Froyo 2.2 update HTC Desire, Mark Moons makes Yoghurt go bad

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Mark moons (Director at HTC Benelux) yesterday announced the roll out of Froyo Android 2.2 for HTC Desire handsets. But after a while his statements on twitter and Facebook have turned from really sweet into bitter and sour. HTC Germany denies the roll out (at least for Germany) and says that Froyo is still in final testing stage. Hundreds, if not thousands of happy campers were anticipating the roll out at various (gadget)forums, where after many hours the anti climax became clear. HTC why would you do this to your users, first there was the very bad update scheme for the Hero and now this. HTC has a rep to keep up, but it is slowly deteriorating. Oh well, will have to wait and see I guess.

Motorola event: Motoblur

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Motorola's Sanjay K. Jha acknowledges that mobile broadband has become ubiquitous and he even expects more growth worldwide. Well that's surely agreeable, but what role does Motorola see for itself in these developments? Well Motorola has a line of devices coming up, but has only announced a single device during the keynote on the event. That device is the Motoblur, an Android device that merges all of your information streams to make it accessible when and where you like. Motoblur actually seems like an HTC Hero interface. It has live widgets like the Hero and home screen is customizable. In addition, during the event, T-mobile announced the Click, a Motoblur Android phone.

Pretty dissappointing so far if you ask me. This phone is definitely not the long awaited Sholes which will probably be announced in a few weeks. If at all that is. Because I don't really see why they would wait with the announcement. So that could mean that all of the exciting rumours in the past months may have been bogus. Let's hope not though.

We'll keep you posted!

HTC Hero coming to Sprint

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"Sprint and HTC Corporation today announced the upcoming arrival of the much-anticipated HTC Hero™ from Sprint, the first wireless device offering the combination of the open and innovative Android platform with the high-speed connectivity of America’s most dependable 3G network1 (EVDO Rev. A.) Offering a rich mobile Internet experience, the much-anticipated HTC Hero offers synchronization for built-in Google mobile services, including Google Search™, Google Maps™, Gmail™, and YouTube™ as well as access to thousands of applications built on the Android platform."

So here it is, finally customers in the US have clarity on where to get the beloved Android phone. Availability is set on October 11th. Oddly the phone will look very different from the European version, as can be seen on some leaked pictures from the web. I wonder what Americans will like better though. I also wonder what version of Android will ship with the US Hero, as Android 1.6 was announced today. It would make sense for the update to be preinstalled but I guess you just never know.

Augmented reality for Android getting a boost

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A variety of Android applications featuring augmented reality have hit the market recently. Although technically in my opinon tagging an object in camera vision with a dot is not really augmented reality, nor does it reach its full potential that way, it is certainly interesting to see programmers get enthusiastical about the concept.

The latest addition in AR is a traffic program that allows users in Toronto to see real time images of traffic on their route, thus enabling users to avoid traffic jams, or to avoid getting on certain roads even before leaving the house.

Watch a video of the app in action:



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Nokia introduces Atom based "Booklet 3G" with 3.5G, a-gps and HD screen

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Nokia has announced a netbook based on the US15W-chipset. That means it will have an Intel Atom Z530 processor. The netbook will be capable of HD playback and sports a 10 inch, high resolution (HD) screen.

It is impressive to see the amount of netbooks emerging capable of HD playback. It seems like Tegra netbook producers are facing some fierce competition in the future. The Nokia netbook is expected in December and it is rumored to ship with Windows 7, meaning that Nokia is not counting on Maemo for a netbook breakthrough.

I think this netbook can be very interesting, however I am a bit disappointed that it doesn't have a touchscreen, which would have been quite interesting with Windows 7 installed.

Press release

TomTom application coming to Android, Android navigation to step up to the next level

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Exciting news for Android fans longing for quality navigation: TomTom executives have indicated that it will not be long before a TomTom app for Android becomes available.

"We cannot ignore such a successful platform as Android. HTC is an important partner of ours and Android is becoming increasingly important too."

This is good news for the Android navigation market. Not only will this encourage the competition to produce better software, having a TomTom app is in itself an awesome deal. TomTom is still considered the pinnacle of navigation software and using my HTC Hero with TomTom will definitely convince me to leave my old N95 at home when navigating to, say, inner city Berlin.

Via: Pocket-lint

The Ultraportable MSI Wind12 U200, World's first Penryn ULV/GMA4500MHD netbook

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MSI has released a 12,1 inch beauty of a netbook. This little powermachine sports up to 4GB of RAM controlled by the new Intel Penryn SFF ULV processor. Now if that is not unique enough for a netbook: The new MSI prodigy comes with the Intel GMA4500MHD chipset which supports 1080p playback. The screen has a 1366 by 768 resolution which is really good and will let you enjoy HD playback for what it's supposed to. Of course 1080p will be scaled down, but hey, what netbook out there lets you watch HD at all? The only let down is the lack of an SSD. But then again, HDD will give you more space at a lower cost, so with HD playback in mind, this is a reasonable choice.

The price range of this tiny monster is set between 500 and 700 euros. Boy, I am getting really excited to see netbook technology progress this fast. This might in fact be a serious competitor to the new Tegra based netbooks. Of course, the MSI U200 will have to make a bit of a price drop in order to become a true threat to cheap low power Tegra netbooks, but it's a start!

Press release