After endless months of speculation, the collaboration between HTC and Facebook has finally been revealed to the world. It’s not a Facebook Phone per se, it’s simply a skinned Android smartphone that just so happens to bestow deep social media integration upon the OS, a move which makes the First — as well as future devices that feature the newly announced Facebook Home interface — an appropriate candidate for the term. The First will be available April 12th for $100 on AT&T, but it can be pre-ordered starting today.

While Facebook Home is taking the spotlight, let’s examine the first piece of hardware it will be featured on. On the spec sheet, the First isn’t going to take anybody’s breath away: it’s a midrange phone with 1.4GHz dual-core Snapdragon 400 processor, 1GB RAM, 5MP rear camera and 1.6MP front-facing cam, Android 4.1 and a 4.3-inch 720p display. We’re just getting our hands on the device right now and will continue to offer up our First impressions, along with a full gallery of images.

Filed under: Cellphones, Wireless, Mobile, HTC, Facebook

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HTC First hands-on (update: video)

Today Facebook finally took the wraps off Home, a suite of apps and a home screen replacement for Android phones. It’s not just a new UI for launching apps however; it replaces the lockscreen with Cover Feed and prioritizes updates from people instead of apps. There is a standard paginated launcher, that is always just a swipe away. But the focus is on the full-screen images that are your new welcome screen. These are status updates from friends that you can easily flip through and double tap to like when someone posts something exciting. Plain text status updates are placed over a user’s cover photo, to keep the appearance consistent with photo-centric posts.

Notifications are presented as small cards, which Facebook applies an algorithm to, in order determine the updates that are most important to you. Just like with the standard Android UI you simply swipe notifications off screen to dismiss them. But, if you want to remove all of them in one shot, you long press a single notification and the rest will be drawn to it and you’ll be able to dismiss the entire stack.

Filed under: Software, Mobile, Facebook

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Facebook Home official, replaces your app icons with social info (video)

We’ve arrived in Catalonia’s capital city, where snow, apparently, has marked the start of this year’s Mobile World Congress. That’s right, the hills surrounding this typically warm Mediterranean metropolis have been blanketed in a thin layer of flurries, but we’re nonetheless optimistic about this week’s smartphone show in Barcelona. As MWC 2013′s massive new venue begins to take shape, we’re preparing to deliver the hottest hands-ons, directly from Fira Gran Via. Some manufacturers, such as HTC and LG, have already demoed their latest handsets, and other devices have made an early debut, but there’s plenty of excitement still to come, as you’ll discover in our show preview. We’ll be sharing our liveblog lineup in a few hours — for now, it’s time to bookmark our event page, and check back often throughout the next week.

Filed under: Announcements, Cellphones, Laptops, Mobile

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We’re live from MWC 2013 in Barcelona!

Imagine our surprise when, upon firing up Sprint’s Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 earlier today for some routine app updates, we saw the 4G logo light up (!) for the first time ever. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it appears that sometime in the past few days, Sprint’s finally deigned to flick the LTE switch in a significant market — namely beautiful San Francisco. We immediately grabbed our Optimus G and EVO 4G LTE review units and hopped in the car for some quick tests. The verdict? We found pockets of LTE in Potrero Hill and SoMa, and nothing but CDMA in the Mission District. Speeds reached peaks of 16.7Mbps down and 9.4Mbps up with full signal but performance varied wildly, even block to block. Sprint had already enabled LTE in parts of Silicon Valley and had marked the city by the bay as one of its upcoming rollouts. Do you use Sprint and live in SF? Hit the comments and let us know if you’re enjoying the sweet nectar of LTE in your area.

Filed under: Cellphones, Tablets, Mobile, Sprint

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PSA: Sprint LTE is now live in San Francisco

LG finally showed off the XL 5.5-inch version of its upcoming Optimus G Pro at the end of a Facebook promo last week, and now it’s revealed a launch date in Korea, more specs and a window for arrival in North America. Also of note? Its CPU is the just-announced quad-core Snapdragon 600 running at 1.7Ghz. Announced at CES, the 600 is supposed to be a milder upgrade (compared to the potentially 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800) to its predecessor, the powerful S4 Pro. New software tweaks include a dual record that uses both cameras simultaneously and VR Panorama that appears to be similar to Google’s Photo Sphere stitching.

Besides the expanded 1080p screen and updated internals, the larger version also sports a slightly larger battery than the Japanese version announced previously by NTT Docomo with 3,140mAh compared to 3,000, but keeps the 2GB of RAM, 13MP rear camera, microSDXC slot and LTE. The phone will be released on local carriers SK Telecom, KT and LG Uplus on Wednesday for 968,000 won ($897), while a North American launch is mentioned for Q2 along with the Japanese release. We’ll find out more about this phone — and likely a few others — at MWC 2013 later this week, for now check out the press release after the break for more specs.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, LG

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Source: LG Korea

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LG’s 5.5-inch Optimus G Pro is the first with a Snapdragon 600 quad-core CPU