TamsPPC – the Windows Phone Blog

Whether you like it or not – the Touch Pro 2 is one of the most important Windows Mobile devices currently on the market. While still impressive, it is now more than one year old.

The image below has been circulating for some time:

An xda-developer user has now stated the following:

Just had a dinner with a friend of mine who is the main distributor for HTC in Europe, and he informed that they will receive the first shipment of Touch Pro3’s this summer and they will be on sale in Europe third quarter of this year. This is my main contact for HTC devices and he arranges a Touch Pro2 for me 4 months before it was officially released…He told me that the device will be much smaller and thinner, and soon he will provide me with the evidence including the full specifications Do you guys think this would be something you would purchase or would you rather wait for the Windows Phone 7?

Given the current rumors (400×240 screen), I am not too sure what to make of it – stay tuned for further info as we get it…

The demo units used by Microsoft employees to show off Windows Phone 7 all had a 800×480 screen – which can be considered the current pinnacle of high-definition screens for mobile devices. However, these screens also are expensive…

Shawn Hargreaves now disclosed further information which should be interesting to both users and developers:

The phone features an image scaler which allows games to render to any size backbuffer they like, and have it automatically stretched to fill the display, with black bars along the edges if the backbuffer and display have different aspect ratios (an idea that will be familiar to Xbox developers). This scaling is handled by dedicated hardware, so does not consume any GPU resources, and it uses a high quality image filter that gives much better results than bilinear filtering like you would get if you did this yourself on the GPU. The scaler is important for two reasons:

* At launch, all phones will have a 480×800 (WVGA) display resolution, but we will add 320×480 (HVGA) in a future update. Of course you can detect the native resolution and program your game to adapt to this if you want, but the scaler allows games to pick just one resolution, always render at that fixed size, and still run correctly on phones with different native screen sizes. For bonus points, we automatically scale touch input to match your chosen resolution.

* 480×800 is a lot of pixels! This is a great resolution for displaying text, browsing the web, etc, but it can be a challenge for intensive 3D games to render so much data at a good framerate. To boost performance, some games may prefer to render at a lower resolution, then scale up to fill the display.

Not much to add here…

Long-term followers of this web site know that I love new screen technologies – especially if they are of the OLED variety. Samsung claims to have one step further with its Super AMOLED…but has not disclosed too much so far.

Don’t ask me where erikaustria1974 got the tone-less video below – it seems to be a Samsung-internal video showing the benefits of Super AMOLED:

Not much to add here…

I guess that we can close the story of the HD2 for good – the two release dates are below:

Press intro event: 16th of March
Public release: 23rd of March

Topic closed – for me, that is…

LG’s eXpo has been in and out of the headlines recently: first, everybody was interested as it was the first smartphone with a projector. Then, everybody wondered about carrier partners…and finally, about availability.

Forbes.com now took up the issue. Their Elizabeth Wayke claims the following:

… Insiders say production hurdles are keeping the phone from consumers. Art Stewart, vice president of wireless products at sensor maker AuthenTec, which provided fingerprint sensors for the phone, says LG had “antenna issues” with the device. “We shipped thousands of [sensors] to LG…but there has been a delay,” says Stewart.

LG and AT&T say the eXpo is out of stock due to “strong demand”. …

So far, not much more is known – but it sounds sensible to me…

When the iPhone came, yours truly was among the first to muse that a stylus would eventually come back – the device has since brought us sausages used as styli, weird aftermarket solutions and a load of other ideas regarding that “god-darn toothpick”.

Dell apparently sees value in styli, too – SlashGear reports the following:

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As for stylus input – something we puzzled over earlier – Choubey seems to hint that Dell might use new transparent conductor resistive panels over capacitive technology in future tablet models, which support multitouch finger-input and stylus control with high-resolution accuracy.

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This makes their Mini5 tablet interesting all over again…

We’ve seen our fair share of HTC HD2 leaks in relation to T-Mobile USA. The carrier has now listed the phone on its web site as “coming soon”:

In related news, TMoNews were provided with the image below showing the final device:

Not much to add here…

We’ve heard our fair share of news about new Bluetooth standards – unfortunately, very few devices have implemented anything beyond 2.x so far. Nevertheless, it’s always interesting to see what the boys plan for Q4 of this year.

PCWorld states the following about the new standard:

…Previous versions of Bluetooth could only go into devices with triple-A or larger-capacity batteries.

Bluetooth 4.0 includes a low-energy specification for transmitting small bursts of data over short ranges, in addition to the high-speed data transfer capabilities introduced with Bluetooth 3.0 last April.

