Wednesday, October 19, 2011

drag2share: The Best New Features in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich [Android]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5851181/first-look-at-the-highly-polished-android-40-ice-cream-sandwich

First Look at the Highly Polished Android 4.0, "Ice Cream Sandwich"Google just unveiled their new Nexus phone, the Galaxy Nexus, along with a preview of Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, coming to phones next year. Here's a look at the creamy new update to the Android operating system.

Most of what's gone into Ice Cream Sandwich is polish, making Android slicker, easier to use, and (finally) more consistent across the board. It's mostly filled with small improvements and tweaks that Google rattled off pretty quickly, so we've listed our favorites here in bulleted form. This isn't a comprehensive list; this is just what Google demoed at today's event—so there's probably even more to come.

Basic Improvements to Android

Google's made a lot of improvements in the way Android looks and feels, from the home screen to the notification drawer to the keyboard, including:

  • First Look at the Highly Polished Android 4.0, "Ice Cream Sandwich"
  • A new stylish lock screen, complete with facial recognition features that let you unlock your phone with a front-facing camera, as well as the ability to launch right into the camera with one gesture
  • A bigger emphasis on consistency with the way gestures work. For example, in the app drawer, you now swipe left to right to see other pages of apps, more like the home screens.
  • Widgets are now stored on another tab in the app drawer, making them easier to add to your home screen. They're also resizable.
  • Folders are now easier to create and use. Just drag one app on top of another, iOS-style to create a folder. You can rearrange them in the folder the same way, and it's all very fluid.
  • Ice Cream Sandwich's dock is customizable, and you can even put folders into it for quick access to apps and contacts.
  • Screenshot taking is now built-in. You can snap one by pressing Volume down + Power. Finally.

  • First Look at the Highly Polished Android 4.0, "Ice Cream Sandwich"
  • Notifications (pictured) are prettier and a tad more useful, showing small contact pictures next to notifications pertaining to email, SMS messages, and so on.
  • You can swipe from left to right to clear single notifications from the drawer, so your notifications aren't so cluttered. CyanogenMod users will be quite familiar with this feature.
  • You can open the notification drawer from the lock screen, without unlocking your phone. This is actually very convenient.
  • The new keyboard has better targeting, a simpler recommendations bar, and inline spell checking. Copy and paste has also been improved, and you can even select text and just drag it around within your message fluidly.
  • Speech-to-text now decodes your phrases in real time. When you say a word, you see that word show up in the window, before you move on to the next one—you no longer have to finish an entire sentence before seeing it show up in the text window.
  • A new default typeface, humorously labeled "Roboto" (but that actually looks pretty good)

Ice Cream Sandwich also sets the stage for button-less phones, à la the Honeycomb tablets. The Galaxy Nexus has no buttons on the front; it's all built-in to the OS. It also raises icon resolution, among other things, so it'll look good on higher-res phones—again, like the 4.65 inch, 1280x720 screen on the Galaxy Nexus.

The Browser

First Look at the Highly Polished Android 4.0, "Ice Cream Sandwich"The browser has a few nice features, but the biggest is certainly bookmark syncing with Chrome. Now, Android's browser will automatically use your Google account to sync all Chrome bookmarks to your phone. It also has a feature that'll take you from a web site's mobile page to the desktop page in one tap, which is really great. Tab management is similar to the old browser, but you can now "flick" tabs away to close them, which looks almost WebOS-like. And, lastly, it has a new "save for offline" feature for those articles you want to save for later. It won't tear out the article and make it more "readable", like Read It Later does, but rather save the entire page in its current state for offline viewing.

Gmail

First Look at the Highly Polished Android 4.0, "Ice Cream Sandwich"Gmail's entire interface has been revamped, featuring a very large, easy-to-read inbox with 2-line previews so you can more easily view your messages without even opening them. The action bar at the bottom has also improved, with simple buttons for creating a new message, viewing your labels, searching your inbox, and more. And, speaking of inbox search, Gmail now downloads the last 30 days worth of messages for searching, a value that you can change as much as you want in the settings. Lastly, when you're viewing a message, you can quickly transition to the next message with a swipe gesture—going back to their whole point of "making gestures consistent across the OS". It's a nice touch.

