Galaxy Note Case

2014年2月9日星期日

Copy/paste

Copy/paste, multi-tasking and more coming soon to Windows Phone 7 devices

Rumor is a Windows Phone 7 update is planed for January 2011. It is said to be MASSIVE and should bring along tons of improvements including support for copy/paste, multi-tasking and more.

Word is the first Windows Phone 7 update is in the works and should be launched some time in January 2011. It is expected to pack a handful of goodies such as copy-and-paste and multi-tasking – things that even plenty of cheap feature phones can do but none of the 500-euro WP7 handsets would offer you.

The Bing Maps app is undergoing a facelift as well. It should get turn-by-turn directions as well as some other improvements. The software update should enable custom ringtone support too.

Unfortunately, Microsoft’s say on these rumors (as cited by Engadget.com) is much less generous as it mentions only copy-and-paste. See for yourselves:

“Microsoft is committed to delivering regular updates to the Windows Phone experience. Our first update will make copy & paste available in early 2011. In addition to this first update, all Windows Phone 7 users should expect to see additional updates delivered in the future as part of Microsoft’s ongoing update process.”

Source

Another photo of HTC Supersonic

Another photo of HTC Supersonic, the Android-powered HD2 twin

These days you might have spotted quite a few leaked images of the rumored CDMA-compatible HTC Supersonic. Well, today we have the best one so far to show you. The phone looks like an HD2 clone and guess what, according to the rumors, the similarities between both devices don’t end up with the design.

Word on the street is that the Supersonic (or whatever its final name would be) will be the Android-running version of the highly popular HD2 (which runs WinMo).

The HTC Supersonic is expected to pack HD2′s zippy processor, namely the 1GHz Snapdragon. The 4.3″ touchscreen will become even cooler as it will be using OLED technology this time. WiMAX support will also be on the specs list.

Reportedly, the Supersonic will also come with a larger battery with a kickstand on the battery cover. That sound pretty much like the extended battery of HD2 spotted a few days back.

HTC Supersonic will run the latest Android OS (2.1) and will feature HTC’s colorful Sense UI. According to the guys from Android Phones the Supersonic will show up in Sprint’s stores this March but its price is still a mystery.

Another mystery waiting to be solved is whether and when there will be a GSM version of the Supersonic.

Source

Bootloader for LG Optimus G (AT&T

Bootloader for LG Optimus G (AT&T, Sprint and Verizon versions) gets unlocked

The LG Optimus G is a good phone as it is, but being the first Snapdragon S4 Pro-powered phone to hit the market, it draws the attention of a lot of power users and those guys are used to customizing their phones. The locked bootloader poses a problem, but one that has now been solved by Project FreeGee.

FreeGee is a tool that will unlock the bootloader of your Optimus G and it comes courtesy of XDA-Developers member thecubed.

The unlock is currently at version 0.5 and works only on the AT&T, Verizon and Sprint versions of the phone and only on Windows. The developer says he will be adding support for the Canadian and Korean versions of the Optimus G, as well as making an unlock tool for Mac and Linux.

The Project FreeGee tool itself is fairly simple to use – you can read the instructions over at the XDA thread. You should be careful as there’s always a possibility to brick your phone when using such unofficial tools.

Here’s a video that shows the LG Optimus G booting into fastboot and ClockWork Recovery.

Well, the door is open and custom ROMs should start popping up soon.

Source | Via

2014年1月6日星期一

Fickr announces official Android app and new Flickr Photo Session for iOS

Flickr has unveiled two new mobile applications to join its Arsenal. The image and video hosting service has officially landed on Android and the company has introduced a new Flickr Photo Session feature to celebrate that.

The Android Flickr client is pretty standard affair – it lets you take photos, edit them, and quickly upload them to Flickr, Facebook, Twitter or wherever else you see fit. It also improves the browsing and navigation, making it easier for you to keep an eye of your (and others’) photo libraries.

As for the Flickr Photo Session feature that is available on iOS or through your computer’s web browser – it’s a tool for synchronized photo browsing. This means that you can invite a few friends and start looking at photos together and when one flips to the next one, the image changes for everyone.

While you��re all browsing, you can also chat and draw on your photos using the built-in tools. The Photo Session is available for Chrome, Safari and Firefox for desktop computers and as a separate app for the iPhone and iPad. Check it out in action in the video below.

Source

Consumer Reports thinks the new iPad is the best tablet ever

Now that’s a bit of a surprise. After berating the new iPad for its heating and charging issues, the Consumer Reports now thinks that the iPad is the best tablet on the market.

