Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on January 19, 2007 by CyberNet.

Going along with our recent poll, here’s another question for you.  How many of you that own an Xbox 360, also own or owned at one point the original Xbox?  According to Chris Satchell of Microsoft, he’s saying that so far, 10.4 million Xbox 360 units have been sold.  But, even more interesting is that he says over half of those have come from people that never owned the original Xbox. Are any of you Xbox 360 owners previous Playstation owners? Satchell says, “There’s lots of new people coming in, which kind of surprises you.  What we’re actually finding is that our customer set is broadening, which we think is important.”

If that’s true, and half of those 10.4 million units were sold to those who weren’t original Xbox users, that says something. Dead Takahashi of San Jose Mercury News interviewed Gates and asked how his plan for 360 was working. Gates says, “It’s working perfectly.  We wanted to be the guy with the small box that costs less.  We wanted to have the most games.  We wanted to play to our software strength, and tools and online.  We wanted to swap positions with Sony.  We wanted to not be a year late, not be a bix box, not be a more expensive box. How are we doing on that?”

Well, let’s see. They wanted to be the guy with the small box that costs less. Check. Most games? Well, considering the 360 has been out for over a year now, of course there are more games than those made specifically for Playstation 3. Are they playing to their software strength, tools, and online? Absolutely. Xbox Live has 5 million users and it’s growing! At CES, Gates and Robbie Bach announced the move of Xbox Live to Vista this year, and an IPTV service for US Xbox 360 owners.

In the same interview with Takahashi, Gates admits that Microsoft did fail in terms of lack of software, price, and size with the original Xbox. It was bigger, cost more, and when it came to software, the Playstation 2 blew it out of the water. When Gates says, “We want to swap positions with Sony” I think just maybe, they could be well on their way with that.

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Our first encounter with Nokia’s N9 may have been eleven different kinds of awesome, but we knew it was a mere scratch of the high-grade polycarbonate surface. One of the core pieces of functionality we didn’t get the chance to address back then was the camera, and after Nokia decided to toot that horn recently — saying, among other things, that it’s the “fastest image-capturing phone” yet — we decided we had to go back for a second go-around.

In terms of performance, Nokia’s camera application definitely lives up to the company’s own hype, with nearly instant captures and an equally brisk return to a state of readiness for more image-taking. When shooting video, we noted that audio recording starts slightly later than the video, leaving the first half second or so without sound. This isn’t an uncommon issue (we’ve seen it on other phones and tablets) and can be seen in our video sample after the break. Now might be a good time to also mention that the N9s we tested with today were all prototype units, so don’t prejudge Nokia’s final hardware on the basis of what you see here. Unless your premature judgment is positive, we doubt Nokia would mind that.

So anyhow, we took a walk around the company’s offices, escorted by a group of unarmed but surely lethal Finnish ninjas, taking shots of the surrounding cityscape as we went. The results show the N9 picking up a ton of detail and controlling noise admirably, while a few impromptu ThinkPad hands-on photos convinced us it can do a pretty stellar job with closeups as well. With a name like N9, however, it was obvious which phone we needed to compare Nokia’s lone wolf MeeGo handset to, so out came our trusty N8 with its world-beating 12 megapixel sensor. Alas, in spite of having an F2.2 aperture on the N9, Nokia hasn’t managed to replicate the heroics of its earlier device: the N8 shows its advantage in consistently picking out better color balance and in also being sharper throughout the frame. It makes the N9’s images appear as if they were shot through a haze, though we hasten to add that this should be considered a strength of the older phone rather than a major failure of the new one. Additionally, the N9 suffers from the typically narrow dynamic range of smartphone camera sensors, which is the cause of the consistently blown-out sky in our gallery images. Still, considering the quick software operation and consistently detailed imagery on offer from the N9, we’d say Nokia is on to a winner here.

P.S. — Looking for the full-size 8 megapixel stills from the N9? We’ve zipped them up for you right here.

