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.

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

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).

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.

If you thought that machining a phone from a single block of aluminum might cause RF issues in a phone… well, you can apparently think again, because HTC just went there with its freshly-introduced Legend

We’ve been able to confirm in a chat with Dell spokesfolks this evening that the lovely Mini 5 won’t ship with the Android 1.6 build (also known as Donut ) that we’ve seen so far — instead, it’ll be running “something newer.” They wouldn’t say what that newer version would be — and to be fair, we’re not sure they even knew since Android is always a moving target on account of Google’s breakneck development pace — but it was specifically mentioned that Flash compatibility was something they had on their radar, suggesting that something really, really fresh might be needed. Then again, they also mentioned that the giant phone / MID / thingamajig is going to be totally upgradeable, something that fellow Android skinners HTC and Motorola have both had to reassure the Android-buying public over. How this all shakes out remains to be seen, but let’s put it this way: Eclair , at minimum, seems to be a lock by the time the Mini 5 is on a shelf near you. Gallery: Dell Mini 5 hands-on at MWC 2010 Dell Mini 5 will run ‘something newer’ than Android 1.6 at launch originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:14:00 EST