In case you haven’t followed the entire saga, Consumer Reports first reviewed the new iPad when it came out and showered it with praise. A few days later, they followed the review with a sensational article as to how the new iPad was running uncomfortably hotter than its predecessor and how it refuses to charge while you are using it. And now, a few days later, Consumer Reports is going back on its initial claims and praising the new iPad again for its excellent all-round performance.

Here’s an excerpt from the latest article:

The high-resolution screen of the new iPad establishes a new benchmark in excellence, providing the best rendering of detail and color accuracy we’ve ever seen on a tablet display. As a result, the iPad tops our new tablet Ratings, posted today.

Performance on the new iPad ($500 to $830) was superb in virtually every other way as well. The 5-megapixel camera took very good photos. Verizon’s 4G network yielded very fast, dependable connectivity to a 4G-compatible version of the iPad in our informal tests. And despite the energy-intensive display and graphics, the iPad still has longer battery life than all other tablets.

Responding to consumer comments on the new device, and to coverage from other reviewers, we also carried out further tests that confirmed the new iPad is warmer in its hottest spots than the iPad 2. But we didn’t find those temperatures to be cause for concern. In addition, further tests of observations we made that the new iPad was not recharging when playing a demanding, intense video game, showed that the problem was limited to times when the device was playing a demanding game with the screen fully bright. Our high overall judgment of the new iPad was not affected by the results of either battery of tests. More details soon on these tests.

The language in the new article is certainly in conflict with the second one. Whereas the second one made the iPad sound like a time bomb that will eventually get hot enough to explode in your hands, the third one, just like the first, makes it seem all peachy.

We tested the heating and charging issues on the new iPad ourselves and although both were true to some extent neither were as horrific as the claims that had started to go around after the CR article. So you can say that CR did blow things a bit out of proportions, what with headlines like “Our test finds new iPad hits 116 degrees while running games” which sound a lot scarier compared to “Our test finds new iPad runs 12 degrees warmer compared to the iPad 2″, which is also true. Also, CR is read mostly by common folks, who are affected more by such headlines than us geeks, who know that a rise of 12 degrees is not only nominal for a device as thin and powerful as the new iPad but also way less than the kind of heat produced by laptops.

And this won’t be the first time CR went for sensationalism, either. If you remember, the whole ‘Antennagate’ thing was started by CR. But if you look at the iPhone 4 sales, clearly, the actual users did not have any issue with it.

So basically, henceforth I would recommend taking Consumer Reports articles with a pinch of salt, especially when it comes to popular products.

Source

2013年12月15日星期日

Samsung Galaxy S III US ad campaign kicks off as the smartphone goes on sale

Today is the day when the Galaxy S III finally arrives on US soil and to kick-start its sales, Samsung has launched a couple of new promo video spots for its flagship.

The first of those revolves around the Samsung Galaxy S III great connectivity and the plentiful content sharing options that the smartphone offers, while the other focuses on the Pop up play functionality. Expect more and more ads will follow those two, as Samsung is hoping the Galaxy S III US sales will be as strong as those in Europe. The flagship broke all of the company’s launch records and the Koreans would certainly want to see more of the same as availability extends.

And here go the two ads for you to enjoy.

Via

HTC One S

HTC One S, One X rooted before release

The HTC One S has joined the One X in the elite ranks of devices which have been rooted before actually being available for purchase on the market!

Both devices can be rooted fairly easily, save for one little caveat: they require an unlocked bootloader to do so. Thanks to the Superboot method implemented by Paul O’Brien over at MoDaCo, both devices were rooted thanks to unlocked developer devices he had access to.

Since most phone manufacturers typically do not ship devices with S-OFF enabled, it will be at the discretion of HTC of when, exactly, they allow users to have access to their bootloader.

Last year, after HTC faced some pretty severe backlash after deciding to lock the bootloaders on all its newly released devices, the Taiwanese-based company quickly reversed its stance, and has since become very developer-friendly.

Could these new pre-release roots cause HTC to once again restrict bootloader access, this time on their new One lineup?

Source 1 | Source 2 | Via

2013年12月13日星期五

HTC Radar put through our battery test

HTC Radar put through our battery test, makes it the first Windows Phone to do so [TEST]

So far we’ve put five smartphones through our new battery test, but the HTC Radar is the first to fight under the WP flag. The Mango-running smartphone will give us the first indication on how the Microsoft platform fares against its competitors in terms of power efficiency.

The HTC Radar comes with a 1520 mAh battery and a 3.8″ LCD screen, so it had a reasonable fighting chance. In fact it is one of the most favorable battery-to-screen-estate ratios we’ve seen so far in our test.

