Dell Lightning smartphone goes official as the Venue Pro, still looking hot

Deemed ‘hot’ by yours truly back in April when it was known as Lightning, Dell’s first Windows Phone 7 device, today announced under the name Venue Pro, is still a real head-turner, even among the sexy WP7 phones from HTC, Samsung and LG.

Pictured below, Dell’s smartphone is a WP7 slider that features a 4.1-inch (800 x 480) AMOLED touchscreen enhanced with Gorilla Glass for extra durability, a 1 GHz Snapdragon chipset, a QWERTY keyboard, a 5 megapixel camera with flash, a microUSB port, and a 3.5mm jack.

The Venue Pro will be introduced by T-Mobile next month

 

Samsung extends Bada smartphone line-up with the launch of high-end Samsung WAVE II

Here you are Samsung update of its wave phone, the Wave II, running on Samsung’s Bada 1.2 OS and featuring a 3.7” Super Clear LCD screen instead of the previous 3.3” super AMOLED display. This new Wave II comes with QuickType and T9 Trace Keyboard, the equivalent of Swipe on Bada, as well as a 5Mpix Camera with AF, 2GB of internal memory, a 1GHz CPU, Wi-Fi BGN and a memory card slot.

Motorola reveals Citrus entry-level Android smartphone

Beside teaming up with AT&T, Motorola got cozy with Verizon too and announced two Android (2.1) smartphones that will be released by it later this quarter. One of those two models is called Citrus and is an entry-level and wannabe affordable touchscreen phone.

Citrus includes a touch panel located on the back that helps with navigation, comes with seven home screen panels to choose from, and has a housing made from 25% post-consumer recycled plastic.

The phone’s price tag was not revealed.

Motorola going after business users with the Droid Pro smartphone

The second Verizon-tagged smartphone unveiled this week by Motorola is the Droid Pro, a model pre-loaded with Android 2.2 and the Quickoffice Mobile Suite, which features both a 3.1-inch multi-touch display, and a QWERTY keyboard which is very handy when typing emails and chatting.

The incoming phone has a 1GHz OMAP 3620 processor, 512MB of RAM, 2GB of internal storage, a 5 megapixel camera with auto focus and dual LED flash, 802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth 2.1, DNLA connectivity, 3G mobile hotspot capabilities, and various security features like AuthenTec IPSec multi-headed VPN integration, remote wipe of device and SD card, and complex password support.

The Droid Pro will become available from Verizon Wireless in the coming weeks.

Samsung releases its first bada smartphone

Samsung has kicked off this week with a bang by announcing the commercial availability of Wave (Model S8500), the first smartphone to make use of the bada platform which was unveiled in November 2009 as part of the Korean company’s ‘smartphone democratization’ initiative.

Equipped with the TouchWiz 3.0 UI and the Social Hub (enabling quick access to social networks), Wave boasts a 3.3-inch AMOLED (800×480) touchscreen, a 1GHz processor, a 5 megapixel camera with LED flash and can do 720p video recording, a microSD slot, GPS, an accelerometer, plus USB, 802.11 b/g/n WiFi and Bluetooth 3.0.

“The Samsung Wave represents our strategy to deliver rich, exciting smartphone experiences to everyone,” said JK Shin, President and head of the Mobile Communications Business at Samsung Electronics. “This launch will make our platform vision a reality and consumers, developers and operators will experience the freedom of choice that bada enables.”

For starters the Samsung Wave is selling in the UK, Germany and France but will become available in Asia, China, the Middle East and Africa, and Latin America soon.

HTC Wildfire entry-level Android debuts

HTC have unveiled their latest Android smartphone, the HTC Wildfire, and it’s an entry-level model that looks to replace the little-loved HTC Tattoo.  Packing a 3.2-inch QVGA capacitive touchscreen, European 3G/UMTS support, WiFi, Bluetooth, GPS, a 5-megapixel autofocus camera with LED flash and HTC Sense, the Wildfire looks like a cross between a Desire and a Google Nexus One.

As for Sense, that has a couple of new features including displaying a contact’s latest Facebook status update along with their photo whenever you call them or they call you.  There’s also a new app called Application Sharing, which allows you to quickly let friends know about software you’re enjoying on your phone: after picking the title from a list, you can share it via SMS, email, Twitter or whatever other social networking tools you have on your phone.

2 New Android Smartphone from LG

LG announced this morning 2 new Smartphone in Korea running on Android with the LG-LU2300 available on LG Telecom and LG-SU950 on SK Telecom or also known as KU9500 on KT.
Running all a 1GHz Snapdragon CPU, our 2 phones comes with a 3.5” WVG LCD, DivX support a 5MPix camera with AF, Dolby Mobile, DMB and a 1350mAh battery.

The LG-LU2300 comes with Android 1.6 (A free upgrade to Android 2.1 will be made available to the public this summer), a full slide keyboard, a 4 way navigation Keypad, 3GB of internal memory, support of MicroSD cards and includes many different application including dictionaries in several languages, Wikipedia, Traffic Info, Weather, Restaurant data base and so on.

Both LG-SU950 and KU9500 comes with Andrdoid 2.1, the same basic features as the LG-LU2300 but does not offer a slide QWERTY Keyboard.

Samsung Exec – a new smartphone from Samsung

Samsung Exec i225 is a CDMA phone that comes with Windows Mobile 6.5 Standard. Among the other features the phone comes with a QWERTY keyboard, a QVGA screen, a 2MP camera and GPS. The phone dimensions are 117 x 60 x 11 mm and weighs 105g, which makes us to say that the phone is a medium-sized phone. The battery Li – Ion with 1500 mAh has a talk time up to 8 hours and a standby time of up to 450 hours.

The screen has a diagonal of 2.40 inches, the resolution supported by the screen is 320 x 240 pixels, and also is a color screen. Supported video formats for Samsung Exec are MPEG4, H.263, H.264, and WMV; while supported audio format is MP3. The internal memory has a capacity of 123 MB and can be expanded using a microSD card. Operating system that will be running by Exec is Windows Mobile 6.5 Standard, and will be an operating system that will provide a working processor with a frequency up to 667MHz.

RIM extends lead in US smartphone market

A new comScore MobiLens report shows that RIM’s BlackBerry continued to be the smartphone platform of choice for most US subscribers, having been used by 42.1% of the 45.4 million smartphone owners recorded in the three-month period ended in February. In the November-ended quarter RIM held 40.8% of the market.

Behind RIM there’s Apple who actually saw its iPhone slipping a little and grabbing a 25.4% share, while on third, Microsoft experienced a more significant drop and had to settle for a 15.1% piece (19.1% share in November quarter).

Google’s Android finally surpassed Palm and claimed the four spot with a 9% share, the latter now having just 5.4%.

The vendor list for the February quarter has Motorola first with a 22.3% share, followed, in order, by LG (21.7%), Samsung (21.4%), Nokia (8.7%), and RIM (8.2%).

BPhone: Quad Band ARM-Linux smartphone

BPhone is a Quad Band Cell Phone featuring 5.0 inch 180 degree rotating QVGA (800 x 400) touchscreen , Marvell PXA310 624MHz processor, 256MB of NAND flash memory, Full QWERTY keypad, built-in GPS and FM radio. It runs on ARM-Linux-2.6, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth capable, Java-enabled, also supports TXT format, MP3/WAV/AMR/AWB audio files, 3GP/MPEG4 (AVI) video files, JPEG/BMP/GIF image files, English and Chinese.

The price tag? $ 569.99.