Remember back when touchscreen smartphone hasn’t rise and conquer the smartphone arena? Back when Nokia still reign supreme over the phone market? There’s the unique and exotic Japanese flip phone that had no Bluetooth and yet are still considered cool because you can flip them around, and they’re rare on our shores. Now everything’s Android and iPhone, do you miss those time?

Well, now we have a new Android smartphone that can bring back some sweet memories and yet keeping you up to date. The new smartphone from Softbank Mobile Japan made by Sharp, called the Aquos Phone Hybrid 007SH will let you flip your phone like a boss back in 2002, and yet letting you check-in that exotic Japanese restaurant at Foursquare. Yes, fool people with your Android clamshell smartphone man!

The Aquos Hybrid 007SH is a Gingerbread phone with 180-degree swiveling touchscreen above the hinge and a numeric dial pad below that all the cool kids in Shibuya crave. It’s also got some pretty solid specs, so far are clamshell phones go, including a 16MP camera and a 3D-capable display. The handset will hit Softbank in mid-June followed shortly by Sharp’s rotary Honeycomb tablet.

SOURCE via Softbank Mobile

We already know that Apple is going to introduce a new cloud-based music service, and it looks like Apple did lots of research on this thing to make sure that everything is smooth for their iOS devices.

Streaming music through 3G network isn’t exactly easy, as the speed of our internet is the bottleneck of everything really. So how does Apple overcome such issue? Well, here’s a new patent from Apple that might just be able to help Apple speed up things.

Apple has just file a patent of ‘partial music sync’ which seemed to be something that we will most definitely see in their cloud-based music service if Apple really manage to pull this off nicely, as usual with their magic wand.

It suggests that just a snippet of the beginning of a song (or movie, for that matter) could be stored locally on a device, and then be synced to the complete version in the cloud, which would let you begin playback “immediately” rather than having to wait for the usual buffering to take place.

The patent application also explains that the streaming playback could be adjusted based on the type of communications network, and that there would naturally be various means to authenticate your device and ensure that you actually own the music you’re streaming.

SOURCE via Apple Insider

Time to get jealous boys and girls, as AT&T has just demonstrated 28.87Mbps of download speed over the air using LTE technology. Yes, while our 3G carrier struggles to provide the advertised 3Mbps speed that they stick on their brochure at “best effort”, US leading carrier AT&T has just demonstrated at their Foundry innovation centre in Texas their upcoming LTE network.

GigaOM was around during the demonstration, and this was shown as a “real time” speed, something that DiGi also used to advertise their 3G speed. This is not the “max” possible speed of the technology, but what AT&T’s LTE network is capable of in real world.

GigaOM witnessed a connection with 28.87Mbps download and 10.4Mbps upload speed using a MIMO antenna passing bits through both 700MHz and AWS frequencies. In actual LTE is capable of higher speed than this, in fact LTE promised speed up at least 100Mbps download and 50Mbps upload, but that’s just on the paper.

AT&T executive told the publication that these were meant to be real-world numbers. Of course, we have to consider the location of this technology demonstration, and that the network is still new and not congested, like how DiGi’s 3G network used to be when they just started. Still, that speed is very impressive compared to my measly 1Mbps Streamyx.

SOURCE via GigaOM

Good news for Android fans, or Google fans alike. The long awaited Music Beta service is now up for grab for everyone. Yes, that means you, you, and all you jerks running nekkid at home.

Something that’s previously only available for Xoom owners, now the Music Beta service from Google is up for grabs for almost anyone. Yes, we used ‘almost’, because you can only get into the beta service through invitation. Google has started delivering invites to those who signup up through the site earlier on, letting even more users upload 20,000 of their favourite jams to its cloud-based storage locker.

So, are you one of the lucky few?

SOURCE via Google Music Beta

Looks like Samsung is going to keep with the trend of the original Galaxy Tab. Apparently the 8.9-inch Galaxy Tab with Honeycomb will have a keyboard dock as accessory, just like the original 7-inch Tab, which had plenty of accessories to play with.

The folks at mforum.ru caught this keyboard dock on camera at the Russian launch of Samsung’s latest slates, and the dock looks quite similar to the original Tab’s keyboard dock. Of course, this one cradles the tablet in landscape mode instead of portrait, which is a very welcomed change.

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Corsair may not build lots of computer casing, but their few lineups have received lots of good reviews about them. From the 800D to the 600T, now here’s something slightly different for those that care about aesthetic and look.

Corsair has recently unleashed the white version of its Graphite Series 600T mid-tower PC case called the Special Edition White Graphite Series 600T. Yes, this is exactly the same case as the 600T but coated with white glamor.

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Is Samsung going to invade the high-end digital camera market? The picture above was posted on Samsung’s blog about lens design, and the boxy camera above is an old-school-like medium format film shooter, from Samsung itself! That’s odd; we never see that on the market. There was a rumor kicking around last summer that Samsung was working on a medium format CMOS sensor and this could be a test rig for just such a slice of silicon. Is this a prototype of what’s coming from the Korean giant?

SOURCE via Akihabaranews

For those Android smartphone owners that love the Metro UI style of the Windows Phone 7, we’ve got good news for you. Previously you can have the home screen replaced to look like Windows Phone 7 by using the LauncherPro Launcher 7. But now you can also have Windows Phone 7’s Zune player in your Android device!

The look and functionality of the Zune player is present in a remarkably full featured interface despite its early alpha status, complete with features like scrobbling and playlists. The only thing it’s really lacking so far is a name, and obviously any Zune software integration. The thing also works on Honeycomb for those Android tablet owners.

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