Nokia Lumia 920T has Adreno 320 GPU instead of Adreno 225

The Lumia 920, Nokia's flagship Windows Phone 8 handset, is coming to China Mobile (model number 920T). As it turns out the Lumia 920T has a Snapdragon MSM8960T S4 Pro chipset, unlike its international version, which has an MSM8960 S4 Plus chipset. The news comes from the carrier's Sina Weibo page.

The difference is that the MSM8960T chipset features the Adreno 320 GPU and not the Adreno 225 like in the international and US Lumia 920 units. It still has two Krait CPU cores though, this isn't the S4 Pro chipset that's used in the Google Nexus 4.

Still, getting an upgrade on the GPU is great even if you don't get double the CPU cores. The only problem is that most devs will be targeting Adreno 225 as that's what most WP8 phones out there have (Windows Phone handsets don't really have much of a variation in chipsets). It might have a lower power consumption as it won't be as burdened as the 225 using the same graphics.

Could this Nokia Lumia 920T deal mean we'll start seeing Windows Phone 8 handsets with Adreno 320 or is it a one-off? If we do, WP8 will be able to put up a fight in the graphics department against the Android flagships and the iPhone.

Thanks for the tip!

Source (in Chinese) | Via

Source : http://www.gsmarena.com/nokia_lumia_920t_has_adreno_320_gpu_instead_of_adreno_225-news-5062.php

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Cellular versions of the iPad Mini could start to ship next week

Although Apple hasn't provided an exact, single date on when the iPad Mini Wi-Fi + Cellular model will ship, buyers who have pre-ordered the tablet are seeing their accounts updated with various shipping dates, some as soon as five days time.

Ever since the iPad Mini was announced, there was a question mark over when the model with 3G/4G LTE connectivity would appear. Apple’s press release stated the cellular models would ship “a couple of weeks” after the Wi-Fi only Mini, putting the date somewhere around the middle of November.

It looks like Apple will keep its promise too, as reports are coming in that customers who pre-ordered the cellular Mini tablet have started to receive notices that it’ll ship “in the next five business days.” That could be on or slightly before November 16, two weeks after the iPad Mini went on sale.

This won’t be the same for everyone, of course, and Apple has already flip-flopped on iPad Mini LTE release dates once, with some buyers finding a November 21 and November 23 shipping date added to their account soon after launch, but this was quickly replaced with “mid-November” instead. Subsequently, these dates have been re-applied to some accounts.

So, if you’ve ordered an iPad Mini LTE, there’s a chance it will arrive sometime between November 16 and November 23, depending on when you placed your order, and your chosen delivery method.

Apple has been experiencing some delays with getting the iPad Mini into its customer’s hands, with the Wi-Fi-only tablet selling out as an online pre-order, and then again when it hit retail stores last weekend. Despite this, Apple shifted three million iPad Mini and fourth generation iPad tablets over those three days.

While still a considerable amount of iPad tablets sold, this was a little lower than some analysts hoped for, and this could have been due to the cellular model not being available on launch day. An analyst for Merrill Lynch called the 4G LTE iPad Mini “more important than people think,” reminding us that the cellular versions of the full-size iPad make up 45-percent of sales.

If you’ve pre-ordered an iPad Mini, has its delivery date been updated yet?

Source : http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/cellular-versions-of-the-ipad-mini-could-start-to-ship-next-week/

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Pearltrees releases version 1.0, premium accounts included

We caught up with Pearltrees' chief evangelist, Oliver Starr, after the company announced its 1.0 release and a new subscription-based business model.

Visualizing the scope of what we share from around the Web is a challenge, but given the popularity of tactile devices like iPhones and iPads it seems a valuable one to undertake. Interacting with website content is becoming more and more expected, and developers are taking note. Pearltrees, a startup we wrote about to announce its $6.7 million in funding early this year, just may be at the forefront of haptically curating information, and the company says it has the metrics to prove it.

