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Leaked T-Mobile roadmap outlines Ice Cream Sandwich updates, new myTouch devices
Looks like our friends over at TMoNews have unearthed a roadmap with some tasty morsels of info about what's coming down the pipe from T-Mobile USA in the next few months. Of course, none of this is set in stone or even confirmed, so take it with a grain of salt. Most interesting is a pair of dates for Ice Cream sandwich updates, with Magenta's Galaxy S II slated to receive Android 4.0 on May 14th, followed by the Sensation 4G and Amaze 4G getting ICS (with Sense 3.6, presumably) on June 16th. A bunch of device launches from Samsung and Huawei round up the list of dates, with no sign of HTC's One X, Samsung's upcoming Galaxy S III, or T-Mobile's rumored Galaxy Note variant. Sadness. Check out the entire bounty below. May 9th: Huawei Astor (low-end phone for 7-Eleven) July 11th: Huawei Buddy and Phoenix (myTouch QWERTY and slate, respectively) July 11th: Samsung Gravity TXT (new color) Aug 1st: Samsung T159 Cacao (low-end handset) Aug 15th: Samsung Apex Q (mystery device)
T-Mobile's next MyTouch: Huawei Ascend G312 QWERTY hands-on
First the leaked product shots, then the Mr. Blurrycam pictures, and now the real deal in our own hands! When we spotted this upcoming T-Mobile MyTouch slider, we just so happened to be chilling out at Huawei's headquarters in Shenzhen where the phone was displayed as the Ascend G312 QWERTY, or "Buddy" according to the "About phone" info ("MyTouch Buddy"?). We didn't see the non-QWERTY variant, but judging by the name, we don't doubt that there's also an Ascend G312 lurking somewhere.Anyhow, this new MyTouch packs a 1.4GHz Qualcomm MSM8255T chip, a 4-inch WVGA screen, 1GB of RAM, 4GB of storage and microSD expansion, along with features like DLNA connectivity and five-second fast boot. As for image capturing you get a 0.3-megapixel front-facing camera plus a five-megapixel main camera (with 720p recording) on the back, and you'll find a handy camera button at the usual place as well. Interestingly, the spec sheet listed Ice Cream Sandwich while the demo unit was only running on Android 2.3.6, so we'll probably need to wait for T-Mobile's final say on this end.During our quick hands-on we were pretty satisfied by the phone's overall build quality, especially with its spring-loaded sliding mechanism and keyboard feedback. The screen isn't the best in class when it comes to viewing angle and contrast, but bearing in mind that this phone comes with a Snapdragon S2 processor, we expect it to be priced almost as sensibly as LG's MyTouch handsets -- stay tuned for the official announcement, of course. Hands-on video after the break.
