Owners of the unlocked version of the HTC Desire in Europe were treated earlier in the month to their dose of Froyo while carrier specific units were put on hold due to additional testing needed to get them in check. HTC Desire owners on Vodafone were probably taken back when an update rolled out a couple week ago, but it was revealed to only add Vodafone’s 360 services – something that can be considered as bloatware by users. Regardless of that, it looks like Vodafone is making good on bringing Froyo now that there is official confirmation regarding the roll out of the update. Starting on August 23rd, Vodafone will begin to send out notifications to handsets regarding the OTA update – with an eventual reach to all customers by September 5th. Not everyone will be receiving it at the same time since the operator will be executing it in stages – so at the very worse, you won’t get it until the last day. Nonetheless, we’d imagine that HTC Desire owners will be more than happy to get down and dirty with Froyo and all of its offerings.
source: Vodafone via Unwired View

NVIDIA Tegra 250 (Tegra 2) tablet

What are the third largest manufacturer of cell phones and an underdog in the mobile chipset business to do, so they can both stand out from the crowd? Well, make something contemporary together, of course. That’s especially if you are 3rd largest mainly due to the constant churn of feature phones, or if you have been trying hard to spark interest in someone in your system-on-a-chip (SoC) for smartphones and tablets. LG announced that it will have Nvidia’s Tegra 2 chipset powering its high-end spectrum of the Optimus line.

The LG Optimus GT540 we reviewed some months ago was a decent Android smartphone, but nowhere near high-end. LG, however, is planning no less than 10 other smart touchscreen devices in the line by year’s end, and one of those will be an Android-running Optimus tablet. For the tablet, LG said yesterday that it will be focusing on productivity like multimedia and document editing, even coding, rather than only on content consumption.

As for the phones, five of them will apparently be running Windows Phone 7, which leaves four for Android, if we count the tablet. Two of those we already heard will be called Optimus One and Chic, and another one should be a Snapdragon-powered Optimus Q with a slide-out keyboard. So this kind of leaves a total of one unannounced high-end handset to be powered by the Nvidia Tegra 2 chipset, if we don’t count the tablet, which will almost certainly be Tegra-based, since Nvidia already demoed a tablet with the SoC.

Looks like our predictions that Nvidia is the best positioned underdog to enter the smartphone chipset battle, and fight with the dual-core Snapdragon and OMAP4 or Hummingbird, is holding water for now. No wonder – the Tegra 2 chipset has a dual-core CPU based on the latest Cortex-A9 ARM architecture and, of course, the powerful GPU should come standard considering who is behind Tegra 2. The only concern with the SoC on last read was battery life not up to par with the dual-core Snapdragons and TI’s OMAP4, but that remains to be confirmed in real life. The Tegra 2 chipset has its potential also recognized by Motorola, which will be having its own tablet with the platform by the end of the year running Gingerbread, so exciting tablety times ahead.
source: WSJ via Engadget

LG Optimus One with Froyo LG Optimus Chic with Froyo

LG Optimus Q

We saw a few pictures and video of the upcoming Android-based Dell Thunder the other day, and now it has received a hands-on preview of two early prototypes dated from April this year. The main design take from the physical exam is that the handset stays with the same classy chromed sides, soft-touch plastic and curved front glass we saw before, and liked.

The prototypes were having the 4.1” screen space occupied by regular LCD screens, one with 480×800 resolution and the other with something in the realms of 768×1280 pixels, which, if materialized in a production phone, will be more than the iPhone 4’s Retina Display in pixel density. Our napkin calculations came up with 364ppi density, while the iPhone 4 has 326ppi. Take those densities with a grain of salt, though, we don’t know what the production units will ship with. The screen was rumored to be OLED all along, and these on the prototypes look vanilla LCDs, but who knows, it might be exactly DELL stunning the world in that regard. Hope is what keeps us ticking.

Other than the screen, the rest of the rumored specs are confirmed from the prototypes – 1GHz Snapdragon chipset and 8MP camera with LED flash, no front-facing cam for now. The previewers found one of the prototypes to be of AWS frequency, which means T-Mobile might be getting the Thunder besides the originally cited AT&T. They also shot a wild guess that it might appear on Verizon or Sprint due to a software they found on one of the devices, called Qualcomm CDMA Programming. We wouldn’t be so sure about it based on that nugget, as the name of the company branch is Qualcomm CDMA Technologies, and Snapdragon is Qualcomm’s creation, so it might be just its general utility software for tweaking both GSM and CDMA basebands in its Snapdragon phones.

