Tag: technology

Nokia Lumia 920 Review: The World’s most Innovative Smartphone

Yesterday Nokia unveiled its latest and greatest at Nokia World. The two devices shown were the Nokia Lumia 820, a successor to the current 800, and, the Nokia and Windows Phone 8 flagship and dubbed The Most Innovative Smartphone in the World, the Lumia 920. Giving a phone such a title is a bold statement, but Nokia has packed a lot of tech into the handset. The main problem with the announcement though is that once again, Nokia demonstrated a remarkable lack of ability in giving one.

CEO Stephen Elop is comfortable on stage – clear, concise, articulate and confident. Quite why he doesn’t do the presentations, like Steve Jobs always did, is a mystery. Instead, he welcomed Jo Harlow, who stuttered and stammered through some impressive features with a tone of voice that suggested they were very ordinary. Then Microsoft’s Joe Belfiore, who appeared to tell people what he told them back in June – that WP8 allows resizable tiles. Only this time he appeared on a mission to put everyone to sleep. Thanks Joe. And then Kevin Shields. Actually someone who is excited about the tech, and gives good demonstrations. But you’re unlikely to see someone else as annoying and loud on stage.

Yet, despite the presentation issues, the keynote got attention. Switch to Lumia, Windows Phone 8, Nokia, Lumia 920 and PureView were all trending on Twitter, and there were some remarkable technology features unveiled. What was most refreshing was that some of the features address some of the most common and annoying problems of owning a mobile phone, but which often go overlooked by other manufacturers.

The screen is one such issue. Everyone is familiar with the pain of trying to read something on the screen on a sunny day, especially in direct sunlight. By ‘pain’, I mean ‘impossibility’, especially on a dark background. Samsung’s approach to screens is to make them bigger – which doesn’t help; the Galaxy S II decided to make the default email client a black background with grey text, making it hopeless to read outside. Apple brags about Retina Display (which is nothing but a marketing term for ‘we have many pixels’). Yet Nokia yesterday unveiled its approach. It has long been using ClearBack Display technology to make screens easy to see outdoors, and the Lumia 900 was voted the best readability for such purposes.The 920, though, takes it further. Not only is the screen HD+ (which has more pixels than Retina Display), it has smart polarisers to help you outdoors. What does that mean? It means, much like the eye glasses that do the same thing, that the screen automatically adjusts itself depending on the sunlight to reduce glare. Meaning this is a device you can comfortably read under bright sunlight.

That alone won’t be enough to set the sales rocketing, but it is good to see a company focusing on improving the experience to such an extent that the typically overlooked aspects are still being improved. Perhaps the biggest announcement regarding the screen though was the ability to use the phone while wearing gloves. Nokia calls this Super Sensitive Touch. One of the big debates surrounding capacitive screens vs resistive screens was that the latter registered touch input from anything – styluses, keys, gloves, and so on – whereas capacitive only registered flesh, or special products that were designed to touch capacitive. Super Sensitive Touch for the first time combines the technologies, allowing the smoothness of capacitive with the benefit of being able to touch it with anything. The main area this is a concern of course is in cold weather when wearing gloves – every phone on the market with a capacitive screen requires the gloves to be taken off. Kevin shields demonstrated this working onstage not with thin material, but with heavy-duty ski mittens. This Super Sensitive Touch will end the frustration of tapping a screen at the wrong angle and nothing registering because it was the nail, not the flesh, that made contact.

Nokia also demonstrated its advancements in mapping technology. Google Maps may be the first port of call when you want directions from a computer, but Nokia’s offering provide perhaps the best in the world. With complete offline navigation and free turn-by-turn navigation, you can even be directed indoors. Nokia Drive, its satellite navigation app, has been updated so that it learns your daily commute and even tells you what time you need to leave home to account for traffic. But what got most attention of the location services yesterday was Nokia City Lens, the augmented reality app that offers a more intuitive way to discover the world around you. You can point the camera around and it will show you places to eat, drink, theaters, cinemas and so on. Point it at a building with shops inside and it will even tell you what’s in there. If you find a restaurant, you can simply tap it and see photos, reviews, and call directly to book a table. All by looking through the camera. With the current alternative to this being pulling up the search engine and finding local points of interest, the leap in the ease of exploring a new place is quite remarkable.

