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Posts Tagged ‘Samsung’

Well, Verizon and Samsung aren’t going to be too happy about this. A little birdie told Boy Genius about a super double secret document that showed all the known bugs and flaws with the Samsung Fascinate. Now to be fair, every carrier and every phone has one of these lists. Just maybe not one that’s quite so.. well endowed.

How bad is it? Well, if you’re on the phone and you accidentally press the search button, you can disconnect the call. Don’t like the Calendar notification? That’s a shame. The GPS doesn’t work well with Google or Bing maps. If you are on one call, and second call comes in, the Caller ID will display the correct information. Until you answer the call. Then the screen will go blank and you won’t be able to see anything until you hang up the phone. The worst part? There are no work arounds for any of these issues. Guess you’ll have to wait until the firmware update to fix this stuff.

For the whole list, hit up the BGR website. It’s too long to show here.

The latest news regarding Samsung’s Galaxy Tab is no more solid than the price (which has, in another’s words, been pinpointed to somewhere between $200 and $1200), but if these “people familiar with the matter” are to be believed, we’ll see a multi-carrier rollout on September 16th. Samsung is said to have made deals with AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint — which is interesting, since AT&T is already on the iPad bandwagon, Verizon has that Motorola tablet coming up, and the Galaxy Tab isn’t 4G. Samsung must have offered them quite a juicy deal for them to take on a non-exclusive tablet that competes with their own products.

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The way that rumors and Verizon's statements have been lining up this year, you might've been under the impression that its upcoming Android tablets would be carrier exclusives -- but maybe not: ye olde Wall Street Journal is citing "three people familiar with the matter" (it's not often they give a quantity of familiar people!) as saying that Big Red, AT&T, and Sprint are all on tap to take delivery of the Galaxy Tab. In light of Samsung's strategy in deploying the Galaxy S as far and wide (and with as little exclusivity) as possible, that'd certainly make sense -- the company is comfortable switching between GSM, CDMA, and even WiMAX radios at this point without breaking a sweat.

Speaking of WiMAX, this rumor certainly lends credence to the possibility that the Sprint version will be 4G-equipped, giving the Epic a big brother in the carrier's growing stable of sexy WiMAX hardware. Samsung has an event lined up in New York next Thursday, the 16th (which we'll be attending, naturally) and the WSJ goes on to say that the Tab's US unveil is going to go down there. Pricing remains an open question, but considering that the Tab's a full-on cellphone in addition to a data device, it seems that American customers might need to be comfortable with another contract if they want in on this thing. Ouch.

Samsung Galaxy Tab heading to Verizon, AT&T, Sprint? originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 10 Sep 2010 19:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Could this be the best-looking Windows Phone 7 device yet? That's open to some personal interpretation, of course, but Sammy's alleged i8700 is looking like quite the beast -- and it should assuage any lingering fears that the Omnia HD-based prototypes floating around would be influencing final ID for the company's numerous WP7 launches later this year. If we had to venture a guess, we'd say this is probably that unnamed model we saw not long ago, identified by its sharp, squared-off edges and the button layout below the display. The about screen reveals 8GB of internal storage and the backside shows a camera of unknown resolution paired to an LED flash, so if you're not tied to the idea of a physical QWERTY keyboard, this might be the Windows Phone 7 handset you've been looking for. Question is, what carriers?

[Thanks, Pradeep]

Samsung i8700 for Windows Phone 7 leaks, puts developer prototype to shame originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Sep 2010 14:39:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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When we first heard about the Samsung Galaxy Tab, we had a great deal of excitement thinking of the features and UI and how useful it would be in the day-to-day. With all the great things the Tab will have over iPad (front and rear camera, smaller form factor, Froyo, massive 4,000mAh battery and a microSD slot), one couldn’t help await a test unit.

Then we heard a nasty rumor, one that was rather disconcerting. The screen on the Tab would be low-res, like 800 x 480. Wait really? Developers comforted us stating that the resolution would be more like 1024 x 600, which we now know is. Now, we are hearing something entirely different for the future iteration, something quite a bit more exciting than a 1024 x 600 TFT-LCD.

Digitimes released a bit of info clueing to the next Galaxy Tab coming with an AMOLED screen. Nothing more has been said, nothing on resolution or other screen technologies. Countdown to viewing HD Avatar on the nice 7-inch AMOLED screen begins now.

