Within the past week we’ve come across countless specs and myths concerning the Samsung Nexus Prime, the passing of the great Steve Jobs, and had some hands-on time with multiple devices. Steve Jobs passed Wednesday October 5, 2011. The co-founder of Apple had shaped and set the bar in every aspect of computing and innovation imaginable. This revolutionary pioneer will be greatly missed.
Not even a day after the release of Apple’s iPhone 4S, Samsung gave us the first official “preview” of the Nexus Prime. Soon after the first live photo of the Nexus Prime hit the net, a spy-video surfaced giving us a much better idea of what to expect in Ice Cream Sandwich and the device itself. Most noticeable is the extra screen real estate from the absence of any type of soft-touch buttons on the face of the device. A crafty artist mocked up an amazing picture of what we should expect the phone to look like upon release, and hopefully it fits the profile precisely. Saturday, the Nexus Prime hit the FCC with both AT&T and T-Mobile bands, yet we all expect this phone to debut on Verizon. Could it hit multiple carriers at once? Or just follow suit with a similar time-release as the Nexus S? Even though we were hoping to find out for sure this coming Tuesday at the Samsung Mobile UNPACKED: Google Episode event, it was unfortunately postponed until further notice.
Michael Crider completed the first hands-on this week with the HTC Rhyme. Unlike most other smartphones, the Rhyme comes with custom earbuds, a desk charging dock, and Charm extension. Soon after, he released a much more extensive review – be sure to check it out! Also given some hands-on/unboxing treatment this week was the Samsung Galaxy S II (T-Mobile), HTC Amaze 4G and HTC Jetstream. T-Mobile’s Galaxy S II was soon benchmarked against the Galaxy S II on AT&T; T-Mobile’s was consistently the clear winner. Both are available now for $199.99 each.
The HP TouchPad is coming closer to a public release of Android OS, yet a dual-boot download for the alpha version became available Wednesday. HP is still researching how a handful of their products shipped with Android native to the device, and state this should have never happened… (obviously). Android applications may finally be possible to run on the iPad from Myriad’s Alien Dalvik 2.0. We will certainly see more of this interesting application next week during CTIA Tuesday. Finally, a comprehensive table of the iPhone 4S vs. the Android competition was created to better view comparisons of specific device hardware.
Be sure to stay tuned for up to date coverage of CTIA Tuesday, October 11, 2011!