The HTC Radar didn’t start particularly impressively and ended up bottom in our first test after surviving for just 6 hours and 53 minutes of 3G voice calls. It’s not a great surprise though – screen size doesn’t play too big a part in this test and it’s all down to the sheer battery capacity.

We then came to the second trial – web browsing endurance. We use an automated script, which reloads a page every ten seconds. There are no flash elements on the web pages, so the playing field is even.

We set the display brightness to 50% and we use a Wireless N connection, with the router placed a few meters away from the tested phones, so we are getting full bars on every one of them.

This second test was where the HTC Radar impressed the most. The WP smartphone went on for the unbelievable 7 hours and 17 minutes before it depleted its fully charged battery and easily topped our charts.

The last individual challenge for the HTC Radar was video playback, but unfortunately it couldn’t do so well there. It took exactly 5:54 hours of SD video playback with the screen brightness set to 50% and all radios switched off to take its battery from full to 10% (this test ends at that point).

As you can see from the graph below, this barely sufficed to lift the HTC Radar off the bottom.

So, knowing the results from the individual tests, we didn’t really expect wonders from the HTC Radar in our overall usage test. The stand-by performance of the device was pretty poor too and at the end, it only got an endurance rating of 34h, which is the lowest score we have issued so far. This suggests that you’d need to charge this one every 34 hours if you do one hours of each of the three activities described above per day.

2013年12月6日星期五

LG Doubleplay for T-Mobile press images surface

LG Doubleplay for T-Mobile press images surface, show two screens and 4G connectivity

A press image of the yet unannounced LG Doubleplay for T-Mobile US (which we first saw under the assumed name ‘Flip II’) just appeared online and gave us a clearer view of what the upcoming droid will look like. The peculiar QWERTY slider will pack a couple of screens – a HVGA main one and a secondary display of unknown resolution on the QWERTY.

Other specs of the T-Mobile Doubleplay that we know include a 5 MP camera, GPS, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. That logo on the screen also shows that there’s 4G connectivity, which in T-Mobile’s case couldn’t be anything but HSPA+.

The LG Doubleplay will reportedly launch on November 2, and it is said to cost $149.99 on a two-year contract. Now that seems a bit high of a price for a mid-range device like that (no matter the coolness factor that the second screen adds), so the rumors might not be spot on here.

Source | Via

2013年12月3日星期二

A Samsung Galaxy S3 smartphone combusts out of the blue and burns off while owner is asleep

Yet another incident with an exploding Galaxy S3 has occurred last night, but this time it hasn’t been provoked by microwaves. Reddit user vizionx1208 was last night woken to a loud sign and a ton of smoke coming out of his beloved Galaxy S3.

Alerted by the really bad smell, he jumped out of his bed just to witness his own phone beginning to catch fire. Here’s what he saw after pouring a glass of water over the phone.

The last three pictures are the cause or consequence of the phone catching fire. As you can see, it’s hardly recognizable as a battery anymore and vizionx1208 says it looked like a bag full of liquid around the time of the incident.

Happily and rather luckily, the owner of the Galaxy S3 is fine and has suffered only a minor burn on his finger from a piece of plastic that had shot out of the device and landed there.

Source

2013年11月28日星期四

Japanese operator KDDI wows with its 2010 summer collection of 10 waterproof phones

Summer is just around the corner, the guys over in Japan have already got the party started, thanks to the KDDI operator and its 2010 summer collection of 10 mobile phones. Despite being quite different, they have one thing in common, all 10 of them are waterproof.

Now, I’m not going to dig deep in details but each of those 10 phones deserves its brief moment in the limelight.

The 13-megapixel cameraphone

The Casio Exilim CA005 is a stunning 13-megapixel cameraphone equipped with a 3.2-inch LCD IPS screen of VGA resolution.

KDDI 2010 summer collection
Casio Exilim CA005

3 x 12

Next up are 3 12-megapixel cameraphones. Both the Toshiba REGZA T004 and the Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot S003 come with VGA TFT displays measuring 3.2 inches. On top of that, the REGZA T004 is powered by a snappy 1GHz Snapdragon processor while the Cyber-shot S003 is said to be the first waterproof slider.

KDDI 2010 summer collection

Toshiba REGZA T004 ? Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot S003

As for the Sharp AQUOS SHOT SH008, it sports a huge 3.4-inch Sharp ASV screen of 480 x 854 resolution and support for Wi-Fi. Like the rest of the phones mentioned so far, the AQUOS SHOT SH008 also offers a TV tuner, microSD card slot, Bluetooth support and an IrDA port.

