I think this would go nicely with a Bose speaker system, especially if connected via goldplated Monster cables.

Nice: 12hr battery without weight/size compromise, internal 3G with the battery to make use of it, Windows 7, HD accelerated graphics and a 1280*720 screen (will be a nice hires video player, and again the battery life makes it practical).

Not nice: it's gma500 rather than Ion, so no flash acceleration anytime soon, which would allow youtube/bbc HD. Worst of all, 1gb max ram?? Urrrgh. Win7 can just about work with that, but with an Atom, a 4200rpm drive and shared graphics memory it's going to struggle.


$600 would be OK, but it seems a little too compromised by the ram limit. If they're going to premium price it, stick a dualcore Atom, Ion and 4gb in there.

Seriously? I assumed Macs must have Bluray playback for ages, it's such old news. How come Apple are so far behind?

64GB SSD min for Win7 Starter? Are they drunk?

Win7 ultimate installs fine in 8GB, and if you strip the junk you have 4GB free - enough for everything needed unless it's your primary laptop.

Tried it some on my Touch HD. It's ok, an improvement as a frontend to raw 6.1, but that's all it is: a frontend.

Went back to Touchflo3D after a while. The latest versions are actually rather good, especially those tweaked up by the xda-dev folk.

The article's sample picture taken by the phone is terrible - all the detail has been smudged out by the denoising needed. They'd get better quality with a 4meg sensor and less denoising.

Totally stupid. My ancient 2megapixel canon takes vastly better pictures than a 9mp camera phone.

We've long since passed the point where increasing resolution at these sensor sizes is not only failing to improve quality, it's obviously harming it with increased noise and consequent massive smeary denoising. It's the same thing with point and shoots - 14mp in a 1/2.5" sensor. Idiotic (most good DSLRs have less megapixels in a sensor 6x the size, and mobile phones use even smaller than that).

Totally pointless. Go buy a $10 second hand 2001 2mpixel camera, and you'll get better quality pics than with this. All these clueless people drooling over the "8" headline figure are amusing - ffs 8mpixels needs a dslr sized sensor or you'll have noise hell.

Camera phones have barely improved from 1.3mpixel days - they're still useless cos of the microscopic sensor size and cruddy optics.

US price is with a 2 year contract, so could be quite a bit more expensive elsewhere.

Looks great: nice hires for video, wifi, great memory space. No HSDPA is terrible though, let alone no UMTS. EDGE is just so slow, and basically unusable for any data purposes. It's such a backward step considering I first used 3G literally 6 years ago, and 1.8mbit HSDPA for the last 6 months. Once you get used to consistent 150-200KBytes/sec on a flatrate tarriff (7.50 pounds a month) it really changes the way you use the mobile.

Maybe in the European version they'll add decent connectivity - I'll probably be tempted to sell my smartphone (MDA Vario II, aka HTC Hermes) then.