Designer Chris Owens has come up with a fashion phone that's even slicker (and lacking in features) than the LG Prada or the Samsung Armani phones. The design's appealing because it's got a giant screen on the front (much like the Prada or the iPhone), but has an illuminated glass dialpad that slides out from the bottom. Yes, it looks like you can pretty much only call or text message people with the phone, but fashionistas don't bother with emails. Video "demo" after the jump. [Chris Owens via Yanko Design]

HTC is very clear that this fix is not a driver for Imageon hardware lying dormant in some handsets

Many HTC owners have been upset at the poor performance of some HTC devices when it comes to video playback. DailyTech reported in January that some HTC owners had banded together and were threatening a class action law suit if the poor video performance issue wasn’t addressed.

One stated goal of the HTC owners was to get a driver from HTC for the ATI Imageon video acceleration hardware present in certain HTC handsets that was not being utilized. HTC spokesman Eric Lin told DailyTech that HTC is releasing a fix that will dramatically improve the video performance on the Touch family of devices and the TYTN II/Tilt, Mogul/XV6900 devices.

This fix will be in the form of software update rather than a new ROM image. HTC is very specific in pointing out that this fix is not a driver for the Imageon hardware locked away inside the Qualcomm chipset in the devices in question. For a reason why HTC won’t release a driver for the Imageon hardware, Lin provided DailyTech with this official statement:

HTC DOES plan to offer software upgrades that will increase feature functionality, over the air wireless speeds and other enhancements for some of the phones being criticized, but we do not anticipate including any additional support for the video acceleration issues cited in customer complaints. It is important for customers to understand that bringing this functionality to market is not a trivial driver update and requires extensive software development and time.

HTC will utilize hardware video acceleration like the ATI Imageon in many upcoming products. Our users have made it clear that they expect our products to offer an improved visual experience, and we have included this feedback into planning and development of future products.

To address lingering questions about HTC's current MSM 7xxx devices, it is important to establish that a chipset like an MSM7xxx is a platform with a vast multitude of features that enable a wide range of devices with varied functionality. It is common that devices built on platforms like Qualcomm's will not enable every feature or function.

In addition to making sure the required hardware is present, unlocking extended capabilities of chipsets like the MSM 7xxx requires in-depth and time consuming software development, complicated licensing negotiations, potential intellectual property negotiations, added licensing fees, and in the case of devices that are sold through operators, the desire of the operator to include the additional functionality. To make an informed decision about which handset suits them best, consumers should look at the product specification itself instead of using the underlying chipset specifications to define what the product could potentially become.

The Imageon video acceleration hardware is present in the devices in question, however, it appears that the reason no drivers were provided has to do with licensing issues.

moNews has gotten their hands on a seemingly internal T-Mobile doc discussing their imminent 3G plans. As tipped, it'll launch in NYC tomorrow and 20+ major markets by the end of the year. One thing to note, in the doc it discusses the "great call quality" and "more network availability" 3G will offer, not hot, melty data. Well, we've been told that the first phones won't be using the 3G network for data, but voice only, to offload capacity from their older network. Hence the batch of bizarrely 3G mid-rangers that aren't exactly browsing or email monsters. Hit the jump to see if you're gonna get in on this by the end of the year.

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What’s that? You somehow got a hold of the 4.7.0.75 OS for the BlackBerry Storm? Well, in this heavily-connected world we call BG Land, you’re already rockin’ something old. We’re running 4.7.0.76 on our Storm, and boy, does this thing improve a whole heap more than 4.7.0.75 did. Here’s a list of the improvements we’ve found (and bugs):

* For starters, switching portrait to landscape is even faster than on .75. We’re talking half a second to make a clean switch. No more “double keyboards” (half SureType, half QWERTY) on the screen.
* After around a full day of use, our battery is sitting pretty at 50%. This is probably a 25% increase over .65. We can’t say how much better it is than .75 since that wouldn’t be fair seeing as how it wasn’t in use for long, but we believe there will still be an improvement.
* There was this annoyance where you’d go to tap on an icon, it wouldn’t select if you tried to tap it fast. That’s all cleared up here…
* This was in .75, but DTMF tones in the phone application no longer lag and cause you to hit the wrong prompts, etc.
* The issue where the keyboard sometimes disappears when you are typing is still there.
* In the browser, if you tapped once in the .65 build, the bottom navigational toolbar would hide and so would the top status bar. In .75, only the bottom bar would hide but the top bar would stay. Here in .76, both hide again.
* In the browser, when you flip to landscape, the text size is increased tremendously. It scales up to fit the width of the page. Very helpful.
* There has not been one reboot so far. In .65 there were probably two a day
* There’s a weird bug where sometimes the back button doesn’t actually work. Can’t figure out what causes this to happen. Oh well.
* When navigating through the music player, playing MP3s is probably 50% better than .65 and 20% better than .75. Very, very quick.
* When navigating through photos, thumbnails appear almost instantly. Even on the Bold it sometimes took a while to load, and it loaded them one-by-one. Here they basically just pop-up after a second or two.
* Overall data connectivity feels a little slower in our non-scientific tests. Web pages take a little longer to load and we get the infamous BlackBerry clock when sending messages and Messenger nonsense.
* The camera application has way more problems than it started out with. For instance, the green autofocus rectangle no longer appears, the bottom navigational buttons flicker on and off, and it’s just all around chaos. The camera app in .75 was a little better than .65 so don’t get too worried, we’re sure this will be cleared up.

The OS version, again, is 4.7.0.76 and the platform version is 4.0.0.96. We have no idea in terms of when (or if) this version will be released, and have no additional information for you at this time. Other than the fact that your leaked OS is older than the one we’ve got. Got any questions? Let’s answer a couple of them off the bat… No, we will not send you the software. No, we have no idea what the status of this is, whether it’s being tested on Verizon, or anywhere else, and we don’t know if this will ever be released. It probably will, we just don’t want to promise anything we can’t 100% confirm. The friendly staff at BGR including myself are around to help if you’ve got any others. Just fire them off in the comments.