PhoneScoop: Samsung Intrepid

[0]Hey everybody phonescoop here. Today we are going to take a quick spin around the Sprint Intrepid, a new Windows Mobile 6.5 phone from Samsung. And as you can see, we havent unboxed it yet. We thought we'd we thought we'd do the unboxing for you on video. So lets take a look at whats in the box here. For the Intrepid. We'll open it up. And we can see that Samsung has put this kind of loosely here. We have got the phone and underneath we have got lots of goodies here. Looks like we have got a pair of stereo headphones, we have got a data cable, we have got a power cable, and we have got the user guide. So thats what comes in the box of the Samsung Intrepid, Windows Mobile 6.5 Smartphone for Sprint. Lets take a look at the phone itself. Now that we have taken a quick look at whats inside the box, lets take a spin [1]around the Samsung Intrepid itself. You can see its a monoblock QWERTY phone. You have got a full keyboard along the bottom, which I have to say feels pretty good. We have got nice travel and feedback to the keys. They have got a little bit of a rough surface to them, so your fingers are not going to slip all over the place while you are typing Lest you think this is not a touch phone, it actually is. The Samsung Intrepid has a touch screen here, which allows it to interact with the user interface. With either the thumb pad here or with the screen itself which is a nice inclusion for this type of form factor. Lets zoom in a little bit closer inclusion for this type of form factor. Lets zoom in a little bit closer so you can get a little bit of a better sense of the keyboard. You can see some of the contours there and textures. Now we have got a full array of buttons here. We have got our two soft keys, our send and end keys, we have got an OK key. A start menu key, we have got a D-Pad here and [2]a selector switch. On the left side of the phone, we have got a volume toggle here which feels good. It has good travel and feedback. We have got a hatch covering the microUSB port, which is something I am very happy to see on a Samsung phone. Nothing along the bottom. On the right we have got a a whole bunch of things going on. We have got a stylus packed away here in the bottom of the phone, we have got a dedicated camera key here. There is the hard reset button. And we have got a power key here. On the back of the phone you can see we have got a vanity mirror and a 3.2MP camera However there is no flash, this is a speaker for the ringer and such here. On the back. No flash on this camera. And on the top you can see tucked away under here, we have a full 3.5mm headset jack. So thats again, something very nice to see on a Samsung phone. We have got a separate jack for [3]audio and separate jack for data and charging which is something they usually combine into their own proprietary port. So. In sum the hardware feels pretty good. I have to say, its a comfortable phone to hold and I like the way the buttons feel. It feels very well designed and put together. One other thing I will show you on the back of the phone. Here is the slot for the microSD memory card and of course here is a SIM card slot. The SIM card of course will allow this phone to roam on to GSM networks over in Europe. So world phone from Samsung, now lets take a little bit of a look at the Windows Mobile 6.5 on this device. So here is the lock screen on Windows Mobile 6.5. We take this and slide it to the left or right to unlock the home screen. What you can see here is that we use the D-pad we can scroll through all of the things that are on the [4]Windows Mobile 6.5 home screen with the D-pad. And of course we could do the same thing with our thumb here and just scroll through this way. Go to the main menu. We touch up there and we have the phone menu that is available You can see it appear similar to the menu on other Windows Mobile 6.5 phones we looked at. This main menu here is somewhat finger friendly. The icons are definitely big enough to push with your finger. Being a Sprint phone, it is loaded with some Sprint software. We have got their NASCAR application there. You can see a software store here. Another Sprint program here, their navigation application. Sprint music store, all sorts of stuff here We have got the TellMe voice search here in the applications. We have got NFL application, shortcut to Google, the camera, and of course all sorts of different services from sprint. We have got a nice [5]weather service from MSN, the file explorer. Lets take a look in there. You can see here that once you dive down into a submenu this deep into the operating system, it becomes less finger friendly. You can see that it is a little bit smaller, a little bit harder to select some of the stuff with your thumb or finger. Of course thats why they included the stylus. Its a stark admission from Microsoft and Samsung that the phone is not quite finger ready yet. But, you know, its not a bad operating system. It is much more usable than Windows Mobile 6.1 was. We will leave it at that. Its a Windows Mobile 6.5 phone I happen to like this hardware better than some of the other hardware we have seen on Windows Mobile 6.5 phones so far. Its relatively compact, has a very good control, and keys, and of course its available on the Sprint network so you know you have got [6]EVDO 3G data and the ability to roam on GSM networks when traveling overseas as an added bonus. So there you go, the Samsung Intrepid Windows Mobile 6.5 phone for Sprint.


Channel: phonescoop

PhoneScoop: Blackberry Storm 2

[0]Hello ladies and gentleman, phonescoop here. What you are taking a look at there is an unopened BlackBerry Storm 2. What we are going to do is unbox it for you and then we will take a quick look at the Storm 2's features and we will also compare it to the original storm. So without further ado, lets dig in. We have got a plain black box here. Not much going on, probably not a final retail box. In fact I am sure its just a sample that they've sent to people in the press such as myself. We will open it up. And we can see the Storm 2 is in there. Not very securely fastened. Resting there. We have got a little cardboard piece here. And we have got a charger in this box. We have got a USB cable, and we have got stereo headphones. So not bad, you know, definitely [1]have seen more accessories come in a box. There is not even a user manual in here. So this is definitely not a final consumer box. So not a whole lot going on with that. So since there is not a lot of interesting things in the box, lets take a look at the phone itself. There it is, the Storm 2 from Research in Motion. Lets dive in and see what its all about. At first glance, the Storm 2 looks almost identical to the original Storm. Almost nearly as same in shape, layout, configuration, size and weight. We have got, you know, similarly placed buttons in hardware, and basically you can see for yourself, the similarities are pretty stark. But concentrating on the Storm 2, you can see that the entire front panel is now one large button. There is no [2]separation here between the buttons along the bottom. These are four distinct keys on the face of the glass. The capacitive screen there. Taking a look at the rest of the phone you can see on the left here we have got just a application key. This key is actually a little bit mushy but it has a rubber top to it. So its easily found with your thumb. We have the microUSB port there. Nothing along the bottom. On the right we have got several different keys Got a user definable application key here. You can use this to launch the camera, to launch the email program pretty much whatever you want. And we have got a volume toggle here This also feels a little bit mushy but again its coated in rubber and is easy to find with your thumb. On the back, you can see we have the 3.2MP camera as well as a flash to help [3]make for better picture taking. And a little bit difficult to see in the top, but to sort of switch things around. Looks like the power key is here now. Before it was on the front face of the phone. My guess is this doubles as a power and lock key and we have got the ever present silent switch to turn off the ringer. When you have got an incoming call. And as with the original we will peel this back, and you can see we have got a SIM card here for use in GSM networks overseas and the slot for the microSD card goes there. So this is pretty similar to the original in most respects. With just some subtle changes. And of course, you will notice the different accents. You got silver on the original and black on the new one. And you know, like, the buttons here are silver and the buttons here are black, but otherwise you know for all intents and purposes it looks almost identical. Oh and of course I forgot to mention [4]the 3.5mm headset jack on the top right of the phone for your stereo headset listening pleasure. So now that we have taken a quick scan at the hardware, lets dive in and see if RIM made any changes to the software on the Storm 2. So after playing with the Storm 2 for just a few moments off camera, I can say immediately and without any doubt that it is a far superior product to the original Storm that was released back in November of 2008. Perhaps the most noticeable and biggest improvement is just the regular performance of the device how it reacts. You can see instantaneous reaction to my finger as I move across it and make selections and try to interact with the phone. We have also got some nice animations, for you know, opening applications. And you can just see it, it is just blazing fast Responds really well to my thumb and the way I touch. [5]Now of course this screen still is a sheer press screen. There are four actuators under this screen compared to the single actuator that was under the screen on the original Storm And that makes it more responsive to presses and better able to localize where you are exactly pressing on the screen itself. So for example, we will type a message, we will type a new message to myself here. And you can see, as I brought this up, that it is the shared press style QWERTY keyboard. You know, we have already send two messages here. I am going to just quickly type up another one. And you can see how well the Storm responds to typing compared to the original. So, there it figured out phonescoop pretty well. There I got it right. You know, I typed, this is a [6]much better phone than the original. And of course, if you want to interact with the full QWERTY, you can just turn sideways, and it works just the same. And hitting the return key will send off the email. You know, you can type this way too So this is how you will type in landscape mode. So, yeah, OK, so I made one mistake but otherwise not bad at all. We have got smileys here that we can dump in there. We can put in anything we want, and off it goes. The typing experience, I cant stress enough, is vastly, vastly improved. Compared to the original Storm. The screen itself doesnt need to travel as far for each successive click, and because of that your thumbs get less tired when typing And of course you could see how quickly it reacts to be [7]turned on its side, and it reacts almost instantly. With the other Storm, the original Storm you sometimes had to wait up to 5 seconds for the thing to react. You know, we got the same access to all the media here. Media player looks about the same, you got songs, you have got videos, looks like they loaded some trailers in there. Back out to the main screen we will jump into the main menu. We have got all typical controls and Verizon applications here. They have preloaded Slacker it looks like and VCast Rhapsody, VCast Song ID, My Verizon which is an account controlling program. Its own mapping program, thats not Google Maps there. They have got VZ Navigator here of course. Instant messaging, all here, you have got Windows, Yahoo, Google, AIM and Blackberry messenger. And of course you have got the camera. Downloads is where anything you grab from the BlackBerry apps will go. You can see some preloaded applications. Of course these are productivity based applications [8]Word To Go, Sheet To Go, Slide To Go, so you can interact with Word documents and you know, its got some games on there and thats it. Its much much better device. There is no other way to say it. Its easy to use. It reacts as it is supposed to. And it feels better designed, more well thought out, and more refined when compared to the original Storm. So the Storm 2, available from Verizon wireless, packing 3G, GSM for roaming on European networks, WiFi, GPS, Bluetooth, and a much better operating system. Storm 2, Verizon wireless, there it is folks.


