New leaked Galaxy S3 photo and manual collaborate to Galaxy Nexus-style device with home button

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  • April 27, 2012 at 9:01 am

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Samsung Galaxy S3 leaked photo with home button

Another day, another Samsung Galaxy S3 (a.k.a. next Galaxy) smartphone rumor. We’ve already seen a slightly varying set of specs and some widely different purported photos of the Galaxy S III, including ones where the the phone’s insides were supposedly in a dummy case.

Today is the first time that we have two collaborating pieces of evidence. First at the top you can see a photo that was received by PhoneArena from an anonymous tipster. The first eyesore is the physical home button and fixed options/multitasking and back buttons, which go against the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich playbook.
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Google X Lab founder takes photo with Project Glass, pretends to upload it on Google+

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  • April 26, 2012 at 4:21 pm

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Sebastian Thrun wearing Project Glass headset at Charlie Rose interview

We’ve already seen Google’s Project Glass augmented reality glasses in public, worn by Google co-founder Sergey Brin at a charity event, however this is the first time that we are seeing them on video and supposedly in action.

Google X Lab’s (the company’s incubator of fantastical futuristic products) founder and head, Sebastian Thrun, was at an interview with Charlie Rose, wearing his team’s latest prototype. This is of course a pair of Project Glass eyewear. On their previous appearance, Sergey didn’t actively use the headset, but Sebastian has been a bit more forthcoming.
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Samsung Galaxy S III turns up in benchmark with dual-core Exynos 4212 SoC besting the best of Android

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  • April 25, 2012 at 5:14 pm

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Samsung Galaxy SIII AnTuTu benchmark and specs

Samsung has managed to build a lot of anticipation for its next Galaxy S smartphone, the often-speculated Galaxy S III, forcing us to bunch up the almost daily rumors into lengthy weekly pieces.

With the London Unpacked event now only one week away, we’re starting to see even more evidence of the new device. It has already popped up in videos, wearing a dummy case though, and in a couple of benchmarks.

This latest leak however is pretty tasty as, if proven right, it might have given us a full list of specs for the Galaxy S III. The smartphone has now popped-up in the popular AnTuTu benchmark and has even managed to top the charts, beating the quad-core Tegra 3 powered Asus Transformer Prime tablet.
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Sad panda: HTC will favor thinness over battery life

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  • April 23, 2012 at 4:12 am

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Sad panda HTC

We were truly hoping that 2012 would be the year of all-day battery life for our gadgets. There was even good indication for that following Samsung’s commitment to the same goal and the improved efficiency of the latest generation mobile SoCs, like the NVIDIA Tegra 3, with up to 61 percent lower power consumption than Tegra 2.

As we’ve said before, manufacturers have to strike a good balance between battery life and portability, avoiding to get into the extreme thinness wars. Unfortunately however HTC seems to have been hanging out with the wrong crowd.
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A future with gadgets made of asteroid-mined minerals and Google’s bosses’ plan for space domination

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  • April 22, 2012 at 3:36 pm

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Artist's impression of Hayabusa space probe over asteroid Itokawa

What do Google’s Larry Page and Eric Schmidt, director James Cameron, Microsoft alumnus Charles Simonyi, billionaire Ross Perot Jr. and X Prize founder Peter Diamandis have in common? Apparently an aspiration in mining asteroids, and making even more money of course.

After conquering the world-wide web, your phone and your smartphone, the Google duo has outer space ambitions and in their plan they will be joined, among others, by the above named billionaires and visionaries and a few former NASA employees.

The group of investors have formed a new company, named Planetary Resources that will be unveiled this coming Tuesday by Peter Diamandis and former NASA Mars mission manager Chris Lewicki. Planetary resources said in a short press release:
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Samsung Galaxy S III rumors weekend overview: hands-on video, specs and did Amazon Germany spill the beans?

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  • April 22, 2012 at 10:02 am

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Samsung Galaxy S III (dummy casing) side-by-side with Galaxy Nexus

Not a week passes without a couple of new rumors and purported leaks of the upcoming Samsung Galaxy S flagship smartphone. Though Samsung hasn’t confirmed its name yet, we’ll assume for now that it will be called the Galaxy S III, following the naming convention of its predecessors.

So here’s a summary of this week’s rumors in an easy to digest form.

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GSM Galaxy Nexus IMM76I Android 4.0.4 update may fix your connectivity woes, here’s how to get it now

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  • April 22, 2012 at 4:00 am

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GSM Galaxy Nexus IMM76I Android 4.0.4 update

When finally the Android 4.0.4 IMM76D update reached GSM/HSPA+ Galaxy Nexus owners, some reported occasional GSM connectivity issues and signal loss. So after only a couple of weeks, Google is already pushing an incremental over-the-air update to Galaxy Nexus devices that maintains the Android version at 4.0.4 but improves the build number slightly at IMM76I.

As usual Google isn’t mentioning what this update improves and fixes, but users that have received the update are reporting that it does indeed fix the connectivity bug. Reports are also coming in that there could be some other minor fixes as well, but nothing confirmed yet.
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Valve’s Handbook for New Employees: managers worldwide tremble

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  • April 21, 2012 at 6:19 pm

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Valve Handbook for New Employees

We got a taste of what it’s like to work at Valve, the successful game software company behind Half-Life, Portal but also Steam, last week through a blog post by developer Michael Abrash. Though this latest news doesn’t add anything to the company’s wearable computing research plans, it does give us another glimpse inside the company and another dose of envy.

