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- Samsung Galaxy S III Review – Great CPU, Decent Interface, Good Camera, but the Design Spoils It (Video)
- Windows Phone Summit Full Clip Available Here (Video)
- Nokia Lumia 800 and 710 Will Get WP Tango Soon; Rolling Out Globally in a Week
- Foxconn CEO Assures Everyone that iPhone 5 Will Kill the Galaxy S III
- Huawei Announces TD-SCDMA Ascend P1 Model, XL Model as Well With 2,600 mAh Battery
| Posted: 21 Jun 2012 02:04 PM PDT
Samsung Galaxy S III has finally reached us for a detailed review and we’ve done quite a lengthy video, that you can watch below. We are dealing with one of the best handsets launched this year, so we gave it a proper treatment. Today is an important day, since this is the day when the Galaxy S III goes on sale in USA, at around $200 on various contracts. Let’s see if it’s worth getting!
The handset comes in pebble blue or marble white and it’s available in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB versions. This new Galaxy S was announced in early May and released internationally at the end of may after an incredible number of 8 million preorders. The design is “inspired by nature”, as Samsung calls it and you’ll feel that both in the sexy curves of the handset, its water drop-like sounds and flowery wallpapers. Galaxy S III uses a brushed polycarbonate shell, measures 8.6mm in thickness and weighs 133 grams. The first problem already appears in the design department: the device is extremely slippery, especially if your palms are sweaty. I recommend you buy a special case with extra grip if you don’t want to drop this phone! Anyway, you should also know that the phone’s On/OFF button is on the right side, while the left side holds the volume buttons. At the top there’s the audio jack, while at the bottom we have the microUSB port. Finally at the front there’s the front camera, earpiece and sensors, 4.8 inch screen and physical Home button, plus two capacitive buttons (menu and back). At the back there’s the 8 megapixel camera with LED flash and under the hood we find a 2.100 mAh battery, microSIM slot and microSD card slot.
Samsung Galaxy S III has a 4.8 inch Super AMOLED screen with a 720p resolution and Gorilla Glass 2 protection. Back to the Home button, this one has 3 uses: the normal one triggered with a single press, the S Voice assistant with a double tap and the task manager, triggered by keeping the Home button pressed. Sadly, this Home button is embedded too much into the lower side of the phone and it’s quite hard to press. As far as the screen goes, its main flaw is the fact that it reflects sunlight greatly and when watching a movie it’ll be very hard to actually see something on the screen. Now let’s get to the specs… We’re dealing with a smartphone that features 1GB of RAM, 16/32/64GB of storage, HSDPA 21 Mbps connectivity, WiFi, DLNA, WiFi Direct, Bluetooth 4.0, NFC (chip in the battery) and microUSB 2.0. At the back we have, as I said an 8 megapixel camera with LED flash, autofocus, simultaneous photo and video capture and support for 1080p 30 fps video capture. At the front there’s a 1.9 megapixel 720p 30 fps camera for videocalls. The star of the smartphone is definitely the quad core Exynos 4212 processor at 1.4 GHz, that involves a Mali 400MP GPU, which makes games look great, just like NOVA 3 does for example.
This CPU was perfect and performed great in both benchmarks and under stress from games, HD movies and heavy multitasking. Other features of the handset include an accelerometer, gyroscope, proximity sensor, compass, barometer, stereo FM radio and 48GB of free storage on Dropbox, for 2 years. The 2.100 mAh battery provides 21 hours of talk time (2G) and about two days of normal use. One thing to also mention about this phone, going back to the display a bit is the fact that its auto brightness has a much too low level. However, you get multiple brightness settings in the browser, for example. On the benchmark side, the phone takes on bravely the HTC One S and One X and outscores them in many tests. Galaxy S III scored 5482 points in Quadrant, 9921 in AnTuTu and 58 fps in NenaMark 2, compared to the 4600 points of the One X in Quadrant, 11.200 in AnTuTu and 47 fps in NenaMark 2. We had a special segment in the video review where we show you all the special features of the handset, those advertised by Samsung. I’m talking about pop up play, the feature that allows the movie playing video to be minimized and moved around the screen.
There’s also S Voice, the virtual assistant that’s no match to Siri, as shown in the video. There’s also Smart Stay, that tracks your eyes watching the screen and stops the screen from going into standby. Various other gestures and motion controls are also detailed in our huge review below. I was happy with the music volume and call quality and particularly happy with the headphone experience, thanks to the Wolfson Micro chip on board, that actually offers an experience on par with Beats, or even better. As far as camera goes, you get HDR, panorama, burst shot, a few effects and some pretty good photos and videos in daylight. Indoors, the camera is crappy though… It doesn’t handle low light at all, even with the flash on. Overall, this is a great phone, but it does have its caveats. One of them is that it slips from the hand easily, also the camera performs in a mediocre way indoors, plus the Home button is uncomfortable and the display is sometimes rubbish under the sun. However, we liked the fluid OS and interface, powerful processor, incredible graphics in games and we felt right at home using Android on this device. For that it gets an 8.83 out of 10 from us and I hope to see much feedback from you below! Related posts:
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| Windows Phone Summit Full Clip Available Here (Video) Posted: 21 Jun 2012 04:44 AM PDT
If you’re curious to know what went down yesterday at the Windows Phone Summit where Windows Phone 8 was announced, there’s a full video below with the entire conference. Joe Belfiore, the head of the Windows Phone project was on stage and he showcased some of the new features of the OS. There were also talks about Windows Phone 7.8, a consolation version of WP7 for people who won’t get WP8 on their older devices.
