Monday, June 7, 2010
Samsung Plasma Technology for 2010
Sunday, June 6, 2010
The Best Smartphones
The first thing you're likely to notice about Sprint's HTC EVO 4G is its size: this smartphone is big. And so is its display, which measures a whopping 4.3 inches. But pick up the EVO 4G and you'll be blown away by its speed. This is one lightning-fast phone--even if you can't experience the phone in all its 4G glory.
4G Wireless
As the first 4G phone to hit stores, 4G wireless support is the EVO 4G's headline feature. Sprint says its 4G network can offer download speeds that are ten times faster than a 3G connection, which will give the "HTC EVO 4G the fastest data speeds of any U.S. wireless device available today."
But 4G is still a new technology and the network isn't yet available in many places. The network is not available in the Boston area, where I live and where I tested the EVO 4G. But I was still impressed by the phone's speed.
Price and Availability
You will pay a premium for all that speed, though. Sprint is offering the HTC EVO 4G for $199.99 when you sign a two-year service agreement. That's a very reasonable price for such a full-featured phone, and is comparable to what AT&T charges for the iphone 3Gs and what Verizon Wireless charges for the Droid Incredible.
But that premium I mentioned, well, you'll be paying it every month. Sprint requires a PDA/Smart Device service plan with the HTC EVO 4G, such as the carrier's $69.99-per-month Everything Data plan. But Sprint also requires a $10-per-month Premium Data add-on for its 4G service -- and that add-on plan is required whether you live in an area with 4G coverage or not.
Design
Measuring 4.8 by 2.6 by 0.5 inches, the EVO 4G is larger than any other smartphone I've seen. It was large enough that I couldn't fit it in the cell phone pocket of my bag, which is just large enough to hold my iPhone 3GS. The EVO 4G weighs 6 ounces, which is noticeably heavier than the 4.8-ounce iPhone 3GS.
The tradeoff for that bulk is the giant 4.3-inch screen, which offers plenty of real estate for viewing Web pages and typing with the on-screen keyboard. It's also bright and clear, boasting a high resolution (800-by-480 pixels).
Below the display, you get four touch-sensitive buttons: home, menu, back, and search. The minimalist design is attractive, though I did wish for a power button on the face of the phone. (It's located on the top of the handset.)
Making Calls
Call quality was very good in my tests over Sprint's 3G network. Voices were loud and clear, though I did notice some occasional crackling sounds in the background. And while the EVO 4G is a wide and heavy phone, it was comfortable to hold during calls. At first it felt too large when held next to my ear, but I soon got used to its size.
Software
The EVO 4G runs the latest version of Android, 2.1. That's a definite plus, as new phones don't always ship with the newest version of Android. Another plus is that the Android Market continues to grow, so you'll find plenty of third-party apps in there. At last count, the Market had more than 35,000 titles. Read my full review of Android for more information.
The EVO 4G also features HTC's Sense interface, which offers some useful options for navigating through the Android OS. HTC has added new features to the Sense UI, include one called Leap, which lets you view thumbnails of the apps that you have open, so you can switch between them or close out of them. The Sense UI also includes Friend Stream, which lets you view information such as social network status updates.
The combination of Android 2.1 and HTC Sense is a winning one. The phone's interface and menus look slick and polished (something that's not always true of Android phones), and navigating through its many options is a snap.
Browsing the Web
Sprint says the EVO 4G features a "custom browser" designed to take advantage of the 4.3-inch screen, and it's a noticeable improvement over other Android-based browsers. Too often, Android browsers require that you access simple browser functions (like the address bar) through a menu. Not so on the EVO 4G: the menu bar is where you'd expect it and you can go back using the handy button just below the screen. As a nice touch, the browser also offers support for Adobe Flash, so you can view embedded videos and animated Web sites.