Continue reading Nokia N9 camera: sample images and video

Nokia N9 camera: sample images and video originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 28 Jun 2011 12:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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If you’ve somehow not heard of the ThinkPad X1 yet, you join us at a good time. The well leaked laptop has shown up at an X Series comparison site, put together by Lenovo itself, where yet more specs have been made known. The 13.3-inch display is dubbed a SuperBright HD inifinity panel, which to you and us simply means it’s built using IPS technology. There’s also an integrated fingerprint reader, a buttonless touchpad, USB 3.0 connectivity, and a promised 10-hour battery life with a slice battery. Weighing in at 1.36kg (3lbs) and measuring about 16mm (0.625 inches) in thickness, it’s described as Lenovo’s thinnest ThinkPad yet. Last time we heard, we were told to expect it on May 17th, guess those webmasters are getting the show started a little early. One more glamor shot of the X1 can be found after the break.

[Thanks, Jesse]

Continue reading Lenovo adds ThinkPad X1 to laptop comparison guide, outs IPS screen, USB 3.0, and optional SSD

Lenovo adds ThinkPad X1 to laptop comparison guide, outs IPS screen, USB 3.0, and optional SSD originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 16 May 2011 02:55:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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We got to feeling a bit curious about how exactly HTC’s latest Android superphone, the Sensation 4G, stacks up against its fellow dual-core competition, so we did what every geek does in such situations, we compiled a chart. Included in this list are the finest and brightest Android handsets from each of the major manufacturers that have gone dual-core so far: the Galaxy S II, the Atrix 4G, the Optimus 2X / G2X, and HTC’s own EVO 3D. As it turns out, there are quite a few commonalities among these phones (besides the benchmark-crushing performance). They all boast screens of either 4 or 4.3 inches in size, the minimum amount of RAM among them is 512MB, the smallest battery is 1500mAh, and yes, they all have front-facing video cameras. Basically, it’s the future of smartphones, reduced to a stat sheet. As such, it must also come with the warning that specs aren’t everything, and user experience will most often depend on the software available on each device and on the preferences of the human holding it. With that proviso fully digested, join us after the break for the data.

Continue reading HTC Sensation versus the rest of the dual-core world: smartphone spec sheet smackdown

HTC Sensation versus the rest of the dual-core world: smartphone spec sheet smackdown originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 15 Apr 2011 09:10:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on July 09, 2009 by CyberNet.

Ever since we did a browser comparison test last year there have been a lot of emails and comments asking if we were going to update the article to reflect new releases. I thought about adding in the new browsers as they came out, but decided against it for one reason or another. Instead I thought it would be better to just do a fresh article, and include even more stats than last time.

The main reason that I thought this was worthy of its own article was because a lot has changed in the last year. Since March 2008 we’ve seen major milestone releases from each of big browser makers, and to top it off Google Chrome has come onto the scene. These browsers have also shifted focus from adding nifty new features to diving deep into the code trying to squeeze out every last ounce of performance.

We’ve got a lot in store for you today ranging from JavaScript speed tests to memory usage comparisons, and we’ll even throw in some Acid 3 coverage. Lets go ahead and dive right in.

Notes about testing:

• All of these tests were performed on the same Windows XP SP3 machine that is wired into a network to eliminate the effects of wireless disturbances.
• All browsers started with a clean profile and no add-ons/extensions were installed.
• All browser data, including caches, were cleared before each test was run.
• Only one browser was open at a time, and no other applications (other than standard XP services) were running.
• Internet Explorer 8 was used in the native rendering mode (“standards compliant mode”).
• No plug-ins (Flash, Java, etc…) were installed on the machine to ensure that slow performance wasn’t due to the loading of a plug-in.

–JavaScript Tests–

The main speed test that everyone seems to use for JavaScript is SunSpider. Last year we compared the browsers with the SunSpider test prior to writing our first comparison, and so we wanted to try something different. That’s when we turned to the MooTools SlickSpeed Test. It tests various operations against a lot of common JavaScript libraries including MooTools and JQuery.

So which one did we go with this year? Well, we did both. We ran each test, SunSpider and SlickSpeed, a total of three times each. Then we averaged the results together to get the pretty little graphs you see below. For both of them the goal was for the browser to complete the tests as fast as possible, and so a lower number is better.

