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Misfit's Shine 2 is a thinner, more colorful activity tracker
Misfit took a roundabout approach towards releasing a sequel for its svelte Shine activity tracker: It announced the cheaper, plastic Shine Flash last year, and it stepped into the connected home with the colorful Bolt smart bulb back at CES. Now, we finally have the Misfit Shine 2, and it should look pretty familiar to Misfit fans. Once again, it's made out of smooth aluminum, but it's a tad thinner and wider than the first Shine, which wasn't exactly a clunker in the first place. In addition to tracking your steps and basic sleep patterns, the Shine 2 now has a 3-axis magnetometer for slightly more accurate activity tracking. Misfit also swapped out the white LEDs on the front of the device with 12 colorful lights, and it now supports capacitive touch, which means it should be more responsive to your taps and swipes. You can nab a Shine 2 in either rose gold or black for $100 later in November.
BlackBerry Curve 8520, LG Shine II coming to AT&T
That successor to AT&T's wildly popular LG Shine that we spied back in August has finally popped official today, becoming the Shine II (surprise, surprise). It's a very evolutionary set -- if you squint, you can't see much difference from the original -- but this might be a situation where it's in AT&T's best interest not to mess with success just as long as they don't end up pulling a RAZR over the next several years. It's got a 2 megapixel cam, a mirror-finish 2.2-inch LCD, GPS, 3.6Mbps HSDPA, and microSD expansion to 16GB; look for it on November 22 for $119.99 after rebate on contract. Perhaps more notably, the BlackBerry Curve 8520 has migrated from T-Mobile over to AT&T today with the same EDGE data and optical pad as its cousin; it'll be hitting in the "coming weeks" for $99.99 after rebate. Of course, the Bold 9700 hits on the 22nd for a hundie more, so there'll be some soul searching among AT&T-based BlackBerry lovers over the next few days, we suspect.
LG's dumbphone haul for AT&T: Shine 2, "Georgia," and something else?
It should come as no surprise that AT&T would be eager to replace one of its more popular, longer-lasting dumbphone staples with more modern hardware that retains the original's major selling points -- so when we found documentation backing up an earlier rumor that there was a Shine 2 in the works for later this year, we didn't bat an eye. Specs on this one should include a 2.2-inch QVGA display, 2 megapixel fixed focus cam, Bluetooth 2.1, microSD expansion, and 3.6Mbps HSDPA. We've got a tiny picture of this sucker in the gallery below, but it came equipped with a big "TBD" over the top of it (which we removed), so we're skeptical that this is the final ID of the device. Moving on, the "Georgia" -- pictured above -- is a slightly higher-end slider with a 2.8-inch wide QVGA display, accelerometer, 3 megapixel camera, and MediaFLO support. We're actually more curious about the phone that was clipped out of the shot to the left, though; the little snippet you see here is all we have, and we don't have any documentation to suggest whether it's coming to AT&T. Any juicy guesses? Update: We've had a couple folks point out now that the Shine 2 appears to be a picture of the KF510. Whether the actual device will really be a branded, North American KF510 is unclear (we're still wondering about that "TBD" that had been slapped on there). Thanks, everyone!
AT&T rumors: LG Secret canceled, Shine 2 and Vu 2 on the way?
Brace yourselves, folks: it looks like one of the more painful incidents in recent memory might be in the process of repeating itself. Remember a while back when AT&T canceled the hotly-anticipated Sony Ericsson K850 at the last possible fricking second? Yeah, well, we're hearing that LG and AT&T may have mutually agreed to put the brakes on the CF750 Secret (which, like the K850, just happens to be a 5 megapixel phone) "due to cost" -- in other words, some guy in a suit thinks the price point wouldn't make sense. He's likely right, but we're going to grumble nonetheless if that ends up being the case. In happier news, the well-traveled Shine looks due to finally be put out to pasture by the end of May "at the latest," while the Vu is scheduled to be euthanized in August -- but don't worry, both models have replacements in the pipeline. Currently, it looks like AT&T expects the Shine 2 and Vu 2 to hit in the third quarter, though we know from countless past experiences that this is liable to slip dangerously close to the holiday shopping season as both manufacturer and carrier realize that neither the hardware nor software are ready for primetime. The Vu 2 is said to have "some new 3D touchscreen that... was very impressive," which we take to mean that S-Class is a strong possibility here. Could the Vu 2 end up being a thinly-veiled Arena or Viewty Smart clone? [Thanks, Kal]