Calendar

First Look at the Highly Polished Android 4.0, "Ice Cream Sandwich"The new calendar app is also nice, mostly in the realm of touch gestures. Like Gmail, you can swipe from side to side to move from day to day, and you can even pinch to zoom in on a specific block of the day. The whole thing is very smooth and fluid, moving as your fingers pinch to the exact block you specify.

Data Tracking

First Look at the Highly Polished Android 4.0, "Ice Cream Sandwich"You can now track your data usage from Android's settings, and it looks really slick. Not only do you have the typical "this is how much data you've used this month" chart, as well as app-by-app usage to see which apps are the worst offenders, but you can pinpoint any block of time on the graph and see data usage for just that timeframe. For example, if there's a huge jump in data usage over a two-day period of time, you can "zoom in" on those two days and see which apps were using the most data during just those two days. It's a really effective way of tracking your usage. You can also add warnings for when you reach a certain threshhold, or even cut off data usage entirely when you go over a certain level—ensuring that you never go over your data cap without your say so.

Camera & Gallery

First Look at the Highly Polished Android 4.0, "Ice Cream Sandwich"The new camera app is designed to be fast and easy to use—they've minimized shutter lag, meaning the camera opens quickly and takes pictures instantly, without any loading time between shots. It's difficult to tell how well this will work on non-Galaxy Nexus phones, but the demo on the Galaxy Nexus looked fantastic. You can also access the camera right from the lock screen, making taking those spur-of-the-moment pictures near instantaneous.

The camera also has a built-in panorama mode, in which you just scan the camera from left to right to take a panorama shot—none of this taking-multiple-images-that-sort-of-fit-together business. It'll automatically stitch them together for you. Video recording has also improved, with continuous focus, zoom-while-recording, and time lapse features, not to mention the ability to take snapshots while you're recording video.

As far as the Gallery goes, you get this great "magazine-style" view with large thumbnails for your albums. You can browse your library by album, by location, or even by the people you tag in your photos. It also includes a simple photo editor, letting you remove red eye, crop, tilt, and even add Instagram-like filters to your photos.

People

First Look at the Highly Polished Android 4.0, "Ice Cream Sandwich"The new contacts app—dubbed "People"—also brings this "magazine style", large-thumnailed view to Android. It almost looks Metro-like even, with the solid colors and giant tiles. Even clicking a contact card in another app will bring up their quick contact card with a giant picture of their face, which is pretty good looking. And, when someone calls you, you'll see a full screen image of their face, not this tiny-low-res-thumbnail crap that's been in Android for so long. Google Voice messages seem to show up directly in the people app, hinting that Google Voice integration might be much tighter in Ice Cream Sandwich.

One of the cooler new "people" features is the ability to send canned text messages when someone calls you. If someone calls you and you're busy, you can just send them a text message that says "I'm busy, call you later" (or whatever you want) with a simple swipe gesture. There are currently apps that'll do this for you, but it's really nice to have it built in.

Android Beam

First Look at the Highly Polished Android 4.0, "Ice Cream Sandwich"Last, but not least, is Android Beam, a new "Bump"-like feature built into Android. If your phone has near-field communication (NFC) capabilities, like the Galaxy Nexus, you can just touch two phones together to send data instantly. You can send articles, maps, or even Market links from one phone to another just by opening it up on one phone and touching the two together, back-to-back. It's one of those features that's very cool, but not so practical yet—especially since not a lot of phones have NFC built-in.

That's probably not everything you'll see in Ice Cream Sandwich, but it's a hell of a good start to a seriously polished iteration of Android. It may not have the most new features, but what it lacks in new, snazzy features it more than makes up for in ease of use and fluidity—I have a feeling this will reinvigorate my love for Android. We'll post the video of the presentation as soon as Google does, but for now, discuss your favorite new features (or the things you wished you'd see) in the comments.

---
drag2share - drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

Read More...