In addition to the 4G connection, the EVO also supports 3G and Wi-Fi wireless networks, so you have plenty of options for speedy Web browsing. I tested the phone over both 3G and Wi-Fi networks, and found its speed to be plenty fast. Web pages and videos loaded quickly.
You'll also be able to use the phone as a mobile hotspot, to which you can connect up to 8 Wi-Fi enabled devices. To use the mobile hotspot service, you'll have to pay an additional $29.99 a month, though.
Camera
The HTC EVO 4G features two cameras: an 8-megapixel camera on the rear and a forward-facing 1.3 megapixel camera. The front-facing camera can be used for video conferencing, while the rear camera captures still photos and video clips.
My photos were impressive, with sharp details and bright colors. Moving subjects sometimes came out blurry, though the built-in flash helped alleviate that problem. The camera also features auto-focus, which you can activate by tapping on the screen, as well as settings for adjusting the contrast, brightness, resolution, and more.
The camera can capture video clips at a resolution of up to 720p, and my test videos looked very good, with crisp images and strong audio.
Music and Multimedia
The EVO 4G includes a decent list of multimedia features, starting with the HTC Sense music player that's much better than the standard-issue Android version. Its interface is much more appealing, and, overall, it's much easier to use. Like all Android phones, the EVO 4G offers one-touch access to Amazon's MP3 store for DRM-free music downloads. It also features an FM radio, but you'll have tp purchase a headset with an antenna to take advantage of that feature.
Video features include a YouTube app and a variety of Sprint services, including Sprint TV, which offers a mix of live channels (showing the same content you'd see on your TV) and content that has been specially packaged for viewing on your mobile phone. I watched a baseball game on ESPN and noticed occasional stuttering and buffering. But I was impressed by the level of detail I was able to see on the 4.3-inch screen.
The EVO 4G also includes a kickstand, so you can prop it up on a table for viewing videos. It also includes a mini-HDMI out connection, so you can view your photos and videos on a bigger screen (though you'll have to purchase of an HDMI cable).
Bottom Line
Taking advantage of all the EVO 4G's features is expensive, especially if you--like most people--live in an area without 4G service. Even without 4G service, though, the HTC EVO 4G is one of the most impressive smartphones available today.
Thursday, June 3, 2010
Wednesday, June 2, 2010
Apple iPad Review
Amongst the furore of speculations and the myths surrounding its new tablet PC Apple finally launched the iPad. It will be available in 16, 32, and 64 GB memory specifications, with the host of connectivity options including Bluetooth, 802.11n WiFi and optional 3G. An optional 3G will however cost you an additional $130. iPad as we said earlier, is a touchscreen tablet PC that comes with a half inch thin body, a 9.7 inch display, and weighs around 1.5 pounds.
The iPad price differs with the memory and connectivity options. The pricing goes like $499 for a 16-gigabyte model, $599 for a 32 GB version and $699 for a 64-gigabyte model with Wi-Fi. For communications and interface, the Apple iPad include a 30-pin Dock connector, a speaker, a microphone, as well as an accelerometer and a compass. It further features a keyboard dock, which connects underneath in the portrait orientation and offers a manual keyboard.
The display for the Apple iPad is really good, with wider viewing angle and an optimal screen resolution. It supports a resolution of 1024x768 for VGA out along with a 480p composite out through the dock adapter cables. A camera attachment kit is further integrated to import photos from your camera via USB or directly through an SD card reader. Being a multitasking device, the Apple iPad runs on a custom 1GHz Apple "A4" chip processor, which does the job pretty well.
A expected, the iPad has more or less similar functions to the Apple's popular iPhone or iPod Touch. With the only difference being the introduction of iBookStore ' an eReader, in the Apple iPad tablet. The software giant has also integrated multi-language support which includes languages like language support for English, French, German, Japanese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Simplified Chinese and Russian.
The Apple iPad Tablet, integrates a 10-hour battery life and a month of standby, which definitely serves good for the device. Although Apple promised a good browsing experience, we are quite unsure about this thing as the iPad does not supports flash, an integral part of almost 90% web pages online.
