Sony Ericsson LiveView goes on sale for 50 euro, wants to be your next watch

LiveView, Sony Ericsson’s touch-enabled mini remote control for Android phones, is on sale in Europe – and for less than expected. It can be worn as a watch or clipped to your backpack strap and it’s just on time, coming out after the Android Eclair update has started for the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 lineup…

The Sony Ericsson LiveView uses Bluetooth to connect to your Android 2.0+ phone (it should work on non-SE phones too) and control it. It can display messages, control the music player and so on.

It can do that thanks to it’s 1.3” 128×128 pixels AMOLED screen, which has four touch-sensitive areas for soft keys (not true multitouch, but on such a small screen it wouldn’t matter) and two hardware keys as well. The LiveView has the watch-like dimensions of 35x35x11 mm and weighs 15 grams.

The wrist strap that turns it into a watch and clip to attach to your clothes come in the box – the whole Sony Ericsson LiveView package can be yours for 59 euro from the French retailer The Phone House or 56 pounds from Amazon UK. Play.com do one better – 50 pounds (matching the French price). It’s cheapest in Germany however – GetGoods.de offer it for just 48.90 euro (including VAT and shipping).

Will you get one? And how will you use it? I keep thinking LiveView would be better paired with a tablet (which you probably carry in your backpack) rather than a phone (which is easily reachable in your pocket)। But maybe you can come up with something better – leave a comment if you do.

These are the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X7 and X7 mini, or are they?

Some leaked slides bring us two new members of Sony Ericsson’s XPERIA lineup – and they are both running Windows Phone 7. The two new phones are called XPERIA X7 and XPERIA X7 mini and they offer specs that should make current-gen WP7 devices shiver (if the specs turn out to be the real deal)…

Sony Ericsson XPERIA X7 and XPERIA X7 mini

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X7 is the bigger Windows Phone 7 mobile of the two – and by big I mean 4.3 inches of WVGA screen big. The other exciting feature is the MSM8260 Snapdragon CPU ticking at 1.2GHz.

Aside from the large screen and the CPU, which will be among the first to go beyond 1GHz (if the rumors pan out that is), the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X7 has an 8MP camera with 720p video recording, HDMI port and Dolby Digital Plus. As for connectivity, HSPA+ is listed with no concrete speeds (but probably very fast).

The Sony Ericsson XPERIA X7 mini, unlike the X10 minis, has a medium-sized 3.5″ WVGA touchscreen and it uses the older QSD8250 Snapdragon running at 1GHz. The mini’s connectivity is a bit slower as well – it offers vanilla HSPA.

Despite the “mini” moniker, the camera on the XPERIA X7 mini is better than the one on the non-mini phone – 10.1 MP snapper with xenon flash and 720p video recording. The slide also promises 3x optical zoom. Oops, we might have bought the whole thing up so far, but the optical zoom totally lost us. Not to mention the generally poor design of the phones on the slides.

The XPERIA X7 and X7 mini will reportedly launch in Q1 next year, but we doubt that.

They sound rather fishy, don’t you think? A 10MP camera? Optical zoom? And all the info is uploaded to YouTube via a newly created account? If they are even remotely related to some real products, I guess that would be awesome. But for now… I’ll pass.

Hitachi Deskstar 7K3000 is the first 7200 rpm 3TB 3.5-inch hard drive

Today Hitachi announced its Dekstar 7K3000 hard drive – the world’s first to offer 3TB storage and 7200 RPM speed. The 3.5” drive also supports 6Gb/s SATA interface and packs a whopping 64MB cache.

These specs should give it an edge over the other available 3TB internal drive – the Western Digital 3TB Caviar Green, which only runs at 5400 RPM.So if you have been delaying that hard drive update for until 3TB units get up to speed it might be time to jump in. The Deskstar 7K3000 offers maximum interface transfer rates of up to 600 MB/s and media transfer rates of up to 1656 Mb/s.

There’s no mention of pricing or target launch date just yet but those should be revealed in the coming weeks।

The WP7 on Samsung Focus is not a card killer, it is just overprotective

Remember the problems Samsung Focus caused when you try to use a new card in its “hot-swappable” slot? Well, the things have finally started to make sense. The cards can’t be read on any other device not because they’re dead, but because they are secured on a deep system level.

Before any further explanations let’s be clear what SD stands for – Secure Digital.

When you configure a card to work with Windows Phone 7 device (which you can do officially only on AT&T’s Samsung Focus) the OS generates a secure password and stores it within the Flash memory. Then your card is being formatted and becomes password-secured. It can work only with device that has the right password stored.

Although the SD is meant to be used that way, today there are no mainstream digital devices that make use of the feature. Because of this, there are very few platforms that can recognize a secured card and format it. As it turned out, Symbian^3 is one of them.

Once formatted under WP7, the card becomes inaccessible for other devices. But Symbian^3 smartphones (Nokia N8, C7 or C6-01) can recognize and format it. You will lose the information, but you will bring the card back to life.

You can get your card back to working order but you still don’t know what card to replace it with. As I told you before, the key factor is the random access speed (or RAS, lower timing is better). It turns out that quite unexpectedly high speed class microSD cards usually have higher RAS as a performance compromise. Of course this doesn’t mean you go to the store and buy the cheapest class 2 card as they are not guaranteed to have good Random Access Speed either.

Microsoft, Samsung and AT&T have no cards in mind to recommend, since card manufacturers don’t included RAS as part of their regular data sheets. That’s the reason why Microsoft has no intend to support expandable memory – it will be a mess. It seems the Focus engineers missed that memo.