To refresh, Valve has no hierarchy, as illustrated by the original post above, which might be hard to comprehend at first but is an incredibly smart, and awesome, idea. You see Valve, as most tech companies should be, is all about creativity and ingenuity that risks getting buried under typical company structures. So to get new joiners up to speed to its idiosyncrasies, Valve has created a “handbook”, which has now been leaked, and you can have a look at here.
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Zooey Deschanel and Samuel L. Jackson take Siri for a ride in new iPhone 4S ads (video)

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  • April 17, 2012 at 4:18 am

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Zooey Deschanel in iPhone 4S Siri commercial

Apple marketing campaigns have included dancing figures and loads of product shots with catchy tunes in the background, but have been light on celebrity clout. Well the two latest Siri ads that have just aired have certainly upped the ante, featuring Zooey Deschanel and Samuel L. Jackson.

Good fits for Apple? We think so. The two Hollywood stars are seen having intimate conversations with their iPhone 4S and the phone’s Siri digital assistant in their own unique relaxed coolness.
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Valve Software investigating wearable computing

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  • April 16, 2012 at 5:20 pm

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Valve Software

Take note as you will be hearing much more of wearable computing in the years to come. Google had just announced early this month its own exciting project to create a pair of self-contained augmented reality glasses, named Project Glass. So now, it would be as good a time as ever for other companies to share their own plans and research on the subject.

Valve Software, best known for the games Half-Life and Portal, has just come out, through a blog post by developer Michael Abrash, that it’s also started doing some R&D on wearable computing. But first a brief intro on Michael, he has been in tech for over thirty years and has worked at Microsoft as the graphics lead for Windows NT, then at Id working on Quake, then working on the Xbox and finally on Intel’s Larrabee GPU architecture. In two words, he is a real heavy weight.
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Samsung sends invites for May 3rd event in London to unveil next Galaxy smartphone

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  • April 16, 2012 at 3:27 am

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Samsung May 3 2012 "next Galaxy" Unpacked London event invite

After a lot of speculation and plenty of possible date-throwing, Samsung has started sending out invitations for an Unpacked event on May 3rd in London. The invite just reads Come and meet the next Galaxy, so this could have possibly been any Galaxy smartphone or tablet. However, the Korean DDaily has confirmed with a Samsung official that this will be the next flagship Samsung Galaxy smartphone, a.k.a. the long-rumored Galaxy S III (though name still remains unconfirmed and Samsung could pull an Apple-type stunt and just call it Galaxy S).

Nothing more in terms of information. Though we can reiterated the standing rumors for the Galaxy S III, which include a large screened device with the first non-PenTile Super AMOLED Plus HD 720×1280 screen, a quad-core Samsung Exynos 4412 processor or the dual-core 2GHz Exynos 5250, just 7mm of thickness and some space-age material.
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PSA: HTC One X is protected by the original Corning Gorilla Glass, not Gorilla Glass 2

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  • April 15, 2012 at 10:00 am

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HTC One X white on sand

Corning had announced the newest version of its popular fortified glass, Gorilla Glass 2, at CES this year. The second version has the same scratch and impact resistance as its predecessor despite being 20% thinner. Corning later announced on February 27 that it begun initial shipment of the new glass to its customers and that we should expect manufacturers to start revealing products using it by the by second quarter of the year.

It has been assumed that the new HTC One X smartphone is already using the new Gorilla Glass 2 to protect is gorgeous 4.7-inch 720p super LCD2 screen and in fact, a couple of websites have even said so in their reviews.

We’ve got in touch with HTC directly and the company has confirmed that the One X actually uses the original Gorilla Glass and not version 2. It practically plays no significance for end users, since both versions of the glass offer the same level of protection, though we though you should know for the sake of completeness. The HTC One X’s screen is optically laminated to the glass, eliminating any gap between them and bringing the screen closer to the edge anyway.
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Sharp expanding production of first IGZO LCD panels, too late for the iPad 3 but in time for a 7-inch iPad?

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  • April 14, 2012 at 5:27 am

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Sharp Kameyama plant entrance

Sharp has just announced that it’s ramping up production of the world’s first LCD panels using advanced indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO) semiconductors at its Kameyama Plant No. 2 in order to meet increased demand. Production of the panels began in March 2012 and the IGZO technology allows Sharp to produce LCDs with high pixel density but lower energy consumption because of the smaller thin-film transistors and increased pixel transparency.

Sharp was long rumored as an Apple partner providing the retina displays in the 3rd generation iPad. However as the IGZO technology was too young, the company couldn’t yet mass-produce the 10-inch 2048×1536 panels required for the new iPad. Apple finally went with the same IPS LCD amorphous silicon panel technology as in the iPad 2, but the new iPad retina panel now consumes 2.5-times the power at the same brightness. To compensate Apple has loaded the new iPad with almost double the amount of battery, meaning that it takes much longer to recharge the iPad 3, and it’s also slightly thicker and heavier.
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How I learned to love the supergrid: pan-European electricity grid could get a push forward

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  • April 13, 2012 at 12:08 pm

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Supergrid for Europe map

Contrary to the Stanley Kubrick reference there is actually nothing wrong with building a supergrid. In fact, it’s actually a fantastic idea. A supergrid is an electric power grid on a mega-scale that connects various countries together, moving electricity from where there is excess supply to where there is demand.

The supergrid in question is an envisaged European high-voltage direct current (HVDC) cable power grid connecting different regional countries, Iceland and even North Africa and the Middle East.

We’ve talked about the supergrid being a great idea, and connecting different countries together in one big grid means: better energy security and reliability, better and more efficient use of the region’s renewable energy resources and energy generation capacity, which would translate to lower cost of electricity throughout Europe.
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