A bunch of readers have been writing to us in the recent months since the announcements of the latest and greatest from HTC, Samsung and Sony Ericsson. When will AT&T Wireless get some of these hot smartphones?
There'll soon be an announcement regarding the U.S. availability of the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, which could involve AT&T Wireless. When it comes to HTC and Samsung, according to Boy Genius Report, AT&T Wireless customers will soon get to choose from two brand new smartphones: The HTC Touch Pro, to be marketed as the Fuze, and the Samsung Omnia i900. We've spent time with both the smartphones lately, and we think it would be safe to say that they are both worth waiting for.
The Fuze is basically a HTC Touch Diamond with a slide out keyboard, and that might be enough to make it the most anticipated Windows Mobile handset to hit the market in a long time. The phone will offer a fantastic display, a 2.8-inch VGA touchscreen, and it's expected to offer a heavily improved TouchFLO 3D interface as responsive as the iPhone's UI. When we previewed the HTC Touch Pro, the phone also seemed snappy in various functions opening and closing apps or reorientating the screen from portrait to landscape. The phone will be powered by Windows Mobile 6.1 Professional and a high-end 528 MHz Qualcomm chipset.
With a large, 5-row, full-QWERTY keyboard hiding underneath, the phone will be one of the first on the market to combine a truly responsive, compelling all-touch interface with the hardware keyboard option. The Fuze also gets a 3.2-megapixel camera with auto focus. The only missing piece of the puzzle right now, is how well the phone will perform after having been flashed with AT&T Wireless firmware. If BGR's release date is on target, we should find out on October 23.
According to BGR, AT&T Wireless will also release the Samsung Mirage i907 in the same timeframe as the Fuze. A couple of months ago, we were lucky enough to play around with the original version of the Samsung Mirage i907, fresh from Samsung's Korean headquarters. Just like the Fuze, only time will tell how well the Samsung Mirage i907 will perform with AT&T Wireless' firmware, but let's hope it'll shine.
The Samsung Mirage i907 will be offering a 5-megapixel camera with auto focus and face detection, as well as 7.2 Mbps HSDPA networking. Music aficionados that are not using iTunes may also find the Samsung Mirage i907 to be a dream phone for music playback, as it'll come with a beefy 8GB or 16GB of internal memory. Similar to the Sony Ericsson Xperia X1, the Samsung Mirage i907 will likely offer an enhanced media player (check it out in our Omnia hands-on video here). The player looks great and expands nicely to full screen.
For web browsing, both the Fuze and the Samsung Mirage i907 will likely offer the Opera 9.5 browser, as well as the upcoming Internet Explorer Mobile 6. In other words, we expect that both YouTube videos and Windows Media videos can be played within the mobile browser on the Fuze and Samsung Mirage i907 out-of-box.
The interface of the Samsung Mirage i907 closely resembles the Samsung SGH-F480, with its TouchWiz UI and desktop gadgets (check out our hands-on video of the Samsung SGH-F480 here). The interface uses a sidebar to store widgets, and the user drags widgets onto the desktop to activate them. The front screen should be highly customizable, though there won't be much room for a bunch of widgets at once. The Samsung Mirage i907 will have a 3.2-inch screen with a resolution of 240 x 400 pixels.
So, AT&T Wireless customers, if your contracts expire this fall, and are looking for a great new smartphone, make sure to check out the Fuze and Samsung Mirage i907 Windows Mobile smartphones before you jump on the iPhone bandwagon.
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