Gearfuse

Normally, we don’t like to post about every new cellphone in the world. There’s simply too many to count and besides, that leaves us with room to post the really cool ones. This time around, Samsung has finally announced the long-awaited Jet. Photos of this phone have been floating around for over a year if I recall, so it’s nice to see it out in the open.

So on to the details: This fucker packs a 3.1-inch AMOLED touchscreen, a crazy 3-D interface that is controlled via that wacky cube at the bottom of the phone, a 5-megapixel digicam with flash and autofocus, 2GB of built-in memory, audio jack, WiFi, DivX and Xvid codecs and to top it off, an 800 MHz processor. Can you believe these specs? Talk about a serious contender to the iPhone, especially with Xvid playback and a processor that’s faster than the desktop I owned several years ago.

No word on a release date or who’s going to carry it.

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Rumors of an upcoming Samsung phone running Google’s Android OS were abound throughout the first quarter of this year. Now Samsung has laid those to rest and announced the I7500, an Android-powered phone that will drop in Europe this June and has already landed in Korea. What can it do? Aside from all your basic media playback bullshit (MP3, videos, etc.), it comes with a 3.2-inch AMOLED touchscreen, GPS, WiFi and 8GB of internal memory. The camera is 5-megapixels, but that doesn’t mean shit unless it has a decent lens and CMOS sensor.

HSDPA-capable and equipped with Bluetooth 2.0, the I7500 is going to be the first Google device that people will actually want. For now, we’ll have to wait around and see if AT&T gets it sometime this year.

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Step aside Microsoft, there’s a new Netflix streamer in town. Today, Netflix announced that it has added TiVo to its growing list of streaming partners. Being that TiVo’s subscriber base hasn’t grown much since 2005, we’re thinking TiVo needs this partnership more than Netflix; considering Netflix has already partnered with LG, Microsoft and Samsung.

Netflix will be available to TiVo Series3, TiVo HD and TiVo HD XL owners. The two companies will begin testing the new service today in “several thousand” U.S. households, and it’s expected to be widely available in early December. Whether or not this will keep TiVo in the business of DVR remains to be seen. For TiVo’s sake, this partnership should keep them in the running for a few more years.

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Samsung has announced plans to release a line of phones through KDDI Japan which will have AMOLED (Active Matrix Organic Light Emitting Diode) displays. This technology has been in the works by various companies, yet this is the first of these phones being mass-produced, going beyond the concept stage.

Japan always gets lucky with this cool new technology, though once a full-scale product is released, you can expect other companies to follow in their footsteps. We’ll most likely see AMOLED phone screens in the U.S. sometime next year I would think. — Andrew Dobrow

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Believe it or not, this exquisite phone concept design was made by a high school student. 15-year-old Andrew Kim posted his design on a forum recently and has understandably been getting great feedback. The Butterfly features a horizontal slider with dual AMOLED touchscreens. Unlike other horizontal sliding phones, Butterfly would feature a “slide ‘n tilt” feature, allowing the first screen to become your keypad.

The phone would also feature a SD card slot, audio/video playback, and a side button which deactivates the touchscreen for pocket-friendly use. Like any other design, there are some drawbacks. For one, you would have to slide out the phone to use the keypad, and then slide it back to activate the call, which we guess could be a perk if you look at it from a keypad-free standpoint. Still though, absolutely gorgeous. And we thought the Pantech concept phones were cool? They need to hire this kid.

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Right now, iriver can do no wrong. After their stellar performance at CES 2007, it seems that they are walking on water. And following in their holy path is the new Clix2 which has been released in Korea. So what can you expect to see if you happen to be visiting the country that everyone is always jealous of (they always get the good stuff first)?

To begin, it has a 2.2″ AMOLED dislay with an unlimited viewing angle, it plays video back at 30fps, it is smaller than its predecessor, and currently comes in 2 & 4GB capacities. You might want to hold your breath because an 8GB is sure to come out soon! Pricing is in Korean: 159,000 and 199,000 won for 2 and 4 respectively. –Nik Gomez

iriver Clix2 released in Korea [via dapreview]