NVIDIA DirectTouch promises more responsive multi-touch experience on Tegra 3 powered Android devices (video)

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  • February 26, 2012 at 4:51 am

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NVIDIA DirectTouch architecture comparison

One of the criticisms against Android over Apple’s iOS, is that it doesn’t offer the same level of multitouch responsiveness and UI smoothness. This perceived ‘lagginess’ has been the subject of much debate, but we won’t go into that right now.

Well NVIDIA has been pimping its newest 4-PLUS-1 quad-core (plus fifth power-saving core) Tegra 3 system-on-a-chip (SoC) and created a new mobile touch technology, named DirectTouch, promising to improve multitouch experience. The DirectTouch architecture offloads part of the touch panel processing to the Tegra 3 CPU cores, reducing lag and increasing touch samples per second. This should improve user interface responsiveness and accuracy and of course gaming experience, without any expense on battery life.
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PSA: Olympus OM-D E-M5 now up for pre-order from Amazon UK with free battery grip; shipping April 1st

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  • February 24, 2012 at 6:50 pm

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Olympus OM-D E-M5 MFT digital camera - black - top

Amazon UK now has the newly announced Olympus OM-D E-M5 up for pre-order here. The 12-50mm lens kit goes for £1,150, while you can get the body only for £999 here.

Though British Micro Four Thirds friends will have to shell out more than their counterparts across the pond, Olympus is offering a nice sweetener to the deal. Anyone ordering the Olympus E-M5 in the UK before the 30th of April will get the HLD-6 battery holder and grip for free. The HLD-6 kit contains both the landscape grip and the portrait grip with extra battery holder. Considering that otherwise you would be looking at around £200-250 for the grip only, it’s not such a bad deal.
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Samsung Galaxy B bezel-free smartphone rumored

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  • February 24, 2012 at 5:15 pm

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Samsung thin bezel concept smartphone in video

Would you like an edge-to-edge-screened bezel-free smartphone with that? Yes please! Apparently someone up there has been listening to our wishes. After Samsung promised that we will be getting at least a full day’s worth of battery life from our smartphones in 2012, another of our wishes could become true this year.

The rumor comes with a good pinch of salt, but if a Korean publication proves right, Samsung maybe preparing a new smartphone with a very thin bezel that would make our dreams of edge-to-edge displays true. The device is named, at least for now, Galaxy B and it may emerge in the third quarter of the year.
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Samsung Galaxy S II tops 20 million sold units in ten months

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  • February 23, 2012 at 8:57 am

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Samsung Galaxy S II

Samsung is currently head of the Android camp when it comes to selling its goods and that’s in no small smart thanks to the success of its Galaxy S series and the current flagship, the Galaxy S II handset. Now we can put a number on that success, with Samsung announcing that it has sold over 20 million Galaxy S II units in the ten months since the 4.3-inch Super AMOLED Plus smartphone has been in around. The Galaxy S II was announced at MWC 2011 in February and launched in late April last year in Asia, it was available in most European countries by May but only reached the US last September.
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LG Optimus 4X HD official: 4.7-inch quad-core Tegra 3 smartphone with Android 4.0

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  • February 23, 2012 at 5:38 am

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LG Optimus 4X HD Tegra 3 Android smartphone

It’s no secret that we will be seeing a lot of Tegra 3 devices at MWC 2012, but LG has just beat everyone else to officially announce the first quad-core smartphone, named Optimus 4X HD (a.k.a. LG X3). Looking past LG’s lengthy naming convention, the new smartphone will certainly become the flagship for its 2012 lineup. It’s a massive 4.7-inch device with a 720p HD IPS LCD display running on the 1.5GHz quad-core (or 4-PLUS-1 as NVIDIA calls it) Tegra 3 SoC. Inside that 8.9mm thin body, you’ll find 1GB of RAM, 16GB of built-in storage and a not too shabby 2,150mAh battery.

The Optimus 4X HD will be running Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and we’ve already seen that Tegra 3 SoC grabbing a 4,412 Quadrant score, handily beating other ICS devices like the Galaxy Nexus (full review here).
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Gadget lust: five new official videos on the Olympus OM-D E-M5

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  • February 22, 2012 at 3:54 pm

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Olympus E-M5 Micro Four Thirds digital camera front

Olympus Australia has posted five new videos covering every facet of the new Olympus OM-D E-M5 Micro Four Thirds mirrorless camera. The demo videos cover the 5-axis in-body image stabilization, the camera’s superfast autofocus with 3D object tracking, 9 frames per second burst shooting and the new electronic viewfinder.

We’ve especially noted how much Olympus has improved on the software for the camera. There are three different styles of information overlay in the EVF and some innovative creative controls, like an adjustable highlight and shadow curve. The latest info point to an early-April shipping date for the camera, which can be pre-ordered now in the US here and here, UK here and Germany here.
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Google Docs for Android update brings real-time collaborative editing and rich text

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  • February 22, 2012 at 3:00 pm

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Google Docs Android app

Google has just announced a new version of its Google Docs for Android app, that won’t just let you edit documents on the go, but will also allow you to co-edit them in realtime with other users.

