HTC announces 5-inch HTC J butterfly smartphone bound for Japan

HTC on Wednesday unveiled its HTC J butterfly handset for the Japanese market. The device features a 5-inch Super LCD screen with a resolution of 1920 x 1080, an 8-megapixel rear camera, 16GB of storage and 2GB of RAM.

Under the hood, the handset is state of the art with Qualcomm’s quad-core Snapdragon APQ8064 chip and the MDM9615 baseband chip, which sets its up for LTE service on Japanese carrier au. The phone comes with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean installed.

There’s no word on price yet, but given the size and specs of the handset, it should definitely be on the higher end. It will be available in three colors when it arrives in December.

The HTC J butterfly certainly looks good on paper, and, just based on the product shots, it’s got an attractive design. If a version of this phone doesn’t make it outside of Japan, I suspect there will be a lot of disappointed customers.

The Taiwanese handset maker has had a rough time of things lately as it’s struggled to compete with Samsung and Apple. In the most recent quarter, HTC barely made forecasts after experiencing a 79 percent drop in profit compared to last year. The company is hoping to kick up sales with the release of its One X+ Android phone and its 8X and 8S Windows phones .

Images via HTC

Official: BlackBerry Playbook Will Support Android Apps

With the BlackBerry PlayBook almost ready to hit the market, RIM has finally declared that its professional tablet will support Android applications.

Launching on April 19 in the U.S and Canada, developers will be able to use two optional “app players” to allow the running of Java Blackberry apps and Android apps.  which will support application run-time environment for BlackBerry Java apps and Android applications created for Android 2.3 and lower.

That means that BlackBerry Playbook owners will be able to take advantage of the 200,000 Android applications already available on the Android Market, adding to the 25,000 apps already available on BlackBerry App World.

Android apps will be placed in a secure “sandbox” on the BlackBerry PlayBook where the BlackBerry Java or Android apps can be run. Developers can simply repackage, code sign and submit their BlackBerry Java and Android apps to BlackBerry App World.

Once approved, the apps will be distributed through BlackBerry App World, providing a new opportunity for many developers to reach BlackBerry PlayBook users. Users will be able to download both the app players and the BlackBerry Java and Android apps from BlackBerry App World.

It’s a huge announcement from RIM, one that we were expecting but surprising nonetheless. RIM will be able to leverage the power of Google’s Android Market and tempt users away from the iPad, despite the fact it is meant to be a purely professional tablet.

BlackBerry Playbook officially priced from $499. Preorders start, but still no release date [Updated]

RIM has officially confirmed a few more details for its BlackBerry Playbook tablet, including the first official price information.

While there’s still no official release date for the device, it will be available at 20,000 retail outlets in the U.S. and Canada and the US Best Buy website already has the 16GB base model up for pre-order at 499 USD.

Meanwhile, Best Buy’s Canadian site is pricing three different models as follows: 16GB for 499.99 Canadian Dollars, 32GB for 599.99 and 64GB for $699.99. Although there’s no official release date, the devices are shown as being set to arrive at Best Buy’s warehouses on 19 April, indicating that a release around that date is likely.

Ever since it first announced the Playbook, BlackBerry has drip-fed us information and we’re almost there now. So RIM, when do we get our hands on this thing?

UPDATE: As a reader comments below, Best Buy’s press release states a 19 April release date. Will that hold? We don’t have long to find out.