So far, this is all good stuff. But Nokia had two particular gems to show off. Wireless charging was one of them. While this feature is already around on the HP Touchpad, Nokia is the first to popularise it on what will be a mass market consumer product. The benefits of it are obvious – no more wires to trip over or lose, no wearing down the USB port on the phone or pulling it loose, and, thanks to certain partnerships, you don’t even need to worry about charging when you’re out and about. Virgin Atlantic’s Heathrow lounge will have recharging pillows, as will Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf, large coffee shop franchises in America. Sit down, open the paper, and your phone will charge while sitting on a small fabric on the table too.

As part of this, Nokia spoke about the Lumia’s NFC capabilities, being able to pair up with wireless headphones and speakers by simply tapping them together – but, the NFC speaker they demonstrated featured a wireless charging area on its top, so the phone can charge while playing music. Imagine an iPhone dock, but without plugging it in.

The second big announcement was somewhat expected: the camera. Long revered for its imaging superiority, Nokia was expected to make a big announcement. After the 41MP PureView handset announced earlier this year, and the N8 two years ago, it was clear the Lumia would get some camera enhancements from Nokia.

The Lumia 920 comes packed with PureView, the stunning new optics technology. The 920 has floating lens technology, allowing more light to enter the camera to not only take clearer pictures in low light, but also reduce blur to produce clear photos every time. Not only does the 920 capture between five and ten times the amount of light of any competitor smartphone, it also lets in more light than most DSLRs. The short video below shows the breathtaking capabilities of taking pictures in extreme low light.

Nokia demonstrated some low-light comparisons between the Lumia 920 and a competitor (it wasn’t named directly, but they tended to use the Samsung Galaxy S 3). Competitor’s attempt is the first photo of each set, PureView second:

Also within the camera advancements, Nokia announced two ‘lenses;” Cinemagraph, and Smart Shoot.

Cinemagraph elevates photos to something else, as they allow movement. By selecting a photo then entering Cinemagraph, users can simply rub the area they want, and it will then start to move.:

 

SmartShoot continues the trend of the screen advancements in solving a common problem: people walking past your camera as you want to take a picture. We all know the feeling, and there’s no way around it other than waiting for everyone to get past and take the picture quickly before someone else walks by. Unless you own a Lumia 920, in which case you can use SmartShoot, which analyses the moving sections of a photo, then removes them:

All in all, it was an impressive demonstration. It would have been more impressive still if Nokia could learn how to deliver a truly excellent keynote, but the features largely spoke for themselves. Wireless charging, unparalleled mapping experience and peerless camera technology certainly puts the Lumia 920 amongst the most desirable handsets. And while Apple has been bragging about the ‘resolutionary’ Retina Display, Nokia has not only made it brighter, and packed 2.5 times more pixels than the nearest competitor to offer blurless scrolling, it also packed it with smart polarisers, and allowed any material to touch it and register.

The World’s Most Innovative Smartphone may just live up to its name.

 

Apple vs Samsung. And the winner is…Windows Phone

As of this week, Apple is walking away with a ruling that dictates Samsung copied many aspects of the iPhone. Samsung is set to pay out over $1 billion in what boils down to way over-inflated patent infringement. Now Samsung will of course appeal and attempt to have this decision mitigated as much as possible in order to save a few quid and its own backsides. However over inflated, out of proportion this whole fiasco was, one can be certain that somewhere in the corner of the court room, Microsoft and Nokia look at each other, nod their heads and smile.