Channel: phonescoop

PhoneScoop: Motorola Droid

[0]Hey everybody, PhoneScoop here, taking a look at the new Motorola Droid. The first Android phone for the Verizon wireless network. We are going to unbox it for you here, and take you through the device so you can get an idea for what its like. Pull the lid off and you can see the device is already falling out on the floor. Here it is right here Very simple styling here, we got black on black. We got soft touch surfaces, metal surfaces, plastic surfaces, feels very good. And what else is in the box. We have got just a charger and a data cable and thats it. Charger and data cable. No other extra accessories are in the box. So thats kind of, kind of annoying but thats what it is I guess. So here it is, lets peel of the stickers and take a look. So you can see the Droid is a very large screen. 3.7" high resolution 854 [1]pixels by 480, pretty impressive. And you have got four touch capacitive buttons here. that provide haptic feedback when you press them. Then this little ledge here which is actually reserved for the RF radios and antennas and such. On the left side we got a microUSB port. Nothing along the bottom. On the right we got a dedicated camera key. A volume toggle. And on the top you will see a 3.5mm headset port. As well as the power and lock key. On the back we will zoom in a little bit here 5MP camera which has image stabilization, autofocus and flash. And can shoot DVD quality video which not many phones can claim to do. Of course its a slider and we have got a full QWERTY keyboard here. The keyboard feels OK. Its a little on the flat side and the keys dont have very good definition I would prefer there to be more definition on this keyboard and its also, you know, a straight up and down keyboard. Its not offset, offset keyboards are a little bit easier to use. We spoke [2]to Motorola's engineers and they said it was a space issue because they wanted to be able to include the navigation pad and that prohibited them from using an offset keyboard. But still it works OK. Travel and feedback is not bad. So lets turn the phone on and give you a look at the user interface. So now we have had a chance to fire up the phone and lets hit the lock key. Here is the basic lock screen and you can see, you can go either way with this little dial pad. You can put it to the right unlock or the left to silence it if you get an incoming call for example, and dialing it over here brings up the basic home screen. Now because this is a Android with Google phone it runs the basic configuration of Android. So you have got one home screen here and one to the right and one to the left. And there are no additional screens, you know, the Motorola CLIQ for example has five home screens. So these buttons here are [3]capacitive buttons and they provide haptic feedback. Whats really nice is they require just a slightly different amount of pressure than the screen itself. The screen here is very responsive This is a little bit less responsive and that, it terms of usability, actually it is a better thing. So you wont accidentally push any of these buttons when you mean to just grab the bottom of the phone. So for example, push the menu button there and the menu will pop up there. You can see it if I zoom in a little bit. Get rid of the menu. Of course it has the same home screen, and menu system that any basic Android phone comes with. And whats interesting is that they have done some neat things with the contacts application. The contacts application which is part of Android 2.0 supports a lot of Facebook APIs so you can integrate your Facebook applications with the phone's applications and merge contacts on the device itself. Since we dont have [4]any data loaded on this particular device we cant show you that. Its hard to show you just how amazing the screen is. The screen is simply phenomenal Google maps application, which offers turn by turn navigation and direction guidance which is a really neat thing to have on this device. We have also got car home, which is a user interface specific for cars. And actually they will be offering a dock for this device that will go into your car. And you know, this is a good user interface to use in a car because its very easy to tell what you are doing with your fingers and you can just very simply push any of these buttons and get what you need. And of course you can just go home quite simply if you tap the button there. The camera offers improved features. You can see launch time was much faster there and you can see the user interface is definitely different [5]You got a nice little switch that will take it from camera mode to video mode and back There is the keys, we are going to settings here. And you see, brand new user interface. Its a half screen, set a full screen, and they got a lot of different settings to adjust here Flash, scene, white balance, color effect and so on. So nice that the camera software has been updated So that is a quick take on the Motorola Droid. PhoneScoop will be offering a more in depth report in the coming days. So Motorola Droid for the Verizon wireless network. Verizon's first Android phone, and there it is.


Channel: phonescoop

PhoneScoop: Palm Pre Contacts

[0]Here is a quick demonstration on how the contacts application works on the Palm Pre. Contacts are found here. Pressing the button will oepn up your main contact list which you can see here Facebook pictures are automatically integrated into the contacts application. We will do a search for Rich Brome from Phonescoop. And you could see all the Richs pop up here. You can see Rich's picture pop up there. Scrolling through it works just as it does on the iPhone and lets see if we can find something thats worth opening up Lets do Amtrak. So Amtrak is here. We will open up the contact and you can see a little bit of what the contact looks like. We can link it to more profiles. Amtrak happens to be in my GMail account. If Amtrak were a buddy of mine on Facebook [1]I could link that profile here so you could see the Facebook data in the application as well. And editing is easy as pushing a button. And adding information. So you are done. You save it, you can also go in here to perform edits. Set them as a speed dial add them to the launcher, which means basically shortcut, and basic controls for the contact application. We will close out of that. Close out of Amtrak, go back to the main view. And you can see thats the contacts application on the Palm Pre.

Channel: phonescoop

PhoneScoop: Palm Pre Email and SMS

[0]Here is a video about email and messaging on the Palm Pre. Email is located right here on the home screen. You press it and any email accounts that you have assigned to the device will show up. Go into the inbox. You will see a list of all your emails here. Lets say we want to read one. Push the button, excuse me, press the screen. The Pre does show full HTML emails which look nice. If you need to zoom in to see something you just double tap and it will do that. If you want to respond, reply to all, forward, trash it those or all, all the easy things to do. Swiping back here will take you back to the main menu. One To write a new email press here, it will show a new email screen. You can type in an email address here, subject here, body of the text there. If you want to add an attachment just press the paper clip there. You can add pictures, you can add videos, you can add [1]music and/or ringtones, and you can add documents. Emails there. Quite easy to do. Press it and it will automatically attach itself to the email. You can see there it is. If I had put in an address, I'd hit the little airplane and it would be on its merry way. So thats email. We'll take a quick look at messaging. Messaging is, lumps everything into conversations. So you can see its threaded messaging. I have had a conversation with Rich, and you can see it again, it incorporates this Facebook picture and we can scroll up and down here. If you want to enter text or just enter it there. Send it. It will send. Rich just got a nice nonsensical message from me. And if you wanted to do something like add a picture you could do that quite easily here. So that is the [2]SMS tool. That is messaging on the Palm Pre.


