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As you probably know by now, HTC has officially unveiled its first Android tablet, the 7-inch Flyer. With all the major players recently announcing new tablets, it was only a matter of time before the Taiwanese manufacturer threw its hat into the ring.

In terms of hardware, it has pretty much everything we were expecting. Thanks to its 1.5GHz processor, 1GB RAM, and 5-megapixel camera, the Flyer can stand proudly next to Samsung's Galaxy Tab. Holding one's own against a 6-month-old tablet is one thing, but how does the Flyer stack up against the new crop of … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Jabra debuted its latest hands-free calling solution for cars at the Mobile World Conference this week. The Freeway improves upon the previous Cruiser2 model and is expected to deliver higher voice and audio quality.

Three speakers in the Freeway create a Virtual Surround Sound for incoming calls, according to the company. Jabra also added a second microphone to help counter background noise from wind and other vehicle passengers. The visor-mounted Freeway uses an embedded motion sensor to automatically turn on and off when it detects the car in motion. New voice-activated features enable the driver to make, accept, and … Read more

Using our mobile phones as wallets is closer to reality. At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this morning, Deutsche Telekom, parent company of T-Mobile USA, says it will unleash the capability to its customers this year.

The first customers to get the full payment system are those subscribers in Germany and Poland. The U.S., Netherlands, and Czech Republic will follow in 2012. Deutsche Telekom said it expected customers to use their phones in place of cash, and eventually in place of tickets for public transportation systems.

The payment system will be run and billed by the carrier, but it requires phones with NFC, or near-field communication, chips embedded inside. The chips allow data to be sent wirelessly over very short distances, around 4 inches. So when a customer waves his phone over a payment terminal, a transaction can be recorded.

But which handset manufacturers will get on board first? Beyond the Nexus S Android phone, few phones have the chips currently embedded. That's where reports from the press conference get really interesting. According to bloggers who were in the room, Deutsche Telekom executives handed out a slide deck that listed manufacturers it expects to launch NFC-equipped phones this year: Apple sometime this year, Samsung in the second quarter of the year, followed by RIM and LG during the third quarter. … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Google today unveiled Movie Studio, a new application for the upcoming Honeycomb era of Android tablets that lets people edit videos.

The software, which Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt announced during a speech here at Mobile World Congress, is designed to expand on a phone's abilities to capture imagery.

With it, people can combine still images and videos to create broader video that can be shared online. People will be able to add musical soundtracks, fade to black at the end of the video, and add effects like the Ken Burns-style panning so common on Apple video software. … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Verizon Communications Chief Technology Officer Tony Melone would love to see a third player in the mobile OS market, but Microsoft's Windows Phone platform may not be it.

Melone said during an interview yesterday at the Mobile World Congress here, that it is important for the mobile industry to have more than two choices in major software platforms for mobile devices. But he is skeptical that Microsoft, which has seemingly had a slow start in the market with its Windows Phone 7 software, will have a chance to be that third horse.

That said, Verizon plans to offer its first Windows Phone 7 product this spring, … Read more

Nokia and Microsoft want to create a "third ecosystem" to rival the mobile phone realms built by Apple and Google--but carriers have an even broader alternative of their own.

Last year at the Mobile World Congress show, a group of them unveiled the Wholesale Applications Community. It's an effort to outflank native software and monolithic app stores with Web apps not tied as tightly to specific smartphones and available through a variety of conduits.

And this year at the show, they launched WAC.

"With the commercial launch of operator storefronts, handsets and applications, all based on … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--The recession is over and wireless operators are finally growing again, but they are warning regulators in Europe, Latin America, and the United States to keep their paws off.

CEOs from some of the largest wireless operators in the world took to the stage here today, the second morning of the Mobile World Congress, to discuss the challenges facing their industry. While each of the executives participating in the keynote panel said he is optimistic about the future as more consumers upgrade to smartphones, they lamented the challenges of keeping up with high traffic demands on their networks.

Also … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--With Apple, Samsung, LG, and Motorola all entering the tablet space, you had to know HTC would join them sooner or later, so we can't say we were completely surprised when the Taiwanese handset manufacturer unveiled its first tablet today at Mobile World Congress 2011.

Everyone, meet the HTC Flyer. This Android 2.4 2.3-based tablet features a 7-inch Super LCD touch screen that's encased in an aluminum unibody design. This is a design that the company has used on a number of its smartphones, including the HTC Legend, and we've always been fond … Read more

We could scarcely believe our eyes when we read in HTC's press release last night that both the HTC Salsa and ChaCha "Facebook phones" will run Android 2.4, Gingerbread's successor.

Android 2.4? That at first seemed unlikely given several factors--the fact that Android developers are just starting to roll out Gingerbread 2.3 phones at this show and elsewhere, the fact that Google just finished a substantial effort to educate developers about Gingerbread, and the fact that Google has stated that it's trying to consolidate its Android release cycles. That adds up to … Read more