Does the world need a new XPERIA Arc? Sony Ericsson seems to think so, and hence the XPERIA Arc S has broken cover. Taking the same, slimline chassis – now in Stormtrooper white – and 4.2-inch display as the original, but boosting processor speed to 1.4GHz, the Arc S promises to bring the Android experience up to speed with what rivals are offering. We grabbed some hands-on playtime to find out if that was true.
Apple’s 2011 MacBook Pro laptops have been on the market for several months now, and there’s one port that has resolutely refused to be used in the way it’s intended. Devices bearing Thunderbolt ports – Intel’s high-speed connectivity standard co-developed with Apple – are yet to hit the market, but SlashGear caught up with LaCie for a pre-launch demo of the new Little Big Disk. The name might be daft but the performance is anything but: over 825 MB/s read speeds.
Intel came out fighting at Computex this week, with ambitious Atom plans to take on ARM in its low-power, long-battery Android stronghold. According to the latest, very early benchmarks, however, the chip company may still have some work to do. Tweakers managed to run some tests on a Compal prototype running Android Honeycomb on Intel's 1.5GHz Oak Trail dual-core, finding it to be underwhelming in comparison to existing Tegra 2 based slates.
Read The Full Story
Details of Motorola's upcoming DROID3 smartphone have been leaked, courtesy of some premature benchmarking of what's assumed to be a prototype device. According to the stats at Nenamark, spotted by Blog of Mobile, the Verizon Android smartphone will have a qHD 960 x 540 display, just like the Motorola ATRIX, as well as use Imagination Technologies' PowerVR SGX 540 GPU.
Read The Full Story
We’ve got quite a nice little look at the HTC Sensation, (previously known as the HTC Pyramid) and what do you know? We even have some benchmarks! These are all courtesy of our good fellow Chris Davies who is, in fact, over in England where the bigtime HTC event has taken place. What we’ve got here is both Quadrant and SunSpider, giving us a generally decent look at both the CPU and the browsing capabilities of the unit.
The mobile browser speed wars continue, and the latest fray comes courtesy of website optimization firm Blaze with claims that Android is 52-percent faster than iPhone, and quicker – in real-world testing – on 84-percent of sites. That’s despite Apple’s much-vaunted Nitro JavaScript engine, new to iOS 4.3 on the iPhone and iPad 2. We spoke to Blaze to find out more about the testing process, and in what ways the company was interpreting the results.
The iPad 2, Steve Jobs took to the stage to tell us, offers twice the performance of the original iPad and 9x the graphics performance, thanks to its dual-core 1GHz Apple A5 processor. Still, what does that mean for daily use? Considering most people spend their time on tablets browsing, we ran some side-by-side SunSpider benchmarking on Apple’s old and new iPads to see how the new model shaped up. Check out the results after the cut.
We've already been impressed by the quad-core speed boost shown by our early 2011 MacBook Pro review unit, but it seems the performance jolt is across the board with Apple's refreshed machines. Primate Labs - responsible for the Geekbench tool SlashGear uses to profile notebooks - has pulled together benchmarking results for the new range, and the improvement is dramatic.
Read The Full Story
Further evidence to suggest the incoming iPad 2 and iPhone 5 will use a new, multi-core processor has emerged, with iOS benchmarking tool Geekbench 2 [iTunes link] being updated recently with new "support for multi-core processors." The app, available on iTunes for $0.99, runs performance tests on processor and memory; however, so far all iOS devices have used single-core chips.
Read The Full Story
As you’ve seen from our first hands-on, Notion Ink’s Adam tablet is a pretty smooth operator, but we wanted to see just how smooth. The company allowed us to load up an Android benchmarking app to see how the slate performs, but there are a few caveats to bear in mind.
Video after the cut
The Sony Ericsson Hallon isn't the only leaked handset out of the company; a new, compact Android smartphone has been spotted at IT168, presumed to be the successor to the Sony Ericsson XPERIA X10 mini pro. The new phone has a slide-out QWERTY keyboard and a 3-inch, 320 x 480 multitouch display; it also boosts the processor over the original X10 mini pro, to a 1GHz chip paired with an Adreno 205 GPU.
Read The Full Story
It may have been a holiday weekend, but Notion Ink has still been busy producing demo videos of the Adam tablet as the slate's release date edges ever-nearer. Both hardware and software are getting a workout, too, with the company kicking off with an HDMI demo as well as being used as a "false digitizer" tablet over the WiFi connection. Meanwhile, there's also some benchmarking comparing Adam to the iPad, iPhone and other Android browsers.
Video demo after the cut
Read The Full Story
