The rumored Motorola Shadow becomes Google Nexus Two?

Only a few weeks back we heard for the first time of Motorola Shadow. Now rumor has it that it will actually become Google's next Android based device, namely the Nexus Two. That aside, we have something more to share with you: a couple of images revealing Shadow's design, QWERTY keyboard and huge touchscreen display.

There are some pretty interesting things a man could learn over at the Mobile01. That is where the Shadow image and information were leaked. Reportedly, the Motorola Shadow will be only 9mm (we suspect that this is actually a typo, considering the QWERTY keyboard) thin and will feature a huge 4.3" touchscreen of 850 x 484 pixels (or more probably 854 x 480 pixels), HDMI port and will pack an 8-megapixel snapper capable of 1080p video recording.

Motorola Shadow

Now, a glance at the new images reveals that the Motorola Shadow (or should we say Google Nexus Two) will also have a side-slide QWERTY-keyboard and an enormous wrist strap eyelet. Unlike the all-black MILESTONE/DROID, the Shadow will apparently come with a black front, white keyboard and some red accents.

More images of the rumored Motorola Shadow

It is still unknown if the Shadow/Nexus Two will run the Android OS v2.1 or a newer version, maybe the rumored Froyo (comes from "frozen yogurt").

And while we're at it, there is one more Android based Motorola device that leaked these days. Of course, we mean the Ruth (a.k.a. Motorola MB511) which specs have been spotted in company's own user agent profile database.

Nothing thrilling in the Motorola Ruth specs

Unfortunately, there's nothing thrilling to see: the Ruth will be a GSM/WCDMA with a Qualcomm MSM 7200A 528 MHz processor and MOTOBLUR-ed Android OS v1.5 aboard. The low resolution screen (of only 240 x 320 pixels) along with the other specs suggests that the phone will be competing with affordable devices such as the HTC Tattoo.

Source

According to the Motorola CEO, the majority of company’s future devices will feature multi-touch support

In a recent interview Motorola’s CEO, Sanjay Jha, revealed that the company will release more multi-touch enabled devices in the future. However, it is still unknown whether those will reach the shores of the United States.

If you didn’t know, Stateside the company’s dream-of-a-revival-come-true Motorola DROID lacks multi-touch support while its GSM sibling, the MILESTONE, has it.

It’s a sound guess that the reasons for the DROID not to pack multi-touch are not technical but as the Motorola CEO confirms “there’s a complex set of factors” (was it Google, was it Apple, both or maybe someone else, the truth is still a mystery).

The same interview revealed something else I find quite intriguing – Motorola are about to announce some new devices, which will finally be able to solve the problem all the tablet manufacturers are facing: creating a mobile device that is compact enough to fit in your pocket and at the same time to offer a large screen (a 7-8″ one maybe) and a keyboard.

Oh, yeah, I’m more than eager to see that gadget in person. And in action too!

Source

Capacitive screens test round 1 – iPhone, HTC Droid Eris, Motorola Milestone and Google Nexus One

Now you know having a capacitive touchscreen is cool but have you ever wondered which one is the coolest of them non-stylus lot? MOTO developed very simple and yet effective test for comparing different capacitive touchscreens. The first four handsets to be tested are four of the top-end smartphones available on the market – iPhone, HTC Droid Eris, Motorola Milestone and Google Nexus One.
The test is rather simple – drawing lines on the screen with a finger – the first time barely touching the screen and applying some force on the second go. Now there are several outside factors that can affect the performance of each device (moisture of the finger or how steady the hand of the tester is to name the two most obvious) but hopefully the guys from MOTO took them into consideration and did their best so the test remains as objective as possible.


The results are here for everyone to see – the iPhone gives the most accurate response to touch in the center but has some problems around the edges. The Milestone scored worst of the four, with quite a lot of inaccuracies all over the screen. Unsurprisingly the HTC-manufactured Nexus One and Droid Eris perform identically – fairly linear tracks with some waviness.
The main reason why people prefer the capacitive technology is that only a gentle touch is required for a click to be registered. Yet the accuracy is also quite important when dealing with smaller UI elements, so it’s good to know that when all comes to the screen there will be an easy tool for comparing and choosing the best.
Here is a video of the actual test:

And just to be clear, MOTO have nothing in common with Motorola. You can find the full test article and explanations here.

The awsome Droid

It's this simple: If you don't buy an iPhone, buy a Droid.







It's the best phone on Verizon, and with Android 2.0, the second best smartphone you can buy, period. It's flawed, deeply in some ways. But it's the second best phone around, on the best network around.






Droid is a champion of possibilities: for Motorola, for Verizon, for Android 2.0. It exists to show you what each of them can really do. You can kind of think of it like a Super G1, laying out what it means to be an Android 2.0 phone, with powerful new processors and delicious new displays with sky-high resolutions. If Droid is merely the first in a new wave, we have a lot to be excited about.