What the general public now will “learn” from the past events will be various interpretations of “Android Copied iPhone”. It isn’t just Samsung though, so shouldn’t that also apply to HTC phones as well? The answer is simply yes, however, as the lawsuits Apple and Samsung filed against each other involved hardware as well, this battle was between the Korean Giants and Cupertino Fruits. There are two likely reasons why it was Samsung who were in court, not another Android OEM. The first one is that at any given time, only one Android maker is making profits. That was HTC at one point, but is currently Samsung. That makes it a prime target for Apple, as when Steve Jobs said he was prepared to go nuclear on destroying Android, it’s wise to choose the company with the biggest public perception. Secondly, whereas HTC has its own designs, as do LG and Sony, Samsung was dumb enough to copy the hardware aesthetics of the iPhone:

The main difference is that Samsung’s offering is slightly taller, and the Home button is rectangular rather than a circle. The dock even mimics the colours of the iPhone’s. Worse still, Samsung applied this look to many of its phones.

The mobile industry is heading in a single direction and has been since the first iPhone came out. The large touch screen interface, generally easy to use OSes and UIs, push email and installable apps were bound to emerge on any platform as technology advances. The importance is who gets their stamp on an improved existing idea first; and that person (company) will then become the school child in a playground who thinks he’s reinvented how to build a sand castle and will challenge anyone who says otherwise.

So where does Windows Phone stand then? For the past 18 months, every Windows Phone review has noted the radically different UI and the way things work. However, beneath the surface, all is still the same – easy to navigate UI, touch screen interface, apps. I’m not for a second saying that any of the items on WP are copied from any other company. I’m merely highlighting that the same functions can be integrated well into a phone OS without infringing anything, and Apple noted as such during the courtcase. The simple rule of thumb is just to be original, something many companies, technology or not, seem to be severely lacking these days.

Does Windows Phone have an advantage now? I would say a profound yes. While Apple and Samsung now tread very carefully, which means development will slow, Microsoft has a clean slate to push out as many new and exciting features and devices as it can. Plus for customers like me who do see the similarities in Android and iOS, it may be refreshing to actually change to a new phone OS in Q4 2012. The ruling against Samsung may even make the Korean technology company to spend more time on its Windows Phone 8 offerings; although it has released some Windows Phones already, Android has always been its main focus. However, knowing that Apple isn’t on a witchunt for Windows Phone may be a key incentive for it – but it will have to think up some new hardware designs.

The first round of the battle in the ever-growing smartphone wars has been fought. Apple emerged victorious, Samsung lost in court, but the  true winner to me looks to be Microsoft.

RIP RIM – BlackBerry a Thing of the Past?

As of the 9th of August, 2012, veteran smartphone manufacturer RIM has come forward and admitted that it is unable to survive in a world dominated by companies “who crank out 60 handsets a year”.

RIM CEO Thorsten Heins told The Telegraph that allowing other original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) to create devices which use the BlackBerry operating system may be the only way that the company is able to stay afloat. As many know already, RIM has always been resistant in allowing its OS to be used on non-BlackBerry hardware. RIM may be able to see more profits by licensing outside hardware companies such as Samsung or HTC to use the OS. The problem would be that many of the larger phone makers already pay hefty fees to Microsoft for licenses to Windows Phone 7/8, and OEMs also pay Microsoft for patents to use Android, along with Google charging nothing for the licensing fee, they may not see the attraction in paying a hefty price for a BB license.

There was some talk of Samsung’s interest in purchasing RIM which actually ran up their share price quite a lot. Samsung ended up having to release a statement clarifying that it had zero interest in the matter. I don’t know about you readers but I can easily come up with a few names that Samsung may have given to their first BB10 device: Samsung BlackBerry X (with X being 10), Samsung BlackBerry S (SII, SIII etc), Samsung Galaxy BB, The BlackBerry Note; you get the picture.

IBM has expressed interest in RIM’s enterprise aspect which includes RIM’s famed secure push email. IBM is the largest provider of all things which have the words “service”, “computer” and “enterprise” in its description. Although this does not foreshadow anything like a “ThinkPhone” or “ThinkBerry”, it does give RIM a slight leg-up in some desperate restructuring. However, if the majority of profits do come from the customer, then flogging what’s under the hood to a behind the scenes company will do nothing to improve their slowing product. First things first, they really need to get BB10 out of door faster.

