HTC today have launched two more phones in its already heavily populated Android stable. The HTC Desire HD is basically an EVO 4G in its GSM form. Many may already know, the EVO 4G is a WiMAX enabled handset sold by American carrier Sprint. The Desire HD gets the Evo 4G’s delicious hardware like the huge 4.3-inch LCD display, 1GHz Snapdragon processor, 8 mega-pixel camera with 720p video recording. One could also call the Desire HD as the Android cousin of the HTC HD2 (which was powered by Windows Mobile 6.5)
The second phone is the Desire Z; also known as the T-mobile G2 in the US. It’s 800 MHz Qualcomm MSM7230 processor and generous 512MB RAM should keep the underlying Android 2.2 OS smooth in operation. User input on a 3.7-inch 800 x 480 pixel capacitive screen is complimented by a sliding QWERTY keyboard. You also have a 5 megapixel auto-focus camera with flash and support for 720p video recording.
Both have got HSPA+ that supports a really fast theoretical 14.4Mbps download speed and the regular Wi-fi 802.11n too.
They also come pre-loaded with HTC’s Sense UI along with a dedicated HTCSense.com website. You can log into that site for remotely backing up all your data, trigger your phone to ring loudly and even track its real-time location on a map. In an extreme scenario, you can even remotely lock or wipe your phone from that website, if the phone should land into wrong hands.
Google Hints at New Directions for Android Tablets
Froyo might be the last word for Android smartphones, but Google denies it’s meant as a tablet OS, adding fuel to rumors that we’ll be seeing Honeycomb or Gingerbread-enabled tablets competing against the iPad sometime soon.
At least one Google (
) executive has been saying publicly that the company doesn’t see the most recent iteration of the Android () operating system or the Android Market (
) as entirely appropriate for tablets, suggesting that tablet-specific OSes might be forking from the Android family in the near future.
Hugo Barra is Google’s director of products for mobile. In recent comments to TechRadar, he said that while the company has seen Android 2.2 (which, like the rest of Android’s distributions, is open-sourced and free for anyone to download) running on tablets, that isn’t one of the OS’s intended purposes.
“Froyo is not optimised for use on tablets,” said Barra. “The way Android Market works is not going to be available on devices that don’t allow applications to run correctly. Which devices do and which don’t will be unit-specific… If you want Android Market on that platform [a tablet running Froyo], the apps just wouldn’t run, it is just not designed for that form factor.”
He continued to say that Google is working on a different UX for a tablet-friendly Android Market. We would infer that, unlike the less-than experience of the first Android devices via-a-vis the iPhone, many of the first Android tablets could be more competitive with the currently market-leading iPad, thanks in large part to an operating system that’s optimized for the full breadth of tablet hardware functionality.
So, what could these mysterious operating systems be, and how soon could we see them? Will they be available on the already-released Dell StreakSamsung Tab (which ships with Android 2.2)? (which ships with Android 1.6) and While most of what we “know” about Android-for-tablets operating systems is shrouded in rumor, we are fairly certain that the fork will begin with Gingerbread, a.k.a. Android 3.0, which may be released as soon as this fall. And Honeycomb is thought to be the next iteration of the same fork.
We can also safely speculate these OSes won’t run on any but the highest-powered mobile devices, such as the Google/Verizon tablet that we expect to see around the holiday season.