If you're looking out for Apple iPad Reviews that give you an inside out story of this touch tablet PC, then please log on to www.thinkdigit.com. One of the latest Apple iPad Review talks about the screen capability along with user interface. It is a two part review, wherein the second part talks about the application and the device's performance in usage scenarios.
Tuesday, May 25, 2010
veratec N1200, the worlds thinnest and lightest Netbook
Thin laptops and netbooks are in high demand these days, the thinner and lighter the better it seems. We carry our laptops everywhere so the easier they are to transport, the more we like them.
Of course they still have to perform well, have a decent battery life and be cool enough to be seen with.
Facebook founder says people don’t want total privacy
Facebook has had a lot of flack recently surrounding its policy on privacy. Since December, when Facebook decided to controversially change the privacy settings of its 350 million users, the complaints have kept rolling in.
Well Facebook founder, 25 year old Mark Zuckerberg has hit back. Talking at the Crunchie awards in San Francisco, he said that people no longer expect total privacy online.
“People have really gotten comfortable not only sharing more information and different kinds, but more openly and with more people” said Zuckerberg.
“That social norm is just something that has evolved over time.”
In a way I have to agree with him, I mean people are free to use Facebook, or not, and to change their privacy settings, or not. No one is forcing anyone to reveal information. Surely if people were that unhappy they would just stop using the site but they don’t.
Now we all know that revealing personal information on the Internet, whether that is on Facebook, Twitter, or any other social networking site or blog or website, can carry risks, we only need to check out the news headlines to see that so the responsibility lies with us as users.
Zuckerberg maintains that the rise in the popularity of sites like Facebook is a reflection of how our attitudes towards communicating online have changed in the last few years.
“When I got started in my dorm room at Harvard, the question a lot of people asked was, why would I want to put any information on the Internet at all? Why would I want to have a website?”
“And then in the last 5 or 6 years, blogging has taken off in a huge way and all these different services that have people sharing all this information,” he said.
Zuckerberg also reckons that companies need to keep up with the times too, and to do so they have to reflect the ‘social norms’.
“A lot of companies would be trapped by the conventions and their legacies of what they’ve built” he said.
“Doing a privacy change for 350 million users is not the kind of thing that a lot of companies would do.
“But we viewed that as a really important thing, to always keep a beginner’s mind and what would we do if we were starting the company now and we decided that these would be the social norms now and we just went for it.”
They sure did!
Best Laptop For Students
For starters, a fair share of the new MacBook’s circuitry comes from Nvidia instead of Intel. Most notably the 9400M integrated graphics, which is a big step up from the Intel X3100 found in the white MacBook. Apple claims it has five times the performance over the Intel IGP, but in the real world the difference is actually even more significant – the 9400M lets you to play some recent games whereas the old and tired Intel X3100 certainly does not.
Design
As far as the new design goes, this is arguably the best looking laptop since the Osborne 1. The no-doubt well paid broilers at Apple’s design department have done an awesome job with the new "unibody" construction, allegedly made from a single piece of aluminum.
To get completely in line with an otherwise minimalistic design, they also decided to let go of the trackpad button altogether, opting for one built into the glass trackpad itself. Thanks to the multi-touch functionality, this works very well – actually there’s no need to use the built-in button at all. The new four-finger gestures to bring down Expose and Spaces are also well implemented.
Connectivity
Unfortunately, they didn’t bother to drill a lot of holes in that single piece of aluminum. There’s not a single FireWire port to be found, which is bound to feel like a betrayal to many diehard Mac users with a room full of FireWire accessories. On top of that it only has a measly two USB ports and Apple’s proprietary Mini DisplayPort, so forget about using your external monitor unless you fork over an additional $29 for a standard VGA or DVI adapter, or $99 (!) for the dual-link DVI adapter.
