Orange San Diego Review

It’s taken a long time for Intel’s smartphone plans to come to fruition. The company has demoed its processors in mobile devices at several CES events in the past, but has struggled to bring them to market. This year, however, Intel came prepared, announcing a partnership with several manufacturers and carriers that would see Intel’s Medfield platform finally making its way into consumers hands. The first phone was the Lava Xolo X900, released in India in May, while the United Kingdom has been graced with the Orange San Diego, previously known as the Santa Clara. So, how does the pairing of Intel and Android hold up? Find out after the jump.

Hardware

The San Diego won’t be winning any awards in the design department. It’s about as generic a design as you can get, and if you look back at hands-on from CES 2012 you’ll actually see that it’s a similar design (if not the same) as the reference phone shown off to the press and developers. It’s the same black monolithic design you’ve seen a thousand times before, just with ports and buttons located in different places.

We’ll give credit where credit is due: whereas phones at this price point and below often use glossy plastic covers, the San Diego instead opts for a rubberized texture that repels grease and fingerprints. The 4-inch handset is comfortable enough in the hand, even if it is a smidgen too big thanks to the wasted space underneath the four capacitive keys at the bottom of the screen. There’s also some noticeable flex to the device. Keep a steady eye on the phone as you shift and twist it in your hands, and you’ll hear some creaking emanating from the bottom half, with some noticeable bending to boot. Does it feel like it’s going to break? No, and it’s solid enough, but it was somewhat alarming at first.

A silver trim goes around the phone which also houses the numerous buttons and ports, including power and the 3.5mm headphone jack at the top, plus volume rocker, camera shutter, and microSIM card slot on the right. A microHDMI output can be found on the left hand side, while microUSB rests on the bottom next to the speaker grills. Odd that Intel didn’t spring for a combined port with MHL output, but perhaps the silicon doesn’t allow for that yet. The camera shutter didn’t present us with any problems, but the power button did give us a bit of trouble at first. It doesn’t protrude from the device enough, resulting in not a whole lot of feedback when pressed. It never failed to register our presses, however.

On the back you’ll find the eight megapixel camera, a nice surprise considering the £199 price of the handset, although you won’t be able to remove the cover. Everything is sealed into the device, including the battery, and there’s no options for removable storage. Even worse, USB OTG doesn’t seem to work, so you’re stuck with the limited internal storage that comes with the device. Orange advertises this as 16GB, although after the operating system and apps take up allocated space, there’s about 10.7GB left available to the user.

The display on the San Diego is definitely punching above its weight. A resolution of 1024×600 spread across 4-inches of real estate may sound like a strange combination, but it works well. Pixel density is great at 296 PI, but better yet is the quality of the panel. IPS this is most definitely not, but it seems that Intel didn’t cut any corners with its manufacturing partner, Gigabyte. Colors are bold and vibrant, viewing angles are above average, and brightness was just about good enough to overcome the glare presented in extreme daylight. Our minor, nitpicky complaints are these: at extreme angles, colours do tend to shift, and holding the phone at an angle while taking a closer look exhibits the same grainess found on the Xperia U. The difference on this handset is that everything looks fantastic when viewed head on, while on the Xperia U it was a constant problem.

As for all the specs, the San Diego is powered by an Intel Atom Z2460 clocked at 1.6Ghz and paired with 1GB of RAM. Radios include quad-band 3G (850 / 900 / 1900 / 2100) with HSPA+ rated at up to 21Mbit/s. Careful, though: the San Diego is locked to Orange’s network, so you won’t be able to pick one up and then use it on another network. At the time of writing, there doesn’t seem to be an unlocking solution for the phone either. That’s a bummer, but you didn’t think Orange was going to make it that easy, did you?

Software

We hope you like Gingerbread, because that’s what you’re going to be stuck with if you buy this phone. It’s strange that the phone has been saddled with android 2.3 considering Ice Cream Sandwich has been with us for some time, especially considering the reference Medfield phone was running 4.0 back at CES 2012. Having said that, we imagine the bulk of software testing to bring Atom to Android was done on Gingerbread. Orange say that an Ice Cream Sandwich update is on the cards for Q3, but by then we’ll be *another* version higher on the Android software ladder. That’s something you’ll have to take into consideration.

“Well,” you say, “I’ll just root the device and put whatever I want on there!” Not so fast there, little buddy. Paul O’Brien of MoDaCo fame has confirmed that the phone has a locked bootloader. To make matters worse, he’s heard directly from Orange that the carrier has no plans to unlock the phone at all, meaning you won’t be able to get root access or flash custom ROMs unless something short of a miracle occurs.

