Mobile Devices - Page 354

I think we've all come to expect mammoth waves of sales figures post fresh Apple device launches no matter what it is in this day and age, and while for many the newly launched iPhone 4S was quite an underwhelming one, it looks like Apple were right once again in anticipating mass success with what they had on the cards, shortening its name from iPhone 4Sales so it would seem.

An overwhelming amount of preorders have taken place over the first weekend since launch last week with more than one million phones sold within the first 24 hrs of being on sale! This makes it yet another new record for Apple according to this announcement earlier today. AT&T actually received more than 200,000 requests for the iPhone 4S within the first 12 hrs of its preorder availability on Friday which is even higher than the sales pace post launch of the iPhone 4 in 2010, which sold 1.7 million units during the first three days in the market and 600,000 within the first 24 hours.

As a result of such intensive demand, Apple has already shifted its shipping times on its website to say "one to two weeks", or until as far as October 23rd, despite the official availability date being Oct 14th.

Current Android-based smartphones in the high-end market sport 800x480 (WVGA) or 960x540 (qHD) displays, but Google's next-gen OS, Ice Cream Sandwich is set to change that. ICS should embrace higher resolutions including 1280x720. Samsung are already showing off a 720p version of the Galaxy S II, and the upcoming ICS launch phone from Samsung is boasting a 720p display as well.

LCD panel vendor LG, who are also in the smartphone making market are now hopping on the 720p Android train with the Optimus LTE. LG is calling the Optimus LTE's display True HD IPS display. The True HD IPS panel boasts a 4.5-inch screen with a pixel density of 329 ppi thanks to its 1280x720 resolution display (which is slightly higher than Apple's Retina Display at 326 ppi). Today's news and details about the Optimus LTE doesn't give any details, but the screen details are enough to make us salivate with desire.

Qualcomm has laid an egg, and from that egg we have some details on their upcoming System-on-a-Chip the S4, their next-generation beauty. It'll bring with it a 28nm manufacturing process as which will have on it Qualcomm's Krait CPU and Adreno 225 GPU. The move from 45nm to 28nm promises smaller components, lower power consumption and improved thermals.

Krait on the other hand will bring a new pipeline architecture that promises a full 60% boost over the current Scorpion lineup with clock speeds ranging between 1.5GHz and 2.5GHz - along with support for asynchronous multiprocessing and dual-channel memory. The new GPU is set to sport 50% greater performance over the current Adreno 220, and is also set to have support for DirectX 9.3 for Windows 8, in addition to OpenGL ES 1.1 and 2.0.

On top of all these whizz-bang specs, the new S4 MSM8960 sets to provide multi-mode world capabilities with support for all the commonly used frequencies from 700 to 2600MHz. It handles Cat. 3 LTE (up to 100Mbps) and Cat. 24 HSPA+ (up to 42Mbps), along with EV-DO Rev. B, 1x Advanced and TD-SCDMA, as well as GSM, GPRS and EDGE. Quite the mouthful of connectivity options, huh?

Oh boy. Just days after Apple's iPhone 4S announcement, the specs of Google's "Nexus Prime" smartphone have been leaked, and what a leak it is. Possibly called the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, the phone is packing some seriously hot features. The long-awaited Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich (ICS) operating system will power the phone, along with a 9mm thin design. The Nexus Prime will feature a 4.65-inch, curved glass Super AMOLED HD display running at 1280x720 resolution.

If that's not impressive enough, it'll also sport a TI OMAP 4460 dual-core Cortex A9 processor clocked at 1.2GHz, 1GB of RAM, 32GB of on-board storage, a 5-megapixel rear-facing camera as well as a 1.3-megapixel front-facing camera, 1080p video capture, LTE/HSPA support (depending on the carrier), Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, NFC technology and last of all, a 1,750 mAh battery.

The device will be a pure Google device, this means that no third-party UI or other modifications will be done to ICS. It is also believed that the Galaxy Nexus could be a Verizon Wireless exclusive. The timing could not be better with the iPhone 4S being unveiled just days ago, but then there is the news that Samsung have pulled the launch of the Galaxy Nexus at the Samsung Unpacked event, which I wrote about a few days ago.

Google Music 4.0.1 for Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) has leaked out and with it sports a new interface (which looks gorgeous), more options, better controls and an overall better look. Below we have a screenshot of the new interface. The old on the left, the new on the right. The new interface is very Android 3.0 Honeycomb, which is great as Honeycomb's UI is amazingly beautiful.

