Verizon's 4G LTE network gets first 4G smartphone

A smartphone manufacturer is finally making good on the LTE 4G network Verizon turned on earlier this month. The Android blog Droid Lite tracked down HTC's newest piece of hardware, the HTC Thunderbolt. It's a smartphone that resembles Sprint's Evo 4G in many ways, especially in its massive screen size.

Verizon's LTE network has been up and functional for nearly a month, but the only devices made available to sail the 4G sea have been a couple of new USB modems aimed at business customers. With the Thunderbolt, Verizon will be opening up access to more consumer-level activity.

Details on the Thunderbolt are slim, aside from physical features it shares with the Evo, like the 4.3-inch screen and back kickstand. HTC previously referred to the phone by the code name "Mecha," and set up a teaser site for it alongside the Evo and the T-Mobile G2.

According the site, HTC plans to reveal the Thunderbolt on January 6, the first day of CES. Stay tuned for our impressions of it and many other gadgety treats as we descend upon Las Vegas next week.

Facebook Mobile Event Nov 3: Will We See a Secret Facebook Phone?

Facebook has sent out an invitation to the media for a “mobile event” at its Palo Alto, California headquarters on Wednesday November 3. Could this be the unveiling of the much-speculated about Facebook phone?

You may recall that technology blog TechCrunch reported last month that Facebook was secretly developing a special smartphone.

Facebook then issued a carefully-worded response that said the company was not “building” a phone, but that it had projects focused on “deeper integrations with some manufacturers.”

The response was reminiscent of the tack taken by Google last year when rumors were rampant that it was about to release a smartphone. In January, of course, Google began to sell the Nexus One phone, which it developed alongside handset vendor HTC, on its website.

The Facebook invite provides no details whatsoever other than to say that the event begins at 10:30 am on November 3 and will be followed by lunch.

But the invitation sports an image of two shaded figures alongside what appears to be the old string-and-Dixie-cup phones that kids in treehouses have long used to communicate. One hopes the actual Facebook phone, if there is one, is slightly more high-tech.

Motorola's Droid 2 is a refresh, not a revelation

As the Smartphone Summer of 2010 lurches to a close, Verizon Wireless and Motorola have refreshed their product lines with the Droid 2 ($200 with a two-year contract), an update to the 10-month-old popular Droid slider phone.

It's a nice update -- the first phone to ship with Android 2.2 (a.k.a. Froyo) -- with some good tweaks. However, after spending a few days with one, I've concluded that it's unlikely to make your heart go pit-a-pat.

Motorola Droid 2Physically, the phone is nearly indistinguishable from its predecessor. At 2.4 x 4.6 x 0.5 in., it's nearly the same size as an iPhone 4 -- just 0.1 in. thicker, thanks to the slide-out keyboard. Although, at 6 oz., it's slightly heavier than a Droid X (again, keyboard), it's a half-inch shorter and about a quarter-inch narrower, with a 3.7-in. screen instead of the X's 4.3-in. display. It's a good size for one-handed operation.

The four function keys along the bottom are fixed-function targets rather than actual buttons that move when you press them, as they are on the Droid X; they're in slightly different order on the Droid 2 than on the original Droid.

Where pressing a physical button on the Droid X will wake that phone, one consequence of the Droid 2's buttonless buttons is that you'll need to find the hard on-off switch along the phone's top edge to wake it from sleep. And because the phone is so very rectangular, that key can be a little hard to find.

The physical keyboard, a landscape-oriented affair which slides leftward from behind the display, is a marked improvement over the original Droid's. The keys are more domed, there are now inverted-T cursor keys instead of the previous square pad, and other keys now have more room. Opening the keyboard automatically causes the display to orient toward it. The keyboard feels more substantial than, say, a Palm Pre's, but it's not nearly as refined as a BlackBerry's. Also, it's meant for two-handed (or two-thumbed) operation.

If you're devoted to single-handedness, the Droid 2 also has an excellent soft keyboard that can use the excellent Swype entry system. But the smaller size of the Droid 2 compared to the X makes the soft keyboard feel a little cramped. For this function, slightly bigger would have been slightly better.

