Nokia has officially revealed the Lumia 925, the company’s new flagship Windows Phone 8 handset, and the latest to bear PureView branding with the promise of “the best low light images” of any smartphone on the market. Announced at Nokia’s London event today, the Lumia 925 – hitherto known as the Nokia “Catwalk” – sits alongside the Lumia 920 and Verizon Lumia 928, wrapping Microsoft’s platform in a sleek anodized aluminum and polycarbonate casing.
This year at Google’s developer conference, SlashGear will be in attendance at what’s guaranteed to be a celebration of convergence. What we’ve seen from the previews, leaks, and rumors of the contents of this conference point towards Android, Chrome, and Google TV devices moving in towards one another, keeping more than just their software in mind.
All eyes are on Nokia this week, as the company prepares for another new Windows Phone, expected to be the Lumia 925, and one with even more of a photographic bent at that. The Finnish firm has made no bones over the past months that digital imagery is one of the key differentiators it sees as distinguishing it from the rest of the mobile market, both from other Windows Phone manufacturers and the smartphone segment at large, and its London launch is expected to be the most camera-centric of the year. Speculation that we could see the “EOS” or the “Catwalk” is rife.
Google’s big Android shakeup, replacing OS founder Andy Rubin with Sundar Pichai back in March and thus bringing Android and Chrome under the same umbrella, won’t lead to a merge in the short-term, but developers can expect big software – though perhaps not hardware – news at Google I/O this week, the new chief says. The big developer event this week will focus predominantly on getting the most out of Chrome and Android, not launching new hardware or combining them, Pichai told Wired, though the freshly-empowered exec also took the time to discuss Google’s broader attitudes to mobility and personal devices. Perhaps most controversially, Pichai isn’t convinced that people-centric Android modifications, like Facebook Home, quite deliver what they should. “I think life is multifaceted” he argues, “people are a huge part of it, but not the center and be-all of everything.”
When you’re arguably the best-known astronaut ever to spend a stretch on the International Space Station, what better way to commemorate your ending tenure than recording David Bowie’s Space Oddity while in orbit? Commander Chris Hadfield, who returns to Earth along with Thomas H. Marshburn and Roman Romanenko late on Monday, May 13, recorded his own version of the classic from the ISS, complete with lingering views of Earth and almost as much lens-flare as a Star Trek reboot.
If there’s one thing people keep asking from Google Glass and other augmented reality headsets, it’s facial-recognition to bypass those “who am I talking to again?” moments. The first implementation of something along those lines for Google’s wearable has been revealed, MedRef for Glass, a hospital management app by NeatoCode Techniques which can attach patient photos to individual health records and then later recognize them based on face-matching.
The Mazda6 is the epitome of the ugly duckling finding its unexpected swan. Anonymous in its first two generations, Mazda threw its Kodo design language at the third-gen version and ended up with one of the most distinctive four-doors around. Meanwhile, with the EV specter hanging over most car firms, Mazda remains a hybrid hold-out, maintaining there’s still plenty to squeeze out of existing technology before we look to batteries. Does the Mazda6 deliver? Read on for our full review.
Details of Google Play Games, the Android alternative to Apple’s Game Center, have leaked, with suggestions that the cloud-syncing, leaderboard-scoring, and multiplayer-matchmaking system will debut officially at Google I/O this coming week. Evidence of the refreshed gaming component was unearthed from a prerelease version (v3.1.36) of the Google Play Services APK, with Android Police sifting through the shared files to discover a new “Play Games” feature intended for managing gaming on the Android platform.
The original Google Nexus 7 tablet (as manufactured by ASUS) has been tipped to be getting a refresh with new hardware and a launch time around June or July. This updated piece of equipment would, if this set of predictions turns true, have the tablet ready to be re-introduced at Google I/O 2013, the company’s developer conference. This conference begins next week, starting on Wednesday the 15th of May, ending Friday.
Nokia has officially announced the Lumia 928, its Windows Phone 8 smartphone for Verizon, and the device it has been steadily teasing over the past week. Packing a 4.5-inch OLED display and an 8.7-megapixel PureView camera, along with Verizon LTE 4G support, the Lumia 928 also has three high-audio-amplitude-capture microphones for better audio recording. It’ll also arrive with an impressively competitive price.
Another day, another string to the Nokia Lumia 928‘s bow, and the slow Finnish drip of information ahead of the new Windows Phone’s release now turns to the optical image stabilization (OIS) on the 8.7-megapixel camera. Anti-shake during still photo framing and video recording is one of the features most praise on the Lumia 920, and so it’s no surprise that Nokia is taking it seriously on the Lumia 928, strapping the new smartphone to a remote control helicopter to show how it can smooth out footage.
Amazon is reading a pair of smartphones and an audio-streaming device, new leaks claim, with one of the phones using eye-tracking and a glasses-free 3D display for hands-off navigation. The unannounced gadgets are the handiwork of Amazon’s Lab126 hardware division, the WSJ‘s sources reveal, with the high-end smartphone relying upon retina-tracking to allow users to dig through a floating hologram-like interface.
