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Feb

Samsung Galaxy S Blaze 4G Set For March Availability From T-Mobile

Posted by Liam Spradlin in Galaxy S Blaze 4G, Gingerbread 2.3, News, T-Mobile

T-Mobile and Samsung announced just moments ago that the Galaxy S Blaze 4G that was unveiled at CES earlier this year will be available beginning in "late March," priced at $149.99 (after $50 mail-in rebate card) for two-year agreements with qualifying voice/data plans. The S Blaze 4G will be a T-Mobile exclusive device, and will evidently include T-Mo's 4GPro App Pack, meaning the phone will come with apps like Dropbox, Evernote, Square, TripIt, Camscanner, and LinkedIn preloaded.

Besides coming with a few practical items of software, the S Blaze 4G packs some decent specs for a phone in its range (though there's no word on the phone's RAM or internal storage capacity):

Android 2.3 Gingerbread
Qualcomm Snapdragon S3 Dual-Core Processor clocked at 1.5GHz
3.97" Super AMOLED display
5MP rear shooter with 720p video capabilities
1.3MP front-facing camera
Expandable storage via microSD slot

While there's no word on exactly when the S Blaze 4G will be available, we'll be here to track any relevant details as they emerge.

Mar

[Update: Study Seriously Flawed] After 45,000 Page Loads, Extensive Study Determines Android's Browser Is 52% Faster Than iPhone's

Posted by Will Shanklin in Android OS, News, Nexus S (Crespo/Soju)

Last Updated: March 18th, 2011

Update: After getting a lot of initial press, experts are weighing in and crying foul with the methodology of this study. Apparently the custom app the researchers used relied on Apple's UIWebView, which doesn't utilize recent optimizations made to the actual Safari browser.

John Gruber of Daring Fireball says:

"That's not to say it isn't interesting that Android's WebView for apps is faster than iOS's UIWebView for apps, but it just isn't true that these results are indicative of anything regarding Mobile Safari's performance. It's easy to see that Mobile Safari is faster than UIWebView - just run something like the SunSpider benchmark twice, once in Mobile Safari and once in any app from the App Store with a web content view.

Aug

Dell Blaze Leaked, Runs Android 1.5, Already Uninteresting

Posted by Nate Kimmey in Blaze, Cupcake 1.5, Dell, News

After today’s Dell Thunder leak, you may be excited to hear about a new Android offering from Dell: The Blaze. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any reason to be interested in the phone – the Dell Blaze is running Android 1.5 with a custom UI, and is described as an entry-level device. So, while we don’t have any actual specs yet, we can determine that the screen is fairly small, my guess would be at the very top, 3.5”, but more likely around 3.2”.

Personally, I can’t understand why Dell would choose to put Android 1.5 on this device – even Android 1.6 (which the Streak still runs) would give it much better access to the latest apps.