Mobile Devices - Page 355

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.

Enjoy the Superman reference? If not, I meant Phantom Zone, which means that Microsoft have killed the Zune, officially. Microsoft have removed all references to the Zune HD from its Zune site on Monday and later claimed that the removal was "a mistake". I don't think so, Microsoft. It looks as though they might have removed them early, and the removal was pushed mistakenly. A new support article on Microsoft Zune's support pages makes it very clear:

This confirmation is the arrow to the heart of Zune, as they've failed to prove popular against Apple's iPod. Microsoft did kill off their original Zune-based devices earlier this year, which was the beginning of the inevitable end. Microsoft urged customers to purchase Windows Phone 7 devices for the Zune experience.

Apple seem to change their mind quicker than most companies, and this news is no different. It looks as though Apple might be working on its own GPU technology which would see an Apple-based GPU that would power more than just desktop systems, but quite possibly any future iteration of their iOS-based devices. It might seem like a stretch, but the smartphone and tablet industry is moving more and more away from CPU-based designs to GPU-based designs.

As we see the industry move away and we have companies like NVIDIA making strides in the market, Apple will obviously want a piece of this pie. Apple would obviously not want to create its own CPU as that is quite the engineering effort, and it would be a copy cat design of another company like Intel, AMD or Arm. Graphics allows innovation in new and unusual ways - plus production can be offloaded to places like TSMC.

We have NVIDIA and AMD fighting in the DirectX corner, but an open graphics platform allows for much more flexibility - if you can be certain of what kind of hardware you're targeting. With Apple, there is no option, so it would be a very fixed/stable environment - this is perfect for introducing a slew of new and unusual features and methodologies in a GPU. It would be very different to anything else on the market, because of Apple's very tight grip of its environment.

Samsung has expanded its Galaxy Tab range with the introduction of the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus. From the name, you would obviously guess its a 7-inch tablet, but it sports a PLS (Super Plane to Line Switching) display with a 1024 x 600 pixel display, running Android 3.2 Honeycomb and a 1.2GHz dual-core processor, which is looking to be the Exynos 4120. Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus also sports quad-band GSM/GPRS/EDGE support and tri-band 3G with 21Mbps HSPA as well as two cameras.

First up there's a 2-megapixel, front-facing camera and a rear-facing 3-megapixel camera capable of taking 720p video. We also see 1GB of RAM and a 4,000mAh battery that is standard on all models. Honeycomb gets Samsung's splash of TouchWiz UI wonder, and size wise we get options of either 16 or 32GB. Both include dual-band Wi-Fi a/b/g/n, GPS and Bluetooth. The 7-inch tablet is quite small, measuring in at 192.65 x 122.37 x 9.96 mm and weighs in at only 0.76 pounds, or just 12.16 ounces.

JK Shin, President and Head of Samsung's Mobile Communications Business chimes in with:

Amazon has finally unveiled their Android-based tablet, which is now known as the Kindle Fire. The 7-inch, 1024x600 device will feature a heavily customized interface tailored around Amazon's services and starting at a surprisingly low price of just $200. In order to get to the sub $200 price point, Amazon have had to cull a few features from the Kindle Fire such as 3G access, a microphone and front/back cameras. Kindle Fire does however include Wi-Fi and a free 30-day trial of Amazon Prime, which is normally $79 per year.

What that means is, you'll get a taste of Amazon's collection of streaming video content and free or discounted shipping for your purchases at Amazon.com. Not only that, but you'll also gain access to the Android Appstore, Kindle books, magazines, and more - all stored for free through the Amazon Cloud Storage and synced between devices invisibly in the background. Whispersync now works with video content, so you can pick up where you left off in a movie or TV show even after switching devices.

Kindle Fire sports 8GB of internal storage, a USB 2.0 port, and battery life for up to 8 hours of continuous reading of 7.5 hours of video playback, with wireless off. Amazon is also introducing something called Amazon Silk. Amazon Silk is described as a lightning-fast web browser that takes advantage of Amazon's EC2 cloud computing engine. CEO Jeff Bezos explains that Silk splits the workload so that some web request are handled locally by the Kindle Fire, while the others are remotely handled by the cloud at Amazon, optimized and sent back to you.