E-Z Life

We touch and feel Sony Ericsson’s latest, live from Barcelona.

While Samsung is desperate for us and the world to focus on its very first Bada device — the Wave S8500 — we found something a bit more interesting for Google fans. Tucked away in the depths of a spec sheet is Samsung’s unannounced i8520 phone running Android 2.1. After quizzing a team of perplexed executives of increasing rank, a VP from Samsung’s mobile division finally told us that it’ll be revealed as the “Halo” tomorrow when the show floor opens. Looking at the spec sheet then, the i8520 Halo packs a 3.7-inch WVGA Super AMOLED display (bigger than the Wave’s 3.3-incher), 8 megapixel autofocus camera with flash (VGA on the front), 720p / 30fps video encoding / decoding, DivX and Xvid playback support, Bluetooth 2.1, standard 3.5mm headphone jack, 802.11b/g/n WiFi, A-GPS, 16GB of internal storage and microSD expansion, stereo speakers, DLNA support, and — get this — a DLP pico projector integrated. The spec-sheet also lists a “Specialized Projector UI” as one of the features, suggesting it’ll look a little different when you toss it up onto the big screen. This quad-band GSM / EDGE phone with tri-band UMTS 900 / 1900 / 2100 will ship in Q3 to Europe and Asia with a chance for a US version at some point later. We’ll bring you more tomorrow just as soon as we get through all this paella.

Note: Even though the i8520 clearly seems to run the same UI as the Bada-powered Wave, we’ve been assured by multiple people in Samsung — including a VP in the Mobile division — that it is, in fact, running Android 2.1. That ties in nicely with the fact that Bada’s graphical representation comes through as a new cut of TouchWiz, so it makes sense these guys would want to port the same look and feel to other platforms. Also of note is the fact that we couldn’t confirm from the company that it’s got a projector on board, but there’s plenty of evidence to suggest it does: the so-called Specialized Projector UI, the fact that the 14.9mm girth is likely thick enough to swallow the necessary optics, and — of course — the big DLP logo on back. We’ll bring out the final details just as soon as we know ‘em.

Update: Images confirm it, Halo is a projector phone!

Samsung i8520 ‘Halo’ Android 2.1 phone with 3.7-inch Super AMOLED and pico projector (updated) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Feb 2010 15:19:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You know what the world needs? Another stereotypical pink gadget to commemorate a Hallmark holiday. Bitterness and shame aside, it looks as if Pentax has decided that too few people were using its custom color shop to craft completely pink K-x DSLRs, and in the honor of Saint Valentine, the company has decided to roll out another stock hue to sell alongside the red, white, black and navy blue versions. It’ll set you back around HK$5,990 (or $770 in greenbacks), but trust us, your honey is totally worth it.

Pentax K-x DSLR goes pink for Valentine’s Day, naturally originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Feb 2010 15:14:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Well, we just had our first encounter with Samsung’s new Bada-sporting Wave handset. We’ll say this to start… the screen is gorgeous, and the phone itself is super fast. No hesitation almost anywhere, but it’s hard to make a judgment call at this point. A lot of the software seemed unfinished, and we saw a few crashes and weird behavior. Still, it’s clearly a device capable of handling some pretty intense work, and a Samsung rep we spoke to wanted to emphasize its ability to multitask. We were also told that the phone has more than 512MB of RAM, which is notable for a device of this type. We’re going to play with it a bit more and flesh out our impressions, but for now feast your eyes on the gallery… and check the video after the break!

A few more takeaways (with some input from senior editor Thomas Ricker):

• Overall the device feels like a glorified feature phone, and speaking to some other tech folks here, that feeling seemed to be common. There just doesn’t seem to be a lot to it that we haven’t seen in other Samsung devices, especially considering the TouchWiz integration.
• There was an issue with flipping the keyboard from portrait to landscape — as we said the phone is early, so this may change, but we had to leave an app and reopen in the other orientation to get it working. We also noticed that there doesn’t seem to be word prediction in place right now.
• The browser is redirecting to WAP pages, so it was hard to see what the results were. We also thought the buttons were in a very odd place, making it a bit hard to navigate.
• The display wasn’t always responding to touches, and at least one unit completely froze on us.
• For those asking, from the looks of things (and the press release) there is no multitouch on this device. Correction… we just tried pinching and zooming on the phone and while it did create some kind of zoom result, it also kept giving us an error! Furthermore, when we tried to load an image heavy site, it forced the phone into its task manager mode and made us close all applications before we could proceed with using the phone. Clearly there is work to be done.

Continue reading Samsung Wave first hands-on: Bada-packed and super fast (video!)

Samsung Wave first hands-on: Bada-packed and super fast (video!) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Feb 2010 14:04:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung‘s just busted out some more news from MWC, and one of the hottest items on offer are its LTE netbooks — the first ever. Sammy’s showing off the previously launched 10.1-inch N150, NB30, and N220 — all with the same specs otherwise, but now packing the company’s own, in-house designed Kalmia LTE modem chipset. There’s no word yet as to when we can expect to see one of these bad boys on the market (though we certainly expect them to show up this year) — so far, Samsung’s only saying it’ll deploy them “according to service schedule and market demand.” You don’t say? Check the full press release which is after the break (which includes each model’s specs).

Continue reading Samsung shows off LTE-packing netbooks at MWC

Samsung shows off LTE-packing netbooks at MWC originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 14 Feb 2010 14:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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