Slender, metal Samsung A3 and A5 bring iPhone-like glitz to Android ecosystem

November 8th, 2014 | Edited by | hardware

Nov
08

On Thursday Oct 30th, Samsung said its sales were stalled by iPhone anticipation. On Friday Oct 31th, the company announced its new A3 and A5 phones for the Asia market, with features seemingly designed to counteract the siren song of Apple’s fashionable phones.

galaxy

The A5 and A3 match the all-metal build of the Galaxy Alpha, adding momentum to Samsung’s move away from plasticky phones. Their specs sit firmly mid-range otherwise: Both phones sport a 1.2GHz quad-core processor, Super AMOLED display, a 5MP front-facing camera, and 16GB of storage. You can expand that up to 64GB by tossing in an SD card. In another break from Samsung’s past, neither phone’s battery is removable.
Both models are super-slim. The A3 matches the iPhone 6 at 6.9mm. The A5 inhales even more deeply, measuring just 6.7mm thin.
The A5 wins out in other specs, with a 5-inch, 1280×720 screen, 2GB of RAM, and a 2,300mAh battery. The A3 has a 4.5-inch screen with a 960×540 resolution, 1GB of RAM, and a 1,900mAh battery.
Both phones ship with Android 4.4 KitKat. Samsung did not specify plans to upgrade to Android Lollipop, but we do know the company’s been tinkering with the new mobile OS.
Samsung is also being coy about whether these phones will come to the United States. For now, they’ll be sold in China and other “select markets.”
The story behind the story: The Galaxy A series is Samsung’s attempt to win over those tempted by the smooth looks of the iPhone. The Galaxy Alpha started the all-metal lineup, and the Galaxy Note 4 has a metal band and faux leather back that’s more refined than previous models’ designs. Given that Samsung’s smartphone sales were apparently hurt by iPhone anticipation, Samsung seems wise to focus on glamour this time around.

Source: www.pcworld.com

Microsoft promotes its Band smartwatch platform with plans to license its technology

November 4th, 2014 | Edited by | hardware

Nov
04

Microsoft plans to license its Microsoft Band smartwatch technology to other manufacturers, with an emphasis on the sensors powering them, a company representative said Friday.
Whether Microsoft plans to put in place a formal program, such as it has for Windows Phone, remains unclear. The Band does not run an operating system per se, but on Microsoft’s wearable firmware, optimized for low-power micro devices, the spokesman said in an email.
“Yes on licensing the technology. Particularly the sensors, “ he said.
Right now, the sensors are one of the selling points behind Microsoft’s $199 Band, which unexpectedly launched Wednesday night. Inside the smartwatch/fitness band are ten sensors, including a GPS, accelerometer, microphone, and gyroscope, plus sensors to measure skin capacitance, ultraviolet light, skin temperature, and continuous heart rate. The Band, Microsoft says, not only provides assistance during your workday, with calendar reminders, Twitter updates, the Cortana digital assistant, and the like, but also measures your sleep and exercise routine.

microsoft-band

The intelligence that Cortana and a separate Intelligence Engine built into the Band might not make it to other manufacturers. But the Microsoft spokesman said that other smartwatch makers may be able to license the technology, so that the sensor hardware and algorithms that monitor them could appear elsewhere. Whether Microsoft will set up a formal branding initiative—a “Powered by Band” tagline, for example—isn’t known. The spokesman said Microsoft will talk more about what it plans to do with Band in the future.

Although it’s hard to say how many Bands Microsoft readied before launch, the company’s Web site now says it is sold out. Social media accounts owned by Microsoft employees showed long lines at Microsoft stores on Thursday, with customers presumably buying Band. And Yusuf Mehdi, corporate vice president of Devices and Studios at Microsoft, tweeted Friday that the company was “looking to scale [Band] to more countries.” So far, the Band is being sold only in the United States.

Why this matters: One easy way to establish a platform is to get the supporting technology into as many hands as possible. At this point, it appears Band isn’t quite equivalent to Windows Phone—in fact, until the first in-depth reviews are in, it’s difficult to say how successful Band will be. But Microsoft’s push to make Band work with Android, iOS, and Windows Phone already shows the company is thinking big.

Source: www.pcworld.com

Achieving the Perfect Selfie

November 1st, 2014 | Edited by | hardware

Nov
01

Anyone who’s tried to take a decent photo with an iPhone knows the drill: tap the app and wait longer than usual for it to open, fiddle around with the settings to make sure the flash is activated, awkwardly hold the phone (along with your breath) and finally, repeatedly tap the screen to take the shot. If luck is on your side, you’ll have a photo that doesn’t look like a typical Bigfoot sighting.

SnappGrip

The Snappgrip is a device that aims to take all that fuss out of shooting iPhone pics. It’s a phone case that gives users an added benefit of physical buttons so there’s no need to struggle with the on-screen functions. Taking a photo, shooting video, zooming, toggling the flash and switching between landscape and portrait modes are all handled by the Snappgrip.
The button layout on the Snappgrip is just like any other camera. There’s a dial to switch modes and a shutter button for zooming and taking shots. The device is super light and curved perfectly for comfort. What’s even cooler is that the button and dial section detaches, leaving you with a phone case. That’s a sure plus for those who hate having to take their phone out of the case just to put on an accessory.
The Snappgrip is available now at the bitemyapple.co website for $70. You also get a tripod mount (for the truly obsessed iPhone photographer), wrist strap, charging cable and carrying case (that you’d probably never use anyway). As far as colors, your choice is only between the obligatory black or white, but who cares? It makes creating the next Instagram buzz a lot easier.

