T-Mobile USA just announced two new phones joining its robust Android roster.   Two spots in the lineup are set to be taken by the Samsung Exhibit 4G and the Samsung Gravity Smart.

Samsung Exhibit 4G

Another one for the HSPA+ network, this handset features a surprising design aesthetic that's more reminiscent of Nokia's stylings than Samsung.   Aimed at mid-range users who like their data bandwidth fast, it packs moderate hardware with a 1GHz processor at the core.  Other details include a WVGA touchscreen display (no size given), aGPS, WiFi, a 3.0 megapixel camera with Flash, a front-facing low-res webcam and microSD card expansion.  It runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread, with pricing slated at $79.99 for a new two year contract.

Samsung Gravity Smart

Looking to capture your entry-level dollar, the Gravity Smart is a landscape QWERTY slider that you're not likely to mistake as anything but a Samsung phone (okay, LG might come up with something similar-looking).  Details include a 3.2-inch capacitive touchscreen display, a 3.0 megapixel camera with LED flash, a four-row QWERTY keyboard and an 800Mhz processor.  It will run Android 2.2 Froyo out of the box and will swipe a mere $69.99 off your wallet.

Both the  Samsung Exhibit 4G and the Samsung Gravity Smart will be available to T-Mobile customers sometime in June.

[via TmoNews]

Two new handsets just made it to the rumor rounds Monday, the HTC Holiday and the Motorola Droid 3, both of them running Android inside big-screened frames.

HTC Holiday

A certified behemoth, the HTC Holiday takes the screen size game a step further, boasting a 4.5-inch touchscreen display.  Design is rather uncomplicated and simplistic, as you can tell from the photo above.  The display is  very generous, though, especially with its qHD (960 x 540) resolution.  Other leaked details of the phone include a 1.2GHz Qualcomm MSM8660, 1GB of RAM, an 8.0 megapixel camera module and Android 2.3.4 Gingerbread.  AT&T is supposedly getting the phone for its US customers.  No word on when, but it's called "Holiday," so maybe the holidays?

Motorola Droid 3

Sure, you've seen leaked photos of the Droid 3 before.  This time, though, TechnoBuffalo manages to snag the inside scoop on its… uhm… insides.  Sitting underneath the handset's chrome trim are a 1GHz Tegra 2 dual-core system on a chip, 8-megapixel optics in the rear and a lower-res one for video calls.  The display has been bumped to 4 inches, with qHD (960 x 540) resolution, and, of course, that new raised 5-row keyboard layout.  It won't come with LTE support, though, so file those 4G dreams away for now.

[via: 911sniper, TechnoBuffalo]

Last week's three-day Pwn2Own tournament showed some interesting results in the mobile phone arena, with both Android and Windows Phone 7 surviving the onslaught from competing hackers.  Does that mean they're more secure than other mobile OS platforms?  Well, not necessarily.

Both the iPhone and the Blackberry were successfully attacked using the built-in browser, which is based on WebKit.  Thing is, Android's default browser is built from WebKit, too, leaving it with many of the same vulnerabilities as the ones they used for the two platforms that fell.  As for Windows Phone 7, it's not exactly the most widely-adopted platform in the mobile space, so the contestants had a lot of work cut out for them (compared to, say, the iPhone which folks have been turning inside and out for years now).

The mobile phones used during the competition consisted of: the Dell Venue Pro (Windows Phone 7), the iPhone 4 (iOS), the BlackBerry Torch 9800 (Blackberry 6) and the Nexus S (Android).  All phones used has their OS and browser versions freezed from last week to ensure they were all running the same builds.

No specific reasons were cited for the contestants who chose to abandon their efforts on Android and WP7.

[via Ars Technica]

Over the last couple of years, Vizio has entrenched itself as a serious player in HDTVs, pumping out richly-featured yet affordable home entertainment centerpieces.  This year, they're entering the mobile game too and have announced their first smartphone effort: the Vizio VIA Phone.

Sporting a sleek-looking slate body, the handset will be running Android (no word on which version).  A custom UI sits on top (at least, based on the press photos), which is consistent with the company's further announcements that they want compatible users experiences running across all their devices -- from web-infused HDTVs to smartphones to...gasp...tablets.

Details of the VIA Phone include a 4-inch capacitive touchscreen display, a 5. megapixel camera in the rear (with 720p video), a front-facing low-res camera for video chat, aGPS, WiFi, 3G with HSPA, Bluetooth 2.1, HDMI out (it can process 720p videos) and microSD card expansion.    An unspecified 1GHz CPU will control the action.

Since this will be tied in with their HDTVs and Blu-ray players, the phone will come with a preinstalled remote app and a built-in IR blaster, in case you prefer changing tracks and channels on your home entertainment system with the same device you'll be sending text messages on.   There's Market access, as well, along with all the usual Android favors.

