AT&T Shows Off a Slew of Android and Windows Phones ~ Pare News

It’s one of the reasons why CES may be inching closer to extinction: so many products are announced at once that each one has a hard time distinguishing itself from the pack. AT&T demonstrated this amply when it let loose a scattershot barrage of new devices Monday — three from Samsung, one from HTC, two from Pantech, and a couple of intriguing firsts from Sony and Nokia that almost got lost in the shuffle.

Chief among the Samsung Android devices — all with 4G LTE, all running Android 2.3 — is the Galaxy Note. This long-anticipated phone-tablet hybrid boasts a 5-inch screen and an “S-Pen” stylus for note-taking, cropping and copy-pasting. Samsung has shipped more than a million Galaxy Notes internationally — although the company won’t break out figures for how many it actually sold.

No precise word on when the Note will arrive, other than “soon.” We’ll be getting our own hands-on at the Samsung booth, and we’re keen to see for ourselves whether a Newton-like stylus-based device can make it in the U.S., or if Steve Jobs was right when he insisted that a stylus was the death of touchscreens.

Meanwhile, for the eco-conscious among us who get a little queasy when we consider what all this gadgetry is doing to the planet, there’s the Samsung Exhilarate — a phone constructed from 80% recycled computer parts. Pantech has a couple of devices — not just the Element, a waterproof 8-inch Android tablet, but also the Burst, a cheap little phone (likely $50) that doubles as a mobile data hotspot.

And Sony? It got around to unveiling its first ever smartphone, the Xperia Ion, which will be exclusive to the U.S. It’s a pretty powerful beast with a 12-megapixel camera — the first smartphone on the market with a camera like that (although, of course, megapixels mean little) — and it will run PlayStation games, though without the benefit of an external memory slot. The Ion will run on Android 2.3, but Sony has committed to upgrading to Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) as soon as possible.

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On the Windows side of the aisle, AT&T promised the first LTE Windows phone from HTC, the Titan II, running on a 1.5 Ghz Qualcomm Snapdragon processor. It also teased a Nokia Windows phone, but we’ll have to wait till Nokia’s own event to tell you more about that. Nokia, at least, seems to have a good sense of how to build anticipation around the launch of a single device.

Do any of these products float your boat? Let us know what you’re waiting for in the comments.