Smartphone Experts–Smartphone Fan

We visited with HP to see what’s changed since we saw the Compaq AirLife during CES — aside from it now having a name — in early January. We were told by HP that the device’s plastic housing has been improved, received confirmation that it’s indeed running a 1GHz Snapdragon, and will be sold exclusively through a deal with Telefonica. The AirLife’s performance was impressive while scrolling through carousels of photos, and control of the resistive display was also snappy with no stuttering while scrolling — that we noticed.

General Mobile — maker of the DSTL1 dual-SIM Android phone — has always walked a fine line between KIRF and originality with its phones, and its latest batch is no different. Normally it’s easy to resist a device widely regarded as a knockoff (for most of us, anyhow), but in the case of the newest model here, General Mobile’s actually managed to answer a question HTC’s failed to so far: where the hell is the HD2 with Android? The so-called “Touch Stone” (deep breaths, Palm) rings true to many of the actual HD2′s specs, from the 5 megapixel camera to the 4.3-inch capacitive WVGA display, but this sucker adds an “optional” analog TV tuner (which won’t do countries with digital transitions any good) and Android 2.0 atop an ARM9-based PXA935 core. Sadly, this phone doesn’t quite exist yet — we were shown a dummy model today with the promise of retail toward the end of the year, at which point HTC and others will undoubtedly have phones like the Supersonic on the shelf.

It’s no secret that the HTC Desire is the exact same hardware as the Nexus One with a Sense-based Android build on top of it, so it shouldn’t be any surprise that an enterprising hacker has already started porting the Desire’s ROM over to Google’s baby. Interestingly, the system file is a little too big for the Nexus One’s internal storage, so some rearranging was necessary, and not everything works yet, but it’s a start — and apparently Flash 10.1 is included and enabled, so this one should be a hot ticket when it’s released.

Windows Phone Series 7 is here, and it’s like nothing we’ve seen from Microsoft—or anyone else—before. But how does it measure up? And where does every other smartphone OS stand? If you want to skip the gallery format, click here .

Over the last several months, Wired has been reimagined with depth and motion for tablets in a new digital product called Wired Reader . Here’s a demo of the experience, and it’s a definite feast for the eyes/fingertips. Teaming with Adobe, Wired built this new rendition of their magazine (due this summer) through Air, which offers compatibility to both Android and Apple mobile platforms as well as Macs and PCs.

Not even a fortnight after we saw Android 2.0.1 slapped onto Sony Ericsson’s all-but-forgotten Xperia X1 , along comes a port that makes the other look like child’s play. A dedicated coder over at XDA Developers has managed to stuff Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04 onto an X1, and while the functionality is limited (as you’d expect), the amount of fun to be had is restrained only by your imagination (and available vacation time).

Acer took MWC rather seriously this year with no fewer than five phone intros to its name spanning the range from Android to Windows Mobile 6.5.3 , so we went ahead and put our hands on all of them today. Starting at the bottom of the range, the lowly beTouch E110 is obviously designed to compete head-to-head with the likes of the HTC Tattoo — in fact, it apes the Tattoo’s design pretty closely in some respects

And there you have it, folks — word straight from Sprint that the much-anticipated Android 2.1 update will be coming to the HTC Hero and Samsung Moment “early” in the second quarter of this year. As you may recall, Sprint has actually been talking about this update since December , but “early 2Q10″ is at least slightly better news than the previous “1H2010″ estimate the carrier’s been dishing out. Update: Sprint has posted a follow-up tweet saying that OTA vs.

Two days earlier than expected , Motorola’s Milestone has become available to the public via Telus Mobility. For Canadians, that means that you can wrap your palms around one of the sexiest Android devices out for as low as $199.99 on a 3-year contract, while it’ll set you back $499.99 with a 2-year deal, $549.99 with a 1-year agreement or $599.99 outright.