The new MacBook is available in two varieties (so far): one 2.0GHz version (our review sample) and a more expensive 2.4GHz model with a larger hard drive and backlit keyboard. Both models come with the same Nvidia chipset, a LED-backlit screen, and 2 gigs of top-of-the-line 1066MHz DDR3 RAM. It’s worth mentioning that the hard drives that ship with the new MacBooks are very well isolated and silent. When the laptop is idle or doing light tasks like web browsing, it’s almost inaudible.
Performance and Games
Thanks to the DDR3 memory, a 1066MHz front side bus, and the Nvidia chipset, the new MacBooks are faster than older models at the same CPU clock speed. Our 2.0GHz MacBook generated an Xbench score of 166.40. It is also perfectly capable of playing some games – WoW delivered fully playable framerates (50-60 fps) at high settings, which is to be expected from an aging game, but even Call of Duty 4 was playable with the settings tuned down a little. Apple promised five hours of battery life, which we found to be a little too optimistic, but the 4.5 hours we managed to squeeze out of it is still very good.
Overall, the aluminum MacBook is an excellent laptop. Although it’s somewhat more expensive than we had hoped, you get a solid and great-looking laptop, and some features that you’ll never find in a similar PC.
New HPs now available
HP released a whole number of new laptops last week, updating virtually their entire line with better hardware and more attractive looks.
HP has recently done a lot of work in updating their consumer products, including Pavilion notebooks, G-Series notebooks and Envy notebooks. Many of them have a redesigned brushed metal chassis as well as updated internals. As part of what might become a weekly ritual here at Laptopical.com, I'll walk you through some of the best new releases of this week.Samsung S9110 A Latest Look Phone
I always thought that if there was a wristphone that could change their minds about the idea, it would GD910 LG. But I was wrong seems that Samsung has announced the wristphone S9110, which looks like a better deal than that is yet to be released GD910. The S9110 has a 1.76 inch 262k color display with touch screen, 40MB of internal memory (no word on enlargement), Bluetooth 2.1, speakerphone, mp3 player, and Outlook email synchronization mail.
Sounds like a good deal for a right watchphone? Yeah, that's the case, but Samsung has gone one step further and insert it all in a body that is 11.98 mm thick, making it, according to the company, the thinner the cellular world to touch screen.
Nokia And Yahoo Announce Exclusive Partnership For Mobile Services
Nokia and Yahoo just announced a worldwide strategic alliance that combines some of their mobile services to “leverage strengths in e-mail, instant messaging, maps and navigation.” The collaboration will see the two companies come up with a number of integrated online services for use on both PC and mobile devices.
Under the partnership, Yahoo will now be the exclusive provider for Nokia's Ovi Mail and Ovi Chat services, with both getting a "powered by Yahoo" tag in their branding. Ovi user IDs will be integrated with a number of Yahoo services, which is expected to go beyond email and chat towards the coming years. Obviously a strategic move for Yahoo, this means getting a lot of new users in the fold, particularly those from emerging markets that's been Nokia's bread and butter for a while now.
In turn, Nokia will become the exclusive, global provider for Yahoo's map and navigation services. That means you'll be seeing Ovi Maps and the Finnish company's accompanying turn-by-turn navigation beyond Nokia's GPS-armed handsets.
According to the press release, the first co-branded Yahoo and Nokia services will be available to end users beginning in the second half of the year. It's not the most exciting alliance, but it could definitely mean improved offerings for both brands.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Honda has suspended operations for a day at two of their factories in Thailand, due to the bloody turmoil created by the Red Shirt protests. One of th
Motorola Backflip is designed with a reverse flip form that makes it easy to watch videos, listen to music and view photos, while the QWERTY keyboard lets users type emails, texts, news feeds, social network messages more easily. The Backflip combines social networking with smartphone features .
