The new Nokia N8 is much better than the elderly N97 but I guess you already knew that. Well, if there is still someone among you that needs a proof to believe those words, here it comes. And one more thing: the N97 should better start packing because it’s time seems to have passed.
It seems good old Velcro had quite a bit more uses than I thought. Including fastening your iPad to the wall, ceiling, or window, not to mention your car’s dashboard and your motorbike’s tank. But even if you don’t care the about the iPad, that’s an impressively filmed video in its own right, so it’s really enjoyable to watch.
China has been censoring a lot of Internet related stuff lately – the latest victim is online maps. Citing security concerns, the Chinese government is going to impose some very restricting rules about maps on the Internet and location-based services in China…
Do you remember David Wang and his work to port the Android OS on iPhone 3G? Well, he’s done all of the heavylifting and the image file and instructions to install Android on your iPhone 3G are now available online.
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.
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.
Is Intel feeling the heat of AMD getting into the netbook CPU business, or maybe it is those ARM-powered smartbooks? Whatever it is, they plan to launch a dual-core Atom – the N550 – in the second half of this year that can be put in netbooks with screens larger than 10.2-inches…
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.
The Android v2.2 is still awaiting its official premiere but, reportedly, its successor is already in the works and is expected to become available sometime in the last quarter of the year.
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.
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.
The Olympic games coming to your city is a good motivation to upgrade the place – London’s mayor Boris Johnson agrees. He promises that before the 2012 Olympics begin, London will be one huge Wi-Fi hotspot…
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.
Lenovo A7000 Preview
Samsung Galaxy S6 updated to Android 5.1.1: exploring the differences on video
Oppo R1x battery life test
Oppo R7 battery life test
Benchmarking Asus ZenFone 2 ZE551ML with Intel Atom Z3580 SoC and 4GB of RAM
