Sony Ericsson has just announced the XPERIA mini and mini pro Android smartphones, the latest in the company’s super-compact line, and we’ve stopped by for a sneaky hands-on play ahead of their planned release in August 2011. Just like their predecessors they’re built for those who don’t want a 4-inch or bigger display and prefer their smartphone to be discrete; unlike those predecessors, they’re not underpowered minnows.
Intel has announced its 22nm 3D Tri-Gate transistors, the world’s first on a production technology, and with the potential to create not only smaller chips for smartphones, tablets and other ultraportables, but to make more powerful servers and desktop PCs. The 3D Tri-Gate transistors will be first used in Intel Ivy Bridge processors, demonstrated today and set to be the first high-volume CPUs based on the new technology. Intel isn’t holding back on the hyperbole, saying Ivy Bridge will bring “an unprecedented combination of power savings and performance gains” – up to 37-percent more performance, in fact – and the company even managed to get Gordon E. Moore – who coined “Moore’s Law” – to speak up on how important the 22nm evolution is to tech.
Streaming music service Spotify has launched its biggest assault on iTunes to date, with the addition of iPod management functionality. Plug in an iPod classic, nano or shuffle and Spotify will list it in the new "Devices" section of the updated software: you can then sync across your existing MP3s as well as buy MP3s through Spotify's refreshed download service. Meanwhile there's mobile iOS and Android news for free Spotify users wanting to take their tracks on the go.
Read The Full Story
Samsung managed a mighty fast turnaround in their labs, reworking the Galaxy Tab 10.1 and 8.9 tablets to better take on the iPad 2, but it did mean the slates weren't quite ready for press consumption at CTIA 2011. Now the 8.9-inch model has shown up in a more stable form in Germany, with NewGadgets.de having a chance to play with the slimline slate on video.
Read The Full Story
ASUS has been plugging away at tablets for years now, experimenting with convertible netbooks and trying to coax some semblance of finger-friendliness out of Windows. It’s taken Android 3.0 Honeycomb and the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer TF101 to actually deliver, however: an eye-catching hybrid offering the touch-usability of a slate and the content creation flexibility of a Keyboard Dock. Has Eee Pad outclassed iPad 2 or do the ASUS Transformer’s two halves not quite add up to a whole? Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.
RIM has publicly demonstrated Android apps running on the BlackBerry PlayBook tablet for the first time at BlackBerry World 2011 this morning, showing how code intended for Google's platform will be packaged and run on the QNX slate. Apps will each run in their own instance of a virtual machine, presented to the user as regular shortcuts and with the emulator automatically - and transparently - loading.
Read The Full Story
The reports of Osama bin Laden’s death may be ubiquitous now, but the story inadvertently broke – and played out amid the firefight – on Twitter first. Abbottabad resident Sohaib Athar noted a “Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)” and then ”A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty :-S” without realizing he was giving an on-the-ground insight into what the US government has described as a 40-minute “surgical raid“.
Expectations around the HTC Wildfire S are, a little surprisingly, high. The third of HTC’s new Android devices from MWC 2011 in February, the entry-level smartphone replaces the Wildfire, a device which managed to carve itself quite the niche among pre-pay users and the budget or bulk conscious. Now the S-variant comes to further refine the lineage: we’re a long way from the Tattoo, but has HTC done enough to keep the Wildfire S relevant today? Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.
The great Kinect hacks continue, and next up is a way to bypass Microsoft's limitations on micro-movement recognition by throwing another controller into the mixture: namely an iPhone. Project iKinect is a PC-based co-play system which allows for more complex gameplay, using the Kinect motion sensor to track general movement and the iPhone's various sensors and touchscreen for micro-movement recognition.
Read The Full Story
It’s been a long time since our first hands-on play with the white iPhone 4: all the way back at WWDC 2010, in fact, when the fourth-gen smartphone was brand spanking new and sparkling under Apple’s halogens. That triumphant launch paved the way for the black handset with no white accompaniment, the start of an embarrassing series of delays as Apple struggled with untold technical difficulties. Now, April 28, more than ten months since its unveil, the white iPhone 4 has finally gone on sale.
Qualcomm wowed us with its augmented reality photo frames last year, and appealed to our retro whimsy with virtual Rock 'Em Sock 'Em Robots, and now the company is making the AR Platform responsible for the underlying technology commercially available. In beta since October 2010, the freshly official Qualcomm AR Platform consists of an SDK and a Unity3 game engine extension, opening the door to Android 2.1+ smartphone apps overlaying digital graphics onto real-world views from the camera.
Read The Full Story
Qualcomm’s latest Snapdragon CPU has found its way into the BSQUARE Mobile Development Platform (MDP), a device targeted at developers looking to test and optimize their apps on Qualcomm’s new 1.5GHz dual-core MSM8660 chipset – as found in the HTC EVO 3D – and Adreno 220 GPU. The MDP runs Android 2.3 Gingerbread on a 3.61-inch WVGA touchscreen, and has a 13-megapixel rear camera, 1GB of RAM, 16GB of internal storage and various preloaded monitoring apps.
