There are several good reasons why Wi-Fi 802.11n hasn’t made its way into mobile phones hardware just yet. Increased power consumption is just not worth it if the speed will be limited by other factors such as under-powered CPU or slow-memory anyway.
But when you have a 1GHz Snapdraggon CPU and 448 MB of RAM at your disposal the temptation to include it might just be too big to resist. And HTC obviously succumbed to it when designing the HD2 monster-of-a-handset. Unfortunately they disabled the feature via a software method.
They didn’t do a very good job of hiding it though and it was really a matter of time before someone enabled it. Read more »
Let’s face it, battery tests are long and tedious. They’re also quite hard to time correctly as mobile phone usage varies quite a lot. But that’s not the reason why over at GSMArena we rarely have something specific to say about battery life in our otherwise detailed reviews.
Enter time constraints. The thing is, we rarely have the test units at our disposal long enough to properly test the battery life without interfering with our reviewing routine. In those cases the reviewers try to evaluate the battery performance based on their subjective feeling and experience rather than anything else. Not that can’t be correct. And we don’t pretend it is.
With the HTC HD2 we are using a retail version (unlike all the many pre-production units that come our way) and we had the opportunity to take our time and test the battery life properly.
It’s now official, folks. A few days ago a spokesman of Sony Ericsson confirmed the XPERIA X1 will not receive any official upgrade to Windows Mobile 6.5.
Well it was expected, as the X1 wasn’t included into the WinMo 6.5 upgrade list long before the release of the OS update. Still hope dies last. Read more »
The LG BL40 New Chocolate is the latest fashionable GSM handset by LG. You may be interested to know that it’s got a beefier, meaner twin made exclusively for Korea. It comes in three falvors depending on the internal storage – LG LG KU6300, LU6300 and SU630.
The main difference between the worldwide BL40 and those siblings here is the 8 megapixel camera onboard. All characteristic traits of the New Chocolate are present in the trio – the unique design, the 4-inch capacitive 21:9 display, the 3D S-Class UI, DivX support plus Dolby Mobile and microSD slot. It’s still unclear whether the Korean New Chocolate will sport Wi-Fi and GPS or will trade them for the T-DMB tuner as usually happens.
Four days ago Microsoft released the first public beta of their next Office 2010. It brings some new features for all apps in the package, along withal slightly upgraded UI but still keeping the Office 2007 feel.
Some of our readers have been recently noticing a worrying lack of Sony Ericsson Satio units throughout some major UK retailers. It became even more obvious when Carphone Warehouse removed all Satio offerings.
Today an anonymous tipster sent us an internal memo, which states that Carphone Warehouse are withdrawing the Satio due to some undisclosed software issues. You can see the memo text for yourselves.
Yesterday Google officially presented their Chrome OS to the world. Well, sort of. They’re still an year ago from release. But we got the heads up on what it’s all about. It will be online based and with rapid boot times and it will be optimized for specific hardware rather than run on all walks of rigs.
What hardware-optimized means is that Google Chrome OS will be tailr-made for specific hardware configurations and you won’t be able to just download and install it on any computer. Only that way Chrome OS will be able to offer the promised unmatched boot times as it skips any hardware checks other OSes do at boot. The netbooks and similar kind of internet devices are the primary target of the new OS as it’s heavily online-based.
Chrome OS won’t work with any native apps, instead it will operate with web apps. Got you interested, read on for more.
AMD seems to be on the right track with their HD5xxx series, since their cards become just faster and faster and there’s no stopping them. A few days ago, their latest crop – the Radeon HD5970 – made its way to the retail stores and awaits you there with a pricetag of $600.
The HD5970 has two separate Cypress cores with 1GB GDDR5 memory each. The engine clock goes up to 725 MHz (the HD5870 one is 850 MHz), while memory runs at 1000 MHz. And it has full hardware support for DirectX 11.
Casio are obviously keen to refresh their digital cameras lineup in time for the Christmas shopping spree. The new offering by the Japanese company is called EX-G1 and according to the manufacturer is the slimmest shock-resistant camera in the world.
Measuring just under 20mm (19.8 to be exact) at its slimmest part the Casio EX-G1 can withstand a drop of 2.13 meters and is waterproof at up to 3 meters. It is also capable of working in dusty and extremely cold (up to -10°C) environment.
There are quite a lot of rumors floating around about an upcoming MacBook tablet. Well, in case you don’t feel like waiting, it seems there’s an option out there already. It’s called tablet conversion and what it means is that the internals of your current Mac are taken and then transformed into a touch-only device. You’d bet that’s not some garden-shack DIY project you might undertake yourself. And no, Apple have not started converting to tablets.
Read more to see what this conversion is all about. This WILL void your warranty.
Nikon D300s, one of Nikon’s latest DSLR cameras, has been treated to a long and detailed review by one of the leading websites for photography gear. In one of their trademark epic 30-page articles DPreview have examined the device performance and ergonomics, telling us almost everything there is to know about it.
Quite as the naming suggests the Nikon D300S is more of a cosmetic upgrade to its predecessor, than a genuinely new camera. The added video recording, contrast-detect AF and increased continuous shooting rate will probably be enough for many to consider an upgrade, but the image quality has remained virtually unchanged.
I’ve been hearing those rumors lately that Apple have a cheaper 8GB version of the latest 3GS ready in the oven. The sources are nothing in particular, but they add up, you know – and they come from various places. Now there’s not anything specific about market availability, but we sure hope that there will be some of those in stores around our parts on time for Christmas.
Obviously, there are one too many things to consider here. For one, Christmas coincides with the 6-month cycle that Apple usually uses for lowering their current models pricing. Introducing a new lower-spec’d model of the same generation actually sounds credible when you look at it this way. But you can bet there’s more to it. Read more »
It’s finally here folks – the Nokia N900 in all its Maemo-powered shine finally arrived at the office. It is certainly one of the hottest names of the season and the hype generated by the new OS is huge. So now that we have the actual device on our hands we can see what this fuss is all about.
Nokia N900 at ours
Now we cannot tell you too much about the phone itself just yet but we can show you how it looks (and behaves). Judging a book by its cover is never a smart idea but starting off at the wrong foot is not what a new platform pioneer would like to do.
Handling the beast
Oh yeah, we almost forgot – there’s also a short demo video after the break, demonstrating a part of the Nokia N900 UI and performance.
The ones that have been paying attention have certainly noticed there’s a certain new feature in our reviews. For the rest of you, we decided to do a quick tutorial how it works so you can get 100% our of interacting with it.
Starting yesterday we have introduced new image zooming system for the camera samples that should hopefully make it easier to browse all the camera samples that we publish for each handset when reviewing it over at GSMArena.com.
Magic Touch zooming now provides more natural and intuitive control on the level of zoom of those images. Once you click on an image thumbnail just wait for the downsized preview to fully load (this is important for the whole thing to work out) and you’ll then get ALL the benefit of a much more advanced zooming and panning system. More details after the break.
Perhaps you’d be happy to hear that we have a little treat for you ready to be published tomorrow. After the successful HTC HD2 preview we did last week, we are now ready to push out the full-featured N900, oops… HTC HD2 review tomorrow. Sorry about that lapsus over there, my mind was off to a different thing altogether. Just forget I mentioned N900 up there, alright?
The HTC HD2 next to Apple’s iPhone
So anyway, I thought you guys (our avid blog readers) deserve a little taster of what’s coming, so here you go. Oblige yourself with a new HTC HD2 UI video. It will be up here at the blog exclusively – it’s the little things that count. We’re really impressed by how snappy this thing is. Check out the clip after the break and stay tuned for our full featured review tomorrow evening (CET).
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