Another photo of HTC Bravo in the wild, this time from Poland

The Nexus One is already out in the open market, but its HTC cousin - the HTC Bravo - is still very much a rumor. Yet another photo popped up and this might be the best one yet - you can get another look at what has changed between the HTC Bravo and the Nexus One.

The HTC Bravo matches pretty much all of the specs of the Nexus One, but there are exceptions - the trackball has been replaced by an optical trackpad and the phone's Android OS 2.0 (or possibly 2.1) is dressed in the pretty, multi-touch enabled Sense UI clothes.

The HTC Bravo also sports a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, a 3.7" AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with WVGA resolution (480 x 800), a 5MP camera, Wi-Fi, GPS, HSDPA and HSUPA all crammed into a shell only 11.7mm thick. The RAM was originally listed as 256MB, then we heard 320MB, but in the end it might turn up to be even more - the Nexus One has 512MB RAM.

A week ago there was a rumor that the HTC Bravo will be available at T-Mobile UK by the end of January, free on a 35 pounds a month contract. But the end of January is approaching fast and there's still no official word from T-Mobile. A different rumor says that the HTC Bravo will be in Europe in March, but again there's no confirmation.

Source

Nokia X6 and LG GD510 Pop go pink for Valentine's Day

Okay class, pick up your painting palettes and your coloring books - we're going to paint your favorite mobile phone in a new color. Let's start with the Nokia X6, then the LG GD510 Pop. Since Valentine’s Day is coming, let’s make both phones pink. Much better.

Ok, now serious. You might have heard rumors of a Nokia X6 without Comes With Music and that it will have 16GB internal storage instead of 32GB. More information has surfaced that supports that rumor and adds a few details.

It will be available in new colors - Pink on White as well as Black on Black - to go with the Red on Black and Blue on Black currently available for the 32GB version of the Nokia X6. According to Eldar Murtazin the 16GB version will be 100 euro cheaper than the 32GB version but you will be losing the WH-500 headphones in addition to the Comes With Music subscription.

The expected release date for the 16GB Nokia X6 is somewhere in the second half of February.

Update: The 16GB version of the Nokia X6 is official. It’s confirmed that it doesn’t have Comes With Music and it will be available in all black, all white, Pink on White and Yellow on White. The Nokia X6 16GB will come with the new Ovi Maps with free voice-guided drive and walk navigation and Michelin and Lonely Planet guides.

Official Nokia X6 16GB photos

The Nokia X6 16GB will be available this quarter. Instead with the WH-500 headphones the X6 16GB will come with a pair of the much cheaper WH-701. There’s still no word on the price though.

The LG GD510 Pop is also going chameleon with a few new colors. Some of those colors we've seen before but there are a few new ones too. Here's the lineup of the five available color versions:

Yep, there's a pink LG GD510 Pop but LG didn't give a specific date for when the new colors will be available. There's still time to Valentine's Day but not much, allowing for delivery.

Source

T-Mobile USA gets HTC HD2 with 576 MB RAM

It must have been annoying for the T-Mobile USA subscribers to have to wait three months longer than everybody else to get the HTC HD2. Well it seems their patience will be rewarded with an upgraded version of the device packing 576MB RAM and 1GB ROM. This definitely looks like a good spot for landing Windows Mobile 7 when it eventually becomes available.

And the good news doesn't end there. The T-Mobile USA will receive a 16GB microSD cards in their HTC HD2 retail boxes, instead of the 2GB available in the European/Asia packages.

The rest of the HD2 specs remain intact, but it doesn't change the fact T-Mobile will offer the most powerful HTC HD2 ever made. The rumored requirements for Windows Mobile 7 include 1GB ROM, so it might turn out that the T-Mobile's units will be the only ones to get the OS upgrade when available.

HTC USA

HTC HD2 gets optional extended battery and kickstand

If the battery life was your only concern about the omnipresent HTC HD2 we have some great news coming your way. HTC has just come up with an extended battery that packs twice the juice of the original one. And to make things even sweeter it throws in a kickstand as well, which should be a major boost to the video watching experience.

The bad (though perfectly expected) news is that those come with a replacement battery cover that adds a few millimeters to the HTC HD2 waistline. This however shouldn’t be too much of a concern, since the device is only 11mm thick with its original casing and even with the saucier battery it will still remain among the slimmest smartphones available on the market.

Our dedicated battery test indicated that the HTC HD2 in-box battery performance was pretty decent indeed so we guess the extended one should be able to take you through a day even if you don’t let it rest for a second. Just think about it – 9 hours of video playback sounds almost insane, considering the 1GHz CPU and the 4.3” WVGA screen.

The HTC HD2 extended battery will be available starting next month for 60 euro (85 US dollars). If you are still interested, you can preorder yours fClove UK.