Just in case you're interested, the Vizio VIA Phone was announced along with a Vizio VIA Tablet and a new line of HDTVs and BD players  running Google TV.  No pricing or release dates were given, but all the goods will be on hand at CES later in the week.

[via Engadget]

If we're going to call a 5-inch slate a tablet, what the heck do we call a 4.8-inch phone?  Acer, at least, is sticking with the smartphone label on their yet-unnamed 4.8-inch Android slab.

Actually, it's not that simple.  In their press release, the company calls it "100% smartphone, 100% tablet," which should be confusing enough to make you want to curse whoever concocted this product's marketing.  At any rate, the upcoming device's large capacitive display will feature a 21:9 aspect ratio, along with a 1,024 x 480 resolution.   The display tops off a slim, elongated profile body, with a curved back panel for cupping smoothly in hand.

Details of the handset/tablet include a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, six-axis motion sensors (gyroscope plus accelerometer), an 8.0 megapixel camera with LED flash, a 2.0 megapixel front-facing camera, Bluetooth 3.0, 3G with HSPA, WiFi and HDMI out.  No word on Android version, but they're touting Flash 10.1 support, so it should be 2.2 or better.

In all fairness, the product screenshots make it look like a nice piece of hardware.  It's got that whole "too weird for a tablet, too big for a phone" vibe, though.  No word on pricing yet, but Acer's hoping to have it in stores by April of 2011.

[via Engadget]

While much complaints have been logged about Apple's draconian policies for its App Store, you can't complain about the level of security they're able to enforce.  Suffice to say, piracy just isn't that easy to accomplish on such a closed platform.

The complete inverse is true for the Android Market.  Ask any developer about what concerns them most about Google's mobile OS and you'll hear the same thing: Android apps are just way too easy to acquire illegally.  Sideloading apps (i.e. installing apps via APK files that come from places other than the Android Market), for instance, is relatively hassle-free.  Plus, you can easily cheat the Market by downloading an app, copying it to an SD card and then requesting a refund - you get both the app and your money back.

For a while now, Google has been talking about enacting ways to foster a more secure system where developers can thrive.  That system is now officially live in the form of Google's licensing service.

It works this way: Developers include a set of code libraries from Google, using them to send a message to the Android Market, requesting the current user's licensing status.  This will be done in real time, with a server receiving all requests and fielding responses, similar to Microsoft's irritating activation nags for its PC software.

All developers can implement the system on their apps, which will work properly on all handsets running Android Market 1.5 or later.  However, all apps will need to be recompiled with the new code requirements, which means developers will have to rewrite and resubmit their software with the corresponding security measures in place.

[Android Developers Blog]

As Apple taketh, Google giveth away.  While the former has decided to make app development on its platform stricter than ever (e.g. banning direct ports from Flash to iPhone), the latter is about to make it easier than ever to produce an endless supply of fart and spam apps.   How?  With the Google App Inventor for Android, a drag-and-drop creation tool that will allow even non-programmers to build their own roster of smartphone applications.

Doing away with SDKs and cryptic code, the new service takes away the building of mobile phone software from the hands of the tech-savvy, down to less-technical enthusiasts.  According to project leader Harold Abelson, the tool has been under development for around a year, with testing performed on a wide range of people that includes sixth-grade students, high school girls and nursing students.

From the write up, App Inventor doesn't appear to restrict itself to simple apps either.  Aside from displaying onscreen items interspersed with programming logic,  it can access the phone's motion sensors, GPS, messaging modules, text-to-speech capabilities and more.  Plus, there are modules to interface with third-party sites, including Amazon and Twitter.

The Google App Inventor is currently in closed beta.  That means you'll have to fill out a request if you want access, the same way Google's many other services started before rolling out to the general public.  Suffice to say, the Android Market is about to get a whole lot more confusing to navigate with the number of titles this will spawn.  This is going to be big - no, huge.

[App Inventor]

I rarely use a travel journal, but I have used plenty of notebook-style software over various platforms. When it comes to aesthetics and design, Trip Journal for Android is easily one of the most gorgeous I've seen, managing to strike a perfect balance between presentation and function. The winner of the Travel category in the last Android Developer Challenge, it's a complete solution for recording, tracking and sharing all about your adventures on the road, accomplishing it all very elegantly.

Instead of dumping the thousand or so pictures you took from your last vacation onto a hard drive, the app lets you document the entire experience in a format that's a real eye candy. Interface resembles a leather travel diary, with worn, browning pages where you can paste pictures and add various notes to. It runs very smoothly as well, making it a joy to use when you're on the road.

Obviously, you can imagine just how detailed of a travel journal you can come up with using a software like this. With Trip Journal, you can track your GPS route, add waypoints, get geotagging data and even view your progress on Google Maps. You can add pictures and notes for each place you visit, as well as get statistics on various information, such as the distance you've traveled, speed and altitude. Plus, you can export details of your trips into Google Earth format, as well as share them on Facebook and Picasa.

