Philips, through Shenzhen Sang Fei Communication, will launch an Android 2.3 and Java based 3G smartphone in India by Diwali.

“We will be launching an Android 2.3 and 3G smartphone in India by Diwali and it will be in the same price bracket in which most of the established handset marketers are offering their handsets,” said Satish Chopra, executive director of Conplex International, the distributor of Philips mobile phones in India, to The Mobile Indian.

On the phones’ specifications, he said, “The Android 2.3 based smartphone will be named X726 and will be a dual SIM capacitive phone. It will have a Standby time of 40 days and talktime of 15 hours.”

The 3G phone X9320 will be a dual SIM device with a 4.3 inch capacitive screen and dual cameras.

Regarding the availability of the phone, Satish said it will initially be available in northern and eastern India. Citing the reasons for this he said that Philips wants to make it available only in those regions where it has a service centre, which will lead to greater customer satisfaction.

Another executive at Philips, who didn’t want to be named, said the company’s Android phone will give tough competition to Samsung Galaxy S handsets and that it will be priced lower.

On Windows based smartphones and tablets, Tan Jok Tin, chief executive officer and managing director of Shenzen Sang Fei Consumer Communications, said, “Philips has already launched a Windows based phone in China and as of now we don’t have any plans to launch it in India as we want to wait till Nokia launches the Window based phone. Tablets are something which we might launch in the near future.”

Philips has just launched five dual SIM feature phones in India under its Xenium brand name. Some of these handsets have very high-end features, like a 3 inch touchscreen and 5 Megapixel Autofocus camera with flash.

According to the company, these mobile phones come with exceptional battery, which can provide as much as 50 days of standby time and 16 hours of talk time.

Among the handsets launched by Philips is Xenium X806, a 3 inch touchscreen device that has a 5 megapixel auto focus camera with flash, and memory which can be expanded to 8 GB.

As reported by The Mobile Indian earlier, Acer has started selling its Iconia A501 Android tablet. The A501 is similar to the older Acer Iconia A500 tablet, but comes with additional 3G data connectivity along with WiFi.

The Iconia A501 is identical to the A500 in terms of technical specifications &#151 it is based on Nvidia’s Tegra 2 dual core Processor running at 1 GHz, but has 512 MB of DDR2 RAM as compared to 1 GB on the A500.

The tablet has a 5 Megapixel rear camera for video and imagery while the frontal 2 megapixel camera is for video conferencing. The rear camera has been tweaked for recording 1080p HD videos as compared to the 720p video recording capability of the A500.

The 10.1 inch display of the A501 is capable of 800 x 1280 pixel resolution, and includes a new ten point multi touch input technology and 149 PPI pixel density.

As anticipated, the A501 does not come preinstalled with Android Honeycomb 3.2 but it will be available in the coming weeks.

The price of the A501 is slightly higher than the anticipated Rs 32,990 which brings it at par with the Windows version of the Acer tablet.

Samsung has accidentally revealed features of the Nexus Prime smartphone, which is also known as Google Phone. Earlier, too, there were reports that Samsung is working on the phone, but the company never confirmed this.

Samsung has now posted the User Agent Profile file of the handset on its website. As per the details listed in the XML file, the Nexus Prime will have display Resolution of 800 x 480 pixels, as opposed to the previously reported 720p HD.

This indicates that Google still wishes to have WVGA resolution for the Android Ice Cream Sandwich platform.

Nexus Prime is also expected to come loaded with Android Ice Cream Sandwich. Samsung was earlier rumoured to be working on the Nexus Prime handset with model number GT-I9250, which recently got WiFi and Bluetooth SIG certification .

Nexus Prime may house a dual core 1.5 GHz processor, which will most likely be one of the Texas Instruments OMAP 4 processors. But the possibility of Samsung using its own Exynos family of dual core processors in the Nexus Prime cannot be ruled out either.

No further details are available from the XML file of the Nexus Prime. Google is expected to unveil the Nexus Prime handset with Android Ice Cream Sandwich in December this year.

Windows Phone apps are likely to work on Windows 8 operating system, Nvidia’s chief executive officer, Jen-Hsun Huang, said.

It means users won’t have to worry about whether the apps of their Windows 7 devices will work on their Windows 8 tablets or not, and for Windows Phone developers it means they won’t waste time if they want their apps to work on the Windows 8 platform as well.

The two operating systems are currently separate entities but at some point, the two need to converge. This development could well be one step in that direction.

Nvidia is the No. 2 supplier of ARM based processors for smartphones and tablets &#151 second only to Qualcomm. Over some time, Nvidia has gradually moved onto mobile processors with its Tegra chips and has exited the computer Chipset business.

The chief executive of Nvidia also said that Tegra chips from the company are found on about 70 per cent of Android tablets and on 50 per cent of high end Android smartphones. After the acquisition of Icera, Nvidia will also be able to add a cellular radio with a processor, the way Qualcomm does with its Snapdragon chips.