The next screenshot shows the Selection menu which has taken on a slight change, instead of a pop-up in the middle of the screen, there is now a dialog-style box directly below the artist. The available offline option is gone, which may bring in a change in the way Music caches its streams.

Next up we have the Player interface itself, which has received a subtle makeover to match the rest of the app. Clean and sleek, less obtrusive and smaller controls. There is also now a 'search' button in the top right, which is thanks to Ice Cream Sandwich's lack of a physical search key.

Windows Phone owner? Xbox 360 owner? Well, your worlds about to collide in a way you never thought. Microsoft have shown a video where they've shown off the Xbox Companion App where you can Find, Learn more about and Control content from Xbox LIVE Marketplace on your Xbox 360. Xbox Companion gives you instant access to the Xbox LIVE Marketplace catalog of games, movies, music and TV shows.

Learn more about what you're watching, listening to, or playing: once you've found an touched the movie tile, the Xbox companion app takes you to an info page which has all the related details about the movie you've selected. Once there, you can select an actor, once in the actors details, you can be taken to other movies starring that actor. From there, you can learn more about their other movies. Once the content is selected and the play button nis pressed, the Xbox Companion flips into "controller mode" and from here, you can navigate your Xbox, or control video playback. The controls are virtually instantaneous - reportedly as fast as using a controller or a TV remote.

The Xbox Companion will be a free download for Windows Phone customers, and should be available soon.

The Indian Government has released a new tablet computer, Aakash, dubbed "the world's cheapest". And at $35 for a student, and $60 for stores, it sure is the cheapest. Here we were thinking that Amazon's Fire was cheap, but now the Indian Government has come and knocked our socks off. On top of the price of the tablet, India is giving away 100,000 free during the launch period. The first 500 tablets released had a luke warm response, with some complaining that they were slow.

The Government hops that the Aakash will bridge the gap between the rich and poor. Kapil Sibal, communications and education minister says:

On top of Apple's announcement today of the iPhone 4S, Tim Cook has come out swinging with a bunch of Apple-related numbers to impress the world with. Starting with, there have been 16 billion songs downloaded from the iTunes store, and also 300 million iPods sold. To give you some perspective, Sony took 30 years to sell just 220,000 Walkman cassette players.

Cook also announced that "the MacBook Pro and iMac are the number one best selling notebook and desktop in the United States". Apparently, the Mac platform grew by 23 percent over the past twelve months, versus a four percent increase from the PC sector. Cook displayed a chart showing the past five years for Mac, showing that Apple is closing in on 60 million Mac users worldwide, leaving Apple short of owning a fourth of the personal computer market. Cook says "there are still 77 percent of people who are buying something else, we have an incredibly high ceiling here. We have a long way to go".

Cook has high dreams for Mac, and with the way things are going, they should have no issues getting there.

Twitter and Facebook (as well as Apple stocks) is alive with disappointed after expecting more from the "Let's talk Apple" event.

Apple left the biggest announcement of the show till the end by introducing "Siri" aka your iPA (personal assistant). Siri takes voice commands and throws the whole concept out the window with a wildly impressive new way for you to communicate with your iPhone.

Apple bought Siri (a mobile assistant app) in April last year and has spent the time since evidently doing a great job of implementing it into iOS 5.0.

The internet and its dog can relax now, Apple has just got done officially revealing and discussing its latest smartphone, the iPhone 4S.

In what seems like what the iPhone 3GS was to the iPhone 3G, the iPhone 4S looks exactly the same as the iPhone 4, but comes with a lot more power. Using the new A5 chip that is used in the iPad 2, Phil Schiller from Apple said "Dual-core CPU, 2x as fast at CPU tasks. Also dual-core graphics. Up to 7x faster in the previous iPhone. One area you really see it scream is in games."

Some may have been expected a low-cost iPhone in the 4S, but we really all should have known it would just be a supercharged iPhone 4. When I say just, that might not have been the right way to put it. I've been using my iPhone 4 since it was first released and it is getting on the slow side and with all the new features and improvements coming to iOS 5.0, the extra power provided by the A5 chip should make a big difference when comparing to a regular iPhone 4 with the A4 chip. Add on to this the iPhone 4S is not a 4G phone as was rumored, but it will be able to offer twice the download speeds of the iPhone 4 with HSDPA compliancy of 14.4Mbps versus 7.2Mbps of the iPhone 4.