Google Launches Nexus S Phone In UK and US 202
siliconbits writes "Google has made its second bid for a slice of the mobile phone market, with the launch of its Nexus S phone. The Samsung-built device comes less than 12 months after the launch of the firm's Nexus One, built by HTC, which failed to win over many consumers. The Nexus S will initially be launched in the UK and US, and will be available 'from the end of the month'."
Links (Score:5, Informative)
Info about Gingerbread [blogspot.com]
Some assorted useful information (Score:2)
Nexus S will ship with support for "fastboot oem unlock", allowing for reflashing of the system software "out of the box", like Nexus One.
Something that may interest this community is that the NDK (native development kit) for Gingerbread now supports native apps (intended to simplify mobile gaming ports, etc) -- providing: libc, libm, libz, opengl|ES, opensl|ES, input/events/sensors, app lifecycle management, etc. JNI is available to access various higher level Android APIs as necessary.
2.3 (platform 9) SDK
KEYBOARD (Score:5, Insightful)
The G2 is gonna be sweeeet!
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SlideIT and Swype are, indeed, excellent. You still can't use them without looking at the phone, though.
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SlideIT and Swype are, indeed, excellent. You still can't use them without looking at the phone, though.
That's not necessarily a bad thing.
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Re:KEYBOARD (Score:4, Insightful)
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I was like that too, especially since I used an HTC Ozone for so long (which had possibly the greatest keyboard ever put on a phone.) Now that I have a phone without a hard keyboard though, I don't really miss it at all. Besides, most of the slider keyboards that come on Android phones are ass-tastic...they're either mushy, or small, or oddly laid out.
Re:KEYBOARD (Score:5, Insightful)
Then get one with a keyboard... not sure what the issue is here. This isn't iPhone where there's only the Nexus S to choose from, there's at least several with slide out keyboards.
Now if your PROVIDER doesn't offer one, then that's your Providers fault, not Google.
As someone that doesn't mind not having a hardware keyboard, I rather like being able to choose keyboard or no keyboard. Just because the Nexus S doesn't have it, doesn't mean they all don't.
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WHOA, nice find, even has my Acer Liquid E on there, bookmarked!
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I'm currently looking into which android phone to buy and found this [google.com] to be amazing for comparing them.
That tool would be amazingly useful if it had a way to search by feature rather than only by model name. I want a phone with a keyboard, but I don't know all of the phone models that have a keyboard.
While I'm posting -- which Android phone has the best keyboard? I have the original Droid now and the keyboard sucks -- it's way too flat. The Droid 2 seems to be a little better, but still not that great. My Blackberry keyboard is much better than my Droid keyboard, but still not all that great.
My ideal phone k
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Thats why I chose the Samsung Epic, had a ton of features, but the keyboard was a requirement for me.
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My personal phone is an iPhone 4, and I use a Blackberry for work. I long assumed I'd hate the virtual keyboard, but I actually prefer it to the Blackberry physical keyboard.
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Blackberries have a tiny cramped keyboard due to its orientation across the bottom of the phone. Most android phones have a slide out keyboard that spans the entire length of the phone.
The Epic's keyboard is ~4.5 inches wide, that is pretty comfortable for typing with 2 thumbs.
Re:KEYBOARD (Score:5, Informative)
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I won't be buying the Nexus S for two reasons, A) Why pay full price for a phone that doesn't even support 4g and B) no keyboard.
Without HSPA+, this thing is dead in the water for anyone who knows anything about cellphones.
I have an EVO on Sprint, and the only hardware thing this has that I'd really like is NFC. The rumour mill stated this phone was delayed so they could re-do the design using a dual-core CPU. Apparently not. Too bad - this phone is gonna get slaughtered by the phone announcements at CES ne
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There are literally _tons_ of android phones with keyboards
There are literally _tons_ of Kins, too, but weight isn't perhaps the best unit of measure here.
Re:KEYBOARD (Score:5, Informative)
NO KEYBOARD, NO PURCHASE. it is simple as that for many people, including myself
And it's the other way around for many of us. I don't want to have a larger than necessary phone by wasting volume and weight on an unnecessary thing like a physical keyboard. Swype works great, and is WAY faster than I would be able to go with a tiny little cellphone keyboard. I'm a VERY fast touch typist on my computer, but a cellphone keyboard is too small to be of any real use now that we have UI advancements like Swype.
