Archive for January 30th, 2011

Xperia Play – Sony Ericsson Play Station Phone preview

Thinking back a while ago when I got my first console and the tons of fun it brought with itself, I can’t help but shed a tear of joy. I also remember when I got my first time around to play with a Play Station and I still remember the game as well – Tekken. Hours over hours of fun and of course cash were poured into those activities so when it was about time, I couldn’t help but get excited as a young girl before prom night when I first heard of the Sony Ericsson Play Station phone.

It appears that the people over at Engadget got lucky when talking about the Xperia Play as it’s named, as they did receive one to get a preview done. I’ll try to keep things short and give you a basic rundown of what you can expect from this latest addition to the Sony Ericsson Xperia line.

The first thing that popped into my eyes was the Android OS version it was running, namely Gingerbread. The UI is the standard from SE, read as “it chews heavily on the resources”. The layout is being dominated by the 4 inch display, which this time around has multi-touch support. SE claims that thanks to the Bravia engine image quality is highly increased, and in the test videos this seems to have been confirmed. Keeping on the display it does have a native resolution of 854 x 480 pixels and houses 5 screens which are easily customizable.

On  the bottom you’ll get to find the standard 4 buttons, which in this preview model don’t seem to be set up quite correctly just yet. Under the hood you will find the yet unconfirmed Qualcomm MSM 8655 chipset, the Adreno 205 GPU,  802.11n WiFi, Bluetooth and 512 MB of RAM. The device has a front facing camera and a proximity sensor and on the back you’ll see the 5 MP camera along with LED flash. On the side of the device we can find the two standard buttons from the Play Station, namely “L” and “R” and between them the volume rocker. The top houses the power button and a 3.5 mm headphone jack.

In the preview we get the chance to see the device in action and despite the fact that it still isn’t really finished yet, it does move along through the menus quite nicely. The first few glimpses of the new Play Station app don’t show anything more than we knew until now. I consider that you can’t really do a proper preview of the device just yet, as there are no games out for it at the time being. Despite that, the device did manage to run a few games through an emulator, yet the experience seemed choppy at times.

Overall the device looks promising and it might come with a lot more features once it’s done. I do like the general idea when considering all the design and hardware choices and now the only thing left to do is wait for it to be launched. Sony Ericsson did any give any more details regarding this at the time, but I’m pretty sure that after MWC we will get to find out a launch date for it. Until next time, I’ll be constantly mailing Sony Ericsson to send one over to me as well.1

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January 30th, 2011 Catalin Mengheris

Posted in Android News, Android Phone

Google Android Market improvements incoming

The number of reasons for which a new user would want to buy a smartphone cannot really be specified. As most phones running around carriers and retailers have pretty similar specs, most of the time the choice comes down to seeing what operating system a device is running, what are the options of updating it and what kind of support the manufacturer offers for the product. But one of the key features is obviously related to what sort of applications you can get for your device, how will you pay for them and how could they improve your overall experience with the said smartphone.

Android market has seen its fair share of improvements over the past few months. Considering that in August of last year it crossed 100,000 applications uploaded on it by developers, it’s good to see that there is quite a lot to choose from. Still Google isn’t that pleased by the income the Android market has been generating according to Eric Chu, Google’s Android Platform Manager. In a recent Q&A which occurred at the Inside Social Apps conference in San Francisco, Eric Chu stated that a large amount of changes will be coming to the market in the following few months.

If these upcoming changes are for the better or for the worse that’s up to you to decide but overall I’ve been quite impressed by Google’s work on increasing the quality of the services the Android market provides. As such one of the new elements will be an In App Payment System which will allow developers to create add-on content for their applications. These add-ons can range from extra levels for a game or different skins or themes for an application. Although this might seem pretty good on paper, we might see a new avalanche of applications which will be half-way done and available freely on the market, but in order to unlock the full potential of the said program, we’ll have to cough up the cash. In a way it’s a good move since this will drastically reduce the amount of “applications” the market displays which largely are either themes or skins.

Carrier Billing is the other improvement which Google is planning on adding to the Android Market. In case some of you remember that a few weeks ago I did a small review for Vodafone’s Application Market, this was a feature already introduced by Vodafone. This will help a lot of users to purchase applications a lot easier but unless some sort of protection to stop your kids from going on a shopping spree with your smartphone. Improving User Discovery of applications in the Android market is another large concern which will be addressed in the upcoming updates. This will help users search through pages of applications more easily and get more relevant results on their searches. I have high hopes for this one at least because we are talking about Google – and we know where they started making money from right?

HTML 5 applications and Added Social features are two big improvements which are coming during this year as well. The first step regarding HTML 5 apps is the obvious benefits this will bring not only to developers but also to the end-user as the apps will be sharing code with both the desktop as well as the mobile browsers. As for the added social features, just think that there must be a reason for which your applications can access your Address Book. In my opinion, apps will have an easier job of connecting to your friend and/or family as well in the future.

If we are to look at all the changes this year is about to bring us, it’s safe to say that there are tons of improvements which will be hitting the Android market as well as us – the user. Until next time, I’ll keep searching for some new themes.1

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January 30th, 2011 Catalin Mengheris

Posted in Android Apps, Android News

Samsung announces new Galaxy line

Just like it happened a few days ago when Sony Ericsson was hugging all the news, this time around it seems that it’s Samsung’s time to take over this little section of our humble webpage. Just after taking a quick look at the Samsung Giorgio Armani Galaxy S I decided to shed some light on the latest additions to the Galaxy line. Samsung has to be happy with how well the Galaxy S did, considering that it did sell in over 10 million units during the course of 7 months, and considering that people come to like the line and what it stood for, it’s good to see that they will be investing some more time and effort into further developing this line.

