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Showing posts with label Samsung. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Samsung. Show all posts

Saturday, 10 March 2012

Galaxy Tab 2 And IPad Comparison


Samsung and Apple are into court battles because of the claims of the latter copying the designs of the former. The Galaxy Tabs are one of those products that said to have been copied from the iPad. But amidst the controversies, it had enjoyed some success behind Apple. It provided some alternative for those who either have no money to spend on shinier devices or just hate all products by Steve Jobs.
Users are expecting another product when the Galaxy Tabs 2 was announced. This was during the time when the rumors of the release of the iPad 3. But when the news about the specifications of the new tablets by Samsung came out, there was nothing to be impressed about.
All the hardware remained the same as the original. There is the dual-core NVIDIA Tegra 2 which is the same with the one on the Galaxy Tab 7.0 Plus. This processor is not an improvement over the original's Exynos processor. Actually, the Exynos is faster at is clocked at 1.2 GHz while the Tegra 2 is clocked at only 1 GHz.
The screen resolution is also the same which is depressing for Galaxy Tab loyalists. This is probably because of the news that the iPad 3 will have retina display and their favorite tablet has no improvements on this area. The 10-inch version will remain at 800 by 1280 pixels and the seven-inch version will stay at 600 by 1024 pixels.
While tablets are now transitioning to 4G LTE connectivity, the Galaxy Tab 2 remains at 3G. Just like the original, you have a choice between 3G and Wi-Fi and Wi-Fi only models. The speeds are the same as original: 21 MB/s for download and 5.76 MB/s for upload.
The only improvement on the Galaxy Tab 2 is the interface as it now sports the latest Android version, Ice Cream Sandwich. This version is the best looking version of Google's mobile OS besides offering a slew of new features. Ice Cream Sandwich is Android's answer to the simple elegance of Apples iOS 5.
With all of these, it seems like the Galaxy Tab 2 is just the original upgraded to the latest Android OS. ICS is good but we would have expected something better in terms of hardware from a company such as Samsung like what ASUS did with their Transformer Pad. There could have been added functions such as NFC or, as mentioned, support for 4G LTE. No prices have been released yet for these devices. But there are rumors that they will be sold at a lesser price than the original. If this is true then the Tabs are worth a look in terms of practicality. But performance wise, the new tablets by Samsung are depressing.

Monday, 5 March 2012

Samsung Galaxy S II update on March 15th


Samsung confirmed back in December that its well received range of Galaxy smartphones and tablets would be receiving an update to Ice Cream Sandwich, promising upgrades in time for Q1. There have also been several leaks of test builds for devices such as the Galaxy S II and Galaxy Note, indicating that steady progress was being made.


Sunday, 4 March 2012

New Samsung Galaxy Note 10.1 with Android 4.0, dual-core chipset


Samsung on Monday took the wraps off another new addition to its Android tablet lineup, the Galaxy Note 10.1. Like the supersized “phablet” it joins in the Galaxy Note family, the Note 10.1 includes Samsung’s S Pen stylus for drawing, note-taking, highlighting and much more. Sadly, this still isn’t the high-definition slate we’ve been waiting for so it looks like Samsung is shooting to launch its Retina-like tablet later this year. The 10-inch Galaxy Note runs Samsung’s TouchWiz UI atop Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich and includes a 1.4GHz dual-core processor along with the same cameras found in the original Galaxy Tab 10.1. In fact, the Note 10.1 essentially seems like a redesigned Galaxy Tab 10.1 with an S Pen and a new processor, which is peculiar since the Galaxy Tab 2 (10.1) is pretty much a Galaxy Tab 10.1 as well. Announced alongside the Galaxy Note 10.1 is the Galaxy S WiFi 4.2, a Wi-Fi-only device aimed at gaming

Friday, 2 March 2012

HTC One X for AT&T pictures, video, and hands-on preview

Gallery Photo: HTC One X hands-on
HTC's new flagship is here: the HTC One X is in the vanguard of not just the new "One" lineup, but of HTC's mini-revival for 2012. Based on our brief time with it, we think the phone will manage to pull off both of those heavy tasks, though whether it will be enough to fend off Samsung's rumored Galaxy S III is sadly going to be an open question until later this year. For now, the HTC One X impresses on its own terms and specs, and what great specs they are.