Channel: phonescoop

PhoneScoop: Palm Pre Phone App

[0]Here is a short demonstration on how the phone application works on the Palm Pre. When I access your calls, press the phone button, and the dial screen will come up right here. If you want to see a list of your calls, press this little button here and you will see a list of different calls that you have made. And even some calls that you have missed. And if you have your contacts saved with pictures, the pictures will show up here If we push one of the contacts to see what is going on, it will automatically call that number. And you can see we have some in call options here, including send it to speaker, mute the call, open up the keypad, or add a call And of course we just hit the big red button here to hang up. We will let it do that and go back to the dialer. Which you can see is right there. And of course you can dial directly from here as well. Screen is very [1]responsive to touch and works quite easily as a phone. Press here to initiate a call and that is how the phone works on the Palm Pre.

Channel: phonescoop

PhoneScoop: Palm Pre Music App

[0]Here is a quick look at the music application on the Palm Pre. Its found here in the main menu. We will press it and it will load the music library. You can see what it first does is show you if you want to shuffle everything and start right away you can do that. You can choose from a few things here in the music menu. Lets sort by albums and you will see all our albums here and I have been enjoying the new green day CD lately. So here it is. We can shuffle this album or just start playing it. here it is. We can shuffle this album or just start playing it. And when we do you will see album art displayed and some other screen controls for navigating the music you know Whats really nice is instead of just hitting the button here, if you want to pause it we can just press the screen. If you want to skip to the next song, we can just swipe and skip [1]to the next song rather than have to touch these buttons. So thats pretty cool. And if you want to see your track listing as it plays you can see this is the song thats playing right now and you have a little progress bar showing you how far along you are in the song. Whats really cool about the music application is that you could perform searches. So we were listening to green day If you want to search for other green day material from the Amazon MP3 store we simply perform a search and it will automatically pull up the MP3 application and we should get a selection of Green Day content in a second. So there you go Theres Green Day content that links just directly from the music player. Same goes for YouTube. Its really pretty cool. We will We want to do a search for Green Day in general or search for this song in particular we can do that. Hitting Green Day [2]we will see what shows up here in YouTube. And takes just a second to fire up the YouTube application so there you go. You want to watch a Green Day video? You are pretty much all set So thats how the music app works with the YouTube app. Pretty neat stuff.


Channel: phonescoop

PhoneScoop: Palm Pre Camera

[0]In this video, we are going to take a quick look at the camera and gallery operation of the Palm Pre. We will fire up the camera here. Unfortunately there is no dedicated camera key anywhere on the phone. You can see that the camera launches in reasonably fast Whats really amazing is how fast the Pre will take pictures. Check this out. Thats pretty fast. Very few camera phones are able to perform that quickly. However there are very few controls Basically you cant make any adjustments except for to the flash, which you can set to on, off or automatic. If you want to check out the pictures you have taken you press the little thumbnail there which will open the photo gallery and sorts them by what you have taken all images or any wallpapers that are stored in the phone. So there is the last image I shot. Not exactly the most thrilling thing I have ever taken. [1]If you want to scroll through them, its easy with your finger. Just swipe to the left. And if you want to double tap you can zoom in and out. We will squish that down. And of course, if you want to just see the whole library, you can swipe back here and it will do that. So scrolling through the whole library you can see it works pretty fast, it loads them into the memory pretty quickly and works nicely to show you things that you have taken pictures of. Want to send a picture on its merry way to friends and family its very easy to do. Select the picture, press here and you can assign. Its very easy to do to contacts, set as wallpaper, or send it via MMS. We will do that and you can see how quickly it will fire up the MMS application and let you send the picture. So that is a quick look at the camera and photo gallery capabilities of the Palm Pre.


Channel: phonescoop

PhoneScoop: Palm Pre Browser

[0]In this video we are going to take a quick look at the browser on the Palm Pre. We can jump to the browser through the main menu. We will select that and here in the basement I was having trouble so I did load WiFi, although in general though the Pre does run on Sprint's EVDO Rev A network which I found to be very speedy for browsing. Lets see how fast it pulls up Google. And there we go. Google page, not bad at all. There is a lot to do here. We can edit things. This is, if you want to cut, copy and paste text from textfield to textfield. We can start a new card which is basically like having a different tab open in another browser. We can add a bookmark share the page if we want to via email. And we can go to our bookmarks. Lets do that. Go to our bookmarks. And of course lets launch PhoneScoop. And of course the Pre [1]shows full HTML emails although it doesnt include Flash capability. You could see how quickly it loaded the HTML site on PhoneScoop. Double tab to zoom in to look at a particular area of the site and of course you can also pinch to zoom in and pinch to zoom out. You can see we can get the text to be pretty big there and zoom all the way out there. And of course, we can also view our browsing history on different sites we have been Lets jump to CNN, which is also a pretty busy page and it defaults to the full version of CNN and not the mobile version and you know of course thats not all that easy to read like this, you can see how tiny the text is and thats what they make double tapping for. Double tap and it will zoom in to show you specific areas of the page. So you know, its a pretty capable browser. Its not perfect. No [2]mobile browser is. But for the most part, it does a pretty good job and you can control some things here such as popups and cookies, and of course you can clear the history, cookies and cache if you value your privacy. So thats a quick look at the browser on the Palm Pre.


