Android phones to make a February debut?

From the APC website -




Above is a photo of an alleged prototype Android smartphone as it posted in Gizmodo. It looks very much like a derivative model of some of HTC's product line, HTC being the world's biggest manufacturer of Windows Mobile smartphones (including the iPAQ series) and one of the leading partners of Google's Open Handset Alliance.

While not exactly aesthetically pleasing, it is, more importantly, already functional, as the screen shots below will show. This means developers and engineers can actually already work on and with it.




A lean, clean look: Android's UI presents a horizontally-scrolling 'carousel' of icons which is similar to the small-screen look of Intel's concept MID devices.




Something to talk about: this screengrab from Google's YouTube demo of Android shows how incoming SMS and chat messages appear in speech bubbles at the top of the screen.

History comes alive: Android's browser shows its history of recently-visited Web pages as thumbnail images of each page.

Gaming a la Google phone: Who needs Snake when you can play Quake? Android includes a software 3D engine and also supports hardware-based GPU acceleration.

Additional screen shots and more details are available here.