We caught up with Pearltrees yesterday when the company celebrated the app’s 1.0 milestone. Pearltrees explains that 1.0 signifies the cohesiveness of its product across its three supported platforms: Web, iPhone, and iPad. It also marks, in some respects, the true launch of the site, despite having officially having launched in 2008. Oliver Starr, chief evangelist for Pearltrees, explains to me that Pearltrees started out as a Web app, but was developed for devices like iPhone in mind. The Web app was just an intermediary platform, since at the time Apple’s mobile wouldn’t be able to support the tech required to develop Pearltrees for the iPhone. In fact, the iPhone app wasn’t launched until July of this year.

Pearltrees was founded on the principles that Tim Burners-Lee, the godfather and founder of the Web, had in mind when developing what we know as the Internet. First, anyone should be able to view any piece of information published on the Web — the leading thought of Web 1.0. The second is that anybody should be able to publish any piece of information, which happened with the rise of blogging, wikis, and Twitter. Finally, and most importantly, the third criterion was that anyone could organize collections of this information.

Pearltrees visually aggregates bookmarks of websites, photos, and anything found online into visual “pearls.” Collectively the pearls make up a tree of information, clearly where the app gets its name. Users can save their latest interests from around the Web individually, but multiple users sharing the same interest can collaboratively curate a single pearl as well. It sort of feels like a visual, graphic Wikipedia without the user-contributed text. For instance, one of Starr’s favorite pearls has over 150 members and curates TED Talks. As he took me through it, the pearl was admittedly expertly curated and there didn’t appear to be any irrelevant information to be found.

The moderation of community pearls is left up to the devices of its members. Despite this, Starr tells me he’s only had to administratively ban approximately fifty accounts, including spam bots. It’s an astoundingly small number considering the 700,000 active users, two million unique visitors per month, and about 30 million pearls. And Starr knows a thing or about community moderation. “Being a veteran of moderating tech comments, I can tell you that’s not the norm.” Starr was Michael Arrington’s first employee at TechCrunch and responsible not only for creating “MobileCrunch,” but also worked as the tech blog’s first community moderator.

Pearltrees has access to unprecendented information about its users through its interest graph, called TreeRank. It can group pearls into similar interests and display them to you. Should you search for “Wolves,” the app would then display all pearls relevant to your search query. But since the algorithm scrapes your interests, it knows exactly what Pearltrees’ users interests are and similar things you’d want to see. It’s a powerful feature that, and one you’d think a marketer’s dream.

Despite this goldmine of user information, the company refuses to sell out. “We’ve kept true to the spirit of the company and the product, which is that we wouldn’t leverage what our users do through marketing,” says Starrs.

Instead, Pearltrees is taking the more difficult and less traveled route to making money by selling services. Luckily, the for-pay feature was one requested by the users. Now users can pay $4.99 per month or $49.99 for one year to make pearls private. But this model serves a dual purpose: It implicitly improves Pearltrees’ platform as a repository of valuable curated content. Putting a price on something will increase its value, and while that can be difficult to prove, it’s been done before — sites like Quora, Wikipedia, and even Evernote have showed us this.

By default all pearls are public, so anyone can see your pearls. With Pearltrees’ mantra to be host to a library of valuable content, Starrs explains that the pearls that users want to hide are typically content that Pearltrees wants you to pay to hide anyway. If it’s a pearl containing embarrassing content or even something not worth sharing, then it’s likely not content that would be helpful to other users should they find that pearl. So users should help pay for the hosting costs if it’s not going to contribute to the benefit of Pearltrees as a whole.

It’s a big bet, but one that the site is confident it can take. Pearltrees 1.0 is available now via the Web and for iOS devices. 

Source : http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/pearltree-chugs-along-with-1-0-release-and-subscription-base-privacy-feature/

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The best pics of the LG Nexus phone so far show all the details

Beside the high-quality photos there is not much new information about the LG Nexus phone. Still, we get its model name - the LG E960 - and a codename - the Mako.

We'd say that if it really turns out to be this year's Nexus device (something our fellow tech journalists are not quite sure), it makes all the sense in the world to be called the Google Optimus Nexus, right?

The pre-production phone these guys have runs currently the latest Android Jelly Bean 4.1.2.

On the front, there's a 4.7-inch screen with a resolution of 768x1280px. On the back, there's a 8 megapixel camera.