Channel: phonescoop

Phonescoop: Palm Pre

[0]After months of waiting, here it is, the Palm Pre, the brand new smartphone from Palm that will be available on the Sprint network in the next day or so. Phonescoop is going to do something a little bit different this time around with the video. We are going to do one master video here which just gives you a general overview of the phone but we are going to dive deeper into all other features separately and you can watch those videos, you know, if you care to see a little bit more about how each of the functions works. This video is just going to concentrate on the hardware and the main WebOS operating system. on the hardware and the main WebOS operating system. So you can see the Palm is very round and smooth of course. Palm said it was fashioned after a riverstone or a rock that you would find at the bottom of a river. Comfortable to hold in the hand, feels nice to grip like this. And given the shape and size it fits easily into any [1]pocket that you care to put it in. We have a got lone one single button here on the front. On the left side, we have just the volume toggle here, nothing along the bottom, nothing along the right except for the hatch covering the microUSB port. And on the back you have got camera flash and the speaker. And on the very top we have a full 3.5mm headset jack as well as the silence key and power and unlock key. Pressing the power unlock key you can see will just unlock the screen. You can check the time and see some messages and things like that. The slider mechanism works pretty well, it was a little stiff when I first got the phone but now that I have been using it for a few weeks, excuse me for one week it is feels a little bit better. What I dont like is this ridge here. Its very sharp and [2]you know digs into your thumb or fingers its not very comfortable. As for the keyboard itself you can see the buttons are minimum here. Very small and have you know just a very small shape and contour to them. You know the keys dont offer that much travel and feedback, its again minimal, not a whole lot going on here, but most people would probably be able to get used to this keyboard in just a matter of several days use. When open it still has a pretty slim profile. We have got a banana shape going on and the back you can see there is actually a mirror and we will get the, so you can see mirror there, and could be used to check your makeup if you are you know, a makeup wearing person, or you know, signal overhead aircraft for rescue if you are trapped in a desert island. [3]Thats the mirror. Now that we have seen the hardware, lets take a look at the software a little bit more. The Pre uses the new WebOS mobile operating system from Palm. Its a brand new Smartphone platform, its developed from the ground up, and incorporates a lot of web technologies into making it all work. You can see along the bottom, we have got, pretty much constant access to the phone contacts, email, calendar, and then the launcher button. Each of these applications does exactly what you expect it to. The launcher button is really, really the main menu of the phone you can see here, basic grid pattern and we have got little arrows here indicating there are two more pages of these applications. We can scroll, now you got one page to the left, one page to the right here on the screen. Any new applications you download from the apps catalog go here. They get piled into the first page. You know, it appears to be [4]unlimited number of applications that you can load. Want to get rid of this, hit the key at the bottom of the phone or hit the launcher button again And that will take you back to the home screen. Lets fire up an application real quick so you can see a little bit about how navigation works. You will see a demo application. Which will launch here in just a second. So we want to type a new memo. We will hit memo, type in some text and there is a menu key up here whcih is present on a lot of the phone systems. And this lets us cut, copy and paste and we will save that. So looks like we can set a color that looks good to me and we want to go back, we swipe back here which takes us back to the main memo screen here. This area of the front face of the Pre is sensitive to touch and lets you [5]scroll back and you can see here we have deactivated this card and if we want to we can just fling it and get rid of it and not deal with it anymore. Thats basically how you close an application on the Palm Pre. You can of course have a lot of applications open at one time. We will look load up the messaging application and then we will load up pictures, which will take a second to load here. And we will load our videos and we will load tasks. So you can see now we have a number of different applications running at once and each of them is stored on the what Palm calls cards, you can scroll through them easily, and [6]jump to any of these applications. This essentially just sends the application to the background If you want to clear up some user memory so that you can do other tasks, you can just get rid of it. You can toss things off at will and of course open things up whenever we want to. So thats the basics of how WebOS works, there is a lot of features included in the Pre, you know, messaging, web browser, camera photogallery, music player, video player and Google maps of course. Also has Sprint services integrated, you know we have got Sprint TV, navigation, the Sprint page and its NASCAR application. There is the App Catalog, YouTube client and Amazon MP3 client and on the last page here you will see all the different tools you can see you can use to configure and the phone. So this is our main overview of the phone and if you want to see some more in depth looks at other features please check out phonescoop's other videos on [7]Palm Pre.



Channel: phonescoop

Newscientistvideo: Tracking trash

[0]You may wonder where your trash ends up after its carted away. Well, now a new tracking device could tell you the answer. It can be attached to domestic waste before its thrown away. It switches on when a sensor detects motion. Its SIM card will then locate a nearby cellphone tower and text back the coordinates. Software can analyze the signal strength to figure out the tags precise location. Last summer the signal strength to figure out the tags precise location. Last summer the tags were tested in Seattle with sixty pieces of trash. Next month, thousands more will be dispatched in New York, Seattle and London. The team hopes that by pinning down where different types of trash end up the waste removal system can be made more efficient.

Channel: newscientistvideo

Newscientistvideo: Map of first light

[0]This spacecraft is building the most accurate map to date of radiation from the big bang. In a test in August, it scanned a strip of sky continuously for two weeks. Now the results are in. Red spots reveal areas where radiation is hotter than average Areas that are colder are shown in blue. A red band shows radiation in the disc of the Milky Way. The data proved to be of excellent quality It will now take six months to complete a full scan of the sky.

Channel: newscientistvideo

Newscientistvideo: Bladeless fan

[0]Blades used in conventional fans chop up air and cause uneven air flow. But now a new design can cool you down evenly. A motor driven rotor hidden inside a pedestal blows air up inside the hollow hoop. The airplane wing shape of the inner surface produces a low internal pressure. This encourages the surrounding air to create a draft which gets channeled through the ring. A stronger or weaker blast of air can be obtained by varying the speed of the rotor with a switch. This fan uses the same amount of energy used in conventional ones but since it has no blades it wont harm children if they poke their fingers inside.

Channel: newscientistvideo

Phonescoop: NOKIA N900

Hi we are here with the Nokia N900 here. Going through a quick UI review. So here you have the default phone screen that that user sees right when they turn on the device. Its a home screen that you can scroll I am sorry a landscape homescreen that you can swipe through. You have four different home screens that you can put anything you want to on You can have widgets, for different kinds of applications. You can have bookmarks, quick access to your websites and these thumbnails [1]autoupdate based on the sites and then you have other different widgets and dedicated applications. So whatever application I want to quickly access is right here. So I can N900 is also a phone. So pressing here opens up the phone menu which can also be used in portrait mode And then in the top left hand corner here, is the multitasking and menu button. So by pressing this, it automatically shows me all the applications that are running. And the icon changed in the top by pressing it again, it takes me to all my applications where I can easily select where I want to go. It has a full Mozilla web browser. Supports Flash, AJAX, CSS Cool. Flash or Flash Lite? Full Flash, 9.4. [2]Yea, so not Flash lite, full Flash. It also supports, going on the same context, automatic switching and prioritization between AT or carrier data and WiFi signals. So I dont have to, if I walk into a WiFi hotspot that I have already connected with, it will just automatically switch over. Its actually very nice Bluetooth, Wireless G, B, everything Does the Wifi radio need to stay on for that to happen?It wont just automatically turn itself on when it senses the network? No, it will but what its doing is pinging every 5 minutes to see what relevant networks are in the area. It doesnt actually kicking on, it just quickly checks for SSIDs or however they use their nerd magic to do that. And then thats the result you know The Merlin output. [3]This is how I can switch between applications easily. One button push to shelf all my songs. It supports a lot of the iCodex straight out of the box and video clips up to 2000kb/sec To put this in perspective, I actually downloaded a copy of transmission the other day and downloaded a copy of it in about 10 minutes from one of those special sites. And played it back on here. No conversion, no anything needed, and it was really nice. One of those places where you go to pay for media. And thats pretty much it. Anything else?


