Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

You’ve waited.  You’ve fretted.  You lamented at the news a cargo ship was rerouted back to Asia thanks to paint chipping.  But now, dry the tears from your eyes and head to T-Mobile to pick up the latest phone, in the hottest color: white!  Heck yeah, no longer just representative of the iPod of 2002, no; white is the new black.

Or is it?  Basic black and bronze (ugh) must be selling well, as Peter Chou, HTC CEO says they are ramping up the numbers and expect to move 1 million of this gadgets by year’s end.  Did they pick white just to compete with that other phone?  Or is there something more?

Find out what my source says about white.

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HTC front man, Peter Chou made three interesting comments on Friday.  HTC is surprising just about everyone with the products they put out now under their own brand.  How good are things for HTC?  Check out these almost outlandish statements below:

How would Palm fit into HTC’s master plan?  Follow to find out.

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Verizon Wireless has just added the HTC Touch Pro to the available lineup, which means that the Touch Pro can now be found on every major US carrier except T-Mobile.  Moving on, the Verizon Wireless branded Touch Pro is a similar offering as the rest of the carriers, except for the pricing, with that it is coming in a little more expensive.  Verizon is currently offering the handset for $419.99 with a two-year agreement, of course they are also offering a rebate of $70, which would bring the price down to $349.99, but unfortunately it is a mail-in-rebate.

So, aside from the pricing, Verizon’s Touch Pro is a Windows Mobile 6.1 handset with a full slide-out QWERTY keyboard, a 2.8-inch touchscreen VGA display, a 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus, flash and video capture, Wi-Fi 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth 2.0 and a microSD card slot for additional storage.

As for availability, the Touch Pro can be found both in-store and online.

Product [Verizon Wireless]

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We all know the iPhone has become quite popular.  Just look around next time you’re in a place with a lot of people—whether it be a subway, train station, airport, city street or college campus, chances are you’ll see at least one person with an iPhone walking around.  They almost seem to mock those of us who are stuck with Verizon or other carriers that aren’t AT&T (well, until the Storm, that is).  There are actual numbers to prove that the iPhone is popular: mobile ad traffic.

According to AdMob, an ad network for mobile websites and apps, the iPhone is the leader in ad traffic for mobile devices.  It holds 4.1 percent of ad requests for October.  That doesn’t sound like much, but it comes out to 236 million requests in one month.  In July, it was only 28 million requests.  Of those 236 million requests, 62.8 percent were from the U.S.  That’s pretty impressive considering the iPhone is still the number 2 phone in the U.S., behind the Motorola RAZR.  5 percent of the requests came from the UK, with another 8 percent coming from all of Asia.  Continued after the break.

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Sections: Apple, Communications, Cellphones, Mobile, Web

Alltel has joined the ranks of Sprint and AT&T and have added the HTC Touch Pro to its smartphone lineup.  The Touch Pro will set you back $379.99, however there is a $100 mail-in-rebate available, which assuming you get that back, will bring your final cost down to $279.99.  In addition, in order to get that pricing you will also need to sign a 2-year agreement.

As for the specs, the Touch Pro is running Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional with a customized version of the TouchFLO 3D user interface.  Otherwise, the handset has a 2.8-inch VGA touchscreen display, GPS, Wi-Fi, a 3.2-megapixel camera with autofocus and flash, stereo Bluetooth and a slide-out QWERTY keyboard.

The HTC Touch Pro can be purchased directly from the Alltel website, as well as in-store.

Product [Alltel]

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HTC, along with Russian carrier Scartel have just unveiled the world’s first integrated GSM/WiMAX handset—the HTC Max 4G.  The new handset has taken plenty of design cues from the HTC Touch HD and has a solid feature set.  To begin with, the Max 4G has built-in support for WiMax, and it takes advantage of that support.  When calls are made in-network, they are automatically switched over to the WiMax network and handled as a VoIP call.

Other features of the Max 4G include a 3.8-inch touchscreen display with an 800 x 480 resolution, GPS, WiFi 802.11 b/g, Bluetooth, 8GB of built-in flash memory, an accelerometer, a 5-megapixel camera with a second VGA quality camera on the front, a 3.5mm headphone jack and an FM radio.  Additionally it will be running Windows Mobile 6.1 and powered by a 528 MHz Qualcomm ESM7206A processor.

As of now a release date has not been announced, of course, this one is not destined for the US market anytime soon, so no sense in holding your breath.

Keep reading to check out the full press release…

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Gizmodo has Microsoft’s Steve Ballmer yelling “6.5!  6.5!.“  We had Moto’s chief spill the beans not too long ago.  And here I am talking about it again.  What could a “point” upgrade be worth?  Certainly not all this, right?

Well, my time with the Samsung Epix on AT&T service has gone pretty well and I’ve hopes 6.5 will bring WinMo out of the dark ages.  While the OS has nowhere near the spit shine Apple products do, tons more usability was baked into this release.  Things like threading text messages, one touch for speaker phone, using the touchscreen for simple things like unlocking the phone.  Now, I am not saying all these things are comperable to other phones, merely just it is possible.  All of it was extremely welcome on phones that us corporate drones must use.

Ballmer confirmed a 2009 delivery time for Windows Mobile 6.5 saying, “With releases we’ll make this year - releases we’ll make with 6.5 next year, Windows Mobile 7, I think we have a pretty interesting roadmap.“  Sure you do, Steve, sure you do.

Yes, Windows Mobile is still ugly, is just as slow and falls down a lot; just like Bigfoot (but maybe I don’t understand him the way you do).  I look to 6.5 to begin the beautification process.  Surely Redmond can take a page from HTC right?

Read [pocketnow]

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There is a new sheriff in town and it’s name is iPhone.  This year, according the JD Powers the top dog spot goes to Apple’s phone, leaving RIM to finish in the #2 spot.  As you can see from the above graph, Apple’s entry was not included in last year (the survey’s inaugural year).  The graph shows some interesting items.

Find out what after the break.

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Sanjay Jha, Motorola’s co-Chief executive and chief executive of mobile devices says we’ll see a Windows Mobile 6.5 device by the 2nd half of 2009.  This is the first mention of 6.5 that I am aware of and points to a half step before WinMo 7 which we’ve been waiting for to at least stay competitive with the likes of Apple and RIM.

“Windows Mobile 6 has not delivered the experience that I think Apple has been able to deliver, but as you look at the plan that is Windows Mobile 7 and even 6.5, I think there are significant new added features which will help the platform,“ Jha said.

Significant new added features in 6.5 huh?  Hmmmm.  Keep reading to find out our best guess at what that means.

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Predicting how many individual units of a device will be sold is difficult.  However, many companies usually predict the amount based on how the product is doing, then they announce that number to the public.  Usually, that number is somewhat low so when and if that company beats the predicted number, it makes them look good.  If they sold less than the predicted number than it looks pretty bad.  Recently, HTC’s CEO Peter Chou came out with a number of G1’s he expects to be sold by the end of the year - 600,000.

In an interview with MercuryNews, Chou released this number as well as what he predicts to happen with the G1 in 2009.  HTC is renowned for their smartphones using Windows Mobile, however, with the G1, they opted in using Google’s platform, Android.  Keep reading to see why HTC picked Android over Windows Mobile.

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