After months of waiting it seems HTC’s Desire customers will have to go on living without the Android Gingerbread update. HTC has finally admitted defeat and announced that the HTC Desire will continue to run Froyo indefinitely. According to HTC UK’s Facebook page the HTC Desire simply doesn’t have the internal memory required to make Gingerbread and the Sense UI tango together without a loss of functionality.
The International Data Corporation (IDC) has unveiled a somewhat shocking press release stating that, according to their predictions, the Windows Phone 7 platform will take the #2 spot from iOS in world smartphone popularity sometime around 2015. Currently the IDC’s stats put Android at 38.9% of market share with iOS trailing with 18.2% and Windows Phone 7 with a measly 3.8%. You’ll note that Symbian is up there too, but many of their devices are feature phones (i.e. not smartphones) and Symbian is being replaced by WP7 on many upcoming Nokia devices in the near future.
For any of you who don’t remember Windows Mobile it was the mobile platform employed by Microsoft in the days before the Windows Phone 7 platform came in to existence. Generally seen to be aimed at Industry consumers, it was never really able to compete with BlackBerry, a service that at the time had something akin to a monopoly in that area of the market.
Apple finally announced iOS 5 at this year’s Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) and it seems that they’ve actually been listening to their fans. If you’ll remember a while back we posted our iOS 5 wish list and detailed most of our issues with the now iconic mobile operating system (OS) employed by Apple. So you can imagine our surprise and pleasure when we discovered that many of our hopes for the iOS platform had come true.
The Windws Phone platform is a mobile operating system (OS) with a great amount of potential. While it failed to convert too many iOS and Android enthusiasts upon its initial release, it is still a good foundation on which we hope Microsoft will build a solid platform.
The Motorola DROID 3 has been the subject of much rumor and speculation in recent months. As the expected successor to the Motorola DROID’s legacy, the DROID 3 is aimed to sell its fair share of units come its release date. When the original DROID was released, it was seen as Verizon’s only convincing answer to (at the time) AT&T’s exclusivity deal with the iPhone line. It was fast, responsive, sported a slider QWERTY keypad and ran on Android 2.0. Since then the DROID has been upgraded to run on Android 2.1 and finally 2.2.
The HTC Sensation is soon set to become HTC’s new flagship phone just about everywhere but the US. The Dual-core 1.2GHz handset boasts some impressive hardware specs, as well as the Android Gingerbread OS and new Sense 3.0 user interface (UI). It’s basically the very definition of the new generation of smartphones and should emerge as a solid competitor for Samsung’s much awaited Galaxy S II.
HTC hasn’t given up on the Windows Phone platform just yet, according to a leaked video of a new HTC Handset running the Windows Phone 7 Mango update. It seems that with Nokia soon to be making its debut in to the Windows Phone family HTC has taken the initiative and gone all-out in the hardware department, including a whopping 12MP camera on this device. While a 12MP camera isn’t anything new to the smartphone world, this will be the first time HTC has tried their hand at providing such a powerful camera.
It seems that our days of quietly encouraging Nokia’s Symbian OS while sneaking an insult or two through the back door might finally have been given a used-by date. Nokia CEO Stephen Elop has delivered an ominous statement regarding the future of Symbian.
At the recent WP keynote Microsoft announced that the first Nokia Windows Phone handset is on its way and it’ll be running on the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango update. This excites us for 2 main reasons: 1) The joint venture between Nokia and Microsoft appears to have been successful, despite some belief that it would fall through before any major release could be made.
Hundreds of cell phone plans unpacked. All the facts. No surprises.