Channel: phonescoop

PhoneScoop: Windows Mobile 6.5

[0]Hey everybody phonescoop here. We are taking a quick look at the Verizon Imagio made by HTC. This is one of the first Windows Mobile Imagio made by HTC. This is one of the first Windows Mobile 6.5 devices to hit the market. Lets take the hardware for a quick spin before we take a more in depth look at how Windows Mobile 6.5 stacks up. You can see we have got a fairly sizable monoblock display phone here large touchscreen, several buttons at the bottom. You can see we have 5 buttons. Send and end key. Dedicated application key here Microsoft Menu here, and a back key. We have got an area here just below the screen thats used to zoom in and out Nothing along the left side of the phone at all and on the bottom, we can see this still stylus and we have a 3.5mm headset jack as well as miniUSB port. [1]On the right you can see we just have the volume toggle up towards the top The back has been slightly stylized you see theres two different types of materials here. We have got a glossy finish on this side and a soft touch on this side. Of course we can see the camera, the Verizon logo HTC logo and one thing I will show you here. Pop this up This is a little stand so that the phone can rest on a level surface and that stand believe it or not doubles as a antenna for the VCast video services. Definitely one of the more appealing devices I have seen from HTC in recent memory It just looks good, feels good and works good. So thats the hardware One of the first things you will notices about Windows Mobile 6.5 is when you unlock the phone there is this slide key here. Now if the phone had received [2]any messages, any missed calls, any text messages or calendar notifications, while this device was powered off or locked we would see some of them displayed here. We slide and unlocks the phone and you can see the HTC made TouchFlow 3D user interface. You wouldnt notice too many differences. In fact we can slide along here. And you will see all the basic applications and settings as you have on other TouchFlow 3D devices. So thats where you know, the similarities and users were experienced with TouchFlow 3D or feel right at home when they dial in to the Imagio. Here you can see the start menu has been reorganized a bit and is much bigger and much more finger friendly We can scroll through and see all the applications that are here [3]You can also see there is space reserved for users to add their own applications and most of the standard stuff is in here and you can see the home screen. Your Favorites for calling. Your contacts. Calendar settings, the phone itself, marketplace, navigator for Verizon bing search as well as music messaging TV and so on. Plenty of applications are already here There is lots of ways to access content. You can also see the Opera browser, YouTube application, and several others. So what we are going to do now, we are going to turn TouchFlow off so you can see the differences and you can see how Windows Mobile 6.5 is supposed to look. So here is the Imagio with TouchFlow 3D removed from the today screen. And you can see it makes the device pretty boring. We got pretty much nothing on the today screen at all. [4]If we hit the start menu, we get the same home menu. You can see its laid out in the finger friendly style. The honeycomb grid is no longer here but we got all the same applications, all the same stuff. Plenty of things going on Perhaps the most in depth menu is the settings menu. You can see we have got lots of different settings we can control here Going into the system folder we have got a lot of control over different things the phone is doing. And you can see how easy it is to access a lot of these different things systems and applications, they are just simple finger pushes away and its much more user friendly. But you know, we go back out to the main screen and hit contacts, and you will see that its not exactly as friendly as it could be. Little bit easier, we can send text message to global support for [5]Verizon wireless if we want to and once we choose to do that it automatically jumps into the text messaging application, and we can take care of all of our messaging needs from the screen. If we hit the menu button, you can see that we can do lots of different things. And you know, its subtle, but some of the changes you will see here are that these menu items are further apart and by placing them further apart it makes them easier to push with your finger. So we want to insert some text and it looks like they dont have any text So we are not going to insert anything. But on the whole its easier to push these things are got what you need done rather than worrying about pushing really, really tiny tiny things on the screen. So its subtle changes like that that are going to make the daily use of Windows Mobile 6.5 a bit better and same [6]goes for calendar, you know we have got no appointments. And if we want to access the menu you can see that these menu items are easier to interact with with your finger So we just go to today. You can see how easy it is to push any of these buttons and get it to do what you want. So those are the basics. Of course, we have got plenty of applications here. As we mentioned we have got the new Internet explorer which we should definitely take a look at. The new Internet Explorer has been improved. This is IE 6 on Windows Mobile 6.5. And here we are in San Diego which is the EVDO capital of the world and you can see we have got the new Verizon home portal loading here. rather slowly. And again we have got finger friendly icons to jump to different things [7]on the web and on the Verizon's portal, and if we want we will just choose News and we will watch it bring up some news And there is today's news. We have got plenty going on and you can see scan through these headlines really quickly and check things out. We have got a little mini map here in the side which shows us where we are on the page. You can see that sliding around as we interact with the screen. So other applications on here include Visual Voicemail and there is also Opera. Nice of them to have Opera and Internet Explorer on here We have got the Opera Mobile, we have got the VCast mobile TV application here We have got the music application here which integrates with you know, the Windows Media Player, and the VCast music application. [8]So those are a little bit more robust than what we are used to seeing on Verizon's feature phones. We have got an FM radio, we have got a mobile instant messaging, and the marketplace of course. Lets fire up the marketplace and see what Microsoft is offering us here. And here we we go. Here is what users are going to see first when they first launch the marketplace for Windows Mobile. So we have got a Facebook application, Pacman We have got different categories and ways to search So lets check out whats most popular. And turns out we have got some applications here. We can scan through these applications, see whats available. We can see pricing, we can see reviews, and lets look at the Facebook application It will show us a description about the application We can see lots of text there. Has some bulleted highlights. [9]Lists some system requirements and gives us access to all the reviews and some screenshots and you can see that there is a little bit of a good screenshot there. Shows you how the application works and of course we can choose to install it. So we will hit the install button and of course we have to have a Windows Live ID. So for those of you who already have Windows Live ID from here you just sign in. And if the application is free you will be download it without any problems and if it requires a payment there are steps you can take to make such payment and then download the application. So those are the biggest things that are new with Windows Mobile 6.5 and they have been demonstrated here on the HTC Imagio for Verizon wireless.

Channel: phonescoop

MobileBurn : MOTOROLA CLIQ 2

[0]The CLIQ supports TMobile USA's visual voicemail system. I am going to pull up one of my messages Turn the speakerphone on so you can hear it and just going to hit play. (on phone): "Test of the visual voicemail system on MOTOROLA CLIQ for TMobile USA" And now that I am done listening to it I can either call the contact back or I can send them a text message or just delete message. Very simple to find and call a contact. Just start typing, it automatically goes through and narrows down your contact list to any possible matches. At which point you can send text messages or call the user. Let me just call this user right now. Turn on the speakerphone. Notice there is also a mute button. And of course you just have to tap to end the call. There are some of the icons across the top thats the notification area. We drag that down. You see there is new email messages. Notification brings that right up. Here is some tests that we sent ourselves earlier. Regular GMail client just like you see in other devices As with other Android devices, if you long press the Home key from anywhere you get your six most recently accessed applications. For example, you can go to Happenings and I can hold down again and access maybe the contacts. Pressing it briefly takes you back to the home screen and in the case of the CLIQ pressing it again from the home screen will bring up the main menu. You can of course bring up main menu by tapping or dragging this onscreen control as well. Give you an example how to access search functionality without the keyboard just long press the menu button. And brings up the onscreen keyboard and you can start typing. So I can further down and type I dont know lets see C, A, M [2]and we got camera and camcorder. MOTOROLA includes a few other Android widgets. You can see we have got tips and tricks, these are actually RSS feeds and you can see how they are used in a more normal sense over here on this pane. Messages come in. You know, new RSS messages from your favorite feeds. You can group them together and do all sorts of things with those. Fairly robust so you can see we have got the same type widget but two different categories, entertainment and regular news. The browser on the CLIQ does a nice job of rendering complex sites but it does not have the multitouch zooming capabilities that people are after. Instead you have to use this onscreen control which disappears after a second only appears when you move the page. So if you are a little off in your timing you could accidentally hit a link or something like that which can be pretty annoying. There is also a 1X button [3]for going back to the default zoom rate. See we are loading up another page right now and it also supports windows. So we have multiple windows open, we can tap over to this story about the recent Sidekick data failure and jump back to the mobileburn page Now there is no proper Flash support on this so you are not going to be able to watch YouTube videos from inside webpages like you can on the HTC Hero but the browser is still pretty good nonetheless. Here is a quick demonstration of Google's voice search. I will tap on the voice search icon here: McDonalds Its going to analyze what I said and then load it up in the browser It should also give us some local results based on the current location of the phone. I can hit get directions here, pull up in Google maps [4]and hopefully get directions from right where I am I am going to pull up the music application Show you how it works. Organizes everything by artist album, track name, that kind of stuff Get a track off of it and start playing it since the phone has a 3.5mm headphone jack it is really convenient to use any normal headphones just lying around the house Pull up the menu and see you can see what else is available. Party shuffle mode you can use this as a ring tone. Create new playlist, and of course go back to the library. I have got the camera loaded right now. So it works in both landscape and portrait modes. Easy to use. Just press the button halfway and get the green indicators for focus press it all the way to take the photo [5]Then the recently captured photo will show up on the bottom of my hand corner. Just tap on it We can see it go through some other photos as well. Another thing thats important is that MOTOBLUR integrates with both photo bucket and Picasa and you can therefore share your photos with those services or you know, MySpace, and other services as well. Its all really quite versatile Pull up the settings just so you can see it not a whole lot of settings. But it does have geotagging support and of course, white balance and autofocus controls as well. You can also activate the camcorder mode, start the camcorder by pressing the button. Now we are recording we will just move around a bit so you can tell its working. Stop it. And [6]access it and we will tap on play here. Now you can see the video. Go back and take a look at the camcorder settings. So on high quality right now and again some white balance and focusing options. We have been very pleased and in general with MOTOBLUR on the CLIQ but there are some UI issues that are not necessarily related to BLUR that have been bothering. For example, I am going to drag this along the clock icon off to the right here where the trash icon will show up so I can remove it. And you will notice that while doing that I will often be able to dump it and its gone. But I have moved to the next screen. Just kind of annoying. Its not a deal breaker. Also the screen's not as responsive as some. More often than not, when I am doing swipe some, opening up an application and [7]not more often than not, but too often I suppose is what you would say and that gets to be a little tiring. So MOTOBLUR contact management system also can be a little difficult to get a handle on with all the various linked contacts especially if you done like me and gone through and added contacts from multiple sources, removed them, readded them, sometimes the linked contacts get a little complicated. So a little bit messy, it needs to be cleaned up a bit. But in general, everything on the device works pretty well. I have been very very happy with it and I have really loved the keyboard. Its really a dynamite keyboard. And I am happy as a nice solid Android device. Still some work which could be done to it to improve it but I think Motorola has done a really fine job with the CLIQ so far. Another thing I really like about the device is the MOTOBLUR portal which allows you to not only locate your device within a 1000ft or something like that and tell you where [8]you lost it on an office or whether it is moving around town in a cab perhaps. Also allows you to do a remote wipe of the device which I have done, import contacts Its really a pretty usable system. Adds a lot of functionality that we havent seen on Android devices, so far. So overall I am very very pleased with the CLIQ It will be on sale for preorder starting on the 19th and available in general beginning next month for 199.99 with a two year contract. Not the cheapest price, but its a really solid device and I think people are really going to like it Once again, thats the MOTOROLA CLIQ for T-Mobile USA and I am Micheal Orell from MobileBurn.com