Motorola Backflip features includes Reverse flip design transforms the Backflip
Honda suspends Thai operations due to Red Shirt protests
Honda has suspended operations for a day at two of their factories in Thailand, due to the bloody turmoil created by the Red Shirt protests. One of them is a car manufacturing plant in Ayutthaya while the other is a motorcycle plant in a Bangkok suburb. The company also closed its main office in the capital as the military cracked down on the Reds.
“We’ll decide whether to operate our business on a day-by-day basis, watching the changing situation there,” a Honda spokeswoman told AFP. The Ayutthaya plant churns out around 240,000 vehicles a year, mostly Accord and Civic sedans meant for the domestic market.
After last week’s wave of arson attacks by angry Red Shirts, which consumed buildings such as the Central World shopping landmark and the iconic Siam Theatre, the City of Angels is being cleaned up now, and normal life is starting to resume, along with the traffic jams.
Nido EV is Pininfarina’s version of the Proton EMAS
Possibly tired of drawing up Ferraris, Pininfarina tries their hand at the whole eco car thing and have released this electric car concept called Nido EV. A development of the similarly named 2004 concept, the Nido EV, which is slightly bigger than a Smart fortwo, is designed both to explore the electrification of a small city car and a modular floorpan.
The body structure of this first running prototype is a tubular steel frame, while the final version will have an aluminium space frame. The structure was designed to adapt to four different configurations: 2-seater, 2+2, pickup and light van. They can be completely electric or hybrid. Doesn’t it sound like a certain concept from a rival Italian design house that captured Proton’s attention?
The Nido EV is powered by a 30 kW electric motor housed in the rear of its 900 kg shell. With 125 Nm of instantaneous torque, the 100 km/h mark is reached in only 6.7 seconds, faster than a Golf GTI. Top speed is electronically limited to 120 km/h. Instead of the common NiMh or Li-ion batteries, the Nido is powered by salt batteries. The Zebra Z5 Ni-NaCl battery is said to guarantee high levels of safety and reliability and a full charge delivers 140 km of emissions free driving. The battery is 100% recyclable at the end of its life.
Also, as if already expecting plenty of questions about the Nido’s unfinished interior, Pininfarina explains that the cabin is still at the “technical prototype” stage, with no attempt at stylistic research. Gallery after the jump.New Audi A8 is a moving WiFi hotspot!
Audi is future proofing its new A8 limo by factory installing a WLAN hotspot for wireless internet connection as an option. Which means that passengers not only have business class comfort, but can conduct business in the car too, as they can access internet wirelessly via the WLAN module and UMTS with up to eight devices.
Wireless surfing, accessing information, data and e-mails from company networks, and downloading the latest apps for the iPad can be done securely, as the connection contains WPA2 encryption for transfer of data. Connection speeds can go up to 7.2 Mbps.
The first car in the world to offer such a function, using the WLAN hotspot will involve inserting a data capable SIM card into the Bluetooth online car phone. There is also the option of using Bluetooth from a mobile phone to establish a connection. Internet connectivity is channelled through the rooftop antenna of the Audi A8 using its own UMTS module, which is said to have outstanding connection stability and reception quality.
Audi is future proofing its new A8 limo by factory installing a WLAN hotspot for wireless internet connection as an option. Which means that passengers not only have business class comfort, but can conduct business in the car too, as they can access internet wirelessly via the WLAN module and UMTS with up to eight devices.
Wireless surfing, accessing information, data and e-mails from company networks, and downloading the latest apps for the iPad can be done securely, as the connection contains WPA2 encryption for transfer of data. Connection speeds can go up to 7.2 Mbps.
The first car in the world to offer such a function, using the WLAN hotspot will involve inserting a data capable SIM card into the Bluetooth online car phone. There is also the option of using Bluetooth from a mobile phone to establish a connection. Internet connectivity is channelled through the rooftop antenna of the Audi A8 using its own UMTS module, which is said to have outstanding connection stability and reception quality.