The LG (Optimus) Nexus phone

The real disappointment is on the inside. Despite the presence of the powerful quad-core Qualcomm chipset with 2GB of RAM, the built-in storage is only 8GB and there's no card slot for expansion.

Judging on the limited storage, LG wouldn't like it for their Optimus Nexus phone to compete with their other flagships. It's much like how Samsung supplied a measly 5 megapixel camera on their Galaxy Nexus.

As things are shaping right now, the Optimus Nexus won't be a customer-oriented multimedia consumption device.

Anyway, check out some more shots at the source link below.

Source
Source : http://www.gsmarena.com/the_best_pics_of_the_lg_nexus_phone_so_far_show_all_the_details-news-4931.php

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How BlackBerry 10 avoids Android's security issues

Marineau: "The model with Android is one of microforking"

Google's problem with Android is both the Linux and Java components it's built with and the way it's implemented by multiple handset makers. That's according to Sebastien Marineau, the senior vice president of BlackBerry OS.

TechRadar at the BlackBerry Jam conference. That causes security headaches and ultimately limits what Android can do.

"I call it architectural integrity; maintaining integrity of the architecture and for that you need to deeply understand that architecture. The model with Android is one of microforking, from handset manufacturer to handset manufacturer and even between handsets."

BlackBerry 10 and QNX partition what different apps and processes are allowed to do very strictly, but the design of Android is quite different. "It's much harder to partition in Android because it's a distributed architecture. It's a distributed object model throughout all the Java components and processes and it's far more difficult to partition that."

Plus there is a lot of Android to understand, compared to the small but powerful QNX kernel that powers PlayBook and BlackBerry 10. "If you look at the microkernel architecture, the microkernel is the only trusted component in the system," he explains. "It's the one thing that can never fail and it gets to control access."

Sebastien Marineau-Mes Senior VP for BlackBerry OS

"In the case of our microkernel it's about 100,000 lines of code, give or take ten thousand and that's the core code that has to be absolutely bullet proof. If you look at something like Linux, I don't know what it's up to today but it was up to 14 million lines six months ago. That code all runs in privileged space and one line in that can take down the whole system or be the vulnerability that people exploit. It's very difficult to test to prove that that amount of code is secure and bug free."

A mature kernel

But the QNX kernel is very stable and the QNX team knows it inside out. "We didn't rewrite the QNX operating system for BB10," he points out. "We took that platform and we took the operating system and we're building an entirely new mobile stack on top of it but the core of it, QNX, has stood the test of time. The version we're building on first released in 1999 to 2000. When you look at the heart of an operating system it usually takes a decade to mature."

Quad-core phones

Samsung Galaxy S3 review
HTC One X review
LG Optimus 4X HD review
Huawei Ascend D Quad review

Do we really care how secure or efficient our phones are providing we can get online and play games? We will, Marineau predicts.

"A day of reckoning will come. Because as more and more of our lives migrate from desktops and laptops to mobile devices, we will have to solve the problems around security, privacy, anonymity, access to data. If we want this true seamlessness between devices, it means that the underlying plumbing has to share all this data and the only way to do it is going to be to actually solve these hard problems. I am sure there will be some spectacular security breaches - and then people will wake up."

One LTE phone everywhere

Better security is just one of the advantages from QNX, Marineau believes. Not having an LTE phone this year really hurt BlackBerry sales but as he points out, "LTE devices today have really poor battery life." It's an area where he thinks BlackBerry 10 can shine with the way it squeezes out more battery life by using the efficient connection to the RIM network for saving power when you're getting email or social network updates.

"When you use services like Facebook and Twitter they're typically polled services. We can turn them into push or do clever things in how we align all these services and when they're polling in order to save battery life."

Explained

4G and LTE: everything you need to know

Plus LTE phones today only work in one country. "The challenge of LTE is there are so many bands and every country is different. The complexity of building an LTE world phone is huge."

But in a few years' time, RIM will have software switched antennas (developed by a company it bought called Paratech) that could work with all the different LTE frequencies around the world, so RIM could make a single phone and sell it everywhere – or you could take your UK LTE phone and use in the US when you travel.