Channel: MobileBurn

MobileBurn: MOTOROLA CLIQ part 1

[0]This is Micheal Orell of MobileBurn.com and today I have with me the MOTOROLA CLIQ for TMobile USA, marketed as the DEXT in other parts of the world. It is a Android smartphone with a slideout QWERTY keyboard, capacitive half VGA display and a 5MP camera in addition to MOTOROLA's MOTOBLUR social networking support. Lets take a quick look at the hardware design. You can see horizontal slideout keyboard 4 full rows with a DPAD here, very good feel in the keys. This is one of my favorite keyboards, probably the favorite keyboard I have had in terms of this form factor. And I have used quite a few of them. Buttons for numbers, symbols shift button on both sides, dedicated back button which duplicates the functionality of this hardware button up here. And it is a hardware button, its not touch sensitive, it actually is a clicked to it. Same thing with the home and the menu keys. As I mentioned the keys have a really nice [1]feel to them. Works really well. Good solid click, this is the titanium finish device. There is also a white version. A volume control and a microUSB port for USB connectivity to a PC as well as charging. This little slider here throws the phone into silent and vibrate mode. You can say its just like a Palm Treo in that regard. When you can see the red its in silent mode and this is the normal mode. Both versions of the device have a textured backpanel. No flash or a supporter mirror for the camera. This is the power standby button here. Turns it to a device on and off. And this is a two stage camera shutter button. Up top is a 3.5mm headphone jack. Nothing much to see on the bottom. And the microphone is actually located at a tiny little indentation right there. [2]On the back of the device is the MOTOROLA logo when it is opened up and it actually glows which is pretty cool. Just to give you some scale, here is the MOTOROLA CLIQ next to HTC's Hero for Sprint. You can see the CLIQ is thicker but otherwise the two devices are about the same size and they both feature the same sized display. Same resolution as well. I have popped the rear cover off the device. So as you can see the battery with a little pull tab for removing it makes a lot easier. MicroSDHC card slot. 4 Gig card comes with the device. I have got a 16 Gig of my own in here which is loaded up with some of these and other things like that. And of course the SIM card slot. These The easiest way to activate the CLIQ is to press the menu button twice. First brings up the lock screen. Pressing again unlocks it. You see we have got a screen full of widgets here MOTOROLA and some third party. One of the nice things about this [3]system is when you throw into landscape mode everything adjusts accordingly. You can also use the DPad to move from home screen to home screen and just like on the HTC sense devices there is more than the standard 3 panel. So MOTOROLA has 5 panels. Now if you look at right here where my thumb is you will see a little visual indication of where you are with the red dot moving across 5 circles. You can of course see use finger swipes to move back and forth as well. One of the big things about MOTOBLUR is that it supports so many different accounts and links them all up. For example if I hit the messaging icon here, you can see a number of different inboxes. I have got personal IMAP mail, I have got exchange mail, Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, the text messaging inbox and the universal inbox which shows messages from all of those. The only thing its [4]missing in here is the GMail client. GMail is done directly through a GMail client although truth be bold, my Exchange account also happens to be a separate GMail account. So you can do GMail through the universal inbox by using it via Exchange. Right now I am in the universal inbox. You can see there is two direct messages from Twitter, little Twitter icon down here exchange message, and a personal email message going to the Exchange message you can see the message here. You can also read HTML versions Right now we are on a WiFi connection but the device supports EDGE and 3G data on TMobile's network. With the HTML version, you can see we have bolder text, colors and things like that. [5]If you want to create a new message, just tap on the plus sign here choose the account you want to create it with and say exchange and we can go here and start typing a message and double space for period. Subject and now lets go back up to To box. But before I do that, I am going to back out here Now you will notice that there is a little one next to the plus sign meaning there is already one new message and progress and so I can create yet another one or I can continue this one go back here and now lets select a contact you can filter your contacts based on account type. You can of course flip through all of them. If you have a lot of contacts like I do, sometimes easier to just pick the account. Pick the exchange account. I have only have one in here to make it [6]easier to find. And I am going to check that email address and there it is. Now I have To Subject and Message body all finished. Now I can just send off the message. The Happenings application works somewhat the same way Its a central Inbox for all your different social networking functions. You can look through old Twitter messages or anything like that You can also set your status on multiple different accounts at one time. I am going to say all services This is a status update. And now MySpace, Twitter and Facebook will all get the same status update at one time [7]Hit the home button to go back and we will slide over to the next panel. You can see right here this is. my status update. And this shows the last one I did. So its also an easy way to get back to this and add your own status update again. This is part of the messaging system. You can see I have the new direct message from Twitter, I can read it right here on the screen. Theres two of them Reply to them or remove them. No recent tweets coming in or anything like that. These are just set up with the test accounts so there is not much going on. You can access the contacts with this blue tab on the home screen Really normal looking contact application lets skip ahead by letter, and of course as I showed you before, you can filter by contact source. All our GMail contacts and if we switch over to history here, you will see all [8]the calls and messages from just those contacts. Lets go back here and go to All contacts again and we move over to status to see all the status updates from all of our contacts Twitter, Facebook, MySpace and all those things are in there You can filter by, say, Favorites or just say Twitter, in this case You can see my last personal update. That last Twitter update also shows up in the happenings widget on the screen. If we go to the home screen, hit the happenings button here. Again you can see there is the Twitter update, you can tap on it to the full things. Favorite it. And even send a reply. One of the things that the MOTOBLUR system does is links up contacts [9]I have a test contact right here. It has the MobileBurn test Twitter account linked to it and of course this is just the regular Google contact. So you can see the two things are mashed up. I can show you in specific, when I go Unlink contact and you can see the various contacts that are linked up here. Now some of them are like the MOTOBLUR address and thats part of keeping everything synced up in case you lose your device You can, then, unlink contacts or manually link them. Sometimes, the names dont quite match up or email addresses are different. You have to do them manually.


