Android Mobile Device

Well, well, well. What’s this we’re hearing about an April 20th launch date for the T-Mobile Sidekick 4G T-Mobile already gave us a good look at pricing, but that wasn’t enough for RadioShack – the retailer took to twitter to confirm earlier suspicions of ours. We first heard that the T-Mobile G2X and the LG G-Slate would be launched April 20th but had no concrete evidence to support that. The fact that a major retailer outed this date for an entirely different phone makes us hopeful that the earlier rumors are indeed true. RadioShack is calling this the “#BestSideKickEver” but this will be the best day ever if all of these devices land at the same time. [via TmoNews]

Verizon looks to be cracking down on subscribers who expect to exchange cosmetically-damaged phones for replacements that are in better shape. Long story short: if your device breaks – even due to a manufacturer defect within the hardware or software – you’ll have to pay a premium if the device has blatant cosmetic flaws. All of this is set to go down April 1st. (And yes, we too are hoping it’s nothing but an April Fool’s joke.)

Blemish on the back cover? You’ve gotta pay. Scratch on the display or dust beneath the camera lens? Yup, that’ll be cause for money out of your pockets too. Sit down while you read this next bit: those damages may cost you $300 per incident. Other notable changes have been made, as well. For one, you can no longer take your device into a Verizon store for an on-the-spot exchange – all of that will be taken care of via today’s standard premium shipping methods.

And overnight service is no longer free as you’ll soon have to pay $13 to get your device to Verizon in a jiffy. Optionally, you can pay $7 for 2-day service. That sucks because they’re reportedly reducing the return window from 10 days to 5 – economy shipping is free but takes 5 days to make it to Verizon. Choosing the standard service instead of overnight might be trouble for you in that regard. (You can still get free overnight service if you pay monthly for Verizon’s total equipment coverage program. [GadgetU via AP]

From the developer:

XDA Member Brings All In One Weather, Battery and Clock Widget. Spares Your Screen Real Estate

Gotta love it when HTC puts a demo or product video out.  So clean, so crisp and so detailed.  In the world of tablets, HTC is definitely setting apart the Flyer, with HTC Sense UI for tablets on board, a pen (scribe) for handwriting input, drawing or coloring and even the ability to highlight notes.  The Flyer is built out of a single piece of aluminum, much like the uni-body design found on the HTC Legend and other handsets.  On board is a fast 1.5 GHz CPU, a 1024 x 600 capacitive display and offers the OnLive cloud gaming service, something that other tablets have not incorporated, yet.  All of this, delivered in a sleek lightweight package.  Check out the video below for an overview of what the Flyer is fully capable of.  Let us know what you think in the comments below.

Click here to view the embedded video.

HTC Flyer Touts Its Features Via New Video

You can say whatever you want about Qualcomm’s speed in getting their newer chipsets inside of devices, but they do come to market with technology comparable to their competitors. Such is the case with the MSM8660 – the same chipset inside of the HTC EVO 3D and the supposed HTC Pyramid

The EVO 3D’s chipset is clocked at 1.2GHz and we didn’t really have enough time with it to run benchmarks on it. Qualcomm seems to be able to clock the thing to 1.5Ghz, though. We’re not too surprised considering they have a single-core chipset inside the HTC Flyer running at those speeds, but our mind was blown after seeing the effects of this overclock.

In a test where the performance of Quake 3 is tested, the chipset outpaces the likes of NVIDIA’s Tegra 2, Samsung’s Hummingbird, and Texas Instruments’s OMAP platform. Quadrant tests reflect much of the same (though we’re aware that many of you don’t put too much stock into Quadrant results). The above photo also shows its performancce in the GL Benchmarks test.

You should note that this chipset does not take into account real-world performance – battery life would be at an absolute premium if you were to just drop this into a smartphone in its current state. Still, it’s quite impressive and we can’t wait to see how this thing will perform inside of actual phones whenever Qualcomm’s OEM partners begin to adopt it. (To date, the fastest chipset OEMs have provided for commercially-available products is the HTC EVO 3D.) [Anandtech via IntoMobile]