Sony reveals Xperia Z a 5-inch, quad-core, 1080p Android phone

Sony’s new flagship for 2013 has been announced it’s called the Xperia Z. The phone itself has a 1080p display, 2GB RAM, 1.5GHx quad-core Snapdragon S4 Pro processor, LTE, up to 16GB internal storage with a microSD card slot for expansion, NFC, Android 4.1, a 2330mAh battery, a 2.2MP front-facing camera and a 13-megapixel Exmor RS camera sensor.

Sadly, the phone is not running stock android as many other phones at CES have been, but Sony’s additions may help in the multimedia department with the likes of ClearAudio+, Bravia Reality Display, and Bravia Engine 2 onboard. Furthermore, the software has caught up with HTC in burst photography which allows a 10fps burst mode when shooting in a 9-megapixel format. The camera on the phone also allows for video HDR similar to what was shown off in Tegra 4. In regards to battery life Sony has added on a Battery Stamina mode that automatically kills background processes and apps when the screen is off which will significantly help battery life. The phone is especially cutting edge in terms of its water resistance to a depth of one meter. Similar to the Nexus 4 it has glass on the front and back of the device, which may make for problems as dropping phones with glass on the front and back usually does not go well. The Xperia Z and ZL variant (without the glass back and water resistance in select markets) are planned to be released in March. Sony says the device will be able to be updated to 4.2 shortly after it is released.

Sources: TheVerge, TechCrunch

Polaroid announces iM1836 mirrorless camera with Android

At CES today Polaroid unveiled the iM1836 mirrorless camera, which has an 18.1-megapixel mirrorless body and a 3.5 inch display, built in WiFi, bluetooth, and Android 4.1. The camera will be able to switch optics with an adapter for Micro-Four Thirds lenses. The camera should arrive in Q1 2013 and comes with a low price tag of only $399, which may be able to produce higher quality pictures than rivals Nikon and Samsung.

Source: Android Police, Engadget, TheVerge

Huawei adding to its high end lineup with the 5 inch 1080p Ascend D2

In addition to the Ascend Mate Huawei showed off a smaller phone today at CES, the D2. It has a smaller screen at 5 inches, perhaps a more manageable size, and higher resolution at 1080p. Huawei touted it as the “world’s most powerful smartphone” and it features a formidable K3V2 1.5GHz quad core processor, 3000mAh battery, and a 13 megapixel camera. Pocket-lint went hands on with the device and said “Huawei poured loads of water over the phone in front of us and it had no issues; they also threw it at the ground and it survived quite a bash” which is quite encouraging for the longevity of the device and those who frequently drop their phones. It also features Huawei’s Emotion UI like its bigger brother the Ascend Mate, and will come in an alternate 4.7 inch size.

Here’s a short video showing the Huawei’s Ascend D2.

Source: TheVerge, Pocket-lint

Huawei Announces Giant 6.1-inch Ascend Mate

ascend mate huawei

Huwaei just announced the biggest android phone yet, the Ascend Mate which has a 6.1 inch 720p display. This phone features a 1.5ghz quad-core processor, 2GB RAM, a 4050 mAh battery to power the large screen, and an 8 megapixel camera. It also features “Magic Touch” technology which allows the phone to be used while wearing gloves, not unlike what the Lumia 920 features. The phone has Huwaei’s Emotion UI which may make the giant size of the device more usable, featuring software additions such as making the keyboard or dialpad fit into the bottom corner of the device.

Source: TheVerge

Vizio Launches 7 inch Tablet to Compete with Nexus 7 and Kindle Fire

Gallery Photo: Vizio 7-inch Tablet hands-on pictures

Vizio decided that it would launch its tablets both in the 10 inch and 7 inch form factors, with stock android today at CES. Both tablets look to be competitive and able stay up to date with their un-skinned android which is “bone-stock”. Nilay Patel from The Verge talked with Vizio’s head of design, Scott McManigal, who said that the device was made primarily for the use in one hand in portrait orientation, and feels significantly smaller than the Nexus 7. The design however is not final. The specs include a Tegra 3, a 1280 x 800 IPS display, 16GB of storage, and a 1.2 megapixel front-facing camera. Pricing has not been announced, but it will be available in the first half of the year. Will this be enough to stand against Google’s own Nexus 7 and more importantly the iPad Mini?

