Sure, we’ve seen all those purtied up renders, but what does the Ulysse Nardin Chairman look like in the flesh? Well, they’re keeping it under wraps pretty tightly at BASELWORLD, not letting photographers near it, but our friendly tipster Greg’s phone “accidentally” snapped a couple pictures. He says there was no way to touch it or see it in action, but he was struck by the sheer enormity of the device. We’re looking forward to selling a few organs for a shot at one ourselves, but for now those two shots up top will have to suffice.
Okay, there’s some amount of originality here, but enough to justify a Red Dot design award? What you’re looking at here is the award-winning Lenovo X1 — as opposed to, say, the Sony Ericsson X1 — which is a triband EDGE handset Lenovo sells in China. To us, it looks like an Instinct with a slide-out keypad and TouchWiz, but what do we know? Coincidentally, Lenovo calls this totally original UI “Touch Dream,” which sounds just a little bit (okay, a whole lot) like an HTC device. So, to summarize: Sony Ericsson and HTC branding, Samsung design, made by Lenovo. Right then.
Right on schedule, the Nokia 7205 Intrigue for Verizon Wireless is online and ready for purchase. Price is exactly in-line with expectations as well, at $180 with a two-year contract, plus a handy $50 rebate to bring it down to $130. Design-wise the flip phone is already a long ways ahead of the frumpy Nokia 6205, at a mere 0.55-inches thick, but there’s nothing much here to get Nokia’s GSM customers jealous — other than that subsidized price, of course. The handset has a 2 megapixel camera, A2DP Bluetooth, a fancy new homescreen (including Habitat Mode), PMOLED display on the back cover, and a microSD slot.
ARM has been talking up its Mali-200 and Mali-400 processors for a little while now, but according to the company’s graphics product manager, Remi Pedersen, they’re now finally on track to land in some actual products, and the first cellphones using ‘em could show up as soon as winter 2009. While Pedersen unfortunately didn’t have anything to say about those phones themselves, he did make some pretty bold claims about the processors, which are able to run OpenGL ES 2.0 and can supposedly pump out 16 million triangles per second and 275 million pixels per second. Those numbers apparently apply to both the Mali-200 and Mali-400, although the later is multicore scalable (up to quad-core at 300MHz), and even able to produce 1080p resolutions. To bring all that home, ARM has whipped up a port of the original Project Gotham Racing game to demo at GDC, which reportedly runs just like the original Xbox game performance-wise, but “feature-wise it looks like an Xbox 360 title.”
Depending upon which source you believe, Michael Dell either directly commented on Dell’s smartphone plans or just hinted at them. DigiTimes has Michael Dell paraphrased as saying in Taipei that Dell will not delay its smartphone lineup and is on schedule to release devices in line with its internal roadmap. The IDG news service, however, has him in Tokyo just hinting at smartphones. “It is true that we are exploring smaller screen devices,” said Dell, adding, “We don’t have any announcements to share today but stay tuned as when we have new news we will share that with you.” Mr. Dell also mentioned Dell’s carrier agreements already in place for the 3G radios Dell ships in it laptops. As such, “it wouldn’t be unreasonable to expect that we would have smaller mobile Internet devices or smartphones in the future.” Look Michael, just spit it out. We don’t care how dull they look — we know you’re probably going after the big, fat chewy center of corporate market share here. Just don’t call it the Ditty Talker and we’re cool.
Read — Dell on schedule with smartphones
Read — Dell hints at smartphones
It’s unsourced, but we’re hearing today that Acer’s first Android phone will be called the A1 and arrive in September. That’s at least the word according to the Phillipine BusinessMirror, and it lines up nicely with our peek inside Acer’s secret roadmap diary at MWC. The touchscreen A1 will apparently launch alongside three other handsets, one of which we’re guessing is the mysterious white C1 pictured above. We’ll see how it goes — hopefully Acer’s second effort is a lot more interesting than its first round of ho-hum WinMo phones.
Most of us are going to have to wait until at least May to get our hands on a 9630, but for well-connected individuals whose blogs rhyme with “Soy Beanius Report,” patience isn’t in the vocabulary. BGR’s gone and landed a 9630 and put it through its hybrid CDMA / GSM paces, and in short, it sounds like it’s a phone worth waiting for (not to say you’ve got many other options if you’re tied to Sprint or Verizon anyhow). Voice quality is described as “the best phone we’ve ever used,” battery life seems to be enough to get through a full day of use (and we wouldn’t be surprised to see this get better as the firmware continues to get tweaked ahead of launch), the screen is as good as the Bold’s amazing example, and the keyboard is “just right.” What’s amazing is that RIM’s managed to package all of this action into a device considerably smaller than the Bold — and if only they’d manage to throw in WiFi, it seems like we might be looking at the closest thing to BlackBerry perfection here. Verizon, Sprint, your move.