If you want a keyboard on your phone, then get a phone with a keyboard. There is no one design that will appeal to everyone. It's not "wrong" for a phone to not have a physical keyboard, just wrong for you. :)
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NO KEYBOARD, NO PURCHASE. it is simple as that for many people, including myself, and i am looking for an android phone to replace a long line of winmo phones with keyboards that i've owned. there is no substitute for a real keyboard. i am not going to use a device that blocks half of the screen real estate with an OSK. it is like paying for a device with half the screen size. . it just won't fly with the tasks i use the device for.
Well then don't buy it, there's plenty Android phones that have a keyboard, no need to rant about the ones that don't.
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I can think of a few phones you may be interested in then:
T-mobile: HTC G2
Verizon: Motorola Droid2 or Droid Pro
Sprint: Samsung Epic (Galaxy S line)
I'm honestly not sure about AT&T, I don't consider the Backflip worthy of recommendation.
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Neither one works worth a damn for ssh or other work related stuff.
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What about a separate Bluetooth keyboard? If it were really thin, and fitted into a bracket in a shockproofing case for the phone, it would seem to be better to be able to choose which keyboard model you prefer, and to choose to leave it behind for a smaller phone.
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Frogpad? And also think there is a 4 key bluetooth chord keyboard out there.
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Since the Nexus S is just a re-badged Galaxy S, why not wait for the re-badged Galaxy S Pro? It should be exactly what you are looking for. It is also the phone I am waiting for.
Phillip.
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Since the Nexus S is just a re-badged Galaxy S, why not wait for the re-badged Galaxy S Pro? It should be exactly what you are looking for. It is also the phone I am waiting for.
Make sure that Galaxy S Pro has HSPA+. I can't _believe_ they didn't include that in the Nexus S. Ridiculously dumb move.
If you want an Android phone with hardware keyboard and HSPA+, on T-Mobile, the myTouch 4G is the phone to get. No NFC, though, which is a shame.
CES next month should see a lot of very big phone announcements, tho
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Having spent a lot of time using friends' Motorola Droid and Droid X phones with my own HTC Nexus One to compare against I have a hard time believing someone would put Moto over HTC. The build quality on the N1 is fantastic and HTC is far more friendly to the open-source and hacking community. Motorola on the other hand launched the mess that is the Droid X, just try getting a AOSP-based custom ROM on one.
Nokia I could agree with you on, their hardware is top notch but software tends to be a thorn in the
now about that only on T-Mobile thing... (Score:2)
- now if they could get more than T-Mobile as a carrier they might get more market penetration -- which was their big stumbling block last time as well.
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Re:now about that only on T-Mobile thing... (Score:4, Insightful)
No AT&T 3G, though.
On the tech specs, it's clearly listed as a quad-band phone with 850MHz compatibility. Given that AT&T's 3G in on the 850MHz band, I thought this meant the Nexus S would work fine at 3G. I recall the N900 wouldn't work on AT&T's 3G (but it would on Edge), because the phone's radio only supported 900MHz.
Or am I missing something here?
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It's quad-band GSM (2G) but lacks 850 MHz 3G.
Re:now about that only on T-Mobile thing... (Score:4, Informative)
From L Nexus S specs page [google.com]:
Quad-Band GSM: 850, 900, 1800, 1900
Tri-Band HSPA: 900, 2100, 1700
AT&T's HSPA bands are 850 and 1900 (I can't find a good authoritative source).
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from google.com/phone: nexus-s
Quad-band GSM: 850, 900, 1800, 1900
Tri-band HSPA: 900, 2100, 1700 HSPA type: HSDPA (7.2Mbps) HSUPA (5.76Mbps)
fcc filings [fcc.gov] seem to confirm (umts iv is 1700/2100) everything but the hspa-900
so the 850 is for gsm, not 3g
believe at&t 3g is 850 and 1900, so it looks like no 3g with the nexus s on at&t
the t-mobile version of the vibrant (on which the nexus s appears to be based) is umts 1700/2100 + 1900, and it's reported to get at&t 3g on the 1900
think umts 900 is for eur
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As was the Nexus One. Didn't help it much.