For anyone who had any doubts regarding the success of the Galaxy series, 4 new Android smartphones with the Samsung logo will be appearing in the near future as Samsung did announce that these devices will be grabbing the spotlight in February at the Mobile World Congress. Samsung claims that these new devices are being launched to cover all the holes, read as people to own a Samsung smartphone, which the Galaxy S left unfilled. I am sort of intrigued by this decision of Samsung to head for more of a mid-range series with these 4 new Android powered devices. This comes mainly as LG, the other big manufacturer in South Korea, has been in the spotlight recently thanks to their new series of high end devices coming out and apparently moving a touch away from the mid-range sector.

These new handsets are the Samsung Galaxy Ace, Galaxy Fit, Galaxy Gio and Galaxy Mini. By taking a closer look at each one of these devices it’s easy to spot that they will be mid-range devices targeted at a much more specific clientele than the Galaxy S. The Samsung Galaxy Ace will come with a 3.5 inch HVGA TFT-LCD display with a resolution of 320 x 480, a 5 MP camera with LED flash, an 800 MHz processor and Android 2.2 Froyo. Samsung Galaxy Fit is set to come out with a 3.3 inch QVGA TFT-LCD display, which will have a native resolution of 240 x 320, a 5 MP camera and a 600 MHz processor to power it along.

The Samsung Galaxy Gio seems rather similar to the Ace, as it will come with a 3.2 inch HVGA TFT-LCD display with a resolution of 320 x 480 pixels and an 800 MHz CPU, but this time around with a 3 MP camera. The last one, but not the least, of the line is the Galaxy Mini which will see the light of day wearing a 3.14 inch display capable of 320 x 240 pixels and a 600 MHz processor. All of these devices will be running Android 2.2 Froyo and will have Samsung’s TouchWiz UI and will have support for micro SD cards of up to 32 GB.

Samsung claims that it will be launching all of these devices in Europe, China, India and Russia. As I said it earlier, it’s obvious that Samsung is trying to cover all the holes which were left by the Galaxy S. I for one am rather intrigued in what this new line will bring and what the pricing for these devices will be. Considering that the LG Optimus One P500 can be bought for around 170 Euros (230 US Dollars) contract free, these new devices will have quite the opponent for the mid-range sector. Until next time, start putting away some money if you do wish to enter the world of Android smartphones.1

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January 30th, 2011 Catalin Mengheris

Posted in Android News

Samsung Giorgio Armani Galaxy S

Some time ago I do remember when looking around the “interwebs” that I was in a way annoyed by the fact that all Android smartphones and that smartphones in general look the same. There is no manufacturer out there ready to push the envelope, ready to innovate, mainly because they all work on the same premise – if it isn’t broken, don’t fix it. That’s probably the main reason I did enjoy the Samsung W899 previewed some time ago, I think it was in December, which did bring something new to this world of black slabs. This is the main reason I enjoy any device which manages to stand out from the crowd even if the changes seems small at the beginning. Taking a simple look at the Sony Ericsson Arc would put my point into perspective.

As such, I was intrigued initially when they first announced the Samsung Giorgio Armani Galaxy S because for some awkward reason I was hoping for a completely new smartphone to come out. Alas I was somewhat disappointed when I saw that the main change was the fact that they stamped a “Giorgio Armani” logo on it. Sure some of the curves and lines have been redone, but it’s nothing worth mentioning mainly because once you go past the skin you will find the same specs underneath it.

Talking about specs, we have HSDPA 900/ 1900/ 2100 network support along with EDGE/ GPRS 850/ 900/ 1800/ 1900. The display remains unchanged, and I don’t say that as a bad thing, in that it’s the same 4 inch Super AMOLED with mDNIe (Mobile Digital Natural Image engine). The main camera is still the 5 MP cam which we had on the simple Samsung Galaxy S device, with auto-focus, action shot, cartoon shot and smile shot options, so nothing new here either. Video player and recorder can go up to 1280 x 720 at 30 frames per second and support a pretty large array of formats. The operating system has remained unchanged, being that it’s Android 2.2 Froyo and here I do have some nagging to do as Gingerbread is much better optimized for Super AMOLED displays, so I wonder why they didn’t at least update that one.

Powering this device is the same 1 GHz processor and as for storage goes, we have 16 GB onboard storage which can be increased via a micro SD card of up to 32 GB. There have been some modifications when looking at the UI and considering that most carriers are giving it away for free with 2 year contracts, it might be a good step up, but other than that, if you do have a Galaxy S, you are not missing out on anything. If you are in the market wanting to get a new device, you can pick up the Samsung Giorgio Armani Galaxy S for free with 40 £ subscription at Vodafone UK. These plans will give you roughly 1200 minutes and 3000 texts a month along with 750 MB of internet traffic.

Rounding this all up, I might say that this seems like a pretty decent buy and it is a high-end device which has proven it’s worth over the last few months but if you have already a high-end smartphone, you can hang on to it since this doesn’t offer anything new or intriguing. If you are in the market for a new phone and would like a powerful and reliable tool, than you could give this one a try. Until next time, I’ll be busy playing with a Galaxy S and sticking Prada stickers on it while claiming that it’s now worth 500 Euros – I might grab some new device if it goes through J.1

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January 30th, 2011 Catalin Mengheris

Posted in Android News, Android Phone
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2013-05-21 02:18:40