Today Opera published their monthly State of the Mobile Web report and it turns out that the release of the Opera Mini in the App Store has made a huge impact on its usage. Apple might have come a little late to the party but their users are certainly enjoying the company.
More than 2.6 million people downloaded Opera Mini in April, even though it was only approved in the middle of the month. Read more »
Today Intel announced the dual-core i5-655K and quad-core i7-875K processors with unlocked core multipliers and made overclockers around the world tremble with excitement. Unlike most of their “unlocked” predecessors those will not be top of the line exclusive models that cost an arm and a leg.
The 3.2 GHz Core i5-655K will support Turbo boost up to 3.46 GHz and will cost 216 US dollars, while the 2.93 GHz Core i7-875K will go as high as 3.60 GHz in Turbo mode and will set you back 342 US dollars. Read more »
There’s a war raging and everybody has to pick sides. Apparently Time Warner and NBC Universal are siding with Adobe on this one. According to The New York Post they and several other major media companies have refused to convert their video libraries to HTML5.
The companies in question have explained that such a move would cost them dear and “is not worth it because Flash dominates the web”. Read more »
The results from the Samsung I9000 Galaxy S dedicated video playback battery test are out and they might be quite surprising to some. A lot has been said and written about the Android handsets poor battery life recently but obviously things aren’t as bad as they are made out to be.
Our testing procedure was pretty standard: we charged the Galaxy S until it said full and looped a standard definition XviD video with the screen brightness set to 50% until the battery level fell to 10% (beyond that point the handset automatically turns off the video player and doesn’t allow restarting it). And in the case of the Samsung Android flagship that took some good 7 hours and 25 minutes. Read more »
SPB Software has just announced the availability of their SPB Mobile Shell 3.5 user interface for Symbian devices. One of the most popular smartphone platforms in the world has so far struggled with providing good user-experience to touch-loving users so it was about time that someone did something about it.
Indeed the SPB Mobile Shell 3.5 will transform your Symbian 5th edition running device beyond recognition and having played with it for a week I can confirm that this is a change for the better. Read more »
Today Panasonic announced the latest addition to their Toughbook family of rugged portable computers. The 10.4-inch convertible tablet Panasonic Toughbook 19 packs some serious processing power with 1.2 GHz Intel I5 -540UM CPU (with Turbo boost up to 2GHz) and 2GB of DDR3 RAM and comes with either a 160GB HDD or a 128GB SSD.
What’s key here however is the MIL-STD-810G certification, confirming the Toughbook 19 ability to withstand a six-foot drop and the IP65 rating, indicating complete dust and water jets resistance. Read more »
If you are looking for a way for making new buddies when you visit South Africa for the World Cup this summer, check out the latest bit of software that exited the Nokia Research Center. It let’s you initiate chats and share content with people in the vicinity. The most innovative thing about it is that you don’t need mobile internet access to connect to some distant chat server. Instead your cellphones connect directly using ad-hoc Wi-Fi mode that’s supported by all phones.
Seemingly bored with its quest for total domination of the personal computer and smartphone, Google just announced its new and upcoming service called Google TV. Television is a huge ad market with 4 billion users around the globe using it actively and Google plans to revolutionize it.
The concept behind Google TV is to merge the web with your TV so you can enjoy all those videos available online on the largest and best screen in your home – the one of your TV set. Read more »
On 21 January Nokia blessed (almost) all their smartphones with free lifetime voice-guided navigation with version 3.03 of their Ovi Maps application. Now, four months and 10 million downloads later the company has released an updated version of the app improving its speed, accuracy and adding Wi-Fi positioning in the mix.
According to the dev team, the new 3.04 version of Ovi Maps gives more accurate positioning, faster zooming and panning as well as faster tilting. Nokia have worked with local Yellow pages companies like Telegate in Germany and Cityvox in France as well as their partners from Michelin and Lonely Planet to increase the Ovi Maps points interest database size.
And in an attempt to make their devices an even better replacement for standalone SatNav units Nokia started shipping the N97, N97 mini, X6 and 6710 Navigator phones with a car holder and a car charger in box. The Nokia 5800 XpressMusic, 5230, E52 and will too get the car holder treatment but will miss out on the charger thingy.
And best of all, Ovi Maps data now includes additional 2 million kilometres of road: it now covers 77 countries throughout the world. Read more »
The iPad is still not sold outside the US officially but there are plenty of units that made it to Europe (including the one we used for our own review). The big problem was, that those were unable to access the App Store and you had to rely on iTunes for applications downloads. As of today however this issue is solved as the international App stores started rolling out.
One of the major announcements at the Google I/O developers event is the new open web video format called WebM. Based on the VP8 video codec and Ogg Vorbis audio codec, WebM should be optimized well enough to allow playback even on mobile phones, tablets and netbooks.
WebM is an open-source format that will be licensed for free so it should provide a nice alternative to the H.264. Read more »
One of the biggest problems when launching a new OS, be it mobile or desktop, is the lack of applications for it. That’s why Google did the smart thing and created an application store for their Chrome OS well in advance, so some content could be gathered before the platform becomes publicly available.
While we never experienced this with our review units, there are plenty of Andriod handsets owners who claim that their batteries cannot last even a day on a single charge. One of Google co-founders Larry Page, however, denied that this has anything to do with the OS and claimed that there is something wrong with the third-party software installed on the devices experiencing such problems.
Those Vietnamese from Tinh Te are on fire with the Apple leaks recently. After posting photos of a next-gen iPhone last week, they now have a camera-equipped iPod Touch to show us.
The Android OS development continues to amaze the mobile world – more than 10 thousand applications joined the Android market last month alone and about 12 000 more are expected in May. However the main weakness of the platform developed by the Open Handset Alliance remains its fragmentation.
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