WP7.8 brings some of the features of Apollo to the older handsets. For example, Lumia 800 will get the new Start screen through WP7.8. Windows Phone 8 will bring multicore support (up to 64 cores actually), 720p screens support and it comes with a shared kernel with Windows 8 and Windows RT. NFC and an e-wallet feature are also on board and among the first partners who’ll launch WP8 devices there’s Huawei, Qualcomm, Samsung, HTC and obviously Nokia. The latest Windows Phone integrates Nokia Maps with support for offline maps and turn by turn navigation. WP8 will arrive this fall, with Windows 8, Microsoft Surface tablet and the first bunch of handsets with the new OS on board. There’s also a slight interface change, that brings 3 sizes of tiles: small, medium and wide (as big as two medium tiles). More of that in the video below: Related posts:
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| Nokia Lumia 800 and 710 Will Get WP Tango Soon; Rolling Out Globally in a Week Posted: 21 Jun 2012 03:07 AM PDT
Nokia Conversations posted recently a piece on new apps that are coming to Nokia devices, but also about an update coming to the likes of Lumia 800 and 710. It appears that these models will get tethering, media streaming from the device and Flip to Silence. The update has been around for a while and apparently it was tested and approved by Vodafone Australia recently.
It should be Windows Phone Tango, unless there’s some other software release in the meantime. This update will be rolled out globally starting from June 27th via Zune. It will be needed to take advantage of the new Nokia Lumia apps and features, including some new camera options, like Smart Group Shot, Action Shot, Panorama, Self Timer. There’s also Contact share, that shares contacts via SMS or email and PlayTo that streams content wirelessly. Meanwhile, as we found out yesterday, aside from Tango there will be a Windows Phone 7.8 update. This one brings the features of Windows Phone 8 to the WP7 and WP7.5 devices, as consolation for the lack of support for WP8 on older models. A nice feature that will be added by WP7.8 is the new type of Start screen, with the 3 types of tiles: small squares, medium squares and wide squares. Related posts:
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| Foxconn CEO Assures Everyone that iPhone 5 Will Kill the Galaxy S III Posted: 21 Jun 2012 02:32 AM PDT
Everyone’s talking about the Samsung Galaxy S III, as if it would have already won the title for the best phone of 2012. Well, some people still like the HTC One X better and some people are really hoping that the iPhone 5 will kill everything in its path. Foxconn CEO Terry Gou is one of the people who believe in the new iPhone.
He actually said that he expects the new iPhone to destroy the Samsung Galaxy S III. Maybe that’s why Samsung is preparing the Galaxy Note II for a quicker launch than estimated. Foxconn Chairman and President Terry Gou isn’t the kind of person to leak products to the press, although he kind of confirmed the iPhone 5 this time. Also, if I’m not mistaking this is the same guy that was caught talking about an Apple HDTV, but apparently there was something lost in translation on that occasion. Reporting on Gou’s praise of iPhone 5, China Times also says that the CEO’s goal in life is to defeat Samsung, as he hates the South Korea company. Terry Gou also justified his hate, by saying that Samsung has a “track record of snitching on its competitors”. He’s referring to Sammy reporting 4 Taiwanese companies to the EU for price fixing in the screen panel industry. Samsung did that to save itself as a “tainted witness”. So, will the iPhone 5 deliver? What do you think? Related posts:
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| Huawei Announces TD-SCDMA Ascend P1 Model, XL Model as Well With 2,600 mAh Battery Posted: 21 Jun 2012 01:31 AM PDT
It appears that Motorola’s example with the larger version of the Droid RAZR, with bigger battery is now followed by Huawei, who announced two new versions of the Ascend P1 handset. The handset was shown at MWC 2012 and it’s now back in two new versions, the Ascend P1 TD-SCDMA, that’s a special version for China Mobile and the Ascend P1 XL.
The TD-SCDMA model will ship this month and use the 3G specific technology. The Ascend P1 XL is a version of the smartphone with a bigger battery, a 2,600 mAh unit. So, the Ascend P1 line is now very diverse, including the Ascend P1 S, formerly the thinnest phone in the world, the standard Ascend P1, only a 1mm thicker than the P1 S and the XL model, once again thicker. Ascend P1 XL will hit China in Q3 and we also found out that the Ascend D1 will be coming to the same country soon. The D quad is still missing from the list and it appears that it’s scheduled to debut in the second half of the year, so this means yet another delay. Could it mean that the plan to use an in house made Huawei processor backfired on the Chinese device maker? So, we’ve got a phone with big battery, one with tiny waistline and a quad core unit. Which one do you fancy? Related posts:
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