Sunspider Test:

1. Safari 4: 603ms
2. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta: 636ms
3. Google Chrome 2.0: 720ms
4. Firefox 3.5: 1278ms
5. Opera 10 ^Beta: 2975ms
6. Opera 9.64: 3931ms
7. Internet Explorer 8: 5441ms

MooTools SlickSpeed Test:

1. Opera 10 ^Beta: 330ms
2. Safari 4: 355ms
3. Opera 9.64: 375ms
4. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta: 464ms
5. Firefox 3.5: 580ms
6. Google Chrome 2.0: 763ms
7. Internet Explorer 8: 1901ms

–Website Rendering Tests–

I used the same method for testing website load times as I did last year. It’s a website called Numion Stopwatch that uses some fancy JavaScript to monitor when a page has finished loading, and then spits out the amount of time it took to complete.

We used two extremely popular sites for these tests: ESPN and the Wall Street Journal. Each site was loaded up three times in each browser, and then the results were averaged together. Obviously we were targeting which browser could load the websites the fastest, and so a lower number is better:

ESPN Load Time:

1. Safari 4: 1.936 seconds
2. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta: 2.194 seconds
3. Firefox 3.5: 2.380 seconds
4. Internet Explorer 8: 2.604 seconds
5. Opera 10 ^Beta: 2.605 seconds
6. Opera 9.64: 2.651 seconds
7. Google Chrome 2.0: 2.873 seconds

Wall Street Journal Load Time:

1. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta: 1.612 seconds
2. Opera 10 ^Beta: 1.989 seconds
3. Opera 9.64: 2.141 seconds
4. Safari 4: 2.166 seconds
5. Google Chrome 2.0: 2.552 seconds
6. Firefox 3.5: 2.886 seconds
7. Internet Explorer 8: 3.292 seconds

–Memory Usage Tests–

I’m sure this is what many of you were looking for. As geeks we like to have a lean browser that knows how to handle itself without us having to keep a watchful eye over it. That’s why we ran numerous different tests to see just how well a browser controls its memory usage when loading a decent number of sites, and also whether it’s able to release that memory once you’ve closed the tabs.

Here’s a rundown of the order in which we ran the tests to collect the stats:

1. We started the browser, and took a memory usage reading.
2. Loaded 10 predetermined sites in tabs, and took a memory usage reading after all the sites finished loading.
3. Loaded 15 more predetermined sites in tabs (totaling 25 sites), and took a memory usage reading after all the sites finished loading.
4. Let the browser sit for 10 minutes with the 25 tabs open, and then took a memory usage reading.
5. Closed all the tabs except for Google.com, which was always the first site opened. Then we took a memory usage reading.

And here are the results. The best browser for each test is highlighted in green, and the worst is highlighted in red.

–Acid 3 Tests–

Last year we also took a look at how the various browsers scored on the Acid 3 test. At the time a Safari nightly build was the closest to perfection by reaching a score of 86 out of 100. Today, however, is a different story. A few browsers can handle the test perfectly, some are very very close, and others (yeah, IE) have some work cut out for themselves.

Note: Click on any of the thumbnails for a full-size rendering.

1. Safari 4 (100/100) – It gets a perfect score and renders everything correctly.
   
2. Opera 10 ^Beta (100/100) – It gets a perfect score and renders everything correctly.
   
3. Google Chrome 2.0 (100/100) – It gets a perfect score, but not all tests are executed successfully.
   
4. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta (100/100) – It gets a perfect score, but not all tests are executed successfully.
   
5. Firefox 3.5 (93/100) – It gets a near perfect score.
   
6. Opera 9.6 (85/100) – This is the oldest release we tested, and it comes as no surprise that it doesn’t pass the test. It should be noted that the next milestone, version 10, does pass the test perfectly as seen above.
   
7. Internet Explorer 8 (20/100) – While they still have a ways to go before they get a perfect, I do have to give them credit for at least making the image look halfway normal. You know what I’m talking about if you remember what IE7′s rendering of the Acid 3 test was like.
   

–Conclusion–

So which browser is the winner? I wouldn’t really say any of them outshine the others. The problem that we are going to face with performance tests from here on out is that the browsers will all come very close to each other in the standings… often within a fraction of a second from one another. As the browsers continue to get optimized we will see these times get even closer, and performance might become less of a concern which picking which one we want to use. So I’d say to pick the browser you feel the most comfortable with, because it’s getting hard to distinguish one browser from another when it comes to performance.

What’s your take on the stats? Anything stand out to you? Will you be switching browsers based upon anything you learned here?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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