It’s no secret that Mozilla has been working on a mobile OS since the summer, but now the developers have actually something real to talk about and not just plans.
The web based operating system will carry the name Boot 2 Gecko and you can see early sketches of parts of the interface. Currently, Mozilla devs are testing proprietary, single-vendor stacks with new APIs for camera, SMS and telephone capabilties and more being built.
Google like to build a reasonably-sized little statues celebrating the releases of the major Android OS builds, which are really cool, but Microsoft is trying to top their effort.
To celebrate the four new Windows Phones that are coming in the US for this years’ holiday season, the Redmond company has built an actual massive six-story-tall Windows Phone. And they’ve shot a cool time-lapse of putting it together.
You might have forgotten about the Windows Phone 7.5 Mango-running Samsung Omnia W, which was announced in the end of September.
Expected to hit the shelves this month, the Omnia W is Samsung turn at giving WP 7.5 a spin and is powered by a Qualcomm MSM8255 Snapdragon chipset with a 1.4GHz Scorpion processor, Adreno 205 graphics and 512MB RAM.
Panasonic has announced two new cameras, the LUMIX DMC-GX1, which is their latest Micro Four Thirds camera and the LUMIX DMC-3D1, which is a point and shoot 3D camera.
The LUMIX DMC-GX1 features a 16.01 megapixel Live MOS sensor and Venus Engine and is capable of shooting at ISO 12,800. It uses a contrast auto-focus system, which is more accurate than a phase difference system. The auto-focus system is also really fast and is claimed to focus in just 0.09 second.
It was fun in the beginning but now reporting a new version of Firefox has become as mundane as telling the time. Just a few weeks after Firefox 7 came out Mozilla has now released Firefox 8.
But this isn’t an official release yet. The official launch is slated for November 8 but keeping with their tradition Mozilla has provided the Firefox release on their FTP servers a couple of days before.
The Samsung Focus Flash is part of the first wave of handsets from Korea, sporting Windows Phone 7.5 out of the box. The device is the budget oriented sibling of the Samsung Focus S.
Budget however,
A rather curious devices has been uncovered by the people at The Verge. The device claims to be a wireless controller for some other device and is shown operating a TV, which is presumably connected to the mystery device.
The Motorola Corvair, as it is called, itself is running on Android 2.3 Gingerbread and has a 6-inch capacitive touchscreen. It communicates with other devices over IR or RF4CE using WI-Fi. There is a 4000mAh battery inside to provide to the juice for all the wireless interfacing and whatever else the device is capable.
It seems Battlefield 3 has stolen Call of Duty’s thunder, with the latter not generating as much interest as its predecessors. But Activision is not going to give up, not when the game is so close to launch. So here comes another trailer for the game.
But this is no ordinary trailer. It features live-action video with notable actors such as Sam Worthington, who plays a veteran gamer and Jonah Hill, who plays, you guessed it, a newbie. The video is actually pretty well made and not as cheesy as such videos usually tend to be. There is even a cameo in the end by American basketball player, Dwight Howard.
Click more to watch the video.
The 1.4GHz quad-core CPU that powers the Asus Transformer Prime sure sounds promising, but the real question is how much of a performance boost it brings. And, as it turns out, the answer is a lot. About two times, to be specific.
As it turns out, the Tegra 3 chipset isn’t all talk and no action – that thing is blazing fast. The Transformer Prime score appeared in the results browser of the AnTuTu benchmark and it’s more than twice higher than that of the Tegra 2-powered Motorola Xoom.
The Samsung Galaxy S II is certainly one of the snappiest smartphones around, but there’s no such thing as a too fast CPU. That’s why the XDA community stepped in and pushed the clock speed of the CPU of the T-Mobile version of the smartphone to the mind-blowing 1.8 GHz.
The exact CPU frequency that was achieved is actually 1.836 GHz. The kernel used to achieve this kind of speed is publicly available and you can try it on your Galaxy S II, if you dare.
Yesterday Motorola unexpectedly dropped their announcement of the XOOM 2 family of tablets and the only thing they mentioned about pricing and availability was that the tablets will hit UK and Ireland in mid-November. The most important bit, pricing was left blank.
Well not anymore, as Recombu got an official word from Motorola themselves on how much the XOOM 2 and XOOM 2 Media Edition will cost you.
Google is continuing to add new features to its Google+ social network as it tries to upset the Facebook dominance in the online social service realm. The search giant just announced that it’s improving the Google+ integration of two of its other popular products – the YouTube video sharing service and the Chrome browser.
You’ll notice a new YouTube button at the top right of your Google+ page. Once you move your mouse over it a search field will pop up and you can look for a video to play. The video itself plays in a pop-up window, but you get the controls for it right on the Google+ page so you don’t need to switch tabs all the time.
Just when Canon’s parade was starting, here comes RED with the rain. The new SCARLET has just been announced and it costs nearly half of what the C300 does while at the same time managing to record 4K resolution 30fps RAW footage and 5K still images.
The size advantage of C300 has also been taken care of by the SCARLET. Although RED does not mention the actual dimensions on their site, hands-on pictures make it clear that the SCARLET is more or less the same size as the C300 and designed for hand-held usage like its big brother RED EPIC.
More news from Canon. Continuing their assault on the professional video camera segment, Canon has showcased an upcoming and yet to be named EOS Movie DSLR.
The highlight of this camera is its full frame 35-mm sensor that can record 4K resolution videos at 24 fps in Motion-JPEG format. It was shown off with a new EF 50 lens and the gigantic Cine 24 lens you see above that even dwarfs the already large camera.
Canon has been making professional still cameras for a long time now but it is yet to enter the world of professional video camera, dominated by the likes of Arri and RED. But that’s history now with the announcement of the $20,000 Canon C300, Canon’s first professional video camera announced today at an event in the mecca of movies, Hollywood.
The two main features of the C300 according to Canon are the high video quality and the compact size of the camera. At 5.2 (w) x 7.0 (h) x 6.7 (d) inches, the C300 is one of the smallest professional video cameras around, making it possible to be used in tight spaces giving the director more room to be creative.
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