Ina Fried

Recent Posts by Ina Fried

HTC Unveils Two New Windows Phones, Both With Front-Facing Cameras for Video Chat

HTC on Thursday showed off its first two phones running the new Mango release of Windows Phone 7, both sporting front-facing cameras and slated for release next month in Europe and Asia, with a global launch to follow.

One phone is the 4.7-inch Titan — the largest-screen Windows Phone device yet — while the Radar is a 3.8-inch device crafted from a single piece of aluminum.

The Radar has a 1 gigahertz Qualcomm processor and a 5 megapixel rear camera, while the Titan sports a 1.5GHz chip and an 8 megapixel rear camera.

With the announcement, Microsoft VP Joe Belfiore said he can now confirm that Mango supports the additional front-facing camera, something about which Microsoft had been cagey.

“A lot of you have asked us whether Mango will support front-facing cameras — and now that these HTC phones have been formally announced, I can confirm officially that Mango does support these,” Belfiore wrote in a blog post. The post mentions video chat as among the features, but doesn’t specifically mention Skype, which Microsoft is in the process of acquiring.

Fujitsu-Toshiba has already launched a waterproof Windows Phone Mango device in Japan, while Nokia is also basing its first Windows Phone on the Mango software release.

Among the features being added with the update are improved browsing, better multitasking and integrated Twitter support. Microsoft finalized the software update in July.

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I think the NSA has a job to do and we need the NSA. But as (physicist) Robert Oppenheimer said, “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it and argue about what to do about it only after you’ve had your technical success. That is the way it was with the atomic bomb.”

— Phil Zimmerman, PGP inventor and Silent Circle co-founder, in an interview with Om Malik