Source: www.macworld.com

Source: Apple’s iWatch will hit production in July with 2.5-inch display, wireless charging

August 23rd, 2014 | Edited by | hardware

Aug
23

The iWatch won’t be an official product until it’s announced on the stage of an Apple press event, but a Thursday report lends more credibility to rumors that Apple’s smartwatch is imminent. Referencing various anonymous supply-chain sources, Reuters has reported that Taiwan’s Quanta Computer will begin production of Apple’s mythical wearable in July.
Details are scant, but the Reuters report says Apple’s smartwatch will feature a 2.5-inch, slightly rectangular, arched touch display, and will be juiced by wireless charging. The gadget will have a heart rate sensor, and connect only to Apple devices running iOS.
The watch would go on sale in October, and Apple expects to sell 50 million units within one year of the wearable’s release. LG will make the watch’s display, and Quanta—a company that already makes Macbooks and iPods—will account for at least 70 percent of total iWatch production.
Or at least that’s the news from a trio of sources that Reuters quotes off the record.
Should Apple release the iWatch (or whatever the gadget is to be called), Microsoft will be the last remaining consumer-tech giant left standing on the sidelines of the wearables space. Hardware manufacturers see wearables as the next step in mobility beyond smartphones and tablets, but an Apple wearable is far from a sure consumer hit.
The wearables market is expected to grow by 500 percent by 2018, but currently not a single smartwatch has successfully made the transition from nerd-oriented curiosity to mainstream success. The Pebble watch is just an idie cult favorite. Sony’s two smartwatches have near-imperceptible public mindshare. And Samsung’s four smartwatches, while the recipients of generous marketing support, have yet to fulfill Samsung’s own promise of being the “next big thing.”

iwatch

Still, if any smartwatch stands a chance of success, it’s the iWatch. Apple enjoys the benefits of an extremely unified, consistent, user-friendly hardware-software ecosystem. So if the company can position the iWatch as the perfect wrist-worn complement to the iPhone, the Apple wearable truly could become “the next big thing.”
The keys to any iWatch success will be simple elegance and execution. How easy will it be to use apps on the extremely limited screen real estate of a 2.5-inch display? How will Apple surmount perennial wearable bugaboos like Bluetooth dropouts and short battery life? And what whiz-bang features will convince fence-sitters to put a completely new gadget type on their wrists?
If any company can figure out the smartwatch conundrum, it’s Apple. But the company will need to move quickly—and keep an eye trained on the competition. At next week’s Google I/O conference, Google is expected to demo LG’s G Watch, which runs the Android Wear OS. It essentially puts the highly acclaimed Google Now digital assistant on the user’s wrist.
Android Wear smartwatches won’t be anything like what Apple is poised to deliver in the iWatch. But they could put serious pressure on the iWatch, four months before Apple’s wearable is even released.

Source: www.macworld

The iPhone’s sapphire future comes into focus

August 21st, 2014 | Edited by | hardware

Aug
21

This may be anathema for someone in the business of writing about tech to say, but I’m not all that interested in iPhone rumors. Shipping products are what grab my attention, not unicorns and phantasms. The minute Tim Cook holds up the new device is the minute it’s worthwhile to start examining features and specs, and all the speculation ahead of time is usually just the noise separating one Apple press event from the next.
So why did I take notice of this week’s report in the Wall Street Journal that Apple is going to use sapphire on the screens for at least one of its rumored iPhones—the larger, more expensive one—as well as that smartwatch everyone seems to think the company will announce next month?
Probably because I expect it to happen.
Or to put it another way, I’ve been waiting for a smartphone maker to replace the glass screens on its devices with the more durable sapphire since January 2013. I was sitting in a meeting room at that year’s Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, and a couple nice gentlemen from GT Advanced Technologies were hipping me to the merits of sapphire as a component in handheld devices.

applescreens_primary

I was working on an article about how device makers were looking to bolster your phone’s durability—particularly when it came to screens that had a nasty habit of breaking when coming into unexpected contact with concrete. It was a subject that Paul Beaulieu, vice president of the sapphire materials group for materials and equipment provider GT Advanced Technologies, was happy to talk to me about. “Certainly one of the trends in mobile devices is that they’re thinner, lighter, and more widespread,” he said back in 2013. “All of those things contribute to higher breakage rates, given current materials.”
The solution, Beaulieu contended, was to use sapphire—perhaps an unsurprising answer, given that industrial sapphire is what GT Advanced Technologies manufactures. But sapphire is attractive as a possible glass replacement for other reasons, as my colleague Marco Tabini noted earlier this year. Chiefly, it’s the hardest natural substance after diamond, and GT Advanced Technologies had developed a way to produce it on a scale that wasn’t cost prohibitive.
GT’s Beaulieu told me something else back in 2013 that I didn’t quote in that article: He believed sapphire would be put to use in mobile devices by 2014. That was months before GT wound up inking a $578 million deal to supply Apple with sapphire. And it was more than a year before Apple opened a GT-run plant in Mesa, Arizona, to start churning out sapphire crystal.
There are, of course, hurdles to reaching our sapphire-encased future, which that Journal article is more than happy to outline. Apple faces risks from everything from demands on its supply chain to the cost of the material. (The Journal quotes an analyst who estimates that sapphire screen costs about five times as much as one made from Corning’s Gorilla Glass, which Apple reportedly uses on current iPhones, and that could either mean a higher price tag on new phones or slimmer profit margins for a company that likes profit an awful lot.)
Still, for Apple, these are risks worth taking if it means producing a phone that can stand out from the smartphone crowd. “A lot of [device makers] are looking for differentiation,” Beaulieu told me 20 months ago. If the Journal’s report is true, Apple may have found a way to do that.

Source: www.macworld.com

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