Google is mirroring the same desktop experience on Android mobile devices, so provided you have an active data connection on your smartphone or tablet, you’ll be able to see live updates in documents as others type or their computers or mobile devices and you can easily join in or invite others to collaborate on your own documents.
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Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 SoC benchmarked, wipes the floor with last generation chips

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  • February 22, 2012 at 10:56 am

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Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 Mobile Development Platform - MSM8960

The rising popularity of mobile devices has made some system on chips (SoCs) household names. One of these, is Qualcomm’s Snapdragon family of SoCs found in some of the finest smartphones and tablets. Qualcomm has been talking about its new Snapdragon S4 (“Krait”) architecture based on a 28 nm process for some time now and we’re expecting to finally see devices running on the SoC at Mobile World Congress next week. Yet, it had been unclear what the performance advantage would be from the new architecture.

The fellows over at AnandTech recently got to take home a Qualcomm S4 Mobile Development Platform, which is a posh name for a test smartphone, containing the first chip from the family, an MSM8960. The MSM8960 has dual 1.5GHz Krait cores, an Adreno 225 GPU and integrated support for practically all wireless radio technologies out there, including HSPA+ and LTE.
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Microsoft shows off Windows 8 SkyDrive cloud integration: Metro style app, sync and large file support

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  • February 20, 2012 at 2:05 pm

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Windows 8 SkyDrive integration - Metro style app

We’ve been following the development updates from the Windows 8 team for a while now and we had no doubts that Microsoft would be adding some sort of cloud integration into the new operating system. We are users of Microsoft’s SkyDrive cloud storage service and although you can already mount it as a network drive on Windows PCs you had so far been limited on the functionality and use.

Windows 8 will be offering much tighter integration with SkyDrive, actually in pretty equivalent terms to what Apple is doing with iCloud in the upcoming OS X Mountain Lion.
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Olympus E-M5 destroys the PEN E-P3 in high-ISO tests

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  • February 20, 2012 at 10:09 am

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Olympus OM-D E-M5 MFT camera in black side with 12-50mm lens

We’ve been covering the Olympus OM-D E-M5 Micro Four Thirds (MFT) digital camera ever since it was initially rumored and following the official announcement two weeks ago, we now have a long wait until it finally ships this April. We’ve already done a spec comparison to other high-end mirrorless cameras and we’ve seen how it sizes-up against the competition, but of bigger importance is how it actually performs and especially in low-light — a sticking point for the otherwise excellent MFT format.

The first high-ISO test of the Olympus E-M5 showed some promise, with little noise or artifacts up to ISO 3,200. During the weekend, Four-Thirds User has posted a high-ISO comparison between the E-M5 and the previous generation Olympus PEN E-P3. As previously, the test was done with a pre-production version of the E-M5 but the results are impressive.
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Google Goggles app can now recognize amongst 45,000 types of banknotes

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  • February 19, 2012 at 12:06 pm

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Google Goggles app currency recognition

Google’s Goggles app is striving to become a Swiss army knife for globetrotters. Using your device’s camera and an active data connection, Goggles can recognize landmarks and famous artworks and more recently it can even translate text on the fly.

The always-active Google development team has been adding even more capabilities to Goggles and it has just enabled the app to recognize between more than 45,000 types of currency from over 300 countries. Currently the app is limited to banknotes, and as usual you just take a picture of the note and it will come back with the type, amount and links to further information.
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Purported iPad 3 leaked photo shows larger lens 8-megapixel camera and gentler curvature

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  • February 19, 2012 at 10:31 am

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iPad 3 leaked back with new camera and gentler curvature

We’re expecting an iPad 3 announcement early next month. We won’t be repeating all the earlier rumors in this post but you can check our timeline below. One of these rumors points to the obvious inclusion of a higher resolution rear camera with a bigger lens. So today, a Chinese publication claims to have images of the iPad 3 showing the refreshed back of the device.
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LG Optimus Vu is official: 5-inch 4:3 IPS display, 1.5GHz dual-core SoC, LTE and 8.5mm thick

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  • February 19, 2012 at 4:38 am

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LG Optimus Vu 5.3-inch Android smartphone held by model pointing to maps

LG’s entrance in the phablet (phone/tablet) space is now official. The LG Optimus Vu has been announced today on the company’s Korean website. The stocky 5-inch device has a unique 4:3 aspect ratio with a 1024×768 display resolution. The Optimus Vu goes head-on against Samsung’s 5.3-inch 16:9 aspect ratio 1280×800 resolution Galaxy Note.

The Optimus Vu runs on a 1.5GHz dual-core Qualcomm SoC and has an 8-megapixel rear camera, 32GB of built-in storage and support for LTE connectivity. Similar to the Galaxy Nexus, it’s also boasting stylus support for taking notes, annotating images and documents and drawing. It will be running Android 2.3 Gingerbread on release in early March but LG is promising an Ice Cream Sandwich update within 3 months.
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