Source

Really cheap Gigabyte Android phone leaks

When it comes to smartphones on the cheap, Symbian is the most common OS with the occasional Windows Mobile sneaking in. Rumor has it that Gigabyte will try to wedge Android in there too with one of the cheapest Android devices yet.

The cheapest Android right now is the HTC Tattoo for 210 euro (300 US dollars). The Android-running Gigabyte GSmart will be priced at less than 9000 rubles for the Russian market, which works out to less than 210 euro.

The rumored Android-running Gigabyte GSmart

Coincidentally, the specs of the HTC Tattoo and the Gigabyte GSmart are almost identical as well - 528MHz CPU, 256MB RAM/512MB ROM, 2.8" QVGA screen, Wi-Fi, GPS, Bluetooth, microSD and 3.5mm audio jack.

The Tattoo however has the upper hand - the Gigabyte GSmart Android phone reportedly only has two-band GSM/EDGE, versus the Tattoo's quad-band GSM/EDGE and two-band 3G with 7.2Mbps HSDPA. It also has a 3MP auto-focus camera, while the camera on the new Gigabyte GSmart is just 2MP with auto-focus. Both phones run Android v1.6, but while the Tattoo has HTC's Sense UI, the Android on the GSmart looks vanilla.

The physical dimensions for the Gigabyte's first Android phone are 103 x 54 x 13.4 mm and it's powered by a 1500mAh battery.

The Gigabyte GSmart with Android is expected to come out in February. The price is said to be lower than 210 euro, but if it's not much lower, than the GSmart faces a tough competition from the Tattoo (and upcoming HTC's) - HTC is well established in the Android world.

Source (site in Russian)

Windows Mobile 6.6 coming in February, 7.0 to be delayed again?

Microsoft plans to launch the 6.6 update for their Windows Mobile OS next month bringing capacitive touchscreen support, among other performance optimizations and bug fixes.

The official announcement of the new version will most probably take place at the MWC 2010 in February in Barcelona.

I have to admit the Windows Mobile 6.5 did well into the smartphone sector and the capacitive-display-packing HTC HD2 was a huge success. So bringing native capacitive touchscreen support is definitely the next logical step.

Despite the fact Windows Mobile 7 is cooking in the Microsoft labs, it seems they won’t give up the 6.5 version and will continue to improve it. The bad news is that this extra work on the 6.6 version may result in delaying WinMo 7 for the early 2011, instead of releasing it in 2010.

I am still hoping that this rumor is wrong and the actual Microsoft event in Barcelona will be the unveiling of Windows Mobile 7. After all Microsoft were pretty clear that even WinMo 6.5 wasn’t a part of their plan, so why bother with another minor update?

Source

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

Nokia X6 enters the review queue in all its capacitive goodness

I do admit that GSMArena.com is running a bit late on X6 review. Unfortunately sometimes getting the phones is not as easy as some of you might think. Especially when we are talking a handset of such high public interest as the Nokia X6, on which everyone wants to get their hands.

Nokia X6 at ours

But now that we have it in, we can guarantee you that we will do our best to come up with a detailed review as soon as possible. But for now we have prepared a short unboxing video as a brief warm-up. This will also give you a chance to ask some questions that you want answered in the review.

From what our first impressions show the Nokia X6 is basically a Nokia 5800 XpressMusic mainboard, blessed with the 5530 software and a capacitive display. Okay there are a few other novelties but the handset is almost exclusively about the capacitive display.

Nokia produced one of the best resistive displays in business (N900, N97 and N97 mini) but even they realized that this technology has its limitations. So here goes the next logical step in their touchscreen evolution.

The other key feature of the Nokia X6 is the Nokia WH-500 headphones that are included in the retail package. Powerful and nicely designed, they promise to change the way we look at inbox accessories for good.

Those and many more will be discussed in great depth in the full review. Now kick back and enjoy the video.

It didn’t really take long: the HTC Google Nexus One can already be unlocked and rooted

p>Five short days was all it took the Android community to enable Google Nexus One unlocking and rooting. Read on to find how to gain administrative rights on your shiny new Android 2.1 device.

And the best part is that you don’t need to be a genius to do it on your own. There is even a video which leads you through the whole process. So, all you need are 8-9 minutes of spare time to watch it. Well that and a Nexus One phone, of course.

Along with the video the guys from the Android and Me blog have posted an extensive step-by-step guide for rooting and unlocking the Nexus One so you might want to do the reading first and then proceed with the whole thing. Bear in mind that this might (and most probably will) void your warranty. Also if you find the instructions not quite clear you might want to stop right there before you have damaged the device.

Right now, the list of available custom ROMs is quite short but given enough time it will grow to a more acceptable size. And, as you know, once you’ve rooted your Android smartphone you’ll be able to get lots of new goodies for it. You know, enabling tethering, getting some apps that only work on rooted devices… that kind of stuff.

