Just as promised, today Samsung showed the world their new smartphone operating system called Bada. At an event, held in London, the Korean company revealed the first details about the upcoming platform and gave the start to the developers challenge that should create a good application base for the future Bada users.

The Bada OS is based around on Samsung proprietary TouchWiz User Interface – in fact the design mockups they’ve presented at the event were pretty much similar to the Samsung Pixon12 UI.

Designed for use on full-touch handsets only, Bada OS should help create “a smartphone for everyone” and increase the market share of the smartphones up to 50 percent.

Being a fully-fledged smartphone platform though, Bada will allow developers to tap into the various mobile phone features and sensors – Flash UI, web control, motion sensing, vibration control, face detection, weather, proximity, and other activity sensors. Obviously developers should have no problems developing immersive and interactive applications.

Samsung have highlighted the various service-centric features as the Bada OS differentiator. Those would location-based social networking services, device synchronization, content management, location-based services, and e-commerce services – all supported by back-end Bada servers.

As you’ll see from the 4-minute presentation video below, at this point Samsung are reaching mainly towards developers, not cellphone users. Samsung are hoping that getting the developers support will get a head start for their new OS. They’ve setup a dedicated  Bada developers website and have already put up the Bada SDK for download.

Leaked images, specs or even videos of unannounced handsets are part of our trivial round. But today’s catch brought something quite intriguing – some specs and a design mockup of a 12 megapixel Nokia N87.

According to the video we’ve spotted, the device is expected to come with some nice goodies such as a large 3.2″ capacitive touchscreen of 480 x 800 pixel resolution, up to 16 gigs of internal storage and a zippy 600 MHz processor.

On the back of the full touchscreen handset there should be a 12 megapixel autofocus sharpshooter with Carl Zeiss optics, a Xenon flash and an additional Dual LED flash.

And the last rumored feature are the slide-out multimedia keys (similar to the ones found in Nokia N86 8MP ).

Now, take a look at the video below and see how one of the next Nokia phones is expected to look like:

Now we won’t get into the discussion whether this info is credible or not. On one hand we’ve seen way more elaborate fakes and on the other, we’ve seen way more ugly things come out true.

So in the end even if this rumor turns out to be false, those specs seem like a great tip for Nokia’s R&D team.

You all know Fring, the application that brings Skype, ICQ, Facebook and other services to your mobile phones, right? Up until now you were able to chat with your pals and to make voice calls but as of today you can also take things to a new level. Enter mobile video calls through Skype.

Just a few days back the Fring app was made compatible with the smartphones powered by Android OS but today’s news is an even greater break-through.

Unfortunately, the Skype video call capabilities will be available to a limited number of supported devices (all of them are Nokia smartphones). Those include the touchscreen equipped Nokia X6, N97, N97 mini and 5800 as well as Nokia N95, N95 8GB and N82.

And here is a short clip showing the video call capable Fring in action:

If your smartphone is among the supported ones don’t hesitate to  get yourself the latest Fring version.

The Samsung Omnia II will soon be released at Verizon on December 2 for $200 on contract after a $100 mail-in rebate.

This should probably come as no surprise as the original was also with the big V, and so this Windows Mobile 6.5 will be in stiff competition with the Moto Droid.

Here’s a video of the Samsung Omnia II with AMOLED screen after the jump.

Sony Ericsson’s first Android phone is now finally official and it’s called Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 – not Xperia X3 and neither Rachael.

The X10 will run Android 1.6 Donut (why not Android 2.0?), coming with a new UX (user experience) platform that we’ve seen before. This UX platform should provide a unique user experience, as it’s “combining best-in-class entertainment features with signature applications, unrivalled integration of social media services and a rich graphical user interface.”

As previously rumored, the Xperia X10 is based on a 1GHz Qualcomm Snapdragon QSD8250 processor – being the second Android phone to use a Snapdragon platform, after the Acer Liquid A1.

With the X10, users will have access to both Android Market and Play Now Arena. At the same time with the X10, Sony Ericsson will introduce two new features: Sony Ericsson Timescape, which “manages all your communication with one person in one place – you can browse through your conversations the bright way to check out your Facebook, Twitter, photos, emails, and texts all in one go”; and Sony Ericsson Mediascape, which “is the smart way to get all the music, photos and videos you want from your favorite friends and artists. It accesses content from everywhere – your phone, YouTube, PlayNow – and presents everything for you.”

Here are the phone’s main specs and features:

* GSM/GPRS/EDGE 850/900/1800/1900

* UMTS HSPA 900/1700/2100 or UMTS HSPA 800/850/1900/2100

* 4.0 inches scratch-resistant capacitive touchscreen display with 480 x 854 pixels

* Wi-Fi

* Gesture control

* GPS

* Google Maps with Street View

* Wisepilot turn-by-turn navigation (free trial version)

* WebKit web browser

* Gmail

* Google Calendar

* Google Media Uploader

* Google phone-top search

* Google search widget

* Google Talk

* Google Voice Search

* 3.5mm headset jack

* Bluetooth

* MicroUSB

* 8.1MP autofocus camera with touch focus, intelligent face recognition, smile detection, image and video stabilizer, and geotagging (no flash, though)

* 1GB of internal memory

* 8GB MicroSD card included

* 119 x 63 x 13 mm

* 135 grams

Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 and X10a will be available starting the first quarter of 2010, in two color versions: Sensuous Black and Luster White. The smartphone’s price was not announced.

Sony Ericsson says about the X10 that it’s “the flagship phone in a family of phones coming to market during the first half of 2010”, so we should expect more Android handsets to be announced soon by the Swedish-Japanese company.

An Xperia X10 promo video can be watched below:

The LG GW620 will be manufacturer´s first Android cell phone. Perhaps the cherished release date is closing in on us, because a dedicated website advertising the device has sprang to life, remained online for short time then vanished into oblivion. Its launch has probably been a mistake of some sorts, because it went offline just a few minutes before we published the current news bit. Still, it failed to go unnoticed and we managed to spot two commercials that had somehow escaped our attention before. Similarly to the commercial of the LG GM730 (LG´s first WM6.5 phone), they are funny and enjoyable to watch. The functions of the phone are introduced by puppets that remind us of the kids´ TV show Sesame Street. They reveal the LG GW620 will come with dedicated applications for social networking controlled by an SNS Manager and nice features like automatic face recognition with the function being able to automatically link the person´s profile on various social networks to the corresponding entry in your phone book. This means cool things like dialling someone or sending them an email directly from the picture they are in. Sounds quite intriguing indeed.  Take a look at the videos to find out more about the device.

Heating up the expectations for the XPERIA X10 announcement next Tuesday (3 November), Sony Ericsson have just published a teaser video of their upcoming Android uber smartphone.

We recently reported on the new Sony Ericsson landing promo page that mysteriously appeared to arouse the interest of the general public about an upcoming announcement on 3 November. We know for sure that this is when Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 will get its official unveiling after so many leaks such as this.

Now Sony Ericsson have added a promo video to that page as a sneak peak to what’s coming. Here’s it:

If you’ve lived on a foreign planet the last several months, we’ll remind you that the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 (previously rumored as Rachael and XPERIA X3) is Sony Ericsson’s first Android smartphone.

The XPERIA X10 is based on a blazing fast Snapdragon CPU and has a 4-inch display and an 8 megapixel camera.