Source: TheVerge, Gizmodo

Vizio introduces 10 inch tablet with Stock Android and Tegra 4

Vizio 10-inch Tablet

Vizio just introduced a new 10 inch tablet that contends with the Nexus 10 and perhaps the iPad 4. TheVerge notes that it has the brand new Tegra 4 processor, a processor which seems extremely fast, and runs stock Jelly Bean, Android 4.2, has a 2560 x 1600 display, 32GB of storage, Bluetooth  4.0, and looks to have mini-HDMI, micro-usb, a 3.5mm headphone jack, WiFi, and front and rear cameras. On their hands on TheVerge noticed that the tablet is extremely light, thin, and feels smaller than the iPad 4 or Nexus 10. Nilay Patel had a hands on with the device which can be found at the source link.

Source : TheVerge

“Project Shield” a gaming controller from NVIDIA with Stock Android

Project Shield was just announced at the NVIDIA Press Conference in Las Vegas, it has a Tegra 4 processor and can display 4k video over HDMI as shown during the press conference, a highly impressive feat. Details announced regarding specs are Tegra 4 included, a 33Wh battery which should last between 5-10 hours gaming or 24 hours of video playback, and sound processing that rivals beats audio laptops. However, it is a controller with a 5 inch 1080p screen latched onto it, with dual analog sticks, a D-pad, and extra buttons that perform proprietary actions It looks to be about the size of an Xbox 360 controller with a very similar layout. Emphasized was the fact that it runs pure android without a skin on it and has full access to the Google Play Store and has Gmail.Screenshot from 2013-01-06 23:41:07

 

It runs stock android and has TegraZone integrated, and games were shown off being displayed at 4k resolution showing the power of the recently announced Tegra 4.

Screenshot from 2013-01-06 23:42:36

Hawken was shown off, a game based on unreal engine 3 which looked crisp and multi-player gaming between the devices looked quite convincing.
Screenshot from 2013-01-06 23:50:43

Also announced was the integration of Steam Big Picture which allows one to connect to a PC with a GTX Graphics Processor to stream to Shield, which can then be connected to a TV for a full gaming experience. The graphics are also streamed to the screen of the Shield which seems extremely crisp. Assasin’s Creed III and Need for Speed were shown off streaming through the PC and has access to games from Google Play and Steam. Steam Big Picture mode was automatically brought up once Shield was connected successfully. It was also said that instead of HDMI to display on the TV, it would be possible to stream images wirelessly in the near future. Pricing and availability were not announced.

Screenshot from 2013-01-07 00:00:15

Tegra 4 Announced at NVIDIA Press Conference with a slew of new features and “Project Shield”

Tegra 4 was announced at NVIDIA’s press conference tonight two nights before the official start of CES. The Tegra 4 has 72 GPU cores, and 4 A15 CPU Cores, which are much faster than the A9 which was in Tegra 2 (2 Cores) and Tegra 3 (4 Cores). The power saving “5th core” is still in play here to ensure power sipping goodness. It also has 4G LTE built in, although it was not mentioned if it is integrated like it is on the Snapdragon. At the press conference, a demo of the Nexus 10 versus a Tegra 4 tablet, loading 25 web pages was shown on screen, however the actual hardware was not shown, but merely a video of the two tablets was played. Hopefully, we will see some hardware with Tegra 4 in the near future. It was also claimed that the Tegra 4 was faster than the A6X in the iPad 4

Also unveiled was the fact that HDR will be improved with Tegra 4 and ”Nvidia computational photography engine” that can drastically improve the results of HDR as a result of taking 2 simultaneous pictures, taking .2 seconds vs 2 seconds on the iPhone 5, and Tegra 4 doing the image processing in the background. Also shown was HDR while video was running, an impressive feat that rendered HDR in real-time onstage. Processing is said to be done all on the chip so there is “No modification necessary, no porting necessary.”

Screenshot from 2013-01-06 23:15:18

 

Dead Trigger 2 was also shown off, and although it did look good, it is still behind console games and very far behind PC Games.

Tegra 4 also has technology based on the Icera i500 modem and they are sampling a 4g modem based on the technology that was acquired. Jen-Hsun Huang also mentioned Android as being the fastest growing operating system. It was also announced that it would be in “Project Shield” that is based on the Tegra 4 and has full Google Play support.

Image from androidcentral.