Also, remember that, due to the mental giants that set up the US's cell phone infrastructure, phones are largely stuck to the carrier they were made for, especially if you want 3G signals.
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At some point the FCC is going to have to step in and force a change. Probably when the real 4G makes it's debut in this country.
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Most US cell providers do not charge more on their contracts if you get a "special" on a phone. They also do not charge less if you don't.
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T-Mobile does in fact charge less on their contract-free month-to-month plan. Even with the expense of the up-front unsubsidized phone purchase, you come out significantly ahead over 2 years.
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unfortunately T-mobile has crappy coverage in southern MS and northern Florida where I spend most of my time.
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[citation needed]
AT&T, Sprint and Verizon have bigger US marketshare.
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That's what he said too.
Here is your citation: http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1898170&cid=34461356 [slashdot.org]
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Oops.
Never post on slashdot before the first diet mountain dew of the day.
Whoopi! (Score:5, Funny)
That Google phone isn't just some random energy phenomenon traveling through space... it's a doorway. It leads to another place... the Nexus. It doesn't exist in our Universe... and it doesn't play by the same rules either. It's like being inside... joy. As if joy is a real thing that I could wrap around myself. I've never been so content... If you go into that Nexus, you're not going to care about the Apple iPhone or the Blackberry Storm or Palm Pre. All you're going to care about is how it feels to be there. And you're never going to come back.
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I still can't get over the fact that Malcolm McDowell was in that...I kept expecting him to look at Picard and tell him to come get one in the yarbles.
No need to ask if he has any...we all know he does.
The best part is... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:The best part is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Not... exactly. There's just enough difference between all the Captivates, Vibrants, Epics and the like to make what you talk about not possible. That might've actually have been Samsung's goal.
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And Samsung hasn't been kind enough to post the source for the drivers. That's why you didn't see froyo on any of the Galaxy S phones until the Samsung release candidate was leaked. Driver source would be the key that would allow the independent development community to keep all the Galaxy S phones as close to 'up-to-date' as possible. Unfortunately, I don't see that happening any time soon.
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The record for the Nexus One is excellent. 2.3 is already being pushed out to those still on the stock ROM. Modded ROMs don't receive the OTA updates but judging by the prior track record I'm hoping for a CyanogenMod release candidate built off 2.3 a few weeks after the AOSP source is released.
If I really wanted 2.3 now I could always flash back to a stock ROM but I'm happy to wait for CM to be updated.
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Somehow, I don't share the enthusiasm. I have a Vibrant, and last I heard, they were just starting to roll out Android 2.2 to the i9000, and still were holding off on the Vibrant for another week or two. Unless they just decided to move straight from 2.1 to 2.3.
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It's the price you pay for getting a non-custom interface. And it's one of the biggest reasons why I wanted the Nexus One rather than one of the alternatives.
Re:The best part is... (Score:5, Insightful)
You missed out one important aspect: it's a rebadged Galaxy running stock software. That is why it'll be getting updates fast. Other Samsung phones probably won't.
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Re:The best part is... (Score:5, Interesting)
...it's just a re-badged Galaxy S. So those of us with GT-i9000s, Captivates, and Vibrants can basically expect every future version of Android within days of the source release.
Ahah!
Oh, you were serious.
Look, it's Samsung. Don't expect any updates on time. In fact, don't expect any updates at all and you'll live happier.
That's very good news, since last I heard Samsung had sold over 8 million Galaxy S devices so far.
Yes, and they're already sold, meaning they already got your money and now they'd rather you buy the next one on the line.
I feel your pain. I bought the original Galaxy. It had one very late update to 1.6 when everyone else was upgrading to 2.1.
Your best bet is to either get a phone which somehow gathered community support around it, or get one of the Google supported "Nexus" devices.
I'm probably getting this one someday, it just pains me to be giving money to Samsung.
Release Date (Score:2)
Not for Consumers (Score:2, Interesting)
Oh, and it's basically a rebranding of
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Wrong. You can pre-order it from the Carphone Warehouse already, which is about as massmarket as UK phone stores go.
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In fact, they have the exclusive.