And you know what? That’s a shame. Part of the reason for the San Francisco’s success was its easy hackability along with the impressive specs for the low price. The San Diego could easily have been a fan favourite among the hacking community, leaving those who wanted custom ROMs free to play around while regular customers still receive the Orange experience. Major players like Samsung and HTC have already recognized the importance of getting the enthusiast community onboard, so why can’t Orange and Intel?

Bootloader ranting aside, Gingerbread is mostly a stock affair but with some minor visual tweaks to the interface made by Orange to fall in line with its other branded phones, such as the San Francisco and Monte Carlo. That primarily comes in the form of the launcher, homescreens, and widgets, although a smattering of apps have also been included with the phone. NAVIGON Select is onboard for turn-by-turn navigation, Quickoffice gives you some basic editing capabilities, doubleTwist provides media playback, and Dailymotion gives you access to online video content. The rest are Orange’s own branded apps, including Orange Wednesdays, Tags, Assistant, and Your Orange.

The standout feature that Orange has included is the Gestures application, which lets you draw certain shapes or symbols on the screen to quick launch an application. Let’s say you draw an “O” on the screen: the browser springs to life and Orange’s homepage loads. Draw a square, and you’ll be kicked into the Messaging app, while an arrow opens the Clock. Better yet, you can create custom assignments for drawings, so you’re not locked into the defaults, and you can choose just about any shortcut you desire, whether it be launching an app, looking at a contact, or jumping into a Gmail label. We didn’t use the feature all that much, but we appreciate having the option and imagine it’ll go down a treat with some customers.

All Android apps are designed to work on ARM processors, but Intel is running everything on x86 thanks to some binary translation trickery. Everything seems to work well, and the majority of apps that we’d normally download to other Android phones ran flawlessly on the San Diego. Having said that, there are some app compatibility issues. Running a quick check against the Top Free apps category will show you exactly what’s available and what’s missing. The short version is that while most major apps seem to be available for the San Diego, there are notable exceptions like Flash and Temple Run in addition to several other games. One of our favourite video players, Dice Player, was also unavailable.

What about the performance of the handset? Does a single-core Atom with hyperthreading really match up to dual-core offerings from the likes of Samsung, NVIDIA, and Qualcomm? Yes and no. General performance of the phone was a mixed bag, with a laggy launcher that can mostly be blamed on Orange’s customizations. Installing a third-party alternative such as LauncherPro yielding much better results. The keyboard was very responsive, and probably performed the best out of all the Gingerbread phones we’ve used in the past.

The browser, meanwhile, seemed to always just fall shy of great performance. While pages are quick to load over WiFi and 3G, scrolling is never completely smooth, and it’s the same story with pinch-to-zoom. It’s about 90% of the way there, but the occasional hiccup and stutter stops everything from being completely perfect. The lack of Ice Cream Sandwich means you won’t be able to turn to alternatives like Chrome or Firefox either, and we can’t help but wonder if the latest version of Android is all that’s holding the phone back from being buttery smooth all around.

In terms of benchmarks, the Atom Z2460 clocked at 1.6Ghz more than held its own. Quadrant returned a score of 3,608, AnTuTu gave us 5,647, NeNaMark 2 finished with 39.7fps, and SunSpider 0.9.1 absolutely screamed with 1,436ms. That’s on par with high-end phones like the HTC One X and the Samsung Galaxy S III. Impressive, but we wish it was mirrored in real world browsing tests.

Camera

The eight megapixel sensor serves up decidedly average results, with photos appearing dull and lifeless thanks to undersaturated pictures and a light smattering of noise reduction which is consistently applied. The camera also had trouble focusing on close-up objects, with several attempts needed before the subject would become clear.

As you can see from the flowers in the gallery, reds seem to get some special preference, but not in a good way, looking extremely oversaturated despite the overcast British weather. Noise ramps up considerably in low-light situations too. Burst mode works as advertised, with the phone capturing 10 photos in rapid succession, then allowing the user to pick the best one. It’s nice to see such a function making it to a budget phone like the San Diego when the HTC One X and Galaxy S III boast a similar feature, but will you really use it with the camera’s dodgy output?

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Video recording is a bit of a mess. We hope you enjoy videos that look like they were recorded underwater, because that’s pretty much exactly what the 1080p H.264 Baseline L4.1 footage encoded at 15Mbit/s looks like. