As soon as MWC was over, Expansys already was making pre-orders available for HTC’s latest handsets that were featured during the event – the HTC Desire, HD Mini, and Legend. Following closely, Amazon UK is now offering the same trio of handsets with some larger than life price tags associated with them – fortunately though, it’s looking like some of them will make their way to UK consumers by April 1 at the earliest. The powerhouse HTC Desire can be fetched for £528 ($795) while the uni-bodied HTC Legend can be taken for £400 ($602) – both having an estimated arrival date for April 1. If you’re a Windows Mobile fan, the HTC HD Mini will cost the least amount out of the three at £369 ($556) with an availability date of April 14. Of course you can dish out some serious cash now to guarantee yourself one of these bad boys before anyone on your block can find one in stores – plus you won’t be required to sign those lengthy contracts; but still expect to wait some time before the actual handset arrives at your front door.
source: Amazon UK (Desire, HD Mini, Legend) via Engadget

Crave recently had a problem with a Nexus One. It was suffering from BGS or Broken Glass Syndrome. A trip to the Doctor (HTC support) was in order and the Doc said that cracked glass was actually quite a common occurrence. The support guy said, “”Putting a phone in a tight pair of jeans and sitting down would usually cause the kind of damage,” that this particular handset displayed. He also said that a small ding could gradually expand over time and become larger and larger. The support guy added that a common cause of cracked screens is the banging that a phone takes from keys when the unit is placed in a handbag. The N-One comes with neoprene case that is made to protect the handset from this type of damage. As far as how much the crack on CNET’s Nexus One would cost to fix, HTC support quoted 180 BP which is equivalent to $273 dollars, more than the $179 price for the phone with T-Mobile’s service. Despite the recent video we showed you of how the N-One goes through some rough tests to make sure it can hold up to daily use, the HTC support guy said, “People sometimes forget that they don’t go in pockets.” Not sure if we’ve ever seen that warning included with a phone before, but we now know better. As for CNET, they did get a new Nexus One courtesy of HTC.
source: CNETUK

• Memento is an application suitable for straight-laced people. We all know such people (personally, we are not of them) – they want everything to be shipshape and well-kept, properly catalogued, sorted by alphabetical order, relative colors or brands and, if at all possible, all of the above at the same time. In a nutshell, Memento enables you to store information about your belongings directly on your handset, including various items, notes on study materials, recipes and what have you. We do like the fact the applications allows you to use a bar-code scanner to enter additional details easily, plus you´ve got the handy option of creating your own product categories. The Pro version is fully functional for 15 days, so you don´t have to pay anything to test the program.

Memento offers a great number of options to help you categorize your belongings

• SmartAss is a great app and not for its funny name only. The program allows you to create lists of products you want to buy, i.e. shopping lists. This may come in quite handy indeed, since it makes your shopping activities more organized, especially for people like us who can get easily distracted, plus the interface is truly user-friendly and does not bother you with thousands of options while you´re struggling through the crowd in a busy shopping mall. We just hope future editions will add tabs for relevant prices, so people can keep track on their spending. In our case, we would be able to finally find out why our salaries vanish into thin air the second day the money get into our accounts and whether or not that sweet tooth we have is to do with the disappearance…

You need application with proper shopping list functionality? SmartAss might be what you need

• Crazyhamster  is a version of the popular game Whac-a-Mole. Your goal is to hit as many rodents (within 30 seconds) as you can, while trying to avoid smacking female rats (they are pink… who knows, they might be males with penchant for weird clothing really…). The graphics is truly amusing and enjoyable, the game itself is addictive and proper reflexes. Only the Lite version of the title is currently available, but the full edition (paid) is coming soon and will include a mini game called Crazy Party. All told, Crazyhamster Lite offers lot of fun for a totally free application indeed.

We cannot wait for the full edition of Crazyhamster

• Your goal in Ballistic Defense is to protect your cities against missile attacks. The game is actually one of the best in this genre (at least from all the titles available for Android) and it´s a shame it comes with antiquated graphics. Still, we do recommend that you give it a shot, because it´s quite addictive and the difficulty increases exponentially as you play, meaning at a certain point it becomes extremely challanging indeed. And the best thing about it? It´s completely free!

Ballistic Defense is one of the best titles in its class

Slashgear got their hands on an HTC Legend. With a trusty video camera, they took a video of an unboxing and a demo of the aluminum clad Android device. Running on Android 2.1 (minus a few incidental things like the animated wallpaper), the new version of Sense UI gets to debut here and one of the new features allows you to take a “helicopter view” of all seven home pages at once while the new “Friend Stream” aggregates all of your social network updates into one single feed. With its aluminum body keeping finger prints away and making the handset practically indestructible, this is the stuff that legends are made of.
source: Slashgear

With Spring Training already underway, the 2010 Major League Baseball season is just around the corner. If you are a big fan, the MLB At Bat app is a must-have for your mobile phone. Last year, the app was available on the iPhone and this year, MLB has upgraded it and has now made the app available for Android phones running 1.5 or higher, and the BlackBerry Storm and Storm2, besides the iPhone. The price has risen 50% to $14.99, but for the fan who eats, drinks and breathes the American Pastime, it is worth every penny.

The app brings you streamed audio of every regular season and post season games (you can select to hear the home team announcers or the road team announcers), in-game pitch tracker, box scores, video highlights and more stats than you can swing a Louisville Slugger at. iPhone users will be able to view selected out of market games through streaming video and a separate subscription to MLB.TV. While currently the Storm and Storm2 are the only BlackBerry handsets that the app will work with, right after Opening Day, other ‘Berries using the 5.0 OS will be able to use At Bat 2010. At Apple’s iTunes app store, At Bat 2010 is already the highest grossing app ever. You might say, it’s a hit! For information on subscribing to the At Bat 2010 app, visit the source link.
source: MLB via CIO

Microsoft’s Tag Reader is an app that allows you to scan a product’s bar code using your phone’s camera. Your phone will then give you information on the product including promotions, videos and special offers. This is the Redmond based firm’s first application for Android and Tag Reader has already been released for the iPhone, Symbian, BlackBerry and of course, Windows Mobile platforms. The app is free and can be downloaded from the Android Market. If you Pre and Pixi users feel a bit left out, start bugging Microsoft and perhaps the next build will be for webOS.
source: Microsoft via Engadget, UnwiredView

Macy’s doesn’t tell Gimbels went the old saying. It would be even stranger for Macy’s to tell customers to go shop at Gimbels. As strange as that seems, imagine Steve Jobs telling would-be iPhone buyers to pick up a Palm Pre Plus instead. That is akin to the situation that Motorola found itself doing to Android developers. While the Motorola DROID can load custom ROMs, get overclocked past 1GHz and basically can be hacked into without a problem, the handset’s European relative, the MILESTONE is locked up tighter than the Queen’s Jewels. Digitially signed firmware makes it impossible to load custom ROMs on the MILESTONE and developers were asking Motorola for some help.The response came from Lori Fraleigh from the Motodev team. Her response was that the company knows there are Android developers who want to go beyond application development to experiment with Android system development and re-flashing phones. She recommended that for those doing such work, buying a Google ADP1 developer’s phone, or a Nexus One as both of those models were “intended for those purposes”. Motorola’s Android phone, she explains, are made for the consumer. the DROID, she added, was a deviation from their common business practice and when such deviation occurs, it is because of a specific business reason.

Motorola has released 9 different Android handsets under 12 different names and the DROID is the only one to accept unsigned images and the manufacturer won’t discuss the business reason that made the DROID different. With talk of a Motorola built device heading for Google’s phone store, will the latter force the former to open up that model? In the meantime, developers have the answer to their question. It might not be something that the Schaumburg based company wants repeated like a mantra, but developers looking to experiment with Android should buy HTC.
source: MOTODEV via MotorolaOwnersForum, AndroidandMe

You’ve probably been seeing a decent amount of commercials on TV showcasing the Samsung Behold II. It really makes you wonder why it took Samsung so long for it to start heavily advertising its Android smartphone geared towards the US market. Some would suggest that it got lost in the myriad of Android offerings that fell through during the holidays or that it didn’t live up to the complete experience that its rivals offered. In any case, it looks like Samsung is teaming up with T-Mobile again for their next Android powered smartphone in the US – enter the Samsung T959 which is speculated to run Android 2.1 from the start. In addition, it features a screen resolution of 320 x 480 (no word on the screen size itself), Bluetooth 2.1, support for T-Mobile’s 3G bands, aGPS, and an unspecified megapixel count for its camera. Even though there weren’t too many people thrilled with Samsung’s last Android offering with T-Mobile, let’s hope they take those criticisms and use it to their advantage with the T959.
source: Cell Phone Signal

At this point it’s pretty much safe to say that we’ll eventually see the HTC Incredible make its way to Verizon’s lineup alongside the Nexus One – which of course has been officially confirmed during the Nexus One’s unveiling back in January. After we reported on how the Nexus One was experiencing some issues with multi-touch, Big Red has ceremoniously placed the brakes on its launch indefinitely until things have been ironed out with it – there’s no questioning the strict tests and guidelines that Verizon imposes on its handsets before making it available. With that in the books, it looks like the Nexus One might be delayed by Verizon until the end of this month. Now there are juicy pieces of news are surrounding one of its brothers – the HTC Incredible. It’s rumored to utilize the same exact touchscreen as the Nexus One, so Big Red is also dishing out the same grueling process on that handset to meet its expectations – potentially causing it to be delayed until May. Additionally there were some shots taken of the HTC Incredible with red colored accents used on its buttons and possibly a red colored rear cover. We know that Verizon customers are really aching to see these handsets already, but its good to see that Big Red doesn’t want to see any headaches come out of its launches – it only accentuates their stance on providing the best handsets out there.
source: Phandroid

A leaked copy of the Android 2.1 firmware for the HTC Droid Eris has made its way to the XDA developers forum. The leak came frim someone who claims to work for HTC in China. The initial version that was posted had some problems, but after a spit and polish shoe shine by the developers at XDA they were able to repair it and flash it onto their phone. The ROM is totally functional and even includes the new Sense UI. As we previously reported, not all of the 2.1 features were part of the upgrade, such as the animated wallpaper. It still could be a while before the official release is launched. Web site Android and Me feels that Google is working on a coordinated release among carriers for the second quarter. Oh, and if you decide to download XDA’s handiwork on your phone, well, you could end up with an Android flavored brick. Some other developers are working on porting the code over to the CDMA version of the HTC Hero.Those with the Hero over at Sprint could soon have a leaked 2.1 upgrade of their own. Or, we could all just take a chill pill and realize that the official release probably is not too far away.
source: XDAdevelopersforum via AndroidandMe