Simply put, RIM is losing its grasp on the smartphone market as its handsets simply do not inspire or excite anymore for many reasons:

1 – Coverage. Unlike Apple who loves the spotlight and Microsoft who look for every opportunity to attempt to show that they are still the best (to an extent, successfully might I add, with Windows Phone 8), BlackBerry has had less coverage at its Keynote Summits and Conferences. There is no build up and therefore, no one queues outside the Carphone Warehouse at 4am to get the newest BlackBerry.

2 – Target. Yes we all know that BlackBerrys are phones for the business type but they are still smartphones and they do many other things; there are even Twitter and Facebook apps for BB OS. The problem is that RIM has never really pushed their devices for anything other the enterprise market.

3 – Same-ol’ same-ol’. RIM has gone the safe route of making almost every BlackBerry look the same for about a decade. There have been a few breakaways such as with the abomination that was the Storm series (BlackBerry’s revolutionary phone with both touch and press in the same screen), and the Torch series that was decent but no game changer.

The most loyal of BlackBerry users all claim that they cannot live without BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), RIM’s dedicated chat app that allows free inter-BlackBerry communication for free anywhere in the world as long as there is an Internet connection. Apple caught onto this and followed suit by implementing iMessage into iOS as well as Mac OS X. No doubt Windows Phone 8 will have something similar such as Windows/MSN messenger.

The smartphone nowadays is the portal for all things social. The smartphone also carries an amount of street cred amongst your peers and BlackBerry is losing that due to some of the reasons mentioned above. Products like newly released iPhones, Samsungs, HTCs and Nokia’s latest offerings such as the N9, PureView 808 and Lumia line have always been excitedly received whereas a new BlackBerry model would be lucky to get anything more than a “That’s cool”. It also doesn’t make sense having a smartphone where one of its features which allows you to save money/allowance is incompatible with the phones of the people you communicate with the most.

An anecdotal finish – I hung out with a local cricket club one afternoon taking pictures with my new DSLR and during their match, I had the responsibility of the valuables bag, to which I performed a little brand-count. Of the 12 players, 6 owned an iPhone of some sort, 3 owned an Android device, 2 dumbphones and only a single BlackBerry. I brought this up after the match and the owner told me that he had been a loyal user of BlackBerry for many years but began to see the attraction of other phones as well as BBM losing its usefulness and when the time came for an upgrade, RIM will have lost another user.

RIM needs to get its feet under the ground and push its products harder. With behind the scenes backing from IBM, as well as an OEM or two, it can be back on its feet in no time and proving to the world that the market stoll needn’t only contain one type of fruit. If RIM wishes to still keep its enterprise image, I would honestly look forward to a BlackBerry device made by Dell or HP…think about it, The BlackBerry XPS or The BlackBerry Envy. Maybe.

Are gaming notebooks worth it?

One of the most heated debates on the internet is whether spending close to double what you would spend building your own desktop is worth it. As you are reading this, a few brands may immediately pop into your head such as Alienware, MSI, Asus and perhaps even Medion. The greatest challenge for me whilst writing this is to stay objective as I myself am current typing this on my third Alienware laptop.

Alienware

I will use my accounts of owning a “gaming” notebook to help any reader make their own minds on whether owning such a machine is worth all that money spent. On Monday, UPS delivered to me my M17x R4, which was kindlly given to me by Dell to replace my M17x R3. First off and most importantly is the price – one may pay in the region of two grand for this “portable” computer and that is not counting the upgrades I will add throughout the course of the single year that I will own it before the draw of newer tech forces me to upgrade. With that money, I could have built myself a pretty beefy desktop will all the metaphorical bells and whistles and actual bells and whistles if I wanted to. The main reason is that I move around, a lot. And that makes owning a desktop out of the question. I carried my old M17x R3 back and forth in a backpack but honestly, I wish it didn’t need to. This 17 incher is about twice as thick and probably twice as heavy as the 17 inch MacBook Pro. For many, the weight and size of any gaming notebook is a definite deal breaker. The laws of physics just cannot be bent – power equals heat and a sleek slim form factor like that of the MacBook Pro just cannot contain that much heat produced by the much more powerful components inside.