Nevertheless, on the software front things are not getting clearer based on the two units – one had Android 2.1, the other 1.6, but considering the rumors that the Thunder will ship with a Hulu app and Flash 10.1, the handset will probably be outed with Froyo onboard. There was no DELL overlay on top of the stock Android, so we will have to wait for the real deal to have a glimpse of the promised custom “Stage” UI.
source: Engadget

Similar to how HTC was seen by Google as the priority choice to bring Android into the smartphone realm with G1, Motorola is now being garnered with the same attention with their upcoming Android powered tablet. It’s being reported that Google is in close alliance with Motorola since their offering, out of many manufacturers out there, is looking to be in line with the expectations set forth by Google. DigiTimes Research senior analyst Mingchi Kuo believes that Motorola’s Android tablet will sport the Tegra 2 platform from NVIDIA along with a 10.1” display panel supplied from Sharp – which is said to have a reduced brightness output compared to the iPad, but still thinner in size. Naturally, Google is going to be working closely with Motorola with this one by setting the expectations for its specifications which should hopefully coincide with a user interface that will ultimately exude a proper experience. The tablet is slated to go into mass production by the end of the year and will be manufactured by Motorola with the hopeful goal of shipping out 2 million units for 2011.
source: DigiTimes

The dust still hasn’t settled with all the updates rolling out for Android 2.2 (Froyo), and all the info swirling its successor 3.0 (Gingerbread), but now we have to memorize yet another sweet sounding moniker?

The ubiquitous “multiple sources” have cited Honeycomb as the next iteration of Google’s mobile OS. While Gingerbread aims to completely revamp the user interface, Android 3.x (Honeycomb) will be more of a minor update, the way 2.1 followed 2.0 (Éclair).

Google used to say that only the major releases will have sweet-sounding names, and minor releases will come with plain numbers, but they strayed away with 2.2 by naming it Froyo. We wouldn’t call Android 2.2 insignificant update given what it brought to the table, so we have high hopes for Honeycomb – if only we knew what Gingerbread will be. We sincerely hope Google will slow down with those releases after Android 3.0, as it promised, since we are getting sugar-rushed every two or three months now, this can’t be good for our health.
source: TechRadar via IntoMobile

In the beginning of 2008, Adobe’s AIR was released, providing a cross-platform browser-less runtime. For those that don’t speak Geek, this just means that AIR allows users to run otherwise web-based Flash, HTML, Actionscript, and JavaScript applications on their desktop, rather than within the limited browser window.

With the release of AIR 2.5 in Q4, Android users will be able to enjoy their new Flash 10.1 experience on their devices, rather than through confining browsers. The other key benefit, besides accessibility, is the cross-platform integration that AIR provides. Because it is based on the common root language of Flash, existing apps and games will be much more easily adaptable, so we can expect a plethora of new applications to be made available to Android soon thereafter.
source: Adobe via AndroidGuys

The rumored HTC Desire HD handset has now appeared everywhere, but in an official announcement by its maker. We had the specs leak (4.3” screen and 8MP camera), the bootleg picture, and now the phone was spotted on an Amazon UK website.

The page has since been pulled down, but we can judge from the listed £415 (about $650) price that the high-end specs are spot on. Could this be nothing else but the GSM version of the EVO 4G? We can only guess, but it’s for a fact that we will have another great phone in the already stellar fall crop to choose from.
source: ElectricPig via MobileCrunch

The Samsung Media Hub was one of the mysteries when the US versions of the Galaxy S were announced. It was supposed to bring on-demand music, TV shows and movies to Samsung’s handsets in that line, and availability was promised for later in the year.

There is now a video showing the Samsung Media Hub beta in action on an EPIC 4G handset. Our take from the conversation in the video, and the mock movies and TV shows content, is that it may be active shortly after one of the most anticipated Android phones hits the market August 31st.

Another thing worth mentioning is that the multimedia purchased from the Media Hub will be licensed for viewing on up to five devices, such as phones, tablets and Samsung TV sets, perhaps. Galaxy Tab anyone? The movies can also be rented temporarily for a much lower price. On a separate note, since the Media Hub was demoed on the Sprint’s WiMAX version of the Galaxy S, downloading or streaming content can be done quickly on the road instead of searching for a Wi-Fi connection.
source: SlashGear

Nexus One owners have now received the final build of Adobe Flash Player 10.1 to install on their device. Finally out of beta, the final version is officially 10.1.92.8 and can be downloaded for free from the Android Market. Or, if you already have one of the beta copies installed, you can upgrade your handset with the final build. Of course, you need to have already received your firmware upgrade to Android 2.2 before you can even think about installing Flash Player.

