For those of you that have been around for a while you know I’m stalking an upgrade around September-ish. I’m on AT&T which has all sorts of awesome coverage here in my area. Speed and connectivity are directly equivalent to my friends Verizon handsets (including a Moto Droid and an HTC Incredible,) in every corner of this town because we always give each other hell as often as possible though we both secretly hate our own carriers. Which brings me to my point. What is AT&T doing? When they were still Cingular they were all sorts of awesome and had the best devices by far. Since the switch back to AT&T and their subsequent exclusivity with the most evil company in the world, all their wireless carrier awesomeness has disappeared, or as my iPhone toting friend chose to say “Their e-penis is all flaccid and unused.” E-penis is his equivalent of one’s technological clout.
Hardware
Toshiba Libretto W100. I definitely want one.
So it may not be the Courier everyone was hoping for but this thing is all sorts of awesome looking. Toshiba has been running their ultra-mobile Libretto line for quite a few years now and they’ve typically occupied price points north of 1,000$ and with this being limited production/prototype sort of model don’t expect any less. Planned to launch for their 25th anniversary late this summer the W100 is going to be rocking side by side 7 inch multi-touch screens with Windows 7 Home Premium. It’s also packing a 1.2GHz Intel U5400 processor with 2GB of DDR3 and 62GB of solid state sweetness. Haptic feedback on a virtual keyboard included, although I’ll be looking into a nice pen/capacative stylus I can carry around for One Note and other such handwriting recognition awesomeness. More info and video links after the break.
Rumors of Sony WP7 handset.
I love finding good news at the beginning of the day. This sounds like a nice set of hardware too. Sony Ericsson is rumored to be working on a 4″ obviously capacative multi-touch display phone running the Windows Phone 7 OS. It’s going to have a slide-out qwerty that I’m praying will be landscape, like the … Read more
I’m on the fence, and Simmons… that’s a squirrel. Part I
I’m currently eligable for an upgrade on AT&T and have no clue what I’m going to be getting (but if anyone says iPhone you are immediately disqualified from conversation.) I tend to do a lot of research in deciding my phone of choice and realized that not everyone does or even knows how. Over the next few months I plan on posting up all my research for two reasons. One, because I’ll learn quite a bit about some newer handsets coming to AT&T’s market and two, because I want to know what you guys think. Fact is that without people to read this stuff then I wouldn’t be here, which kind of means I work for you. We’ve got a good Windows Mobile base of writers here with a few oddballs. Simmons is on the Android train drinking all the Google kool-aid he can get his hands on, and Ramon is rocking the Blackberry. If you readers feel like some area of mobile news is not getting addressed properly by our articles then now is the time to say so. Whatever phone I get will obviously effect the apps, UI’s, articles, etc, that get posted here. Now I’m not leaving this completely up to the masses but I intend to do a good bit of listening as well. Read more for the ground rules.
Dolby Surround Sound on phones… really?
I work around a lot of bad ass audio products at Best Buy. This has the effect of giving me quite of bit of skepticism toward products with “simulated surround sound.” For the uninitiated, Simulated surround sound is based off the idea that sound waves coming from different directions are changed by the shape of our ear and the waves path into it. By placing a microphone inside a model of human ear, researchers are able to measure what changes are made by the shape of our ear and create those changes at the speaker or headphone and “tricking” the brain into believing it has come from a particular direction. This has obvious unintended consequences when the sound wave travels through the ear “again” and is changed a second time creating wholly unnatural sounds that don’t trick your brain into crap. It does have some advantages, but for most it just doesn’t matter.