Plus the OS and even apps could behave differently depending on how you're connected and where you are. That's something Marineau says the Android architecture won't support.

"It's one of the benefits of actually owning the stack. You're basically able to change anything in the stack to globally optimise when you have a hard problem to solve, which is something that iOS can do but Android is limited in what they can change.

"They can't really change Linux that much; and they get standard drivers from vendors and it's difficult for them to change them. If you look at where they're innovating, they're innovating in the Java layer at the top but they're constrained in what they can do lower down the stack."

Source : http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/how-blackberry-10-avoids-androids-security-issues-1103381

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Behind the Lumia: How Nokia designs its phones

Nokia's executive vice president Kevin Shields

If you've ever found it hard to decide between two Nokia handsets because the cheaper model has some features you'd really like, that's deliberate Nokia executive vice president, Kevin Shields told TechRadar. Crazy? Shields thinks it makes perfect sense.

"As a consumer you have two good choices as opposed to there's a really good one and a sort of dumbed down one. At every price point we play in, we sort of want you when you walk in the store to not have price be your only decision.

"With the Lumia 610, we did a really delightful, beautiful colours and materials and design. Consumers picked that thing because it was cool looking even though it was a lot less expensive. We almost make you have to think 'Huh; that material they use in that phone is pretty cool; maybe I do want to get that one even though I can afford the more expensive one'. "

Learn more

What is NFC and why is it in your phone?

That means leaving the microSD slot out of the Lumia 920 leaves something for the Lumia 820, which also has the wireless charging option. And sometimes you have to suffer to look good; "we wanted to have an uncompromised physical form that generated a really beautiful device and if we put a microSD card in this thing it's just going to defile it."

Plus Shields says most users don't actually need extra storage. "Our research is showing us that consumers - especially with this phone - are streaming music, they're streaming video," Shields told us. "They aren't really using the storage they have anyway."

Taking out what people don't need

They don't need other high end features like HDMI out, because when you put them into handsets, they don't get used. "We know in software how often used and it's hardly ever activated. The industry is deeply guilty of innovation for the sake of innovation; it confuses things, consumers don't know what they are and are not supposed to care about.

"Let's just stop, let's do a few things that work really well for customer that are executed well and actually give them some really daily benefit."

So what new features are useful? Shields has a shopping list that sounds remarkably like the Lumia 920. "Take wireless charging; if we can get wireless charging to be ubiquitous this would be a real benefit. Optical image stabilisation; finally I can take a really good picture with my smartphone and not to feel I have to carry an SLR. A display that works great outdoors in bright sun and with gloves on.

"These are innovations that that are going to make your smartphone work better - and more usefully - for you in your normal life."

Ignoring features that sound good but don't get used also leaves more time for Nokia to solve technical problems like radio frequency interference. Moving the USB port to the bottom of the phone so it's easier to put it on a charging dock wasn't a trivial redesign. "This was a pain the in the rear end," Shields said with some feeling.

"It turns out that the micro USB port in phones is just an RF nightmare. The reason why you see it get put in these ridiculous places on phones is that there are antenna issues, they're trying to get it out of the way.

"The decision to put it where you want it on the bottom took some serious, serious engineering to do it and not end up with the antenna compromises. Having the headphone socket on the top is a little less difficult but it still has its own challenges. The point is to develop a really beautiful phone; don't screw with it."

Adding more radios

Building in wireless charging only adds to the problem, he points out. "Wireless charging effectively is radio; it's an antenna. Obviously NFC is too, then you got LTE, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth… suddenly you have a lot of antennas and it gets really challenging to make them all work well together."

Wireless power isn't only about convenience - although we're really looking forward to a feature we last saw on the HP TouchPad.

Because the Lumia 920 has NFC, it knows which wireless charging pad you've paired it with so you can set specific applications to load when you put your phone down on each base. Your Lumia can show the clock when it's by the bed and photos or appointments when it's on your desk at work.

But the next stage is doing away with wires and ports altogether. "What I'm looking forward to is the day you don't have to hard power at all," Shields told us. The day is coming that the power port and the USB port don't have to be there anymore. That day is a long way away, there's a lot of inertia built up. But once you get all those ports off there, interesting things start to happen."