Way to take the wind out of our sails, ARM -- no sooner does your dual-core Cortex-A9 finally ship, do you reveal an even more powerful smartphone, smartbook and server-slaying beast. The Cortex-A15 MPCore picks up where the A9 left off, but with reportedly five times the power of existing CPUs, raising the bar for ARM-based single- and dual-core cell phone processors up to 1.5GHz... or as high as 2.5GHz in quad-core server-friendly rigs with hardware virtualization baked in and support for well over 4GB of memory. One terabyte, actually. Like we'd heard, the ARMv7-A "Eagle" chips are destined for Texas Instruments, but ST-Ericsson and Samsung as also named as "lead licensees," so we fully expect to see some badass silicon powering a Galaxy when the 32nm and 28nm parts ship in 2013. Press release and video after the break, replete with ARM partner companies fawning over the new hotness. We can't really blame them.

Continue reading ARM reveals Eagle core as Cortex-A15, capable of quad-core computing at up to 2.5GHz

ARM reveals Eagle core as Cortex-A15, capable of quad-core computing at up to 2.5GHz originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Sep 2010 01:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The price of the Galaxy Tab is being rolled out as slowly as the device itself; early reports pegged it at €700 to begin with, or £679, or several other wildly different numbers — and then a Samsung exec flipped everyone’s bit by saying it would sell for under $300. It’s clear that it’ll probably be available both with and without a carrier picking up the tab (so to speak), but pricing for wireless data is still worth checking out.

The Tab will be coming to Three in the UK, and you can get a data only plane for £7.50/1GB or £15/5GB. That’s more generous than AT&T’s shockingly restrictive iPad plans, at least.

There’s still no legitimate subsidized or unsubsidized price in sight, though, so until Samsung elucidates us on that particular subject, we’re quite in the dark, especially if US numbers are going to be much different from UK ones.

We already knew about Samsung's grand plans for expanding its display production in 2011, but now we also have a number to give us a sense of scale: 30 million. That's how many screens the new Mobile Display fab (set to go live in July) will be able to churn out in a month, a vastly superior rate than the current 3 million maximum. Lee Woo-Jong, the display business' marketing VP, tells us its estimates for AMOLED market demand have been revised upwards to 700 million units in 2015, with the new facility obviously being the key cog in making that growth happen. Intriguingly, he also notes that Super AMOLED -- one of the big attractions of the Galaxy S line of Samsung phones -- is not exclusive to Samsung's electronics arm, everyone can apparently use it. That directly contradicts what we heard from Sammy's mobile reps, but then this is hardly the first time that one part of Samsung doesn't know what the other is doing. Still, it's nice to at least dream of a S-AMOLED HTC HD7, no?

Samsung Mobile Display promises 10x increase in production next year, end to AMOLED shortages originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Sep 2010 05:44:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We knew that the Samsung Fascinate is coming to Verizon's online store today (and physical stores tomorrow), but we didn't know that Verizon has a special offer for buyers: buy one, get one free.Of course, this means that if you buy one Samsung Fascinate for $199, together with a new two-year customer agreement with Verizon, you get another for free. It also comes with a two-year customer agreement, with a $29.99 data plan or higher required. In other words, you need to find a friend who is also willing to sign a two-year contract, which will give both of you a $100 discount.If you decide to partake of this offer, keep in mind that the cost of the phone with the two-year contract is actually $299, and the $100 mail-in rebate brings it down to $199. So, if you buy two, we assume you initially need to dish out $399, and then you'll receive two separate rebates that make the second phone "free."Disclosure: Samsung is a MashableMashable sponsor.[via Engadget]

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Yes, that fateful day is upon us, the Samsung Fascinate has made its debut on Verizon's online store pages, and it's arrived with a quite unusual (for a top tier handset) sweetener. When buying one Fascinate, you're given the option to obtain a second one for free. Well, the hardware would be free, you'd need two-year commitments on both phones with a minimum monthly data plan of $29.99 a piece, but it's still the nicest thing Verizon's done for us since it started throwing out free Pixi Pluses with purchases of Palm's webOS handsets. You should also bear in mind your initial outlay here is a quite lofty $400, with two separate $100 mail-in rebates bringing the cost down. So it's free in pecuniary terms, but probably not free of headaches.

[Thanks, Mike]

Verizon sweetens Samsung Fascinate deal with Buy One Get One Free offer originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 08 Sep 2010 02:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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