LG is going to launch G pad 8.3 by the end of this year.
LG announced the impending arrival of its G Pad 8.3 tablet, which will officially launch at IFA 2013 next week. The company revealed that the tablet will have an 8.3-inch display screen and run Android Jelly Bean 4.2.2. Unfortunately, while full specs for the device have been provided, we still do not know the price yet — that will be provided when it launches. However, we do know that it will be available worldwide in the fourth quarter of 2013.
LG’s G Pad will come with a 1.7GHz Quad-Core Qualcomm Snapdragon 600 Processor, 16GB worth of memory, 2GB of RAM, dual camera (5MP rear/ 1.3MP front), weigh 338 grams, and come in black or white.
The official announcement of the G Pad had been expected following the discovery of a YouTube ad on the company’s channel. It featured people talking about their experience with current tablet devices offering feedback like they want full HD picture quality, being able to connect to other devices, and that it not be a think device.
The electronic giant’s tablet is its latest G Series device that it hopes will successfully build on the launch of its G2 “superphone”. It touts four key items that it believes will entice consumers to try it out and buy one:
The G Pad has a 4600mAh battery and weighs just 338 grams. When you stack it against the iPad Mini, which boasts a somewhat comparable 7.9-inch display, the G Pad is actually heavier by 38 grams.
Featuring a 1900 x 1200 display at 273 pixels per inch, consumers should find watching movies, playing games, and whatever else they do on the tablet to appear sharp and clear. LG has copied the same attribute that it included with its G Series devices. Compared to the iPad Mini, which has a 1024×768 resolution at 163 pixels per inch, LG seems to have the win in this category. But then again, this comes just days before Apple holds an event in San Francisco where some say that a new iPad is being announced (or maybe not).
LG has implemented a better integration with its QPair app. Through this unique piece of software, the company says that you can see incoming calls and messages. This is interesting in that, while you can’t actually take voice calls on the device, you could respond to them in texts
LG touts that the G Pad includes “real-life benefits” include multitasking with its “slide aside” feature (three-finger swipe), QSlide, which allows you to control up to three different apps without any interruption, and KnockOn, a feature that lets you turn the device on and off just by tapping on it twice.
Okay, so here’s the important part: the tablet is not available yet — it will be sold worldwide starting in the fourth quarter in North America, Europe, and Asia, along with some other regions. It’s also still unclear whether this will be a WiFi only device or available on mobile carriers like Verizon, T-Mobile, AT&T, or Sprint.
Amber Update Will Come To All Windows Phone 8 by September last,says Nokia.
Today Nokia promised owners of its Lumia Windows Phone 8 devices that its “Amber”update will reach all phones by the end of September. The Amber upgrade is a mix of feature improvements that will improve Nokia’s handsets, further setting them apart from devices built by other smartphone OEMs.
Amber contains a photo-editing tool, improved image processing, the ability to snag motion in sequence with “Action Shot,” the acceptance of double-tap input to wake the phone, and improved internal storage reporting.
However, the most important new piece delivered by Amber is “Glance Screen,” a tool that makes your phone’s inactive state more interesting. When your handset is inactive, it will display a clock and battery information. So, you can more quickly interact with your phone without having to do anything at all. You can turn off Glance, of course, or have it switch off after a set amount of time.
In past years, we would now discuss how Amber puts Nokia ahead of Samsung, HTC, and other Windows Phone OEMs (remember Dell?). We don’t have to do that anymore, as Nokia controlsessentially the entire Windows Phone market. Thus, the changes are not as much changes to Nokia’s Windows Phone handsets as they are adaptations to the Windows Phone platform itself. Given that Nokia sells nearly 90 percent of Windows Phone devices, any changes that it makes become de facto official changes.
This is a problem for Microsoft, as it initially ceded flexibility to make changes to Nokia in partial exchange for it adopting the platform. This saved Microsoft’s mobile life, but in the process cost it control: If Nokia can essentially skin Windows Phone to its own contentment, Microsoft is in a material way not in charge of the Windows Phone user experience and design.
Thus, Microsoft either builds a phone itself (there have been rumors), or it bolsters HTC (the only remaining OEM partner with more than a scrape of market share that isn’t Nokia) to get a better grip on its platform.
Whatever the case, if you are a Nokia handset owner, the Amber update will be rolling out depending on your handset and country and likely carrier over the next month.
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News,
Nokia Mobiles
Cube26 brings gesture control technology for Indian SmartPhone makers.
Gesture control is a buzzword on the tips of everyone’s tongues these days, and after Samsung debuted a number of touch-free control features with the Galaxy S4, it’s natural that other OEMs are looking to integrated the same kind of tech into their devices. That tendency has played out well for Cube26, a Santa Clara-based startup.
Cube26 co-founders Saurav Kumar and Aakash Jain have found some interested buyers, starting with six of India’s leading OEMs, including number two smartphone provider Micromax, Intex, Celkon, Zen, iBerry and Lemon Mobile. All told, Cube26 says this represents 25 percent of the Indian smartphone market, which according to recent data, is one of the fastest growing on the planet.