Posted by Augustine at 3:40 AM

Tuesday, October 18, 2011

drag2share: Ultra HDTV technical standards agreed on, more pixels is a good thing

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/18/ultra-hdtv-technical-standards-agreed-on-more-pixels-is-a-good/

The high-definition pride of your living room may not want to hear it, but it looks like ultra high-definition TV (or UHDTV) has now taken another step towards reality. While shop-floor products remain years away, experts in the ITU Study Group on Broadcasting Service have made several agreements on technical standards for your (next?) next TV purchase. Increasing pixel count in future sets is also expected to improve viewing angles on glasses-free 3D, which needs more dots to work its lenticular magic. 33 megapixels sounds like it should be enough to work with.

Ultra HDTV technical standards agreed on, more pixels is a good thing originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Oct 2011 15:25:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceBroadcasting and Cable  | Email this | Comments

---
drag2share - drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

Read More...

Posted by Augustine at 6:37 PM

drag2share: Canon 1D X: The New Most Epic DSLR Ever [Cameras]

Source: http://gizmodo.com/5850747/canon-1d-x-quite-possibly-the-most-epic-dslr-ever

Canon 1D X: The New Most Epic DSLR EverThere are a lot of reasons the 1D X might be the most ridiculous DSLR ever made, but the numbers seem like a good place to start. A full-frame 18-megapixel sensor with the biggest pixels ever in a Canon DSLR. ISO 204,800. 12fps RAW shooting. 61-point autofocus. Three DIGIC image processors. One gigabit ethernet port.

There's a lot here, so I hope you're sitting somewhere comfortable.

The $6800 1D X replaces both of the cameras currently at the top of the Canon pile, the 1D Mark IV and 1Ds Mark III. The full-frame 18-megapixel image sensor is a brand new design, with the biggest pixels of any Canon DSLR sensor yet—6.95 microns, which is 1.25 microns larger than the 1DMKIV and 0.55 microns bigger than the 5DMKII's pixels—and the now-standard gapless micro lens architecture. Additionally it's got a new photodiode structure with ultra-efficient photoelectric conversion rate. Canon's promising it's their lowest noise sensor ever.

Also brand new, and part of the reason it's so not noisy: dual Digic 5+ image processors, which are each 3x faster than Digic 5 and 17x faster than Digic 4. They enable a lot of the camera's new hotness, like 12FPS RAW shooting (or up to 14FPS in JPEG, though both require a full battery) and new features like multiple exposure mode, which'll combine up to nine separate images into a single photo. (There's four ways to combine multiple exposures: additive, average, bright and dark. You can guess what they do.) They increase standard sensitivity by two stops, which is why you get crazy ISO numbers. The standard ISO range is 100-51,200 but expanded hits 102,400 and 204,800. Some sample photos I saw from a pre-production model that were shot at ISO 25,600 were ridiculously, ridiculously clean.


Completely revamped as well are the autofocus and metering systems, the latter of which gets its own Digic 4 processor—yes, just for metering. Canon's calling the new autofocus its "61-Point High Density Reticular AF" system, since the points in the center are so dense and overlapping they form like a net of autofocus. The 21 central points are precision cross-type points up to F5.6, while the five dead center focus points are high-precision diagonal cross-type points for apertures up to F2.8. And there's another 20 outer focus points that are also cross-type, so 41 of the 61 AF points are cross-type. The new intelligent tracking autofocus is helped out by the new metering system, which has a 100,000-pixel RGB metering sensor with 252 zones (which can be reduced 35 for better low light metering), allowing phase detection to be associated with subjects' color or face.

Video's improved too. It's the usual 1080p at 24fps or 30fps or 720p at 60fps, recorded in h.264, but Canon's now got continuous video recording up to 29 minutes and 59 seconds—the camera automatically generates a new video file when it hits 4GB. They've figured out a way to reduced the moire problem as well. Two new compression formats: intraframe (ALL-i ) and interframe (IPB). And there's now Rec Run and Free Run timecode embedding.

And I almost forgot—the jog wheel now has an iPod classic type touch control for silent operation during movie recording.