Only 20 000 HTC Google Nexus One Android smartphones sold a whole week after its market launch

HTC Google Nexus One is a superphone, indeed. And it seemed to have all it takes to become a market hit as well. But apperently something went wrong, because the start of its sales is seriously short of impressive? As it turns out only around 20 000 Nexus One Android smartphones have been sold during the first week after the official market launch of the device.

So, if this trend keeps up, the Google’s first smartphone might just fail to set the world alight. Let me remind you that analysts expected 5 to 6 million Nexus Ones to be sold by the end of the year.

The first week sales of the Nexus One seem miserable when put next to the 250 000 units of Motorola DROID or the 1.5 million units of Apple iPhone 3GS in their first weeks of existence.

But let’s not forget that the HTC Google Nexus One is currently only shipping SIM-free to USA, UK, Hong Kong and Singapore. As this list grows we might expect the sales speed to increase.

Best seller or not, one thing is for sure – the Nexus One made the beginning of this year far more exciting than I could have ever expected.

First leaked screenshots of Samsung Bada OS

Soon after the official Samsung Bada OS presentation last week, the first screenshots made their way online. The new OS is a definite looker and you can really tell it’s based on Samsung’s current non-smartphone TouchWiz UI.

Now here’s a another set of screenshots…

I can’t stop seeing this as a colorful cocktail of TouchWiz, Android and a pinch of Symbian, but hey that’s just me.

It will be a lot of time before we see a working Bada smartphone, but Samsung will surely enter the fray with a nice set of wheels.

Sources:

Samsung Flash Wiki

Engadget Germany

10 good reasons to jailbreak your iPhone, no matter what generation

I guess there’s a large number of iPhone owners that are still hesitant to jailbreak their iPhones. They consider jailbreaking a dangerous and daunting task that may eventually void their warranty. Since I’m on the other side of that barricade, I’ve put down a nice list of the 10 new features you will get if you go for jailbreaking. The benefits are more than ten, but I’ve compiled the most major ones.

Jailbreaking is a software process that unlocks the access to the iPhone original system files so that you can modify some of them for the better. You shouldn’t confuse it with a carrier unlock. Jailbreaking allows us to unleash the true power of the Apple’s iPhone.

Getting your iPhone jailbroken is like getting a totally different device – at least software-wise. And while I find it next to impossible to resist the tempting new features, I can totally understand you may have perfectly good reasons to keep your iPhone untouched. But hopefully, this list will help you convert.

And a word of warning! This post is not a tutorial in jailbreaking your iPhone. If you need one, a nice place to start is iClarified iPhone section. Installing unofficial third-party apps may cause unwanted side effects so always rely on your good judgment when dealing with those. I am not to be held responsible for any damage you may inflict to your iPhone.

Now that I’ve taken that off my chest, please, say hello to freedom.

1. Multitasking

The first new benefit from jailbreaking is surely true multitasking. There is a free and a paid app that both offer task switching and management each in its own way. Both depend on a third-party app – the free Backgrounder – to do the minimizing for them. While that may sound complex, switching apps is as easy as it gets.

The free task manager is called Kirikae and shows the running apps as a list. Tapping one will switch to it, while a finger swipe reveals a button to kill the process.

Multifl0w is the paid task manager. It offers the same functionality as Kirikae, but uses a cover-flow-like view for your running apps. It’s kinda like the way Safari displays the opened tabs. Multifl0w looks really fancy and even outperforms Palm Pre’s Card Interface at times.

Multifl0w • Kirikae

2. UI themes and custom sounds

The second benefit from jailbreaking is customizing how the UI looks and feels via the Winterboard theming app. With Winterboard you can apply various themes and widgets to the iPhone UI.

Developers have had full two years to work on themes and nowadays an elaborate theme can replace all of your icons, wallpapers, menus, sliders, sounds, page controls, menu layouts and even add live widgets and weather information on the Springboard.

The Winterboard app has very simple interface

Here are some examples of themes changing the springboard and menus:

G.O.C. theme • iElemental PRO theme

Here are some examples of themes changing the lockscreen:

Weather Elements V3 Lockscreen theme

3. Lockscreen applications

Thanks to the several available lockscreen applications like LockInfo and IntelliScreen, you can get acess to your calls, messages, calendar events, weather information, etc. straight from the iPhone lockscreen.

IntelliScreen • LockInfo

Parallel to those two, the various Cydgets allow you to make use of several lockscreens. They are still in early stage of development and there aren’t many cydgets to choose from, but still the concept looks promising.

Cydgets

4. Improved messaging

The devil is in the details, they say… The iPhone is skimpy on a lot of them details. Delivery reports and a sms character counter are certainly two of those.

With the help of the SMS Helper app you get a nicely integrated character counter, which looks as if Apple made it themselves.

