Sony is traditionally very tight-lipped about what kind of tough glass it uses on its smartphones, but during a press conference in Hong Kong the proverbial beans might have been spilled, at least as far as the Sony Xperia Z goes.
And the answer seems pretty weird – Sony uses two different materials from two suppliers for the front and the back glass of the device.
Qualcomm told us all about its high-end chips due to launch in mid-2013, but now it’s ready to share the full scoop on its mid-range oriented Snapdragon 200 and 400 chipsets.
Starting with the Snapdragon 400, it includes two Krait cores clocked at 1.7GHz joined by quad 1.4GHz Cortex-A7 cores; Adreno 305 GPU takes care of gaming and Qualcomm says is highly responsive for web browsing and rendering web pages.
How does it feel to use Project Glass? That’s the question Google has focused on with its Project Glass promo video showing the various ways you can use the sci-fi-looking frames.
Google has also given you a chance to pre-order the Project Glass, which was previously only available for developers. You can go to Google+ and share what you would do if you had Glass (in 50 words or less) and if chosen you could be rocking it when it goes on sale.
So the PlayStation 4 has been announced but what about the games? Well, not to worry because Sony also announced a healthy roster of games for the new console, which should be good enough to get you going when the PS4 launches later this year.
One of the first major titles is the new ‘Killzone: Shadow Fall’. The new game is set thirty years after the events in ‘Killzone 3′ in a new world with a new hero. The Helghast and the Vektans have been living side by side peacefully in this new city, but not for long.
As was widely expected, Sony announced its upcoming PlayStation 4 gaming console at the February 20 event. While a lot was said about the console at the event, we still don’t know what it looks like or how much it would cost.
But let’s talk about what we do know, starting with the hardware. For the PS4, Sony is using an x86-64 AMD processor with an integrated 8-core ‘Jaguar’ CPU and GPU. The GPU is capable of delivering 1.84 TFLOPS of performance, which pegs it slightly above AMD’s Radeon HD 7870 desktop GPU announced last year. The PS4 will also have 8GB of GDDR5 memory with around 176GB/s of memory bandwidth.
If you’ve missed the HTC One unveiling yesterday or just want to relive the excitement now is your chance. HTC has released a video of the event in London, for everyone interested to check out.
And if you don’t have that much time, HTC has prepared a much shorter version, containing only the highlights.
The most popular aftermarket firmware for Android smartphones has added one of the latest features to its stock camera app. CyanogenMod 10.1 now comes with the camera app with the ability to shoot high dynamic range pictures.
The stock camera app in the CyanogenMod shoots three images shot taken with positive, negative and no exposure correction. It then blends them in a single image with expanded dynamic range.
In addition to its earlier teaser hinting at an upcoming device under the Infinity series, ASUS has now launched an even cooler-looking video portraying an alien invasion of Barcelona, Spain.
More specifically, the video shows an alien space ship that’s landing on top of the beautiful Sagrada Familia in Barcelona.
Xiam Techonologies Limited, a Qualcomm company has launched an application named Snapdragon BatteryGuru, which extends the battery performance and improves the overall user experience of the Snapdragon smartphone.
Snapdragon BatteryGuru is expected to deliver a long battery life and make you look for a charger less often. The app learns how to use your Snapdragon smartphone by optimizing its power consumption without affecting its functionality.
Viber is one of the most popular instant messaging services with more than 140 million users. The application which also offers free calling and saves you few bucks off your phone bill has been updated with few minor improvements.
Viber 2.3 update had earlier enhanced the messaging experience with new interface and sounds. The earlier update allowed you to share stickers with your friends and makes messaging a fun task.
Out of the blue Nokia has posted a video comparing its Maps app to Google’s own.
The video focuses on showing how the two solutions manage offline maps in a number of examples and things didn’t look too good on the Android device.
Nokia recently unveiled its Music+ service and now the subscription is available for the Nokia Lumia users in the US market.
Nokia Music+ aims to take on the host of currently available music streaming services with a much cheaper price tag. The latest service from Nokia offers you unlimited downloads for offline use, unlimited skips and allows you to use the service on as many devices as you have, while barely affecting your credit card bill.
In one of the weirdest experiments, researchers from the University of Erlangen in Germany have achieved to bypass the security lock by cooling an Android smartphone.
The experiment was conducted on a Samsung Galaxy Nexus running on the latest Android OS and the smartphone, which was cooled down to -15 degrees Celsius and then quickly restarted.
The Ubuntu team has been busy working on a phone OS, but it decided to take an intermediate step and create a tablet OS. The timing of the launch coincided exactly with the HTC event (leading us to question if the two are related, turns out it wasn’t) and while the new HTC One got all of the attention yesterday, it’s time to meet Ubuntu for Tablets.
Ubuntu’s interface started off as a desktop UI, but Canonical – the company behind Ubuntu – has a vision similar to that of Microsoft. They want one interface to conquer all screen sizes, from a pocketable phone to the 60” TV on your wall.
SwiftKey has released the final version of the SwiftKey 4 keyboard on the Google Play Store. The main feature in this update is the inclusion of the new Flow feature.
What SwiftKey Flow does is that not only does it let you enter words by swiping your finger across the screen but you can also string together entire sentences without lifting your finger.
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