Good news for UK mobile addicts: Orange’s long-anticipated HD Voice service has officially made it to the Land of Hope and Glory. Starting today, British customers can pick up a HD Voice-enabled handset — including the Nokia 5230, X6, E5 and Samsung Omnia Pro at launch — from Orange, and start buttering their ears with “crystal clear” phone calls while within the carrier’s 3G coverage. Prior to the launch, we were fortunate enough to try out the new service on a couple of Nokia E5 prototypes, and boy, that was some pretty impressive stuff there — the wider speech bandwidth really added a lot of clarity to the caller’s voice, and additionally, the noisy traffic from the caller’s end was well suppressed at where it’d otherwise crackle over a normal call. Perhaps the easiest way to put it is that this is much like jumping from a bad FM radio broadcast to some sweet CD audio, thus making conversations a lot easier to interpret even if the recipient is in a noisy environment. As always, hearing is believing, so do check out our sample audio clips after the break.

While Orange remains a dominant driving force behind this mobile revolution, the carrier assured us that it expects other companies to pick up this open standard. That said, it’s rather disappointing that current owners of the aforementioned handsets won’t be getitng a software patch for the HD upgrade (we were told that no extra hardware is involved), but we can understand — the manufacturers do need to sell new phones to stay alive in this rapidly changing market. Anyhow, here’s hoping that the forthcoming flagship Android and Windows Phone 7 devices will also get a taste of this crystal clear call quality.

Continue reading Orange HD Voice service and handsets go live in the UK, we go ears-on (video)

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I first heard the term “Super Phone”  used as it relates to a new category of devices at a conference I attended last month. I’ve thought for a while now that the industry needed to come up with a term other than smartphone to distinguish these new classes of devices. Even though I’m not completely in love with Super Phone as a term (and I’m pretty sure consumers don’t care about these terms anyway) it is perhaps the best so far.

So what is a Super Phone? Today’s devices running processors around the 1GHz level are capable of HD 720p encode and decode of video and render graphics comparable to Sony’s PlayStation 2. Super Phones running dual core processors in the 1.5GHz to 2GHz range will be fully capable of 1080p encode & decode of HD video, capture 1080p video and capable of achieving console level 3D graphics.

LG announced at the end of last week that they would be aggressively releasing upwards of fifteen new mobile devices by the end of the year. Perhaps even more interesting was that the announcement explained that some of LG’s newest devices would be running NVIDIA’s mobile processor named Tegra, which puts them in this new category of Super Phone.

Tegra is best known currently as powering the latest Zune HD and more recently the Microsoft Kin, may it rest in peace. Those devices however ran the first generation of Tegra processor where the LG ones will be running Tegra 2.

It will be interesting to see the devices from LG that roll out packing Tegra as their CPU. I have tracked Tegra since I first started doing additional analysis of mobile processors just over three years ago. Back then Tegra was called the APX 2500 and ran a very impressive demo on a mobile device showing HD processing as well as graphically rich media and user interfaces. The SlashGear team ran some hands on video of this device back in 2008.

Since then Tegra has evolved and is in its second generation called Tegra 2.  From what I am hearing from OEMs Tegra 2 is gaining significant momentum in the super phone and tablet space. Qualcomm has been in the news as one of the leading mobile processors for these types of devices with their Snapdragon chip; however Tegra 2 is currently gaining with OEMs and ODMs due to its advantages in HD video processing, gaming, graphics capabilities, dual cores, multimedia features and current availability.   It is important to note that these devices from LG running Tegra 2 will be the first dual-core mobile phones on the market. All of this is taking advantage of the ARM architecture, which has provided an important foundation for mobile and touch computing.

These new classes of devices will be particularly interesting as Google rolls out Gingerbread (Android 3.0), which will be able to take advantage of the powerful processors that exist in Super Phones.  I fully anticipate that we will see a wave of these devices enter the market next year by any manufacturer who wants to stay competitive.

We live in exciting times and it will be interesting to see how the hardware and software community takes advantage of these powerful mobile devices.

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If you’ve been waiting patiently for Verizon to push out the Android 2.2. Froyo update for the HTC Droid Incredible, not taking the easy option and opting for one of the unofficial ROMs that are circulating, then today could be the day your high standards are rewarded.  Verizon has pinged us to let us know that they’re pushing out Froyo for the Droid Incredible as an OTA update, complete with Adobe Flash Player 10.1.

The update also includes the 3G mobile hotspot app together with an upgrade for the camera software that enables 720p HD video recording.  Unfortunately you’ll have to wait for your Droid Incredible to offer the firmware to you, since Verizon tells us there’s no way to artificially prompt it.  More information on the update process here.

[via Android Community]

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