Need delivery reports? The iPhoneDelivery is a simple, but highly useful app that’s capable of *delivering* you delivery reports in various customizable ways.

Delivery reports

5. Make ringtones out of your music without iTunes

The iPhone ringtone limitations are quite a bugger. The AnyRing app will set your incoming calls music free of Apple.

You can choose any song from your iPod library, trim it and assign it as a ringtone or alarm tone. The downside is that you have to pay for AnyRing itself (yes, the most innovative unofficial apps are paid).

AnyRing

6. Video recording on iPhone 2G and 3G

You don’t have to own an iPhone 3GS to shoot video. Thanks to the Cycorder app you can capture videos at CIF resolution at 15fps, which is way better than that joke of a video recorder in the official AppStore.

img height=250 alt="gsmarena 025 10 good reasons to jailbreak your iPhone, no matter what generation" src="http://blog.gsmarena.com/pics//09/12/iphone-jailbreak-apps/thumb/gsmarena_025.jpg" title="10 good reasons to jailbreak your iPhone, no matter what generation" />
Cycorder

7. File access and management

After you jailbreak your iPhone, you have full access to the file system. The iFile app is a popular file manager running directly on your iPhone. It is capable of copying, cutting, moving, renaming and deleting files.

iFile

8. Safari file download manager

if you’ve missed having a way to download files on the iPhone, you may be interested in the Safari download plug-in. It’s basically a download manager for the mobile Safari browser. However you will need a file manager to access the files once they’re downloaded.

Safari download plug-in

9. Extended TV-out functionality

If you are tired of the TV-out restrictions in your iPhone, you’re in for a nice surprise once you jailbreak your iPhone. The TVOut app is here to help. It enables the TV-out output for all iPhone applications. It has some problems with the landscape apps, but there’s another application called Landscape TV Out that fixes that as well. Now imagine playing your iPhone games on a big TV screen.

TVOut app

10. Misc UI improvements

As I mentioned in the beginning of the article, there are a lot of other benefits from jailbreaking. Though none of them is a major thing, I appreciate every single one.

If you happen to own an iPhone 2G or 3G you will most definitely welcome the battery percentage level (3GS-style) that can be enabled via the asBattery app.

Perhaps all iPhone users will appreciate the HapticPro app, which enables vibration touch feedback. The SBSettings app is practical as well. It gives you quick access to various features and it’s always a single swipe away – some of the functionality it offers is a basic task manager, 3G, Wi-Fi and EDGE switches, respring shortcuts and even more.

SBSettings

Turn-to-mute has been a novel feature for quite some time now and almost all other phones with accelerometers have some sort of turn-to-mute functionality. Thanks to the AutoSilent app you can mute an incoming call simply by turning the iPhone face down. You can even opt for shaking instead of turning.

Conclusion

I get it, there are people who respect all the restrictions Apple make on the iPhone. But this short list should be enough to convince you that Apple should really reconsider their whole app policy. The unofficial third-party app scene is flourishing and people are enjoying the freedom their devices have. That should definitely tell Apple a lot, right? Now that I’ve made my point, I’ll see you on the other side!

P.S. If you still feel hesitant to jailbreak your iPhone, you can check out Gizmodo’s Guide on the most popular and useful free AppStore apps.

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.

Android 2.1 powered Lenovo LePhone on its way to China

A few days ago Lenovo announced their second Android smartphone at CES. It runs on Android 2.1 and today we have a lot of official pictures for you to enjoy. But don't hurry falling in love with it - for now it's only China-bound.

Surely, the LePhone looks like every other touchscreen device out there, especially on the live photos and its demo video. But it turns out it hides more originality than meets the eye.

The first thing you need to know is that the LePhone packs a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, a 3.7" AMOLED capacitive touchscreen with WVGA resolution, special gesture area just bellow the display, a 3 megapixel main camera with a VGA one for video calls, Wi-Fi, GPS and Bluetooth. Sound almost like Nexus One, doesn't it?

The LePhone supports 3G connectivity, but it's unclear if the LePhone will be CDMA or GSM oriented device. Perhaps they are keeping their options open.

Lenovo LePhone

LePhone's size is impressive - it is 60mm wide and only 12mm thin. Lenovo promised to deliver a whole new experience thanks to the unique attachable keyboard, which looks more like a docking station.

Lenovo LePhone

The Android 2.1 OS found in the LePhone will be well customized. Its main menu is directly inspired from the iPhone's one, while the multi-tasking follows the webOS steps and looks like the Card UI.

You can check the demo video from MobileBurn.

Lenovo's LePhone is not the company's first Android cellphone. They initially released the oPhone 001 a.k.a. Lenovo Mobile 01 a.k.a. Miro 01. You can find more about it here

There is no word on the LePhone worldwide availability yet, but China will get this mean machine sometime in first half of the year.