March, 2009 - Android Community

HTC Magic poses with Arnie

By Chris Davies
on 4 Mar, 2009

With a sturdy chin like that, it can only be one phone - oh, and one Terminator-turned-governor holding it. We're not entirely sure why, and we're not entirely sure how, but the PR team for HTC have managed to snap Arnold Schwarzenegger gleefully holding the new HTC Magic. The Magic - which is dwarfed in Arnie's hefty paws - is obviously one of the pre-production prototypes we saw at Mobile World Congress last month, as it has the old button design. He seems particularly pleased with the new video player app, which unlike the T-Mobile G1 will come preinstalled on the HTC Magic. Honestly, this photo is calling out for a caption-competition. I'm having to strongly resist all of the obvious puns.

Yuhua Xphone-SDK concept: pretty face but slow

By Chris Davies
on 4 Mar, 2009

The company behind the General Mobile DSTL1 Android smartphone design, Yuhua, have followed up with a new reference design. Yet to find a distributor, the Yuhua Xphone-SDK is a sleek full-touchscreen handset that is vaguely reminiscent of some of LG's recent devices. Unfortunately the good looks are, where it really matters, only skin-deep. The Xphone-SDK is limited to EDGE data, which when you're living in the cloud as Google envisage could lead to some significant slow-downs, and has a mere 128MB of RAM and 256MB of ROM. Yuhua do promise a 3G version at some point in the future, and the 3-megapixel camera, WiFi and Bluetooth is certainly welcome, but we wouldn't suggest you hold out much hope to see the Xphone-SDK on shelves any time in the near future.

Processor -- Marvell PXA-310 624Mhz
Memory -- 128MB SDRAM; 256MB internal ROM
Flash -- MicroSD card slot for up to 16GB external
Cellular -- 900/1800/1900MHz GPRS/EDGE
Display -- 3-inch TFT WQVGA (240 x 400)
WiFi -- 802.11b/g
Bluetooth -- Bluetooth 2.0
Camera -- 3Mpix camera (no flash)
Video playback -- H.264, streaming, 3GPP, MPEG4, Codec 3GP
Audio playback -- G-streamer based engine supports major codec media files, including MP3, AAC, AAC+, WMA, MPEG4, WAV, MIDI
Image support -- JPG, BMP, PNG, GIF
Web and messaging -- HTTP, WAP Push, xHTML, SMS, MMS
Other features -- Data kits for USB/JTAG connectivity
Battery -- 1000mAh
Operating system -- Android (Linux/Java)

[via EngadgetMobile]

Apology from Android Community

By Chris Davies
on 3 Mar, 2009

As you may have seen, Android Community was subject to a security breach yesterday. While we have been advised not to make public the full details of the incident, a high-level password was compromised and an individual with issues against Android Community management took advantage of the situation to post defamatory and explicit content. We'd like to unreservedly apologize to anybody offended or insulted by the unauthorized content that was put onto the site and its forums. We're working hard to make sure that this doesn't happen again, and we'd like to take this opportunity to thank everybody who got in touch to alert us to the problem. We're also grateful to those Android Community users who consistently flag up forum and comment spam. Android Community is more than news and reviews, it's about like-minded people sharing their thoughts and ideas. We're proud of our forum community, of the links we've built, and of our moderators. If anybody notices something out of place that you think we may have missed, please get in touch; our contact details are in the forum as well as in the side-bar on the Android Community frontpage.