If you can seal a phone completely it's less likely to be damaged by dust or water and you can use the space from the power connector for something else.

It's not that easy, Shields points out. "There is actually one hole left after that, the earpiece hole and the mike so it's not like it's completely sealed at that point. But we have ideas about that too."

Source : http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/behind-the-lumia-how-nokia-designs-its-phones-1101883

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Motorola Razr M first impressions: Maximized screen real estate at its finest

Here's our first look at the budget-friendly model of Motorola's new Droid Razr line ahead of its September 13 release date.

Motorola announced an updated line of its Razr smartphone family this week, and the first of the three to be released is the Motorola Razr M — otherwise known as its budget-friendly edition. At $100 (with a 2-year contract,) the phone stacks up competitively to other budget phones on the market such as the HTC One V. Here’s our first look at what Motorola has in store for its Razr line.

It’s funny to think that a 4.3-inch screen phone these days is considered “compact,” but that’s exactly how Motorola described the Razr M during its press conference Wednesday. The near edge-to-edge design offers more screen per square inch — which makes the advertised 4.3-inch screen bigger than it sounds. The 960 x 540 resolution display itself is truly vivid especially under the gorilla glass, and the whole device feels more expensive than your average budget phone. Thanks to its Kevlar back, the anti-scratch and added grip makes for a beautifully-designed phone that feels like it’s worth a ton more than one Benjamin.

While the Motorola Razr M comes with an internal memory of 8GB and 1GB of RAM, storage is expandable with the micro-SD slot placed right on the side of the phone. The SIM card slot is also right next to it, so no more opening the back of your phone and digging your nails in to remove either chips. The device is runs on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, which is a bit of a disappointment, but Motorola says all the new Razr phones should be getting Jellybean by the end of the year.

The Razr M also comes with a dual-core Qualcomm MSM8960 Snapdragon S4 processor, 8 MP back camera, and a 3 MP front-facing shooter. The dual-core processor makes the Razr M run extremely fast. Switching between screens is swift, and you can program your own pages and add them as needed. To delete, simply hold and drag the app icon or page to the trash can.  

What’s new about the Razr M is a circle interface that allows you to customize shortcuts. For example, new text messages can appear on the most prominent circle while the second circle is dedicated to weather. For each city you add, you can flip the circle to navigate through the cities and get updated weather information for each location.

According to Motorola, one full charge can deliver an impressive 20 hours of battery life but we’ll see if that claim holds true. Be on a lookout for our full review shortly. In the meantime, the Motorola Razr M is available for pre-order now at Verizon with an official release date of September 13. To get the $100 price, you will have to mail in a $50 rebate through Verizon.

Source : http://www.digitaltrends.com/mobile/motorola-razr-m-first-impressions-maximized-screen-real-estate-at-its-finest/

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Droid Razr M and Razr HD developer's editions incoming

The new Droid Razr M makes for a compact developer device

On top of announcing three new consumer model Android smartphones for consumers, Motorola has unveiled two new handsets for developers.

Developer editions for both the Droid Razr M and Droid Razr HD are on the way. Both developer editions are identical to the consumer models, with the added bonus of an unlockable bootloader to dive into the device's code.

As announced earlier, the Droid Razr M sports a 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED display, a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor, 1GB RAM, 8GB of storage, NFC support, and an 8MP camera capable of 1080p video capture.

The Droid Razr HD packs a 4.7-inch HD display and is only 8.4mm thick. It is built for speed and battery life, with a dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor and a 2500mAh battery that boasts 16 hours of talk time, 10 hours of video, and 6 hours of web searching.

Droid for devs

Developers can already place their order for the Razr M developer edition directly through Motorola and will start shipping September 13. At $549.99, it is a little bit pricier than the $99 consumer model, but makes up for the difference with the unlockable bootloader.

The Droid Razr HD developer model will be a longer wait, with no information announced about its release date or final price. Those interested in snagging one though can register online through Motorola for updates when the handset is available to order.

Source : http://www.techradar.com/news/phone-and-communications/mobile-phones/droid-razr-m-and-razr-hd-developers-editions-incoming-1095004

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