Channel: MobileBurn

PhoneScoop: Samsung Rogue

[0]Today phonescoop is taking a quick look at the Samsung Rogue, a new messaging phone for the Verizon network. You can see we have a fairly large touchscreen device here that is little bit on the thick side. Of course it is thick to accomodate a full QWERTY keyboard. On the front there is just a couple of buttons here at the bottom they are Clear key and Send and end keys. On the left side of the phone, we have got a volume toggle here. The volume toggle is easy to find. It has good travel and feedback. Here we see Samsung proprietary charging and data port. Little bit disappointed to see the proprietary port on here. Some of Samsung's newer phones have switched to microUSB so this phone must have been in the pipeline before that decision was made to switch to microUSB. On the bottom you can see nothing but the microphone hole there and we have got a whole lot going on here. [1]On the right side of the phone. We have got a dedicated camera key here, we have got a speakerphone key here, a voice application key here, and a lock key here, a slot covering the microSD hatch here and this is a full 3.5mm headset jack. And we have got the lan loop there. On the top we have nothing. And on the back you can see the camera. And this camera is a 3MP shooter. And you can see it has a flash and vanity mirror there, so you can preen yourself in shots. All the hardware feels pretty good, cant complain too much although it is a little thick for my tastes. Opening it up, you see a full QWERTY keyboard here and it is a nicely spaced 4 row keyboard. The row at the top dedicated to numbers which is always nice to have makes using a keyboard a little bit easier. And you can see on the space [2]bar here we have got a short cut to emoticons, and smiley faces and such although not too many other shortcuts here from the keyboard to things such as launching a text message or launching a browser or music player. Just the normal letters, numbers character, and you can see some control keys over here to move the cursor around so if you are wondering what system the rogue uses, of course it runs the TouchWiz user interface from Samsung and its the Verizon version of TouchWiz. So you can see we have got the dock the 4 main things on the bottom, the dialer, contacts, messaging and main menu just above the main buttons here, you can see this little status bar. So that tells you if and when you have got all sorts of different notifications. So the notifications bar is something that is nice to have and nice to see it on this phone's user interface [3]Of course, we have this sliding dock which can be used to quickly access a lot of the phone's systems. And as with other TouchWiz phones if you want to drop something on to the home screen you can do that. And of course you can take it and drop it right back in to the dock. Going to the main menu, we will jump in there and you can see the Going to the main menu, we will jump in there and you can see the Verizon icons here for the main menu and once you get here its a pretty similar to other TouchWiz phones. Hitting the settings tool, you will see the standard menu system for controlling the phone. And we can jump back out to see the browser. We will let the browser fire up here and even though we dont have massive amounts of coverage we will see how quickly the browser manages to launch itself there. And this is the new Verizon portal. You can see it is slightly optimized for finger [4]touch. We have got icons here on the home screen that we can easily touch to get the latest news. So we will hit the news one and see what it pulls up and we have got plenty of little news items down here. And this is a dock along the bottom that lets you control the way the browser behaves and if we hit the menu there you can see all the different things you can do on websites. We will jump all the way back out and exit the browser and look at some of the other applications The Rogue also supports email. Looking at email here we have three choices We could do mobile email which is Verizon's onboard email client. It could do corporate email for exchange accounts and mobile webmail which will use the mobile web to connect to the Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo and such to check mail via the browser rather than onboard client. So [5]we have got a lot of applications here preloaded on the phone. You can see Twitter and YouTube MySpace and Facebook. So nice to see social networking integration thats all good stuff and if we jump back into the main menu you can see that the main messaging client also supports visual voicemail. You have got instant messaging here, another link to email, chats, lots of different settings so That is the Samsung Rogue, a new TouchWiz based messaging phone for the Verizon network. Features a full QWERTY keyboard for easier messaging.

Channel: phonescoop

PhoneScoop: Samsung Moment

[0]This is the new Samsung Moment, a Android phone for the Sprint network. We can see it has a nice, large AMOLED display and on the front we have got a number of different controls here. We have got send and end keys an optical trackpad, and capacitive buttons here on the front face for controlling the Android menu system. On the left you can see we have got a volume toggle here for adjusting volume. Nothing along the back on the right side we have got a number of different buttons. We have got a dedicated camera key here. We have got a voice application key here. We have a mini excuse me, microUSB port which is nice to see on a Samsung phone. Lets take a look at the back here. Moment, with Google 3.2 MP camera with flash and vanity mirror and of course the Moment is a slider and has a full QWERTY keyboard. Nice spacious [1]4 row keyboard. Perhaps my favorite feature, a search key dedicated search key push a little button here and it will automatically take the cursor to the Google search bar So as for Android it will ship with Android 1.6 so but this particular unit has 1.5 on it. It does not have TouchWiz It is a naked Android user interface, so you can see that its does seem like other Android devices. We have got the main menu here which we can get to and we can swipe to other home screens here and its loaded with some Sprint services. You can see there NFL and Sprint TV are all here and ready to go and NASCAR and So we have got not too much preloaded on this obviously and we have got the notification bar up here with the Android system so Sprint and Samsung havent done too much to cut customize Android. They said that Sprint wasnt interested [2]in using TouchWiz so its just the basic user interface but there we go a look at the Samsung Moment for the Sprint network available in the coming weeks for $180.


Channel: phonescoop

PhoneScoop: MOTOROLA CLIQ

[0]Hey everybody, phonescoop here. Today we are talking a slightly more in depth look at the new MOTOROLA CLIQ, soon to be available for sale via TMobile. We looked at the CLIQ several weeks ago when it was first announced by Motorola, but now we have had some time to spend with it and have a lot more impressions based on daily use. Lets take a quick tour around the hardware before we dig into the software. We have got a generous screen on the front and just three buttons here. We have got a menu key, home key and back key. You will notice there is no send and end keys on the MOTOROLA CLIQ as there are with most other Android based handsets on the left side of the phone we have got a sliding lock key here and the volume toggle here. The volume toggle little bit hard to find and then we have got a microUSB port here along the bottom corner of the phone there. Nothing along the very bottom. And on the right you can see we [1]have got two different buttons. One is a two stage camera key and the other is a dedicated power and locking key. Nothing in particular along the back and on the top we have a full 3.5mm headset jack. Now one thing I am going to show you, take off the back cover there we have got the SIM card slot, big old battery and here is the microSD card slot. We have also got this really weird little hatch thingy that you have to pull back in order to retrieve the card, so they dont make it easy, card is locked in there good and tight. So you know its not going to go anywhere. And also, atleast you could hot swap though. You cannot take the card out while the phone is running. And thats the hardward, and of course we shouldnt forget the full QWERTY keyboard. I will be honest with you folks, I was not the biggest fan of this keyboard. Very mushy, in particular, the [2]T key has no travel and feedback at all and that could be because I have a preproduction unit here but you know it keyboard was not the strong point. I felt the keys themselves were not the easiest to find and travel and feedback wasnt all that great. D pad here however does work good. One thing to notice. You will see lots of ply with the top half of the phone when I shake it around It wasnt put together exactly you know super duper strong The MOTOROLA CLIQ of course runs MOTOROLA's new MOTOBLUR service which you can see here on the main screen. Basically what MOTOBLUR does is stream all your Facebook and Twitter updates on to the home screen so you can see we have a weather widget. This message box here is for messages that are directed specifically at you. So any DMs you get from Twitter [3]any emails you get from Facebook, or status updates on your page as well as text and SMS messages are going to go in this area here you can dive down and read them individually. The very top are updates that you put up.So if I update my Twitter status or Facebook feed that where it goes right there. And you can see that we can easily post something to all the services or to either Facebook or Twitter depending on how feel And this of course is your Facebook and Twitter stream and I am not going to dive into that only because I dont want to reveal the identity of all the people that I follow and who follow me and converse with me but basically you tap this, it opens and you can swipe sideways to see all the different pages of things people post. So this is going to be the only one we look at. And this is basically how it appears. You will see that all the happenings that show up here on your stream will look [4]exactly like this. And you can swipe sideways through them to look at them more in depth. Other things that are on the home screen of the MOTOROLA CLIQ are news feed which you can see here, looks very similar to happenings and again you can zoom through it sideways. And of course entertainment, we can dive into entertainment and look at all sorts of different headlines here and whats really interesting of course is that this is fully customizable. So we will hit set up, go in here and you can have all sorts of different crazy feeds that you can put into your own channel. So we will choose a channel, we will go to the best in blogs, we will go to technology blogs because hey, thats why you are here right and you can see all the different blogs that are listed here that we can choose from. So we will go to the top 10 google android blogs and you can see it has a whole list of different android blogs there. We can choose any of these and have their information fed into our home screen feed. So [5]you could spend hours and hours and hours doing this. Its a little bit fun, but it also takes time, and you can see how far down we dug before we get back out to the main screen its pretty far. Of course we also have other areas in the home screen to drop in content that we like. Also included out of the box we got some tips and tricks in getting started. These are things that you can ditch and get rid of after you have used it for a little while. Basically just offer you ways on how to use the device more effectively. Of course we have the main Android menu here not changed from other Android phones. Course we want to go to the phone dialer we just tap here we have the basic dialer, using this key we can jump into our contacts, we can use voice commands or we can choose this to go into search mode, search through our contacts. You can also look at recent calls, frequent calls and set up your own speed dial and call quality is OK, and interacting with the phone itself is not [6]bad. So those are the basics. We could spend all day diving into MOTOBLUR and how it works, but you have seen a pretty nice overview here. Of course, you know, the MOTOBLUR comes with a number of other features such as the camera, video recorder, gallery application, instant messaging, music application you name it, its pretty much all there. Nice that its preloaded with TeleNav Office, you have got the voice search, voice dialing, YouTube application and social networking all built right in. And of course Google services such as GMail Google Maps, Google Talk and so on. Here is the other happenings client you can access it from the home page or you can look at like this. And this is where it will basically feed or stream all your Facebook and Twitter updates into long, long continuous stream of posts. So you never have to actually check a separate Facebook [7]or Twitter client. You can just use happenings directly and access all your information from here. So pretty interesting way to interact with all your social networks. That is the MOTOROLA CLIQ, a new Android phone from MOTOROLA running MOTOBLUR.