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The summary has it wrong, this phone isn't aimed at average consumers at all and is by no means a "bid for a slice of the market". It's reference hardware that will support the latest Google-branded builds of Android over the next year or so, so that developers can test their applications. The inclusion of technologies such as NFC and a gyroscope is what probably necessitates a hardware revision besides the usual software update (that's available for the N1 as well).
And it's going to be a failure for a lot
The $50 question... (Score:3)
Will it be rootable with the oem-unlock command? That is one of my biggest criteria -- ease of rooting and making custom ROMS for the device.
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It's a developer device, so it should come rooted from the box.
In reality, not a whole lot... (Score:4, Interesting)
No phones have an NFC chip at all, so uh... thanks? Also, the Nexus S isn't geared towards gaining consumers, I think it's more geared towards developers. The big things that are great are:
1) Text Selection (FINALLY!)
2) VoIP and SIP stack (yeahhhhhh! Incoming video chat apps)
3) New dalvik improvements for speed.
Everything else is fluff.
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No. There was however a separate mention of a added camera selection system, so that any app making use of cameras could select between rear and front facing cameras during use.
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You know, good hardware, and Google has more say in the OS... I am all over this phone. My Vibrant just went up for sale.
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But I'm really wondering what changes will be in 3.0 that they will use to WOW people, or if Honeycomb will be way more geared toward tablets...
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Yep, very disappointed by Gingerbread.
I mean, they say a focus was video/ audio encoding, but a quick look at the APIs show it is still not possible to encode a video from anything except a camera, so video editing of any kind is still not possible. iPhone users get to produce high quality video's with all kinds of effects, Android users can't even *bleeping* crop them! And again encoding was a point of focus, yay we get dead-on-arrival WebM support!
Let's just hope that they really actually added some relev
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Eh? I can select text with Froyo on my Nexus One, and on my G Tablet. The UI for it isn't always great or consistent, but I've used copy and paste with text selection plenty of times.
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Yeah that's exactly what I was referring to. For instance, in the GMail application, you have to go to Menu --> More --> Select Text.
In Gingerbread, you will be able to do a long-press on any app to bring up the Text Selection menu. It isn't this way in 2.2.1 and earlier.
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Any GSM Phone on Any GSM Network? (Score:2)
Can't I just take any Android GSM phone and put in a SIM for any GSM network, so long as the SIM's accounts are active (and both the phone and the network use the same frequency, as they all do in the US)?
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Re:Any GSM Phone on Any GSM Network? (Score:5, Informative)
T-Mobile will provide unlock codes [t-mobile.com] for any phone they sell, at no charge. AT&T is a different story.
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Most of Europe has phones unlocked, I think only UK locks to providers. Even then you can buy software that will unlock pretty much any GSM phone. All European phones support 900 and 1800 Mhz so any GSM phone will work on any network operator. I've used French, English, Italian, Ukranian, and other SIM cards in my Nokia E71 without any problems.
Phillip.
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Yeah, that will definitely work for voice calls. Data service is more complicated. You might have working 2G or 3G or neither depending on what the phone supports, and what service is in your area.
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No.
The two big GSM providers in the US use different 3G frequencies. (AT&T 850/1900, T-Mobile 1700/2100).
You can get voice and GPRS/EDGE, so long as your handset has been SIM unlocked (this is different to rooting or jailbreaking).
This is not an Android limitation, the same restrictions apply to iPhone/N900 etc.
I am not aware of any phone that has a flashable radio chipset allowing reconfiguration of the wireless bands, there may be a requirement for a physically different antenna.
The magic words used t
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Until someone makes a handset supporting both AT&T's and T-mobile's 3g bands there are two requirements for that scenario in the US:
1.) The phone is unlocked or was not carrier-locked to begin with
2.) You don't mind not being able to use 3g on one of the two carriers
No HSPA+ (Score:3)
I've been waiting for this phone to renew my T-Mo contract, but the lack of "4G" network capability means I'll probably end up switching to Verizon. Way to fail, Goog-Sung!
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I've been waiting for this phone to renew my T-Mo contract, but the lack of "4G" network capability means I'll probably end up switching to Verizon. Way to fail, Goog-Sung!
