You know how some people have a really hard time keeping secrets? Especially if it’s a big one? Well, sometimes PR people are like that and that is how some leaks happen in the industry. So this time, a PR of the Swedish branch of the carrier 3, let the cat out of the bag by saying that they will have the HTC Bravo by 2010. And where did this happen? Why, on Facebook of course — that great place where privacy is shrinking faster than a woolen sweater in a hot wash.

The HTC Bravo, for the unaware (welcome from under your rock), is probably the fastest phone made by HTC alongside the Nexus One. In a weird state of affairs, this is yet another SnapDragon equipped Android phone that has the clock speed of 1GHz and is rumored to carry 512MB RAM. The information came out via a massive leak that showed the entire roadmap of HTC phones well up to Q2 2010. What nobody can understand is exactly what most of you are thinking by now — why another one? Wasn’t the Nexus One enough? Well, I guess HTC wants to make one on their own terms and may be imbue it with their fantastic Sense UI.

So overall, this year is all set to be a rocking year for phones, with Sony’s XPERIA X10, Google’s Nexus One and of course — the mighty iPhone’s next generation. Which brings to mind the several leaks that have been going around about the device. I think Apple is pulling the strings here to divert our attention to the iPhone. Coming up next!

[read]

Have you been noticing this? Almost every major phone manufacturing company has announced at least one Android Phone by now and some have already released their first or second-generation Android phones. What started out as a small deployment last year is now becoming bigger with every release. Looks like Google is living up to its announcement of having about 18 Android phones by the end of this year. Get to the other side for the recent Android developments and devices.

Android 1.6 ‘Donut’ SDK

Continuing naming Android point releases after confections, Google has released the 1.6 Donut SDK for Android developers. This is for the upcoming public release of the Donut upgrade to Android that will bring a few major additions and mostly tune-ups and polish jobs to the Android OS.

Amongst the major additions is the addition of CDMA compatibility. This does not mean much at the moment but it means that we will soon get a bunch of new CDMA phones running on Android. The other major addition is the higher resolution support of QVGA and WVGA resolutions. This essentially makes sure that the future Android devices will be able to have great looking screens with high resolutions. Watch the video below to learn more about Android 1.6

Archos 5

French company Archos has finally made their Archos 5 Internet tablet device official. This device has been closely followed by everyone through a slew of leaked photos that were put up all over the Internet.

The Archos 5 descends from a line of tablets that used to run Archos’ own home brewed Linux OS. But this time round Archos has made the wise decision of going for the Android OS. The new tablet runs a custom shell on top of Android. It runs on an 800MHz processor and has a 4.8inch widescreen touch sensitive display that has a resolution of 800×480 pixels. The touchscreen is not capacitive but resistive. Still, it seems to be quite responsive from the reviews and the videos that we have seem of it so far.

Amongst the other features, the things that would interest the readers of this blog would be the following – WiFi (802.11 b/g/n) and Bluetooth (easily connected with your mobile phone for Internet access). However, since Archos is mainly a media devices oriented company, the focus of the Archos 5 is on media playback. It does have the Android webkit based browser but it does not support too many functions that would enable you to use it as a normal tablet with a touchscreen based interface.

All hope is not lost though because this is Android after all and there means there are apps out there that you can use.

Motorola CLIQ

Motorola has recently launched its first Android based phone – the CLIQ. The CLIQ is your usual (3inch) touchscreen equipped phone with a slide out keypad to aid in non-stop messaging via a 3G network. The form factor is nothing new and a lot of the newer touch based smartphones have come out with this form factor because it seems to working quite well for the consumer market. Still, Motorola manages to make the Cliq standout by designing it well. The Cliq has smooth good looks that look very impressive with the curved edges, rounded corners and a great keypad.

However, the Cliq’s marketing point is definitely software. Not only is it an Android phone, it also has a special custom-built social media architecture via a custom shell called BLUR. BLUR is what runs on top of Android on the Cliq and incorporates the special social networking features that the phone is marketed for. The feedback has not been too good though. Although people like how it looks, they hate the convoluted UI that constantly gets in the way and has a steep learning curve. Sounds like the usual Motorola phone to me.

LG GW620

LG is the latest to join the Android fold with the announcement of its first Android phone – the GW620. Previously known as Etna, very little is known about it outside of what the press release says.

From the announcement we gather that the phone will be touchscreen based with a 3inch touch sensitive display and a slide out keypad for tactile typing. The phone’s keypad does not look all that promising in the images though. Hopefully it will be better in person. LG says that the phone will be consumer-friendly and will appeal to first time smartphone buyers. With any luck, this claim will not turn out to be a large set of gimmicky features that will only hold the phone back from being a popular Android phone.

LG so far has been great at making phones but the software inside the phones has so far been annoying at best. Hopefully this will change for god with the Android backing. Not that Android guarantees a good UI though.

iNQ Going Android

iNQ has been bringing up affordable phones packed with niche features for quite some time. Now they have announced that they are going to use Google’s Android OS for the future phones that are going to be touchscreen based. iNQ is known for phones like the Facebook Phone and Twitter Phone. It is of course anybody’s guess what those phones are meant to do.

iNQ’s basic premise is to make phones that are cost effective and have tight integration with online services such as the ones mentioned above. The company has not been very forthcoming with the details but it is certain that their first touchscreen phone is in the pipeline and it will be running Android.

