic tasks like status updates, pokes, friend requests, wall posts etc.
We worked closely with Gemalto on their Facebook for SIM product and believe it will be another easy and affordable way for people to stay connected through Facebook on the mobile phone of their choice. Facebook for SIM creatively combines technologies from some of our existing mobile solutions that especially are attractive for people with feature phones and have limited or no data plans with a mobile operator. Through the Facebook application on the SIM card people can: Update their status and view comments on it; write on their friends wall; receive notifications; find friends on their SIM phonebook.The toolkit is part of GSM standards and will hence provide services on every GSM set. Everything will be carried over the class 2 text messages. Class 2 text messages are directly sent without the user intervention.
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The 4.2-inch screen is bright and lucid, though we'd warn against expecting too much from the Bravia Reality Display marketing. As we've mentioned before, the display enhancements only kick in when you're consuming multimedia. Still, general performance looks more than satisfactory. Hard buttons around the body are well arranged and designed, a contrast from the fiddly keys we found on the Xperia Pro. What was consistent with the rest of Sony Ericsson's Xperia crew, however, was the Arc's inability to execute its pinch-to-zoom widget summary screen. It's an ambitious function -- gathering all your widgets from each screen into one cohesive overview -- but, basically, it's laggy as hell. Aside from that, general UI responsiveness could also stand some improvement, but we like where Sony Ericsson is going with the whole thing. If it keeps up its promise to repent from last year's sins with relation to Android updates, the company has a very good chance of striking it rich with the Xperia Arc. It's a phone that can truly get by on its looks alone. Video after the break!
We were able to play three titles: Star Battalion, FIFA, and Asphalt. All were found via the applications pane amongst all the other software, but they were also highlighted by the eponymous Xperia Play app. (There was additionally the infamous PlayStation Pocket app, but more on that later.) The former title, very much a StarFox ripoff, had tight controlling via both the gamepad and optional accelerometer option. The trackpads wasn't supported, however, but when we swapped over to FIFA, we found the left "pad" could be used for moving the player. Though definitely usable, it felt rough under our thumbs and we couldn't smoothly slide about as we would with an analog nub. It is large enough to do varying degrees of a direction like an analog stick, but you won't really be fine-tuning your shot so much. The indents work really well to help gauge your thumbs' position without having to look down. Both titles took quite a while to load, crashing a few times in the process; we were told multiple times this was largely due to early software. Multiplayer was not an option at the show, but we did make it through Asphalt far enough to notice it was being run still by Gameloft and not via Sony servers. As for Xperia Play (the app), we couldn't help but notice the Get More Games section, no matter how simple, does a much better job at highlighting individual games than the Android Market currently does.
The PlayStation Pocket app on most demo units was as barren as our own model, but we found at least one running Crash Bandicoot for PS One (the "legendary pre-installed title," as referenced in the press conference) at a smooth 60 frames per second. To compensate for only two L and R triggers, the settings menu offers six different button layouts where you can use the trackpads as secondary shoulder buttons (which prevents their use as analog nub replacements) or have L2 / R2 on screen virtually. Thankfully, jumping out of the app saves the game's state, and you can return by clicking on the app. An additional confirmation screen confirms you're really ready to play, which though we can see being a nuisance to some, will be welcome to others who often mis-click. The rep told us no multiplayer, but still you can toggle between the game pad being seen as controller one or two. We also heard that the PS One library will likely be rolled out on a weekly basis and not be available all at once.
What we needed to convince us of the Xperia Play's viability as a game platform was the games itself, and we will say that Sony and SE are doing well to assuage our concerns there. The form factor is still sleek despite the slide-out gamepad, which feels great to use. The initial PlayStation Suite launch line up is... promising, but we hesitate to give it higher marks without more flagship original titles. What it'll take to attract more developers is a larger reach for the platform, which ironically will take more PlayStation Certified devices -- and as for when that'll happen, no one's saying yet. We'll have hands-on video of the Xperia Play later tonight; meanwhile, find hands-on pictures of the phone (and dock!) in the gallery below!
Update: Fleshed out impressions -- looks like Crash Bandicoot will come pre-loaded!