More than just a travel app, this is one of the best journaling tools I've seen and is currently my favorite on a mobile platform. They have a lite version available if you want to try it, but the full application is priced affordably enough at $2.99.

[iqApps]

Acer has recently gone live with the newest member of their Android-powered line up, the Acer Liquid E. The device set to take the markets soon will be powered by the impressive Android 2.1 OS and will pack a Qualcomm 8250 768 MHz snapdragon processor, one of the most powerful processors available to smart phones on the market today. In all truth, however, the Liquid E is simply an updated form of one of Acer's other recent releases, the Liquid. With similar specs and load outs the only real difference is seen in the form of the operating system it runs, yet even that can mean a huge step up from the previous phone version seen earlier.

The new 2.1 Android, also known as "Eclair", delivers a number of upgrades over the previous 1.6 "Donut" version, affording all users an overall much friendlier phone experience. Still, this does beg the question among many industry analysts why Acer did not simply issue an upgrade to the existing Liquid phone rather than investing more time and money into the complete new design of the Liquid E - a question that is still yet to be answered as of late.

Regardless, the Liquid E still packs an impressive 3.5-inch TFT capacitive touch screen (for ultra-friendly finger and thumb usage). Although it would have been nice to see a bit more than a measly 256k colors, the 480x800 WVGA resolution generally more than makes up for this. The device also sports a great media player to play back a number of different file formats, and with the added functionality of viewing YouTube, this makes entertainment a breeze.

Camera-wise, the Liquid E does sport a fairly decent five-megapixel camera, and along with a wide range of pre-installed as well as downloadable applications it's a breeze to quickly upload any photos you take to social media sites like Facebook and Flickr. Another big plus is that the camera comes with an LED flash (something not seen on all phones these days) as well as decent video capturing at 20fps, a relatively good auto-focus and even geotagging (for those interested in sharing the exact location a picture is shot from at any given moment).

The big bonus for the Liquid E comes in the form of its actual interface, though. Since the Liquid E is running the new Android 2.1 system that means the home screen is actually five screens, all of which are able to be interacted with in a 3-D viewing mode so that users can easily select which screen they want to zoom in on at any given time. Combined with the Snapdragon processor for quality application running this means a smooth, quality experience from the home screen onwards.

All in all, the new version of Android really does soup things up, although potential users might want to hold off to see what Acer's next handset has to offer by way of improved specs before making the leap to the Liquid E as of right this moment.

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Most people are likely to dismiss the Motorola Cliq XT as nothing but a slightly updated version of the original Cliq from last year. While that may be true to an extent, this device actually deserves better recognition as it improves upon its predecessor in many ways. Heck, they could have named it something else and it wouldn't have been such an issue.

Physically, the most noticeable change from the Cliq is the omission of a physical keyboard. While the general look is similar, the new phone is taller and wider, while reclaiming more portability by being lighter and slimmer. It comes with a 3.1-inch capacitive touchscreen (320 x 480 resolution) that manages excellent colors, but is noticeably less vibrant than higher-end smartphones like the Motorola Droid. The touchscreen comes with both multi-touch (which works on most apps, but not on Google Maps) and Swype (for text input). While it also offers a traditional onscreen keyboard, we did find Swype a much better mode of input once you get used to it.

As a phone, the Cliq XT manages excellent call quality. Everything went through loud and clear on both ends, with rich sound and plenty of volume. The speakerphone performed similarly, with nothing but an occasional, ignorable buzz to break up the near-perfect sound. Battery is rated at 6.5 hours of talk time, which should last for a good two days or more.

The phone pairs both 3G and WiFi, allowing you to have access to fast broadband internet in most situations. Onboard Webkit-based browser performed admirably, loading pages fast and accurately. With pinch-to-zoom and Flash Lite, it allows for a great browsing experience. While the phone uses the same 526Mhz processor as its predecessor, it performed faster in almost every way. It's a sufficiently speedy phone, exhibiting none of the frustrating sluggishness we found on other Motorola phones like the aforementioned Cliq and the Backflip.

Feature set is similar to the Cliq, coming with both Android 1.5 and Motoblur out of the box. As expected, it's got all the usual stuff you can expect from such a combination - Motoblur's social-friendly functions, Google's suite of apps and terrific messaging capabilities, among others. One pleasant surprise is the changes Motorola did to Android's music player, turning out one that not only looks better, but comes with more features too. My favorite additions: running streams from Shoutcast, YouTube and GoTV, as well as the integration with TuneWiki.

The 5.0 megapixel camera module comes with LED flash and autofocus. It only allows for standard editing options, but manages excellent photos. There is a bit of shutter lag, though, so it's not perfect. Other features include quad-band roaming and Bluetooth 2.0.

Overall, the Motorola Cliq XT is easily one of the better mid-range Android phones right now. It's not yet on sale, but is expected to go for around $149.99 with a contract from T-Mobile. At that price, it's easily a better buy than either the Cliq, Backflip or any of the even cheaper Android handsets around.