 

40% Gingerbread isn’t going anywhere!

Yesterday, Google refreshed their quarterly android install base chart. The state of the chart perceived by most tech blog community is rosy, as they are pleased with Jelly Bean numbers and overall increased ICS percentage. But where this chart starts to show holes is 47% Gingerbread install base (around 250 million devices) which isn’t going anywhere for next few years, thanks to Samsung and other android OEMs!

Lets look at some numbers and start with US market. Samsung sold around 22 million devices between June 2010 – July 2012. Guess what, most of these phones except members of GS2 family are not getting update beyond Gingerbread. Situation with HTC was even worse with updates in gingerbread era.

Rest of the world also show the same trends. Samsung sold around 50 million in 2010 and approximately 90 million smartphones in 2011. All indications point to Asia as the largest market for Samsung and also the most price conservative. Trend depicts around 60% of all sales were mid range phones with no hope for ICS update.

Specifically in India, 8 out of 10 all time best selling Samsung phones were budget phones. In short no ICS ever.

47% of gingerbread may slowly descend to approximately 35-40% mark but will be around for next few years until users buy a new phone. Speaking of buying new phones, US users are generally tied in for 2 years contract. Cost conservative market consumers stick to their phones even longer. No matter how much Google praises OEMs for android success, it has backfired in the shape of fragmentation bomb. Recently Eric Schmidt confirmed the fact “The core strategy is to make a bigger pie. We will end up with a not perfectly controlled and not perfectly managed bigger pie by virtue of open systems.”

Bottom line is, this is going to continue forever. Today it is with Gingerbread, tomorrow it will be with ICS, when latest version would be 6.0 or beyond. Best thing to have happened around this fragmentation explosion, Google saw this coming early and made big bet on Motorola. Once Google influenced Motorola phones starts selling well, other OEMs would be forced to follow the suit of vanilla android, thereafter.

Its time for Google Voice to graduate to Version 1.0

 

As you all might know, Google voice is a brilliant service from Google that never took off as everybody hoped. Most of it has to do with its limited free availability in key markets and rest to a very weak mobile app. Google voice was initially introduced on Android back in July of 2009. Since then, it still rocks version 0.4.2.72 as of writing this article and I have no hopes of the situation getting any better for a foreseeable future. I am almost sure this has to be one of those million things that gets blocked because of carrier pressure. At the same time if it is offered as an app in a Play store or other competing stores, consumers get to choose which app to use and which to refrain from. Additionally it would not violate Verizon’s hypocrisy theory, who possesses more control over Android than Google themselves.

There are already several existing successful apps(WhatsApp (doesn’t support calls but great multi-platform texting app, Viber, Skype to name a few.) which does the same or in some cases even more than Google Voice. It turns out, people love them and really want to make use of them. On the other hand Apple has already changed the rules of texting game on their platform with a nuke named iMessage(which was supposed to be open sourced, but they are still dealing with thermonuclear round one).

This is where I think Google Voice comes to the forefront with the concealed capabilities and power of cloud behind it. The single best feature that comes along with Google Voice is “It gives you one virtual number that can be hooked with all your phones(including land line)”.

Lets step back for a minute and analyze the offerings already in the market WhatsApp,iMessage for texting and Viber for calls. The problem with all these apps is that they use your real phone number or your primary email ID. Even if you do not want to share your phone number or email ID with strangers who also happen to have this app installed, you would be FORCED to share with them.

This can all be overcome by an excellent Google Voice client which needs to be on all major platforms so that consumers who have access to the internet can communicate with each other without worrying about privacy and irrespective of the platform being used.

Similarly it applies to text messages, one can connect with their acquaintances without really having to share your actual number/email ID with them.

Internally too, Google is fighting a war with these diverse communication tools namely Gtalk, G+ Messenger, Google Hangouts and good old forgotten Google voice. Indeed Google confirmed, they are working to unify their communication platform but it does not mention Google Voice anywhere which is disappointing to say the least.

In an ideal world Gtalk, G+messenger, Google Hangouts and Google voice should be unified as one tool ruled by one virtual number.

App should be a multi-platform with one time assignation of virtual number working seamlessly over TCP/IP. I personally can’t wait for carriers to convert into dumb pipes rather than be a draconian freaks controlling phone experience  Google Voice 1.0 would just be the beginning!