Kumar says
OEMs around the world are looking for new ways to stand out from the crowd, which is what motivated Samsung to come up with its own gesture features to begin with. Cube26 offers a way to do this via licensed software, rather than having to develop it in-house, giving any OEM access to tech perceived as at the cutting edge of mobile products. And unlike Samsung’s version, it doesn’t require specialized hardware; the Galaxy S4 contains two IR cameras to make Air Gesture features work, whereas Cube26′s tech is designed to be used with standard smartphone cameras, as well as other connected devices like smart TVs.
Cube26 offers up a number of gesture features including “Look away to Pause,” “Auto-call” (call starts when phone moved to ear), and “Touch-less Swipe to answer,” which is demoed in the embedded video. All of these need only a front-facing camera to work, and if you’re curious about how the look away feature performs, you can download the startup’s dedicated video player for iOS, a tech demo which Cube26 says has received over 150,000 downloads since its launch in April.
To reflect its increased efforts to sell to mobile companies, Cube26 has also brought on Kunal Ahooja, former CEO of Indian mobile OEM S Mobility as an advisor. Smartphones packing its tech have already rolled out from Micromax (the Canvas 4) and iBerry (the Auxus Nuclea N1), and devices from the remaining new partners will follow shortly, per Kumar.
Others including Israeli startup Umoove and Leap Motion are attempting to capitalize on the newfound interest in gesture tech via partnerships with OEMs, so expect a lot of activity from this space as the land grab continues. Whether or not anyone will actually use hand-waving to control their smartphones long-term, instead of just as a product differentiation gimmick, remains far more uncertain, however.
Future mobiles may build with Carbon instead of rare earth metals.
One of the biggest knocks against cellphones is they require small amounts of rare earth elements: gallium, indium and arsenic, for example, that are both scarce and expensive. But what if you could make a phone out of a more common element, like carbon?
Researchers are taking slow but sure steps toward building the innards of a cellphone out of carbon nanotubes, a structure that resembles a microscopic sheet of chicken wire rolled into a cylinder. These cylinders can be used to either conduct electricity or store energy.
At the Technical University of Denmark, Jakob Wagner and colleagues have found a better way to build carbon nanotubes that could lead to their use as a semiconductor, a key component of all electronic circuit parts found in both cellphones and laptops. Carbon nanotubes have properties of both a metal and a semiconductor, depending on how they are rolled.
“The breakthrough here is that we are able to control the production of nanotubes whether they are metallic or semiconducting,” Wagner said. “That’s important because if you want to use them in cellphones, we have to make sure they are either one or the other. The prospect is to use semiconducting carbon nanotubes as a substitute for gallium.”
Warner published his work earlier this month in the Nature publication Scientific Reports.
The next step is to be able to produce large amounts of semiconducting carbon nanotubes that could be made into an electronic device, Wagner said.
“It will not be tomorrow, let’s say 10 years,” he said.
But at IBM, researchers like James Hannon are working to speed up that lab-to-prototype timescale. Hannon says that Wagner’s finding is an important step, but it needs to be replicated on larger-diameter carbon nanotubes.
"This is a nice scientific demonstration, but not in the range that would be used in a logic application," said Hannon, manager of IBM’s carbon electronics group in Yorktown Heights, N.Y. "I’d like to see if this technique could work for larger diameter tubes as well."
Last year, Hannon and his IBM colleagues announced they had built memory and microprocessing chips using carbon nanotubes. He said the tough thing is getting them to lie down in straight lines, but they overcame this obstacle by creating special grooves etched into the silicon chip surface and a bonding agent.
Hannon says the two challenges with carbon nanotubes is figuring out how to place them and how to separate the semiconducting ones from the metallic ones, which are thrown away. A separate team at North Carolina State University recently reported they were able to integrate carbon nanotubes into a flexible scaffold for a silicon-based battery that would last longer than existing lithium ion batteries.
Hannon says he expects carbon nanotubes to play a big role in electronic devices in a few more years of testing.
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Future tech,
News
Micromax is in race with Samsung to become 1st in Indian Market.
India’s currency may be floundering, but its smartphone market is on fire. Sales have nearly tripled in the last year, led by the local upstart Micromax, which is nipping at the heels of Samsung for market share dominance. Micromax now commands a 22% market share, up from 18.8% in the first quarter. Samsung’s share has slipped to 26% from 32.7%.
The scenario that is playing out in India — initial dominance by foreign brands like Samsung and Sony, which is quickly eroded by homegrown manufacturers like Micromax and Karbonn — is eerily similar to the dynamic seen in China, where Samsung and Apple had an early advantage that is being steadily erased by Huawei and Lenovo.
Other companies that fit a similar mold include Coolpad in China, Smartfren in Indonesia, Ninetology in Malaysia, Cherry Mobile in the Philippines, i-Mobile in Thailand, and Q-Smart in Vietnam, as IDC noted earlier this month. There is plenty of money on the table: emerging-market sales are expected to surge from 400 million units in 2013 to 749 million in 2017.