Other bits! The ethernet port's gigabit and lets you run the camera as an FTP server, time sync between cams or pull photos over DLNA. (Sorry, no built-in Wi-Fi, but there is an attachment; same with GPS.) Dual UDMA-7 CF card slots. The carbon fiber blades make for a shutter rated to 400,000 cycles. The viewfinder is optically the same as the 1Ds MK III, with 100 percent coverage and .76x magnification, but it's got the same intelligence as the 7D, with the on-demand grid. Also like the 7D, dual-axis electronic leveling. Canon's also slightly retooled the camera, so controls are simplified, both in the software interface and in the hardware: playback controls on the left, operation on the right. It's got the same style / weather-sealed magnesium alloy chassis as the 1D MKIV, as well as the same 3.2-inch LCD.

All in all, there's a ton here—I only scratched the surface, particularly when it comes to the itty bits, like the new mirror architecture or more precise shutter. And while it may be a hell of a camera, it remains to be seen if it truly satisfies the needs of every pro with the one-size-fits-all model that Canon's going for here, since it has fewer megapixels than 1Ds MK III (which is useful in a studio environment) and it lacks some of the additional reach that the 1D series offered with a 1.3x crop factor (useful for sports photogs). Not to mention it costs nearly $2000 more than the 1DMKIV. I suppose none of that matters until March, though, which is when Canon's expected to ship it. But, um, I still totally want one.

Oh, the X? It's 'cause it's the tenth generation EOS camera, not 'cause Canon's been taking marketing lessons from Apple. At least, that's the official line. [Canon]

---
drag2share - drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

Read More...

Posted by Augustine at 5:56 AM

drag2share: Cedar Trail-powered Asus VX6S netbook gets some early benchmarks

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/18/cedar-trail-powered-asus-vx6s-netbook-gets-some-early-benchmarks/

Benchmarking unreleased hardware is a dodgy business, largely because you're not working with final drivers. Nevertheless, Netbook Live's latest efforts could possibly be seen as establishing a bare minimum of what Cedar Trail is capable of. They put a 12-inch Asus Lamborghini VX6S netbook containing the next-gen Intel D2700 Atom CPU and the AMD Radeon 6470M GPU up against its Pine Trail/ION2-powered VX6 predecessor. For good measure, they also threw in an Eee PC 1215B running on AMD's Zacate E-350 APU (not the superior E-450). The PC Mark benchmarks gave the VX6S a gain of around ten percent against the Eee PC, with the VX6 coming a distant third-- not quite revolutionary, but that's what you get for being impatient. Click the source link for more.

[Thanks, Jimmy]

Cedar Trail-powered Asus VX6S netbook gets some early benchmarks originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Oct 2011 03:03:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceNetbook Live  | Email this | Comments

---
drag2share - drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

Read More...

Posted by Augustine at 5:55 AM

drag2share: Nokia Essence promises 99.8 percent noise cancellation, lets you listen to Ke$ha in peace

Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/10/17/nokia-essence-promises-99-8-percent-noise-cancellation-lets-you/

In-ear headphones that cancel out almost all of the background noise? Yes, please. The Nokia Essence is the latest stereo Bluetooth to hit the market, and it's poised to eliminate as much of the world around you as possible -- 99.8 percent of it, at least. As many earbuds impel the user to turn up the volume level just to hear more bass, the idea with the Essence is to zap out low-frequency background noises (such as traffic) to provide a deeper bass sound without having to crank up the knob to 11. The Essence is also equipped with NFC for easy tap-to-pair functionality. Scroll down below to see a video showing a guy who's getting the most out of his new headphones.

Continue reading Nokia Essence promises 99.8 percent noise cancellation, lets you listen to Ke$ha in peace

Nokia Essence promises 99.8 percent noise cancellation, lets you listen to Ke$ha in peace originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 17 Oct 2011 16:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceNokia  | Email this | Comments

---
drag2share - drag and drop RSS news items on your email contacts to share (click SEE DEMO)

Read More...

Posted by Augustine at 12:14 AM

Subscribe to: Posts (Atom)