The myTouch 4G has HSPA+ on T-Mo.
I'd recommend waiting for the inevitable flood of phone announcements next month at CES. Dual-core phones are coming _soon_.
aggrieved consumer (Score:3)
I am not being just an impatient techie, the Galaxy S has one significant flaw - the GPS is next to useless. i was warned - Samsung lie about update schedules and may not realease at all in some markets.
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2.2 Froyo is out for the Galaxy S. Depending on where you live of course.
It could be worse. You could have a Sony Ericsson and have been waiting for 2.1 Eclair instead!
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Samsung makes nice hardware, but sucks with the post-sale support. Don't expect that update to come anytime soon, if it will ever come at all.
Me and some other guys keep writing this everywhere because we were burned with their first generation Android devices and we wanted to get the word out.
Funnily enough, around the time that the Samsung S devices were coming out, some of my posts in at least 2 different sites mysteriously disappeared.
If I was a cynic I'd have thought that the Samsung marketing machine
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Froyo has been out for Galaxy S for over a month (yes, the first version was pulled back because of problems but new one is now available).
If your carrier doesn't offer it, bitch to the carrier. For unlocked phones just use the Kies updater, it's there.
Galaxy S has it's flaws (GPS had bugs with release firmware, Froyo mostly fixes these, the custom filesystem is not very good, camera is average compared to what for an example Sony Ericsson and Nokia offers) but it is a solid Android phone for the price (I'm
Phone isn't about sales (Score:4, Insightful)
This is not a "bid for a slice of the mobile phone market." Google's purpose is to offer a reference device to the marketplace, to bring order to the Android chaos.
Look at why it's so hard for Microsoft to innovate in operating systems. It's because the hardware vendors went in a million different directions, leaving MS with this huge diversity of configurations to support. And because MS has no hand in the hardware arena, they can't implement simple improvements like fast sleep/unsleep that require HW support.
This phone serves two purposes: (1) it gives Google a direct line to developers and the geek elite (who want OS updates first, and tend not to like the UI "enhancements" offered by the carriers) for testing their latest software, and (2) it signals to other manufacturers the direction of the Android platform and encourages them to support the same features (NFC, etc.) This phone doesn't have to sell millions of units to achieve its objective, most importantly it has to be the phone that developers and the geek elite want to have.
Why only US and UK? (Score:3)
Why not make it available, in unlocked form, for everyone, everywhere?
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Why not make it available, in unlocked form, for everyone, everywhere?
Ecommerce in every country doesn't magically happen on its own - that takes a lot of preparation. Also, the rules covering cell phones are different for every country. Just because the FCC in the U.S. approves a phone, doesn't mean it's automatically approved for use or sale everywhere else. Global release of an electronic product that broadcasts, plus making it work on all the different phone networks, negotiating with all those phone co
BestBuy (Score:2)
How does Google rationalize selling at BestBuy with their "don't be evil" policy??
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How does Google rationalize selling at BestBuy with their "don't be evil" policy??
It's the cellphone equivalent of extraordinary rendition. They're sending you to somewhere else to get eviled. Also known as "techno torture by proxy".
Another stillborn phone from Google? (Score:2)
If this is nothing but a rebranded Samsung Galaxy S running stock Google Gingerbread OS, then this may be another misstep by Google. This would mean that it wouldn't support T-Mobile's "4G" data network.
No 4G, which is bad since we can get a "4G" phone that runs at 1GHz from HTC called the MyTouch 4G.
Not to mention the less than stellar support Google provided for the Nexus One.
Will it be available at an actual T-Mobile store? Currently it looks like it's exclusively at Best Buy which is also a no go. Ap
"world's first" 4in (10cm) curved display (Score:2)
Today, only twelve years later, we get a curved screen again, signaling the start of a new 100 year race: curve it all the way back to 1897!!!
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Yeah but now it's concave!
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Admittedly, the phone is a bit dated now, compared to when it was released, but at that point it was just about the fastest thing out there in terms of computational po
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ya, I'm surprised at the lack of a dual core. Not that hummingbird is bad, but apparently the Orion is based on ARM9 and is about 5x faster (using both cores fully of course). I'm not up on the software side of android since I'm stuck with an iPhone and blackberry until august.