While Verizon has decided to split the Froyo upgrade for the Motorola DROID into two parts before the Flash Player can be downloaded, many owners of the Time Magazine 2009 Gadget of The Year have yet to receive the first part of the OTA upgrade, which is supposed to be completed by this Wednesday. As we reported,  Adobe had posted that the same date is to be the debut of Flash Player 10.1 in the Android Market for the first-gen DROID. Now it seems that this Wednesday will just be another day. A Big Red spokesman said, “The Android 2.2 (”Froyo”) upgrade continues to be rolled out in phases to DROID by Motorola users on the Verizon Wireless network. Later this summer users will be able to download Adobe Flash Player 10.1 from the Android Market.” The phrase “Later this summer…” sure seems to indicate that if owners of the first-gen DROID want to immediately start viewing embedded videos and animated ads in the browser, their best bet is to upgrade to the DROID 2 which was shipped with Android 2.2 and Flash Player 10.1 pre-installed on the phone.
source: AndroidCentral

Mobile payments with your cell phone is nothing groundbreaking. Japan has had it since 2004, and today more than 60 million Japanese wave their phones to pay at soda machines, metro entrances and at cash registers at grocery stores.

When you put Apple with its iPhone in the mix, though, things are starting to look serious for the technology to become cool in the rest of the world as well. Apple’s recent hiring of Benjamin Vigier, who has been working on the Near Field Communication (NFC) adoption since its inception in Japan in 2004, might mark the beginning of a wide-spread contactless payment solution in North America.

Mr. Vigier has worked on some of the milestone projects in the cell phone payments area, such as developing the mobile wallet program for the French carrier Bouygues Telecom, and at the flash memory company SanDisk (Visa is offering contactless payments through a special microSD card, for example). He was last heading mFoundry, the payments company that is behind PayPal Mobile, the Starbucks barcode scanning service, and mobile wallet projects for two major carriers and a bank.

Apple, on the other hand, hasn’t been sitting still and waiting for the cell phone payments revolution to find it by surprise. It has filed a bunch of patents in recent months, that cover most possibilities that an NFC chip will present the iPhone and iPod with, such as:

• “An NFC-based mobile payments service that lets consumers make payments to merchants and other consumers via a credit or debit card, directly from their bank account or using credit stored in their iTunes account.
• The ‘iPay, iBuy and iCoupons’ patents, describing a comprehensive mobile payments, mobile commerce and mobile marketing business based around an NFC-enabled iPhone.
• Products+, an NFC-based product marketing and promotions application.
• An airline ticketing and boarding pass application that describes an unmanned, automated airport ticketing and baggage counter kiosk and introduces the concept of an automated security checking process where users of the iTravel app could process themselves through the security clearance system and check themselves in at the boarding gate.
• The Grab & Go patent, designed to make it easy for customers to transfer files between devices such as the Mac, iPhone and Apple TV.
• An NFC-enabled iPod, games controller, TV and iPhone.
• An NFC-based concert, entertainment and sports venue ticketing application that includes exclusive bonus features for users of Apple’s service.”

Benjamin Vigier is the new product manager of Apple’s mobile commerce department now, so exciting times lie ahead for people who have been craving for a while to leave their keys (NFC can also serve as an access card), camera and wallet at home, and replace them with just their iPhone.

And, much like with every other feature that’s been sitting on the sidelines all along (uhmm… FaceTime?), an Apple adoption could mean exponential growth, as long as the carriers are also on the same page. AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon recently signed an agreement with Barclays and Discover to work on partnership standard for contactless payments with your cell phone, fighting behemoth proprietary payment networks like those of Visa and Master Card, which are coming up with their own ideas. Visa even offers an unsightly case for the iPhone that allows for mobile payments, but obviously this is not the road that a design-obsessed Apple will be inclined to take.

All Nokia smartphones will be shipping with NFC chips starting next year, and the first NFC-enabled Android handsets are to arrive in Q4, so the timing is certainly ripe for Apple, if it doesn’t want to be left behind.
source: NFCWorld