The article (in Chinese) is a little long-winded and machine translation doesn’t yield much but promises: Yinlips is planning to launch an iPad lookalike that will have a 6-inch E-Ink screen instead of an LCD one. This clone will have WiFi and can last up to 20 hours at a full charge. Other specs include FM radio with recording.

The photo above, however, is official. The iPad clone E-Ink reader will come with a touchscreen and a single home button. It supports PDF, TXT, CHM, FB2, RTF, TCR, PDB, OEB, HTM, PRC, HTML, EPUB, DJVU, IW44, IW4, DJV as well as photo formats. Leave it to Yinlips to announce an iPad clone ahead of everyone else. More details to come for sure. Hopefully we’ll have the official name and pricing of this iPad clone in a week or two.

[via imp3]

What you’re looking at folks is what’s being purported as the LG Arena’s heftier brother, the LG Arena Max LU9400. It’s expected to come with a 3.5-inch touchscreen, 5-megapixel camera, WiFi, GPS, and a 1GHz Snapdragon processor running under the hood. The Cyon branding on it more or less confirms that the LG Arena Max will be released in Korea though there’s still no official announcement about it just yet. However, rumor is that it will be launched this coming March. That’s all the info we have for now, but hopefully, we’ll get more details about the LG Arena Max at the MWC set to rock Barcelona this month.

[cetizen via unwiredview]

Are you ready for HD video in the 4G iPhone? It’s not confirmed yet, but based on the current trend and latest discovery while poking around the iPhone OS 3.2 SDK, this is now shaping up to be quite a plausible idea.

There’s a mysterious N89 device listed in the SDK and its AVC profile now comes with 720p support. Is the N89 one and the same as the 4G iPhone? We don’t know for sure right now, but we’d certainly like to think so.

In related news, word is that Pegatron has been picked to be the OEM for the N89. Foxconn, however, hasn’t been ditched and they’ll both be going at it together which could mean either two things - demand will be up and Apple needs more people on-board or there could be multiple generation devices hitting the market at the same time. Of course, all these are just speculation, but be that as it may, at least we now have something to keep a look out for in the next couple of months.

[digitimes via engadget]

We weren’t too impressed with the Samsung IceTouch, to be honest, but it appears the Korean company has bigger plans for the new OLED technology… 14-inch transparent laptop displays. The IceTouch will have the enviable task of making consumers feel comfortable about transparent OLED screens, though at $332 it’s a little steep. Next in line are widescreen SatNav devices. It’s easy to imagine we’ll get transparent laptops pretty soon.

[via engadget]

Ahead of the Apple iPad launch, X2 has released the Windows 7 iTablet. Yes, a non-Apple iTablet and it is available in many sizes from 10.2 inches to 12.1 inches. It is powered by a 1.6 GHz processor and employs a hard-disk storage giving this baby a 35mm thickness, which is really thick. In exchange for the bulk, you get 250GB of memory, 3 USB ports and an HDMI out aside from WiFi, Bluetooth and a 1.3 MP webcam. The X2 iTablet also runs on Linux and is available in many colors. No pricing yet and this is a UK-only announcement, but this sounds like Apple iPad has been slapped with a glove.

[via pocket-lint]

Apart from being the first Google phone, the Nexus One is also known for its OS, Android 2.1. It’s the first and currently the only phone available in the market right now that runs on the said platform. That’s soon about to change though as Samsung has just announced their latest touchscreen phone which will break the monopoly the Nexus One has over the Android 2.1 market, the Samsung SHW-M100S.

This baby packs a 3.7-inch AMOLED display, 5-megapixel camera, 720p video recording, WiFi (802.11n), GPS, 3.5mm jack, 800MHz processor, T-DMB tuner, and the latest TouchWiz UI running in tandem with Android 2.1. SK Telecom will release the Samsung M100S in Korea this March with an uncertain future elsewhere. Pricing is still yet to be known as well.

In related news, Samsung has also announced that an Android 2.1 update will be released for their first Android phone, the Samsung Galaxy. This will happen sometime in the second quarter which should be a nice consolation for others if ever the Samsung M100S doesn’t make it out of Korea.

[unwiredview via cellphones etc]

We haven’t tested it and we aren’t entirely sure it’s actually possible for such a small device, but that’s what Yinlips is claiming for the YDP102 MP3 player. The specs are basic for the cheap MP3 player: 2GB storage and support for MP3, WMA, APE, FLAC, AAC, OGG, WAV.

The 100 hours is believable but then Yinlips claims to achieve this on a 5-minute charge! Not an entirely impossible feat for a company that gave us the YDP800 projector PMP. How much does the YDP102 cost, you ask? Only $20.

[via imp3]

Nothing official yet, but it seems that Sony fancies the all-touch iPad formfactor for their next portable gaming device. According to Nobuyuki Oneda, Sony’s CFO, “[The Apple iPad] is a market we are also very interested in. We are confident we have the skills to create a product.” He also added that “Time-wise we are a little behind the iPad but it’s a space we would like to be an active player in.”

The Apple iPad may have underwhelmed a lot of industry observers, but if Sony thinks it will have a market then you most certainly will be looking at a new market segment for multimedia and gaming with the iPad as its paragon.

[read more here via slashgear]

The largest smartphone software has now officially become open source. Symbian has been the leading OS for smartphone for many years and has been migrating to become fully open source since 2008.

“When the Symbian Foundation was created, we set the target of completing the open-source release of the platform by mid-2010, and it’s because of the extraordinary commitment and dedication from our staff and our member companies that we’ve reached it well ahead of schedule,” said Symbian Foundation chief executive Lee Williams.

The Symbian^3 will be feature complete and should include a marked advance than previous Symbian versions particularly the popular Series 60 in Nokia smartphones. Nokia is a controlling investor in the Symbian Foundation spending hundreds of millions on the development of the Symbian software. The entry of the Apple iPhone and Google Android has put Symbian into an unenviable position of being a dinosaur.

[via zdnet]

The official announcement of the Apple iPad and an app called iBook complemented by a fully stocked iBookstore has rattled the people at Amazon. Amazon leads the pack in the ebook publishing world and its E-Ink device Kindle is the undisputed champion of ebook readers, but they’re obviously worried about iPad’s potential as the company seeks to branch out technologically after they purchased Touchco. (more…)