I know many of you disagree with Microsoft on cutting the expandable memory from Windows Phone 7. But they have some very good reasons – it’s better for both customization and optimization.

If you own a Focus, just stay put। Format your unreadable card (if you have one) with a Nokia phone and wait for the official list of compatible cards. Meanwhile I’m sure Samsung or any other company for that matter, won’t do the same mistake again and release a WP7 phone with an uncovered memory slot.

Mobiado Classic 712 Stealth is a pleasure to your eyes, burning pain to your wallet

Mobiado has just announced the latest addition to their lineup of luxury phones – the Classic 712 Stealth. Inspired by military stealth aircrafts, the Mobiado Classic 712 Stealth is hand-crafted from exquisite materials like aircraft aluminum and sapphire crystal.

On the feature side the 712 Stealth offers a 2.2” QVGA display, which Mobiado curiously refers to as “large”, a 5 megapixel camera with flash, 3G and integrated GPS. Not much for a 3000-dollar phone, but we all know you are not going to buy this one for the features.

You will do so because they let you pick between black, clear, blue, or ruby selection button and you can decide between English, Arabic, or Cyrillic inscription for the keyboard।

BlackBerry Playbook trashes the Apple iPad at browsing, the video’s inside

Okay this video comes from RIM’s own YouTube channel so you should probably take it with a bucket of salt but it’s worth checking out nonetheless. Here’s how it goes: the RIM upcoming BlackBerry PlayBook tablet and the insanely successful Apple iPad are placed side by side on a table and are then made to load several pages simultaneously.

The result is there for you to see – the PlayBook swim laps around the iPad and that’s discounting the fact that the Apple tablet lacks Flash. If the video is in fact representative of the PlayBook real capabilities and the “under 500 US dollars” price promise is kept this might very well be the tablet to get in the first half of 2011.

Microsoft KIN One and Two could be coming back from the dead, to arrive at Verizon in Q4

The Microsoft KIN phones may have become zombies as they are apparently back from the dead – and into a leaked Verizon roadmap for Q4. The zombified KIN One and Two have lost their pricey data plan – maybe now they’ll be more competitive. Mind you, you’d be still buying a canceled product…

The Microsoft KIN phones survived a mere 48 days before they were pulled off the US market and they never reached Europe. Now they are making a comeback and while they’ve dropped the expensive contract, you can still stream Zune Pass music from Wi-Fi hotspots.

The leaked file does not list price for either KIN, but their specs are pretty impressive. The KIN One (“ONEm” in the roadmap) is a tiny portrait slider with hardware QWERTY, 5MP camera and 4GB of built in memory. The KIN Two (“TWOm”) on the other hand is a bigger side-slider with QWERTY and 8MP camera with 8GB built-in memory.

Both KINs are built on the NVIDIA Tegra platform running at 600MHz and the Microsoft KIN Two records 720p video। Before you go “that’s a great deal!” keep in mind that their custom OS is rather limited – no apps, no games, no calendar and not even IM.

Bootlace 2.1 can install Android Froyo on your jailbroken iPhone 2G or 3G, no computer needed

Some developers have snuck in and created Steve Jobs’ worst nightmare – Android 2.2 Froyo port for the iPhone. If you have a jailbroken iPhone 2G or 3G you can install Bootlace 2.1 and run Froyo way earlier than some actual Android smartphones. You don’t need a computer to do it either…

You have to keep in mind this is as unofficial as it gets (Apple is not exactly known for supporting the hacking community) and the Android port for the iPhone is not full baked either – there’s no power management, for instance, so your battery will run flat pretty quickly. Marrying Android and the iPhone is not a new affair, but it’s only now that hard-working developers have come up with a an easy, seamless way of installing it.

You can follow this installation guide if you want to give it a shot. Or if your device is not supported you’ll want to keep an eye on this page – it lists the progress iDroid (that’s the name of Android for the iPhone) on different devices. iPod Touch 1G support is almost done and iPhone 4 is still in the very early stages.

Anyway, once you have OpeniBoot and install Bootlace, you’ll be able to install (an upgrade) iDroid without a computer. Here it is on video:

There’s no good solution for some hardware incompatibilities – namely the keys. Right now, the iPhone’s home key is mapped to Android’s menu key, the Power key serves as back, volume up is call key and volume down is the Home key.

Still, a well-designed Android launcher can take care of that problem. iDroid doesn’t have access to the Android Market, but there are other ways to install apps.

So, iDroid is far from complete but it’s a really interesting project। What do you say – will you use it when those incomplete features are done?

SuperAMOLED Samsung Galaxy Tab makes a first public appearance, a 4.5-inch SWVGA display brought along

Samsung know they have something going with that SuperAMOLED technology of theirs and they are not hesitant to use it to their advantage. It appears that the next device to get a taste of those deep blacks and excellent sunlight legibility is the Galaxy Tab tablet. Samsung even showcased a working AMOLED Tab unit at the FPD International event.

Considering that the screen viewing angles were probably the only thing we held against the Galaxy Tab when we reviewed it, this is excellent news indeed. Of course demoing a prototype is not the same as releasing the actual product, but if Samsung are to only replace the screen that shouldn’t be too far away either.

Oh and some good news for the smartphones came along. Samsung are obviously preparing a new 4.5 inch AMOLED panel with WSVGA resolution (1024 x 600 pixels that is). It will certainly make for one huge cell phone but imagine the kind of picture quality we are talking about.

We guess we won’t be seeing too many of those SuperAMOLEDs before the new Samsung mobile display plant starts operating in July 2011।