KDDI 2010 summer collection
Sharp AQUOS SHOT SH008

The battle of the 8MP cameraphones

All 4 of the following phones are capable of taking 8 megapixel images. The Sanyo SA002 features a 3-inch TFT display while the other three devices have 3,2-inch screens on board. Measuring only 112 x 49 x 14.8 mm, the SA002 turns out to be the slimmest waterproof slider ever announced (the Cyber-shot S003 measures 118 x 52 x17.6 mm).

KDDI 2010 summer collection
Sanyo SA002

The Sony Ericsson BRAVIA S004 impresses with its unusual form-factor which is quite reminiscent of the Nokia N92. Like the Toshiba REGZA T004, it is has a Snapdragon CPU inside.

KDDI 2010 summer collection
Sony Ericsson BRAVIA S004

The Sharp SOLAR PHONE SH007, like its name reveals, sports a solar panel. According to the manufacturer, 10 minutes of sunbath should be enough for a 2-minute phone call.

KDDI 2010 summer collection
Sharp SOLAR PHONE SH007

The last member of this group, Hitachi Beskey, has a user-replaceable keypad and you can choose from three different keypad designs.

KDDI 2010 summer collection
Hitachi beskey

The affordable ones

Finally, there is another couple of phones left. Like the rest so far, the Kyocera K005 and the Pantech PT001 are waterproof. The Kyocera has a 3-inch TFT display, a 3-megapixel snapper and a microSD card slot.

KDDI 2010 summer collection
Kyocera K005

The air-conditioner-remote-control-look-alike Pantech PT001 on the other hand has no screen (unlike most air conditioner remote controls) and is meant for elderly users.

KDDI 2010 summer collection
Pantech PT001

The 2010 summer collection of Japan’s second largest operator, KDDI, should become available by the end of the month.

Source

2013年11月27日星期三

Sharp unveils world's first mobile device camera module shooting 720p hi-def 3D videos

Sharp has just proudly presented a 3D camera module capable of taking 720p high-definition 3D videos. This is the first camera module of that kind that is made for mobile devices such as cameras, mobile phones, etc.

Of course, the module consists of two separate cameras which simultaneously capture images for the left and right eye. The thing also synchronizes color, brightness, timing and optical axis of image data output by the two cameras and then transfers it to the devices memory.

The mass production of the new 3D modules should start within 2010 but there is still no word on any particular devices that will have them on board.

Source

Siri will never be available for the iPhone 4

Siri will never be available for the iPhone 4, iPhone 3GS or the iPod Touch, say Apple engineers

Sad news for iPhone 4, 3GS and iPod Touch owners secretly hoping for Siri to make it to their devices. Well, legally at least.

A concerned customer has sent Apple engineers a bug report suggesting the company release a special 5.0.1 version of iOS with Siri being enabled for legacy iOS devices such as the aforementioned ones. Unfortunately, the answer from Apple wasn’t what the guy has been hoping for.

Here’s the response from Apple’s engineering division:

So, the only option for users of older devices, which find Siri desirable, is either go for the new iPhone 4S or go outlaw and look for an unofficial port.

Source

2013年11月20日星期三

Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket landed in front of our camera [VIDEO]

When the Samsung Galaxy S II trio got announced in the United States a couple of months ago, AT&T wireless’s offering came closest to the original I9100. The versions for Sprint Wireless and T-Mobile came with bigger, 4.5″ Super AMOLED Plus screens. The aforementioned occurrence left quite a few AT&T customers just a tad disappointed for being stuck with “only” a 4.3″ screen. After all, bigger is always better in America.

Well, it looks like AT&T has decided to take action and fix things with the launch of the Samsung Galaxy S II Skyrocket. The Android powerhouse now comes with the same 4.5″ screen as its T-Mobile and Sprint siblings. AT&T has also given it the LTE treatment to make up for the wait.

In case the device looks familiar to you, there is a good reason for it. The Galaxy S II Skyrocket is almost 100% identical with its T-Mobile sibling. It lacks NFC but, like we mentioned above, packs LTE connectivity. And yes, its back cover is now black, not gray.

The Skyrocket features a Snapdragon S3 CPU with two 1.5GHz cores. There is a gig of RAM on board, along with 16GB of built-in memory. In case you need more, there is a microSD card slot present. The screen is the already familiar 4.5″ Super AMOLED Plus unit with WVGA resolution. An 8MP camera, capable of 1080p video capture, is, as always, the main snapper, while a 2MP front unit is at your disposal for video calls.

The Galaxy S II Skyrocket runs Android 2.3.5 Gingerbread with the latest TouchWiz launcher on board. We have prepared a video of it in action for you. Check it out below.