Motorola Droid News

While it still isn’t in the United States yet, LG’s newest mobile phone uses the Android operating system.  Debuting as the LG GW620 in Europe and the Eve in Canada, the newest smart-phone from LG is using Android along with Windows Mobile as its OS.

It’s a slick smart-phone featuring a touch screen and a slide out QWERTY keyboard.  Other technical specifications include:

Dualband UMTS GSM WiFi and Bluetooth 2 or 4 GB internal storage microSD card slot 5 megapixel camera

One standout feature of this phone is the SNS Manager (Social Networking Service) that connects social media sites Facebook and Twitter into a single mobile application.  Facial recognition connects people in photos to the phone’s contact entry.

Android is an open source operating system designed specifically for mobile applications.  The company was acquired in 2005 by Google and the first Android OS phone was released last year.  Market research firm Gartner has predicted Android will be the second most popular OS for mobile phones by 2012.

Google has said there could be as many as 20 Android handsets available worldwide by the end of 2009.  Right now HTC has three Android handsets on the market and Motorola’s Droid sold 250,000 units during the first week it went on sale.  Once these other handsets are released I’m betting we’ll see much different numbers next year.  Wired has written there will be 12 new Android handsets available by the end of this year including the LG GW620.

The GW620 is a beautiful looking phone with a black face bordering the touch screen. Contemporary use of silver and grey distinguish the QWERTY keyboard.  Placement of the SD port and other input ports make the GW620 look just like a mini-computer.  By adopting the Android OS, handset makers can now focus more on design and functionality rather than having to worry about developing software.  Phone companies will be able to distinguish their products by design and this new LG phone reflects those efforts.

LG’s newest cell phone, the GW620 smart-phone with the Android OS will be released to market in the United States before the end of the year.  It is already available in Europe and is called the Eve in Canada.

South Korea-based Samsung has officially unveiled the Samsung i5700 Galaxy Spica that had the speculative rumor mills on the internet buzzing as the Galaxy Lite before its release.

Samsung is right to take out the “Lite” branding as the i5700 does have improved specifications over the earlier Galaxy i7500 smartphone.  This is Samsung’s second Android handset targeted specially to European markets (the 4th worldwide).After what seems like a sustained market demand, users can now watch DivX movies on the handset, making it the first Android to run DivX.

Samsung has earlier brought DivX to its flagship Omnia HD (8900), Ultra Touch (S8300) and BEAT DJ (M7600) in recognition of its excellent high quality lossy compression codec that now figure prominently in ripping High Definition disks and stored in MKV files for both home and mobile viewing.  Not all mobile phones carry the feature as it still require DivX certification and licensing for any device to get it playing the codec.  Android phone users, however, can still get DivX from third party apps like the vxflash player from MobileSoft.

A Word about DivX

DivX is a brand of codec technology that makes a competent balance of high quality MPEG4/Part2 compression algorithm with files sizes that are small enough for archiving across consumer media appliances like for the home and on the road. There are now over 100 million DivX-certified gadgets from leading consumer electronics brands that is making a dent in spreading a high quality high definition video experience across major platforms.

It requires certification and licensing to get your device to run DivX but it also figures as one of many codecs commonly used for ripping discs into hard drives for transcoding in smaller files.

Features at a Glance

Apart from being able to run DivX video, its media players can play just about all the popular media files you throw at it.  Headphone listening can come either from a 3.5mm headphone jack or wirelessly from its Bluetooth A2DP support.

The new I5700 Spica is a quad band GSM/GPRS/EDGE on 2G and dual band 3G/HSDPA housed in a touchscreen monoblock body measuring 115 x 57 x 13.2mm weighing 124 g.  There’s WiFi 802/11 b/g for hotspot surfing and Bluetooth 2.1 for high speed wireless data synchronization.

It gets a powerful engine with a proprietary Samsung 800MHz CPU, making the i5700 Spica one of the fasted smartphone on in Android territory.  Memory is a modest 180 MB which can be expanded up to 32 GB on its microSD slot.

It has a 3.2” TFT capacitive touchscreen supporting 16 million colors on a 320 x 480 pixel resolution. Like most other touchscreens, it has a gravity accelerometer to auto-rotate viewing orientation based on the tilt of the handset. Imaging function is supported by a 3.15 megapixel autofocus camera with geo-tagging from its assisted GPS receiver. It does not have any secondary camera despites its 3G video calling capability.

Like its heftier i7500 brother, the new handset runs on the Android v1.5 Cupcake which is a tad down from the current v2.0 Éclair Android that runs on the Motorola Droid/Milestone.  It has a Java-based digital compass, Google Search, Google Maps and tight integration with YouTube and Google talk. From its generous 1500 mAh li-Ion battery, the Samsung i5700 Galaxy Spica gets up to 11.5 hours of talk time and 27 days of standby time on a single charge – one of the best among touchscreen mobiles.

—>> Download Beautiful Widgets

So who doesn’t like the SENSE UI on the latest HTC smartphones? I guess it’s safe to say that most of those who see it, fall in love with it. Heck, there’s even a leaked Sense UI ROM for Android 2.1 out there. You don’t have an HTC phone? Well, that might not be a problem now, as long as you have an Android-based phone.

Beautiful Widgets has come to the rescue, and is now available on the Android Market. Beautiful Widgets is actually a set of widgets that run on Google’s free mobile Android platform, with a stylish and nice looking design inspired by the HTC interface (Sense UI).

So, all those Motorola DROID owners who would kill to have Sense UI on their smartphones, now you don’t have to (killing is never good, you know). If you own a Samsung Android-based phone, you can also get this app to work for you.

Vote: 
Does Beautiful Widgets make the stock Android home screen better than Sense UI?
Yes or No

*Voting will give you a chance to win $1,000 Best Buy gift card.

Next are the Features:

- Two nice looking flip clocks with 12/24 hours support
- Weather with realistic icons
- Celcius and fahrenheit temperature
- Automatic language detection
- Geolocation for the weather city, or the ability to enter the city name
- Automatic sunset/sunrise calculation
- High res graphics for WVGA Devices (such as the Motorola Droid)
- 1×1 beautiful Wifi/Bluetooth/Plane mode/Silent/Vibrate widgets to easily enable or disable them
- 1×1 GPS widget that act as shortcut to enable or disable location in the settings.

Even after a C&D from HTC, Beautiful Widgets is back and as beautiful as ever.  The newer version doesn’t look as much like Sense UI, but the older version can still be found.