Channel: phonescoop

PhoneScoop: Palm Pre App Catalog

Of course the Palm Pre is the first device that will be able to access the yet to be released Palm app catalog. We will look at the beta version now that was loaded on to the Pre so you will get a sense of how it works. Pressing the App Catalog here very similar to other app stores that we have seen from competitors to Palm. We will take a few minutes to load and populate the store. There is not a whole lot of applications here right now and you can see the big beta signal there. You can see the application have ratings, star ratings. If we want to check out Pandora we will load that up and you can see it has been reviewed 28 times. Its been downloaded 2007 times. The application itself is 253 kB and if you want to we can read reviews and you can see how its tagged and sorted on the page itself. You want to download push the download button. Most applications download in just several seconds and then they will automatically install themselves and then after the application is installed the app catalog remains open. It doesnt exit out. We can continue to search for other applications or we can launch Pandora directly from there and you can see how that works. So thats a quick view of how the Palm App Catalog will work.

Channel: phonescoop

PhoneScoop: Palm Pixie

[0]This is the new Palm Pixie. This is our latest addition to the WebOS line of products It is the smallest product that we have ever made. As you can see, it is extremely thin, compact and stylish. It shares a lot of capabilities with the Pre including the intuitive WebOS as well as a multi-touch screen. The touch screen on this product is a 320 by 400 capacitive touch panel screen you can use gestures to go in and out of applications to delete list items, to scroll, as well as you can use the touch to zoom in and out of web pages. In addition to the display area the gesture area in black at the bottom of the display area is also touch sensitive. So I can use this area to go back, I can use the center bar here to go into the card view. I can also do swipe up to bring up the launcher. So both the display area as well as [1]the gesture area are touch sensitive and I can use gestures in both places To round off the front of the device, we have a full QWERTY keyboard which is exposed so someone who wants to send a quick message can do that without having to worry about opening the slider, which on the Pre provides us a bigger screen Lets turn to the side. As I mentioned its an extremely thin device and you can see this in the side profile. Its more than 10% thinner than the iPhone 3GS and more than 20% thinner than any BlackBerry model out there today. At the top as you would expect from any Palm phone is a ringer switch so you can easily put the phone to silent mode when you are in a meeting or in a cinema hall. The volume up down buttons and nicely tucked in here is the microUSB port which allows you to charge through the wall adapter or also connect to the PC for trickle charging, for moving files back and forth as well for doing iTunes sync for your DRM free music [2]Turn back and you have a 2MP camera with an LED flash. The camera is optimized to take really quick pictures and because of the flash you can take pictures even in dim environments. 3.5mm standard headset jack so you can use your favorite headsets for listening music and you can always be on hands free phone calls as well. Lets talk about the back cover. The back cover is removable and completely replaceable. The back cover you are seeing right now is the standard one that we ship with. You can use an optional inductive back cover and the phone TouchStone compliant so if you have a TouchStone charging accessory you can charge the phone using the inductive back cover. In addition to that we are talking personalization on this phone to a new level. As you can see, we are announcing the availability of the Palm pixie artist series back covers. We have worked with 5 California artists on these really [3]interesting designs which allow our end users through art rather than just through color. And we feel the end users in this category will really enjoy that These will be available at the time when Pixie becomes available by the holidays this year and the other thing to notice all these back covers are also touch stone compliant. So I can take one of these and place it on the TouchStone and you will see its magnetic so it can be used to charge through the TouchStone as well. So thats the Palm Pixie. Lets talk about Facebook. As you already know with WebOS, when we launched the Pre we have Facebook integrated into contacts, calendar as well photo upload So you can easily upload photos to your Facebook account. Now complimenting that functionality with a dedicated Facebook application as you can see here Application which will be available with the Pixie allows me to update my status It gives me access to my entire newsfeed so I can stay on top of whats going on in my friends [4]lives. I can comment on their status and I can also view their pictures. In this case, Kate, who is at Fashion week in New York, has just uploaded an album of all the pictures she took there. I can look at these pictures pretty much like the default photos application on the device. I can flick through the pictures using the gestures. I can double tap to zoom in double tap to zoom out. I can turn the device around and view the picture in landscape mode as well. Turn it back. Flip back to the first picture. Tap on it. I really like the picture. So I am going to actually leave her a message. I can send her a message on Facebook so this gets posted on Facebook right when I do it here on the client side This is an example of the kind of new functionality that will be available with the Palm Pixie. The other area where we have been doing a lot of work [5]is our application catalog in SDK. As you know we announced beta for application catalog including eCommerce recently. It will go out of beta by the end of this Fall. And thats when we will start talking general submissions. But I wanted to showcase a couple of third party applications that we have here on the phone and how those are integrated in the rest of the system. So lets look at the iLike concerts application. If you like music and you would like to go to a concert there is no better way to plan it than the iLike application. So when the application loads at the top I see the name of the city where I am currently as well as list of concerts around me listed by date as well as popularity. I can also filter them using other criteria such as venues. So if I am interested in lets say the Fillmore I can just type the name and it will filter the list and in this case I am going to bring up the [6]Fillmore and it will tell me all the shows that are going to take place in the Fillmore in the new near future. So I am a big David Cook fan. So I am interested in this concert. All the information that I need in order to plan for the concert is available right here. It tells me the date, it tells me the location if I want to go with a friend I can tell a friend and this is the kind of integration I am talking about. It immediately composes an email and takes me to the email application and it precompose the email included all the information as well as a URL link to the show and I can just type in the to field the name of my friend that I want to send it to in this case, Kate, and then just send the email. We allow all our third party this kind of integration, so the applications, the third party applications are not isolated. They are not silos but they are very well integrated into the native functionality of the device. One other point of integration is calendar. So I want to add this event to my calendar [7]so I dont forget. Sometimes I forget whether I booked the tickets for the Monday or the Tuesday. Now it gave me a notification that it has been added to the calendar. We can go launch the calendar application and I can see there is the David Cook show at Fillmore 8 o clock.

Channel: phonescoop