Dear Sony, Samsung and every other tech company in the world: stop trying to be Apple

Thursday, February 2nd, 2012

Given a choice, I can’t think of any technology company that wouldn’t like to have what Apple has. A proprietary system that ties people in every step of the way: the device in their pocket, on their desk, and pretty much all the content that sits within them. (more…)

Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7: first-look review of the best tablet at CES

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

Tablets have come in many shape and forms at this year’s CES, but there’s only one that’s made us go “wow”. And that tablet is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 7.7.

It is, quite simply, drop dead gorgeous. Of course we can reel off the specs – it’s 7.9mm thin and weighs 340g  – but that doesn’t do it justice. When you pick it up for the first time your arm jumps up too quickly; it expects to be lifting something heavier.

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Forget innovation: why Lenovo leads the way for sheer fun at CES 2012

Thursday, January 12th, 2012

The most fun I’ve had in Las Vegas? Spending ten minutes with the Lenovo IdeaCentre A720. Sounds crazy but it’s also 100% true.

I played the piano, lost a strange game involving multiplying insects (don’t ask) and then showed my considerable skill at losing by being heavily defeated at an excellent multiplayer game in the mould of Guitar Hero. Who needs dancing girls, cocktails or casinos?

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Video: Sony Phone Watch demo at CES 2012

Tuesday, January 10th, 2012

The phone watch is an idea that just isn’t going away, with a different spin of the concept produced pretty much every year at CES. But this time, Sony assures us, it’s really going to happen and it’s really going to be fabulous.

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Warranties, app stores and me

Friday, January 6th, 2012

My late uncle and I were very different people. Despite being the two ‘fixers’ in the family, the ones who got the busted kettles and the snapped gear cables from the rest of the clan, we were poles apart in one area: our approach to warranties. Even though he would keep his cars going for 20 years, he had a very sharp understanding of what should be his responsibility, and what was down to the vendor.

Actually, that’s an understatement. Woe betide the firm whose slipshod customer handling captured his attention. Once the horn-rimmed specs and the Brylcreemed bonce were aimed in their direction, he would pursue them relentlessly, his measured drawl torturing their receptionists until they actually did put him through to the MD or the Company Secretary (which incidentally is still quite a good one to try, since chancers seldom know enough about company law and structure to try that route).

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Nvidia and ARM forced to bail out battery makers

Friday, November 11th, 2011

ARM and Nvidia are major mobile players, so it pays to listen when the firms announce new technologies. The latest developments from both serve up an interesting similarity with regards to how these companies are tackling one of the biggest annoyances of the modern smartphone: inefficient batteries.

ARM’s recent announcement, big.LITTLE, pairs one of its high-end Cortex A15 MPCore chips alongside an entry-level Cortex A7, which consumes much less power. It’s designed to seamlessly takes over when a device is tackling low-intensity tasks, so the power-sucking A15 is reserved for intensive games and apps.

Nvidia’s Tegra 3 chipset, meanwhile, uses a near-identical approach: the four cores on the main chip can be turned on and off to tackle everything from basic web browsing to high-end games but, if the phone’s in standby mode or you’re running low-power apps, those four cores will shut down, with processing power provided by a “Companion Core”. It’s based on the same Cortex A9 used by the main Tegra 3 chip but, crucially, it runs at 500MHz instead of 1.4GHz. (more…)

Google must get a grip on the Android orphans

Friday, October 28th, 2011

We may have griped about the problems we had upgrading our iPhones to iOS 5, but at least those old handsets are being upgraded to Apple’s latest OS. A new piece of research published in the US suggests the majority of Android handset owners are being left behind by the ever-evolving Google operating system.

The research, by Michael DeGusta from TheUnderstatement.com, tracked every Android handset released in the US before July 2010, and then recorded how many of them had been updated to the latest version of the OS. The results were startling.

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Photoshop-style Content-Aware Fill, for free, on your phone

Thursday, October 27th, 2011

We’ve covered Adobe Photoshop CS5’s stunning Content-Aware Fill feature on the blog before, as it’s an undoubted head-turner: the ability to draw around an unwanted object in your photo and, with a bit of tech trickery, watch it disappear, with the gap filled by the app’s best guess as to what should be there instead.

That’s the kind of feature you expect to find on paid-for software such as Photoshop CS5 and Photoshop Elements, but there’s an app that’ll do the same thing for free on Android and iOS devices – TouchRetouch. Here’s how it’s worked its magic on one of my holiday snaps, with a couple of inconveniently-placed tourists removed from in front of this Cretan ruin:

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Apple vs Google: the clash of the cowards

Thursday, September 8th, 2011

Google’s motto may be “don’t be evil” — but when it comes to confronting Apple, it seems “see no evil” is the rule.

For while Apple has been unleashing a patent war against manufacturers of Android devices such as HTC and Samsung, Google has – publicly at least – turned a blind eye, appearing less keen to rock the boat than the captain of the QE2.

Apple has hardly qualified for the George Cross either, picking its fights with licensees rather than Google itself, even though many of the disputed patents appear to relate directly to Android.

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Samsung Galaxy Note review: first look

Monday, September 5th, 2011

Bravely stepping into the no-man’s land between phones and tablets, Samsung’s 5.3in smartphone, the Galaxy Note, attempts to bridge the divide between the 4.3in Galaxy S II and the newly announced Galaxy Tab 7.7.

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