In India’s case, the trend will be accelerated by the country’s currency woes, which are making foreign imports much more expensive — the rupee has declined by nearly a third in the last six months. But even without foreign exchange fluctuations it could spell bad news for companies like Samsung and Apple, which derive huge portions of their profits from smartphones, yet have largely saturated their existing markets and are facing increasingly intense domestic competition in new ones.
Micromax, now within shouting distance of becoming the top smartphone maker in the world’s largest market after the United States and China, at first glance bears some similarities to Xiaomi, the Chinese firm that drew attention this week by poaching a top executive from Google’s Android division, which makes the operating system used by some 80% of the world’s smartphones, including Samsung and Micromax.
Like Xiaomi, Micromax’s top-of-the-line phones are significantly cheaper than the premium-priced handsets from Apple and Samsung; its newly launched Canvas Doodle 2 phablet sells for 19,990 rupees ($300). (It also has a gimmicky “blow-to-unlock” feature.) The company has bet heavily on the super-size phones known as phablets, which now make up 30% of the Indian smartphone market. “[G]iven the growth we are seeing in the phablet category (Canvas series), we are aiming to be the top player by Diwali, which is Q3,” Micromax co-founder Rahul Sharmatold the PTI news agency.
Market research firm IDC said that India’s second-quarter smartphone sales nearly tripled to 9.3 million, from 3.5 million a year earlier, led by devices with super-sized screens of five inches and bigger. These so-called phablets now make up 30% of the Indian smartphone market.
If there’s anything standing in the way of Micromax’s march to dominance in India, it might be the lack of a charismatic executive at the helm, a la Xiaomi’s Lei Jun, often called “China’s Steve Jobs.” Rajesh Agarwal, co-founder and managing director of Micromax, was forced to resign at the beginning of August after he was arrested for attempting to bribe municipal engineers to obtain approval for the construction of a banquet hall. The incident could derail the company’s anticipated IPO; it is backed by private equity firms Sequoia Capital, Sandstone Capital and Madison India Capital.
HTC One blue is coming on September 10.
The Blue version of the HTC One has been in the news for a while now, with leaked images, press shots, and images of the frame of the device surfacing over the past few weeks
A screenshot outlines a Sprint road map, mentions the blue HTC One has one of the upcoming devices, with an availability date of September 10. The HTC One is currently available from Sprint for $99.99 with a 2-year contract, along with a “buy one get one free” offer that the mobile carrier is running, with the second “free” device requiring another contractual commitment as well. The blue version of the HTC One will join the current lineup of white, black, and red that are currently available from the company.
Of course, the changes to the upcoming HTC One are purely superficial, as the hardware and software of the device is going to remain unchanged. But if you were holding out for a snazzier option, the blue version is certainly a good choice.
Since we all know what else is happening on September 10, it has to be mentioned that HTC and/or Sprint really know how to pick release dates. That being said, if you’re in the market for one of the best Android smartphones of 2013, “the b(lue)est HTC One since the HTC One” will soon be heading to a Sprint store near you!
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HTC Mobiles
Samsung is going to give metallic body for new Galaxy?
We are at least six months away, if not longer, from the next Samsung Galaxy flagship, and the rumors surrounding the device have already begun. Following a report that the 2014 Samsung flagship could feature a 16MP camera with OIS,it will also could feature a metal chassis.
Samsung is planning to use a metal chassis, with plans to begin a production line by the end of this year. Apparently, a sample has been created in Europe and sent to Vietnam, where the chassis will be mass-produced. The report goes on to state that Samsung is approaching this idea with caution, and will do a lot of pre-production testing to avoid issues faced by devices using full-metal bodies, such as radio interference.
Granted, similar rumors surfaced around the same time last year as well with regards to the Samsung Galaxy S4, so we have no idea whether Samsung is actually considering a move in this direction, or whether to company will continue use a plastic body. If true, it’ll be interesting to see whether the company will continue to feature a removable battery, or go for a unibody metal design, like the HTC One, for it’s next flagship.
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Samsung Mobiles
Skype is coming in 3D!
Skype is working on a technology that will no doubt be impressive when used once and then promptly ignored for the rest of time – 3D video calls! The project was revealed in relation to commemorate Skype’s 10th anniversary.
Microsoft’s Corporate VP for Skype Mark Gillett told BBC that Skype’s labs has been doing work on both 3D capture and 3D display of video calls, and while it’s impressed with the progress made in monitors and TVs that can produce a 3D image, the company still believes there’s a lot of work needed to be done before the 3D capture technology is where it needs to be. That’s because there’s too much tuning required to get the multiple cameras you need for producing 3D images angled as you need them for live video calls.
Gillett said in the BBC interview that Skype has the tech working in the lab, but needs the hardware ecosystem to be able to support it before it’s introduced. But he also said that 3D video chat would take longer to catch on with consumers than other 3D video tech in all likelihood, which begs the question of whether it ever really will.
In the BBC article, Gillett says that Skype is looking in the near-term at more practical improvements, like bringing 1080p video calls to hardware beyond the upcoming Xbox One console. Building 3D calling capabilities in the unlikely event that the tech takes off in a big way may turn out to be a prescient move, but for now it seems like a case of building something no one likely wants.
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Apps