MacBook Pro...seriously?

So what about performance then? By now you may be thinking, maybe I can look past the bulkiness of the laptop as long as it provides me with what I need in terms of performance. A user should be buying a gaming notebook in order to play games, otherwise they are just plain stupid. The single feature of any gaming notebook that differentiates it from the crowd should be its graphics card. At the time of purchase, my Alienware M17x R4 had a GTX 660m as its base configuration; I configured mine with a GTX 680m, the top of the line notebook GPU at this time of writing. Do not fall into the trap of the naming schemes of mobile graphics cards compared to desktop ones. A GTX 680m is a far cry from the desktop GTX 680 but instead similar to a desktop GTX 670 with lower clock speeds. Now, the GTX 680m is able to pump out decent frame rates in most of the modern games with the exception of a few. Games such as Call of Duty – Modern Warfare 3 and Battlefield 3 all run with playable frame rates with details set to their maximum. Alienware is also not the only company offering this particular graphics card. Other gaming notebook lines such MSI and Clevo (resold by pwnpcs and PCSpecialist here in the UK) have their variants of the GTX 680m. Of course, for those that need to save a few quid, there are other configuration options such as AMD’s very respectable 7970m (comparable to a desktop 7870) and the lower GTX 660m offering mid- to low-tier graphics performance. For those looking to buy a gaming laptop, you MUST do your research as naming schemes like these are often used to catch users out with them spending lots of money and only receiving mediocre performance.

When reading this, some may have gone to the Dell website and configured a system to their own liking and noticed that the GTX 680m is much more expensive than the AMD 7970m despite being only a few percent quicker. Nvidia has generally always charged more for its flagship mobile GPUs and the rationale is that they offer more features such as PhysX and in the case of the M17x R4, 3D. That’s right, my rig has a Full HD 1080p 3D display utilising Nvidia 3D Vision 2; glasses come standard. Despite the AMD GPU being fully capable of driving a 3D display, Dell has chosen not to implement this so 3D = Nvidia. For those that have been wondering why I’m talking about Dell, Alienware is owned by Dell; all the warranty, repair and customer service is handled by them.

The next best thing about a gaming notebook is the potential upgradability. My M17x R4 is configured with the lowest Ivy Bridge i7 that Dell offers – the i7 3610QM. The CPU is no slouch with four cores and a CPU speed of up to 3.3Ghz (2.6Ghz when all four cores are on full load) but there were better CPUs which could clock up to faster speeds at a premium. The reason I went for the lower CPU was because unless you are doing CPU intensive work such as video rendering and data processing, other programs, which may seem intensive such as games, do not fully tax the CPU. Plus for paying customers, it is also the cheapest option. I also went for the least amount of RAM at the slowest speed because I knew that RAM would be easily upgradable for cheap. The CPU is upgradable and a few months down the line, I can decide to be adventurous and buy an i7 3920/3940XM CPU. The “XM” highlights that it is the extreme edition of the mobile processors and it has an unlocked multiplier. The unlocked multiplier is an enthusiast’s dream as it allows the user to define the clock speed of that they wish to run the CPU at (overclocking) provided there is sufficient supply of power and they can keep temperatures under control. I had a play with the same last generation i7 2920XM in my M17x R3 and successfully managed to increase the CPU from its default highest clock of 3.5Ghz all the way to 4.6Ghz running on all cores; stable albeit very hot under load. I had also replaced the 4GB of RAM that came with the laptop with 8GB running at a faster clock speed. This upgradability can be seen across all gaming laptop brands.