Despite its 1-GHz processor, a significant upgrade over its 550-MHz predecessor, during testing the Droid 2 frequently felt slow and underpowered. Contact details were sometimes agonizingly slow to come up -- a particular disappointment because the software brilliantly pulls together contact information and recent activity.

Similarly, the powerful K-9 e-mail app, available for free through the Android Market, was sometimes sluggish to the point of apparently hanging. When you're standing on a street corner waiting for a taxi, you don't want to your phone software to be lagging.

Bottom line
In the end, the Droid 2 might be more important to Verizon Wireless and Motorola than to their customers. The smartphone business moves pretty fast, and after just 10 months, the original Droid is getting a little old. The Droid 2 fills a gap in their product line: the hard-keyboard Android phone.

If you like Verizon's network and you want an Android phone with a hard keyboard, the Droid 2's your baby. But if the keyboard is negotiable and you don't mind a slightly bigger phone, you may want to step up to the Droid X.

Dan Rosenbaum, by day a search strategist and content maven, has been reviewing mobile technology since the 1990s. His MicroTAC and StarTAC phones are still in a box somewhere.

Nokia N8 tips up online

FINNISH PHONE MAKER Nokia said Sim Free N8 handsets will be available from 26 August, with one website advertising it at £420 including VAT.

Of its many features it is the N8's 12 Megapixel camera with Xenon flash that can record HD quality video that is most anticipated. Beyond that it boasts a 3.5-inch AMOLED touchscreen, 16GB of memory, GPS, Bluetooth, 3G and its OS is Symbian^3.

Its 1200mAh battery will deliver 390 hours of standby time, 12 hours of talk time for GSM networks, 50 hours of music playback and 7 hours for playing video.

Sadly the delayed Symbian^3 operating system is the latest in a long line that have failed to capture the public's imagination. Windows Mobile, anyone? And Nokia is not even using Symbian^3 for its other mobile devices. It's opting instead for its Meego OS, which it is developing with Intel. Nokia even admits the N8 will be its only device that will use Symbian^3.

Meanwhile T-Mobile has only a registration page for potential customers, as does Vodafone.

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Coming to AT&T August 15

Announced back in November, Sony Ericsson's Android-based Xperia X10 is set to debut on AT&T on August 15...but it looks like it's packing Android 1.6.

Mobile operator AT&T has announced that it plans to start offering the Android-based Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 smartphone for sale starting August 15. Initially announced way back in November 2009, the Xperia X10 packs a 4-inch TFT touchscreen display, 1 GHz Snapdragon processor, and an 8.1 megapixel camera with face recognition and smile detection. It also run Google’s Android operating system—although AT&T is being cagey about exactly what version that might be.

“Sony Ericsson is raising the bar for entertainment-rich phones with the launch of the Xperia X10,” said Sony Ericsson North America senior VP Paul Hamnett, in a statement. “With the convergence of our user experience platform and the Android OS, we are bringing consumers a smartphone experience that is not only exciting, but also very refined.”

The Xperia X10 sports UMTS HSPA 3G connectivity, along with 802.11b/g Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR wireless networking. The phone sports assisted GPS for mapping applications as well as geotagging photos, and boasts Sony Ericsson’s Mediascape entertainment platform that pulls together all music, photos, videos, and other content on your phone and from online sources into a unified interface: for instance, users can be listening to a song on their phone, then use Mediascape’s “infinite” feature to pull artist info from the phone’s memory as well as more songs and video content from sources like Google and YouTube. The Xperia X10 has about 400 MB of user storage and comes with a 2 GB microSD card; users can swap that out for a card offering up to 32 GB of storage; the camera sports an LED flash, and also features automatic scene detection to easy point-and-shoot pictures.

One possible hitch in the Xperia X10, however: although AT&T isn’t saying, the phone has been shipping in international markets with Android 1.6. As the U.S. Android market is finally starting to see Android 2.2 “Froyo” rolled out to compatible devices, it’s not entirely clear what version of Android the Xperia X10 will use—and, if it is Android 1.6, whether it will be upgradable.

AT&T plans to begin selling the Xperia X10 for $149.99 on August 15 with a new two-year service agreement; however, Sony itself says it wil be offering the device for $20 less.