Samsung Focus 2
I don’t know how I managed to miss this yesterday, but Samsung announced the Samsung Focus 2. This Windows Phone packing device will be available via AT&T starting from May 20th. Specs include a 4-inch Super AMOLED display, 5-megapixel camera, front-facing VGA camera, and support for AT&T’s speedy LTE network.
The Samsung Focus 2 costs $49.99 with a 2-year contract.
Nokia Lumia 610
Nokia just confirmed that the Lumia 610 will hit Finland on May 18th. A few retailers (Gigantti and Verkkokauppa) have the Nokia Lumia 610 listed for 199€ and 199.90€ respectively, making it the cheapest Windows Phone available. It’s great to see Windows Phone available in more price categories. Sub-200 EUR has for long been the separator of good and bad Android phones. A quality Windows Phone in this price will most probably sell pretty well.
O2 Germany, White Sensation
A WMPowerUser tipster has revealed that the Nokia Lumia 900 will be available in Germany via O2 sometime next week. The unlocked Lumia 900 will go for EUR 541, or for EUR 22.50 a month on a 2 year contract. As can be seen in the image above, O2 will be rocking a “White Sensation” campaign for the white Lumia smartphones.
HTC 7 Mozart update to 7.10.8779.8
Aviraj Ajgekar, a Microsoft evangelist, reported today on his blog that his HTC 7 Mozart just got updated to Windows Phone 7.5 Refresh, aka the Tango update. The build number for this update is 7.10.8779.8. Ajgekar’s Mozart actually went through a series of updates before getting to the final build version. His Mozart was first updated to 7.10.8107, followed by an update to 7.10.8112.7, then to 7.10.8773.98, and finally to 7.10.8779.8. It remains to be seen when this update will get delivered to other Windows Phone 7′s out there.
Fire up Zune or Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac to see if you’re able to download this update!
Nokia Lumia 900 and 610 available May 31st
Nokia just updated their Finnish page to let users know that the Lumia 900 is up for preordering in Finland.
Nokia also listed a selection of retailers and links to their product pages. I just checked with all the retailers via the links, and Gigantti shows that both the Lumia 900 and Lumia 610 will ship on May 31st. The text on Gigantti’s page shows “Toimitukset alk. 31.05.2012,” which means that shipments will begin on May 31st.
Holy crap this looks cool! It would be great if Apple, and why not Google and Microsoft, could implement a feature that works like that seen in the video. Selecting text on a touchscreen would be much more less painful.
And this is what you need to do in order to get this implemented in iOS for iPad:
Follow the directions below to let Apple know you want this feature. You can also share this with your friends so more people are involved! Follow @danielchooper on Twitter to stay up to date on this and other cool projects.
1. Go to bugreport.apple.com, sign in and click “New Problem”
2. Set the Title to “Editing Text on iPad (duplicate of rdar://11365152)”
3. Set the Product to “iPad”, Version Number to “N/A”, Classification to “Feature (New)” and Is It Reproducible to “Not Applicable”
4. Copy the letter below and paste it in the Problem Details section then click submitI just saw Daniel Hooper’s iPad keyboard demo and I want that for my iPad! (Check out the video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RGQTaHGQ04Q) Apple says the iPad is the future of the Post-PC world; if it’s going to be my primary keyboard, I want a better way to edit text!
Tapping directly on text to move the cursor works well for small portions of text, but we don’t just write short portions of text anymore! When performing lots of edits in larger documents the direct interaction metaphor falls apart for cursor control. Even short portions of text can be painful to edit when you need to move the cursor to a precise location. Would you ever want to write a document on your computer without using the arrow keys? This is the reality iPad users face because they do not have the equivalent of arrow keys. There is a better way.
Take advantage of gestures by making a drag over the keyboard UI move the cursor. Move the cursor in word increments when dragging with two fingers. And finally, let the user select text while dragging when they hold down shift.
Windows Phone 8 Apollo on a Lumia 900?
What is that above? It looks like a Nokia Lumia 900 with something that resembles Windows 8. In the upper right corner we see the text Apollo V 3.7, and Windows Phone 8 is currently called Apollo. The log-in screen again resembles that of Windows 8, which could mean that we’ll see a partially merged Windows Phone 7 and Windows 8 layout in the upcoming Apollo release.
Will Microsoft preview Window Phone 8 at their own Windows Phone Developer Summit on 20-21 of June? Could this device be used to show features? Who knows. Just wait a bit longer ;)
Nokia Lumia 800 in Glossy White
Nokia continues to push out semi-regular firmware updates to their Lumia series. Now somewhere in the world, a new firmware of version 12072 is being pushed out to the Nokia Lumia 800.
This update is said to fix a volume-related bug caused by the previous update, some power management improvements, as well as to bring some improvements to the Camera app to automatically detect 50Hz or 60Hz flicker reduction. Keep on checking your phone’s update screen or fire up Zune on a regular basis to be amongst the first to download this update.