A few laptop vendors such as Alienware, MSI and Clevo allow graphics card upgrades. Mobile GPUs that are removable come in the MXM form factor and are hard to come by, and are very expensive when purchased separate. Visit the forums to find out more. Below are four of these modules for a size comparison against a 17 inch laptop.

4 MXM graphics modules.

The single greatest upgrade that a user can perform on any laptop will be changing the regular spinning HDD (Hard Disk Drive) with an SSD (Solid State Drive). SSDs use flash storage similar to those found in SD cards and memory sticks and offer far quicker performance compared to regular hard drives. My computer boots from cold to usable desktop in under 15 seconds, a feat unachievable when using an ordinary HDD. Games load quicker and the system is noticeably snappier. There will be an upcoming post focusing on the benefits of SSDs so stay tuned.

As of 2009, the laptop market finally overtook the desktop market. More people are buying laptops compared to desktops but there will still be religious system builders that will consider a gaming laptop a plain waste of money. The truth is that laptops will always perform one or two steps slower than any desktop built with even half its cost. For 2-3k, the only reason for a buyer to look at the possibility of buying a gaming notebook over a desktop is to have some performance on the move. I have heard people wanting to buy these flashy systems plainly to show off to their friends. Speaking from experience, the stares and gasps are only good the first time. After that, you are left at the back of the group desperately trying to drag your monstrosity of backpack onto your already painful shoulders and just looking like an idiot. Gaming laptops are the best for LAN parties and gaming on the move and that’s about it. They will offer far more features than any ordinary notebook or ultrabook such as dedicated graphics, quad-core overclocked processors, 3D displays and even WirelessHD but they are almost always way overpriced. The single best advice I have given anyone wanting to buy one of these is this: Never configure one online and press buy, phone up and haggle. Dell sales reps are paid by commission so they’ll be willing to budge on price and throw in an extra thing or two, and never over configure, pay for only what you know you cannot upgrade anymore, then buy the rest on eBay.

The Unstealable Object

There have been many people who have wondered whether it’s possible to find an object that can’t be stolen. This object is safe and you don’t have to go out of your way to keep it safe. As technology levels increase we are undoubtedly getting closer to the time when thieves actually become good people, but will it be a day that will ever come?

In my opinion no. Let’s look at it like this. Yes, technology is increasing and we are now getting stories where stolen laptops, iPads, and iPhones have anti-theft software that can tell the owner where it is and even who stole it by taking remote photographs. Most thieves are generally morons so they usually don’t notice or take into account software like this. So it will certainly increase the number of items that are returned to the owner.

Thief

Going back to my point about the thief community being made up of mainly idiots who couldn’t exist in a real job, it’s a certainty that more of these will be caught. However, if they are stupid then they are still going to try to steal it as they will believe, wrongly, that they will get away with it. This is not an unstealable object. Just because the object happens to be returned doesn’t really mean anything. That means that your iPads and your iPhones are still at risk. All you are doing is giving yourself a better shot of catching the individual who did it in the first place.

Will it reduce the levels of people trying it? I think it will as some thieves are smart enough to not go for high-risk objects. And if everything becomes a high-risk objects then they’ll give the game up and just go back to leaching off of state benefits instead. So there’s a point in introducing all of this anti-theft software as it will reduce the levels of people who are stealing.

But there’s also a risk. Thieves have existed since humanity began and they will exist until humanity ends. So that tells us that they are more than capable of moving along with the times. If we move into a world where technology protects everything from sticky fingers then they will just move with the times again. In the beginning there will be a reduction in crime as they struggle to adapt to the new world of anti-theft tools, but eventually they’ll adapt.

Cyber crime

Personally, I think we will see a world with a smarter criminal. You will still have your petty thieves who try to steal a packet of cigarettes from the local shop, but I think that the large majority will simply move online. It’s a well-known fact that as more people become connected to the internet the levels of cyber crime just increase. So in the future it will be the thieves acting from a remote base who will be the biggest threat. It will create a smarter thief. And I daresay that it will create more of them because if you steal from home then it takes less courage and less bravado than it does to walk into a store and take something off of the shelves.