The first and most important thing about the One X is its screen: a 4.7-inch 720p "Super LCD 2" panel that is simply better than anything we've seen on the market. It's bright and crisp, of course, but as we turned and twisted the phone we were literally unable to come up with a viewing angle that contained any distortion or discoloration.
4.7 inches is most definitely on the high-end of what we'd consider acceptable for a phone's size, but HTC has managed to craft a device that doesn't feel completely unwieldy in the hand. Part of that is due to the 9.7mm thickness, but most of it comes from the polycarbonate shell that's both grippable and attractive. We'd say that the plastic on the HTC One X is second only to the Lumia 800 (and 900) in terms of material quality, appearance, and overall feel. The rear of the phone is necessarily a wide expanse of the plastic, interrupted mainly by the 8-megapixel lens that juts out just a bit.
HTC chose to keep permanent, capacitive buttons in lieu of the on-screen button of the Galaxy Nexus. In practice it's not problematic, but it is a curious design choice given Google's push to remove the need for physical buttons in ICS. One thing that could be grating to those with small (or even normal) hands is that the power button it located on the top of the device, requiring quite a long reach if you are using the phone with one hand.
The camera takes pictures as quickly as HTC's claimed 0.7-seconds in our testing so far, thanks no doubt to the "HTC Image Chip" that handles much of the image processing work. The f/2.0 aperture makes macro shots easy and better than most anything we've used barring the iPhone 4S. HTC also included a large set of Instagram-like effects that can be applied in real-time as you're composing your shot, but unfortunately it did not include a dedicated physical camera button. HTC also chose to go with a single LED flash instead of two, but told us that it is backed by significantly smarter software that will only light it up as brightly as the situation requires instead of just flashing a blinding ray every time.

HTC's One X also leads the company's Android 4.0 and Sense 4.0 charge, and on both fronts we're pleased with the implementation. Sense in particular is a different beast compared to the previous generations, it's lighter and more sensible than previous efforts and on the whole it's frankly less intrusive. When Sense first debuted on Android, it was common to call it the best of the Android skins and with 4.0 HTC has a chance to take that dubious crown again: there are no more pesters to merge contacts, the dock is customizable and no longer permanently set to annoying defaults, and it matches stock Android's horizontal scrolling on the app launcher.
Multitasking, however, is not quite the stock Ice Cream Sandwich experience. Instead of presenting a vertical list of swipe-able apps, Send 4.0 takes you to an entirely new screen that shows your most recently used apps in a horizontal list that's reminiscent of Windows Phone 7. Each app is angled at around 45 degrees and can be swiped up to quit. Sense 4.0 also uses Dropbox as your cloud-storage solution, which help alleviate the fact that it only contains 16 gigs of onboard storage (32GB in non-US version), but even in today's well-connected world that could be a problem for some. Maybe our favorite feature in the new sense is an upgraded Car experience that pretty much does everything you'd want a car app to do: you can quickly swipe between contacts, Google navigation, and music in a "fat-finger" interface that's simple and intuitive.
Most importantly for the skin and the overall feel of the phone, the Tegra 3 processor has no problems whatsoever driving the phone. Whereas before Sense constantly gave you the feeling that the phone was struggling to keep up with your taps and swipes, with the One X we found little to complain about in terms of lag. We'll have to see if the AT&T LTE variant with it dual-core Qualcomm S4 chip presents the same experience, but early benchmarks for the S4 lead us to be hopeful. The One X has 1GB of RAM and in our brief time with the phone it handled multiple apps without issue.

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