…

So much, so good…

Long-term followers of this blog know that I consider Microsoft’s Pink and Turtle phones potential show-stoppers for the Windows Mobile ecosystem. I am thus unhappy to present the two images below, which hit us via Engadget:

According to them, the devices will hit Verizon on the 20th of April…potentially causing even more issues for Palm…

HTC’s HD2 has been covered all over recently – last but not least due to some (likely intentional) leaking on the end of T-Mobile USA.

Fortunately, we now have a new victim – the HD Mini has just hit Amazon UK:

As of this writing, the price translates to 557 USD or 409 Euros…

As usual, the folks at BrightHand’s have just released their infamous monthly mindshare numbers.

To all new readers: BrightHand is a large US mobile phone site which covers all platforms evenly (read: not much of a bias). They monitor which devices generate the most search traffic, and thus are “most in demand” with power users.

This month’s list is as follows (last month’s position in brackets):

1. BlackBerry 8530 (4)
2. Nokia N900 (3)
3. Nokia E63 (5)
4. HTC HD2 (1)
5. Samsung Moment (Android, 2)
6. Motorola Droid (Android, 7)
7. BlackBerry 95630 (Storm I, returning)
8. XPERIA X10 (Android, returning)
9. Motorola BackFlip (new)
10. BlackBerry Bold 9000 (8)

The Nokia E71 and Samsung Omnia II fell out of the top list from last month…

Rumors about T-Mobile USA’s upcoming release of the HTC HD2 are dime-a-dozen – all we still miss is the price.

TMoNews now shares the image below:

Not much to add here…

Both Microsoft and Palm have had a strange love-hate relationship with OS updates for existing devices – while Palm initially offered loads of them and then gave up, Microsoft so far allowed OEMs to decide.

HTC was apparently hell-bent on getting a WM7 update for its HD2. Unfortunately, it looks like this won’t happen after all. apc reports the following:

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Despite the HD2 meeting many of the criteria laid down in Microsoft’s ‘Chassis 1’ spec – including a 1GHz Qualcomm processor, high-res capacitive touch display, 5 megapixel camera and 3.5mm headphone jack – the phone will be ruled out for the simple reason that it has five buttons instead of the three mandated for all Windows Phone 7 devices.

That’s the official line from Microsoft, at any rate. Natasha Kwan, General Manager for Microsoft’s Mobile Communications Business in the Asia-Pacific region, told APC that the HD2 “doesn’t qualify because it doesn’t have the three buttons”.

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If you ask me, this is nothing short of a boneheaded move. It puts the entire economy into “hibernation” until WM7 devices drop – lovely, lovely…

Everybody who knows how I use my MSI Wind U100 probably smells that I am unhappy with the new 4xx series of Atom CPU. The reason: their VGA output is severely limited and can’t drive large monitors.

Nevertheless, the company has just added a new CPU to the line-up. The N470 has a slightly higher CPU clock speed – which comes to nothing, as almost every N270 can be overclocked to 2GhZ without much effort.

Either way – we told you about it…

Windows Mobile 7 was too different an operating system to be considered a true successor to WM 6.5 – Microsoft’s decision to let WM 6.5 live on thus wasn’t too surprising. However, some questions remained…

ZDNet blogger Mary Joe Foley now posted the following replies which she got from a Microsoft representative:

Q: Is Mobile Starter available to phone makers via Bsqure only? Or also direct from Microsoft?
A: The Windows Phone 6 Starter Edition SKU is available to all direct partners. It is also available via MediaTek and BSquare.

Q: Which version of Office Mobile is part of one of the two Starter SKUs?
A: The current version of Office Mobile will ship in Windows Phone 6 Starter Edition. Office Mobile 2010 is currently available in beta form for Windows Phone 6.5. When Office Mobile 2010 ships, it will be made available to OEMs and distributors.

Q: Is this a stripped-down version of Windows Mobile 6.5? What’s not there that’s in the full fledged version?
A: The Windows Phone 6 Starter Edition SKU is offered in multi-language versions with and without Microsoft Office Mobile and supports 2G (GSM), 2.5G (CDMA2000 xRTT, EDGE, GPRS), CDMA (Rev A, EV-DO Revision A), and TD-SCDMA radios.

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Q: Have any phone makers signed up yet as customers?
A: Yes. OEMs will be launching products built on Windows Phone 6 Starter Edition this year.

Given that Adobe has just stated that it will not release Flash 10 for Windows Mobile 6.5, it remains to be seen how far these devices will be usable on the web – on the other hand, Palm’s Treo managed to live for quite a few years without a good browser…