Tech QQ

LG Promised to shake things up with their upcoming Android devices. A leak regarding their prototype Star makes me want to believe them.

The upcoming Star is apparently based on NVidia’s Tegra 2 chipset, meaning it will run on dual core’s.

And it sports some otherwise nice hardware specs as well, a 8MP camera and promising 1080p video recording. It also has a front facing camera, a 4 inch screen, micro USB and a 1500mAh battery.

The person responsible for the leak ran Quadrant(free benchmarking tool available on Android market) on the device, it produced a score of 1759. In perspective my HTC Desire scores 1289(higher than the reference Desire shown in the Quadrant comparison view, most likely due to me running Froyo).

The LG Star is told to be destined for a early 2011 release, and the leaked device was running Froyo. Hopefully it will be upgraded to Gingerbread if it releases in 2011.

Just to bad this beast couldn’t be released for the holidays 2010 instead!

The LG prototype device has been a common sight for a very long time in the Windows Phone 7 scene. Then lately the product monikers C900 and E900 has surfaced, but not very much have been known about them except that C900 will be a slider and E900 won't.

But now the guys over at Android.com.pl has gotten their hand on two examples and published some specs.

The E900 allegedly has, A Qualcomm QSD8650 processor - that's right folks it's time for some 1.3GHz goodness! The QSD8650 supposed to be about 30% faster than it's 1GHz brother, but at the same time be about 30% less power hungry (using only 10 milliwatts in standby). Except the usual required stuff it sports a 3.7" screen and handles HD video recording and playback.
The price figures given by the site says 300$-400$ when released later this fall.


The C900 is a landscape slider model, comes with a QSD8650 as well and ofcourse the usual bells and whistles. Price said to be about 300$ at launch.



Here's a small vid of them booting side by side, although it seems the C900 crashed. If this is anything to go by the E900 boots in about 25s which is pretty good.

Another video of Windows Phone 7 running on a LG Panther has been released. It doesn't bring any new to the table that we haven't seen before, but it's a nice, good quality vid showing off how smooth the WP7 is running as of the latest builds.

Check it out:

The Windows Phone 7 - Devices page got updated with some tidbits about Asus and a new section about the existing LG device.

Wednesday the 9:th of June, I attended the Windows Phone 7 Developer Hub in Stockholm. Holding the technical presentations were Ben Riga and Niel Hutson and during the evening was a design centric lecture held by Albert Shum and Bryan Agnetta.

Overall the event was very good I felt. There was quite a lot of info I got that I never had heard about before, we also got some hands on with devices they had brought, and I also got a few of my questions answered.

The devices they had brought with them was the LG "Panther" and the Asus phone we've seen so many times by now. I didn't know it before, but the Asus phone actually got a name, it's called "Galaxy".


I got some hands on time with the Panther and these are some of my thoughts:

• The device it self feels pretty solid but there is still a plastic vibe there that they need to chip away before release.
  
• The slider keyboard is actually much nicer than I had originally thought.
  
• The keyboard felt easy to use and enter text on.
  
• The slide out mechanism was distinct and felt good.
• The OS felt responsive and quite complete, I was honestly expecting a less finished feel.
• There is a small resistance in the GUI when flipping between screens or pictures, some times it feels like that resistance is just a little too much. I think that the idea is great, it shouldn't start flipping about stuff to easily, so there should be a bit of a resistance and it ties in so beautifully with the accordion effect the UI got. But it shouldn't be too exaggerated either, cause right now it some times felt hard in portrait mode to flip stuff about.

I didn't get any hands on time with the Asus Galaxy device, but I got confirmed that it was just a very early prototype, just as suspected from it being shown as the first device in Barcelona at MWC 2010. They said Asus has more devices in line, and they look nothing like the Galaxy.

More posts with information from the event to follow tomorrow...

Microsoft has been sending out Windows Phone 7 devices to some developers last weeks. The device in question being the LG phone we saw demoed already at MIX10, but now more refined and with later builds of the OS. The working name of the phone is Panther, but on the box it says GW910.

The responses regarding the phone has so far been pretty good, people are saying it still not feels ready for production but that it's getting there as it's much improved compared to the device demoed at MIX10. Regarding the WP7 OS they are saying everything is smooth and running pretty good. And the production pace for the WP7 team is apparently high as the phone is getting new builds all the time.

For a short tour of the first setup of the phone, see the vid below.

At MIX10 one of the Windows Phone 7 devices that was shown was an LG phone. It was a qwerty-slider and it has been rumored that the device would be launched as early as September. Now a new version seems to have been spotted, this time Microsoft is preparing for ReMIX and this new device has been sent out to the french office.

On the pictures below are the two versions, the first one being the version shown at MIX10 earlier this year.
This second picture showing the device that have been photographed by a Microsoft employee in France.
We can see that the buttons have changed a bit, other than that doesn't the later one look larger? Or is it perhaps the angle the picture is taken at that makes us believe it has a much bigger screen?