Posts tagged smartphones

New Samsung Galaxy unveiled tomorrow.

It seems phone designs aren’t the only thing Samsung is trying to copy from Apple, with the launch of the long rumoured Galaxy S3 (or whatever it gets called) causing excitement in the tech world, much like an iPhone launch.

Keep an eye out on their website for more news on the official announcement, in less than 24 hours from now.

Mobile graphics beginning to outperform consoles.

With no new Xbox or Playstation consoles having been released fur such a long time, it’s could be next year before smartphones are able to match their graphics capabilities, according to NVIDIA’s Mike Rayfield.

Several years ago, a PC meant a display that measured 11 inches or more diagonally, a physical keyboard and possibly a network connection. With the advent of mobile devices and smartphones, the idea of a PC has largely been redefined. It is now considered to be anything with a display of at least four inches, with a touchscreen that supplements (or replaces) a physical keyboard and is always connected and “on.”

New GPS chip works indoors, shows vertical position, and uses half the power.

The unimaginatively titled BCM4752 chip from Broadcom uses data not only from the GPS satellites, but also GLONASS, QZSS and SBAS (whatever they are) to offer improved time to fix in all scenarios, more accurate real-time navigation, faster reacquisition of signals after blockage or tunnel exits and improved sensitivity. It also consumes half the power used by previous generation chips, meaning longer battery life for already drained smartphones.

By using extra satellite constellations, the chip takes data from up to 59 orbiting satellites, and also sources location information from Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, NFC, and handset inertial data to provide navigation apps more data than ever before. It also means it’s able to provide vertical position.

That opens up a range of possibilities for app makers, for example buildings and malls could be integrated into Google maps to allow your smartphone to guide you not only to a building, but to the right floor and position inside it as well.

Although the chip has already hit the market, it could realistically be up to a year before it’s integrated into smartphones and tablets.

Graphic: The World of Lost Smartphones

The graphic was compiled using data from mobile security company Lookout. Their Android App allows users to locate their phone from an internet browser using the phones GPS, so it’s worth noting that the information is showing the number of phones located by GPS data, not necessarily found and returned.

Check out the full sized graphic here.

Almost one in five US kids have a cell phone.

According to a study of Massachusetts school students, 20% of third-grade boys and 18% of third-grade girls have a cell phone. (Third graders are around 8 years old)

That figure was up to 39% for fifth-graders.

In middle school, over 83% had a cell phone.

Instagram for Android released.

Slightly OT, but I’ve been waiting for this for ages! It’s a free download, here at Google Play.

Sphero goes international.

I got an email through from Sphero today, who’ve released their smartphone/tablet controlled ball for international shipping. While super excited about this when I first saw it, it’s hard to know whether or not it would actually be any fun for any length of time. Here’s what the website had to say:

Sphero is like nothing you’ve seen before. It’s the first robotic ball gaming device that you control with a tilt, touch, or swing from your smartphone or tablet. Sphero delivers a unique mixed-reality experience with apps that let you engage in the virtual world and play in the real one. 

So now I dunno, $159 seems pretty steep for a ball. Anyone tried one out? How was it?

Nokia to release 41 megapixel cameraphone.

Nokia have shown off their 808 PureView smartphone at MWC, with a huge 41 megapixel resolution.

The Verge notes that while the phone is billed at 41 million pixels, “as you might have surmised, this handset doesn’t #mce_temp_url#take full 41-megapixel stills. Instead, it oversamples — taking the image data from seven neighboring pixels and consolidating it into one pixel’s worth — and generates pictures roughly 5 megapixels in size. That’s still plenty of dots for most uses, and the image quality you can obtain from such a system is frankly ridiculous.”

The camera has a Carl Zeiss lens, 1080p video, and an HDMI out port.

Surprisingly, it features Nokia’s Symbian Belle OS, instead of the Windows Phone OS which is on some of their newer phones.

More details on Huawei’s new quad-core mobile chip.

Huawei came out with an early surprise announcement at MWC this week, unveiling a new quad-core chip which will be used in their new smartphones (earlier story here). The K3V2 chip was an unexpected announcement, and along with being used in new Huawei phones it will also be offered for sale to other handset makers, which will provide competition from the quad-core Tegra 3 chip from NVIDIA.

In fact, Huawei officials claim their chip is 30-50% faster than the Tegra 3 across a range of benchmarks. Along with 1.2-1.5Ghz speeds, it features a 64 bit memory bus - twice that of Tegra 3.

The graphics block handles 2-D and 3-D work and helps a handset deliver 35 frames/second video compared to 13 fps for Tegra 3 and 8.4 for a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon, according to Huawei’s tests.

While the K3V2 uses a 40nm manufacturing process, the company already has plans to release a new design in 12 months based on 28nm technology.

Mobile World Congress kicks off tomorrow.

MWC runs from 27 February to 1 March, and is likely to see big announcements from most of the big smartphone manufacturers. Unfortunately, Samsung have already announced that the successor to the Galaxy S II will not be shown off at MWC, with a separate event for that before mid-2012. As usual, Apple won’t be attending.

Bookmark 8 Bit Future for the latest updates from the show, which are likely to include:

• More 4G/LTE devices,
• Quad-core smartphones,
• Many new Android tablets,
• News from a keynote speech from Google CEO Eric Schmidt,
• NFC/mobile payment systems,
• Connected babies (!),
• Ubuntu for Android,
• Waterproof phones,
• And perhaps, flexible devices.