The Shiny New OS


The main attraction for Droid is Android 2.0, the remarkably updated mobile OS from Google. It's so important, it gets its own review. After all, you will start to see it on other phones soon. It's what makes Droid so great—new navigation app, new contacts/social network syncing, better email management, better browser—but also why Droid still falls short of the iPhone, particularly when it comes to managing music and video. If there's something you don't see here, chances are we discussed it in the earlier piece—if you care about the phone, you're gonna want to read the full software review too.






Design and Build


It didn't hit me until last weekend why Droid's design struck such an emotional chord with me. Was it the functionalist, industrial masculinity, expressed perfectly through glass and metal and unapologetic angles, in a powerful phone that's remarkably streamlined? It's all of that, yes. But it's also the fact that aesthetic is rendered black and gold metal accents, which is why it taps into something deep and profoundly affective from my childhood:


It's practically cheating. I can't not love the design of this phone.






Oh, That Screen


Droid's 3.7-inch, 854x480 display with an eye-popping pixel density of 267ppi, is the kind of screen you ache for. An analogy: Do you remember how amazing you thought Nintendo 64 games looked, ten years ago? Have you looked at them lately? Do you remember the sinking feeling you got, realizing just how ugly they are now? That's how'll you'll feel looking at every other phone with the now-standard 480x320 screens we thought were so gorgeous a couple of years ago. They're lo-fi and lifeless by comparison.






It's the clarity of the text that captivates. It's true, there've been Windows phones with excellent screens that have the same resolution as Droid, but the font rendering has always been too weak to take advantage of them. Reading ebooks on an iPhone has always given me a headache (so I don't), but with Droid's pixel density, I could read on it for hours. It's that good. The color's fantastic, too, though not Zune HD OLED level.






Touch response is mostly effective. When there are misfires, like getting no response when you flick your finger to pull out the app menu, it's hard to tell if it's the phone or the software—at least until more Android 2.0 phones are out there. But no serious complaints.






Keyboard and Strange Buttons


The keyboard is okay. I liked it a lot more on Day 1 than I do today, and that's because I never got any faster. The problem is that the key landscape is too flat and homogenous—a necessary sacrifice for Droid's remarkable skinniness—so there's simply no way to feel out precisely what key your thumb's on, meaning I never broke out of having to stare at the keyboard while typing. I found the actual layout to be excellent. Overall, the keyboard works, but you'll probably never fly on it. I'm faster on the landscape touch keyboard, personally.






The d-pad's not as dandy as a trackball for getting around, but for navigating around text, it's better than I expected—despite its puniness, I never pressed the wrong button.






But I hate the four soft touch buttons on the front of the phone. For one, there are no dedicated phone or end call buttons, so if you accidentally call somebody at 4am, you have to figure out how to end the call exclusively via the software interface. For two, the lack of feedback is annoying, especially if you're holding down the search button trying to activate voice search and it's not coming up. Did you miss the button? Are you pressing it wrong? Who knows? If Android's going to rely hard on these four buttons, the way iPhone relies on the home button, they need to be actual physical objects.






This Camera Sucks


The camera is complete garbage. It takes 10 years to start up, 2 to focus, and another 4 to actually take the goddamn picture. And there's no distinct visual feedback to let you know a photo's been snapped. And the photos suck. That pumpkin shot, in decent lighting, is as good as it gets. Like I said in the Android 2.0 review, I don't know if it's the hardware or the software, but it's inexcusably bad. (Update: Here's a couple of more shots from the camera. You can compare the indoors one with the much better Sprint Hero sample shot seen here, since they were taken in the same place.)





















Video's not terrible, though, beyond the fussy format even VLC doesn't even like playing:






Performance


Droid's brain is a potent ARM Cortex A8 TI OMAP 3430—it's basically the same as the chips inside of the Palm Pre and iPhone 3GS. Like I said in the Android 2.0 review, while it runs apps and multitasks with gusto, basic things like menus and the desktop stutter way too often. It's like driving a Ferrari with a door that groans loudly every time you open it.






Battery Life


With moderate to heavy usage—browsing, some navigation, push Gmail, moderate app usage, with the occasional app running in the background—I managed to make it through a full 8-12 hour day before recharging, each day for about a week, though some days were closer than others. Your mileage will vary, depending on how many apps you've got running in the background and how much you hit GPS, but my experience was that it was entirely acceptable for a modern smartphone.






Nuts, Bolts and Stability


Verizon's network is top notch, and being able to actually use the internet on my phone with impunity in New York is revelatory. In both New York and Seattle testing, reception has been excellent, though around Pittsburgh, it was spottier than expected. Voice quality was pretty excellent whenever we didn't use Google Voice.






While definitely stable enough to use as an everyday phone, we did run into a few bugs: GPS accuracy was wildly off-target on more than one occasion, pinpointing our location hundreds of miles away, and the only way to fix it was to reboot the phone (I assume that's a software issue, not a hardware one). We also had one complete crash after finishing a phone call that required a reboot. And more apps stopped responding more often than we were used to on previous versions of Android, requiring a force close.