Meanwhile, others like Samsung and HTC have already released Android based phones with HTC already releasing its 2^nd line of Android phones. If anything, HTC is actually getting better at making great phones with every new line.

One thing is becoming quite apparent from these releases – Android’s on the move and its presence is getting quite big. Also, the higher the number of Android phones get, the greater the third party attention will be. Result – more apps and great ones at that.

People Have Also Been Looking For:

9.09.09 was more or less dominated by Apple’s Yerba Buena, SF event and hence, predictably, a lot of things that otherwise would’ve been reported properly got buried under the Macavalanche. You have been playing catch-up with all the new releases and you should be because not everything was revealed at event presentations. There are a lot of small things that you should know about (and things that I will cover in my 5-gen iPod Nano review ). So now that the crazy hype has finally worn off, here are six things that you should know about as an avid Otaku Gadgets reader.

Palm Pixi

Not to launch in to a stream of illegal-substance related puns here but Palm has chosen to call its second WebOS based phone Pixi for some reason. First spotted as something called the Eos and also the Pixie, this phone might remind a lot of you of the Centro because of its form factor and design.

This phone is basically the cheaper, stripped down version of the Palm Pre. This one has a candy-bar form factor and will ship with 8GB of memory (nice) and without WiFI (not nice). It will have only EV-DO Rev. A along with a full QWERTY keyboard, a flash equipped 2 MP camera and a teeny 2.6inch 320×400 touch-sensitive capacitive display. One question Palm – WHAT are we supposed to do with that touchscreen huh? Nothing useful? Yeah, that’s what I thought.

Well, it seems like they chose a nice launch date for it so that it can hide its shame underneath the positive avalanche of Apple news. See here Palm, if you have to take on the iPhone why not do it properly? I sure hope you are working on the next version of that Pre of yours because that’s where you should be placing your money right now.

The Pixi will be available in the US in time for you to but it for this holiday season for a very affordable price in all likelihood. Stay tuned to know what that price is.

Leica M9

Leica also chose the nines to launch their new M9 camera that takes on the family duties following the M8, which has now been retired. The M9 is special in two ways. One is that it has Leica’s first ever full frame digital range finder. Next is the fact that it has a 18 Megapixel Kodak made CCD sensor that matches the size of the original 35mm frames. This means that the M9 will be able to use all the M lenses at the focal lengths that they were originally intended for. Thus, let us break the paragraph here in the fond memory of the M8 and its crop-sensor lenses.

Externally the M9 does not look very different except a few changes in the button positions. Internally it is very different indeed. Kodak has added micro-lenses in front of the sensor to cut a better image on the sensor by bending the light. These micro-lenses are not like the ones in front of other sensors because of the rangefinder. These lenses correct the sharp angle of incidence caused by the proximity of the lens’ end to the sensor. A special glass layer replaces the filter used by Leica to filter out infrared.

Shutter speed is up to 1/4000^th of a second and is super-silent thanks to the new microprocessor controlled mechanism. The MSRP is $8000 but there are better deals online if you look for them.

Netgear Digital Entertainment system

Netgear is offering a new all-in-one set top box that hooks up with the Internet through your home network to give you online enterntainment on your TV. You get to watch streaming video, TV, images without ever needing to use a computer. It is called the Digital Entertainer Live system. Fancy name that basically describes a box that lets you watch YouTube, Hulu, NetFlix, etc.

It has component video out, Ethernet port and two USB ports. It will also work with other Netgear stuff like EasyNAS and USB storage devices. For $150 it seems to be a nice option if you want to use your broadband solely for entertainment.

Locally Dimming LCD

This is what Toshiba will use to fight off Plasma. Current LCD panels cannot match up to the blackest black that you can see on Plasma panels. The reason being that current LCD panels do not fully switch off the light when a portion of the image goes dark. This new technology will use LED backlighting to locally turn off pixels where the image is dark.

As a result, the blacks look really black and hence the image looks better. The new Toshiba ZV650 will use the technology apparently. [via Gizmodo]

AMD’s New Branding System

AMD has decided to do away with its confusing branding system for a simple and smart set of three logos that will help the average joe to understand what computer is right for him. AMD CMO said that today’s customer does want to know about the innards of the computer and nor does he care. He cares about what he can do with the machine. This is what the logos will denote.

The hierarchy is a simple three-tier basic-mid-high-end division. They will thus be Vision, Vision Premium and Vision Ultimate. I think you can guess the hierarchy here. There are the initial divisions that will be used for notebooks.

Somehow I suddenly have this urge to talk about Vista Ultimate and Vista Home Premium, go figure.

Click on the image to zoom in.

Experimental Facebook Application for Mac Desktop

Facebook has been testing out a delightful little application for us Mac users. It will sit on top of the desktop on the menu bar. The best thing about it is that it is not written in something like Adobe Air like TweetDeck. Instead it is a native Mac OS application that seems to have been made in Cocoa. It will display Growl notifications if you have Growl installed. Nice eh?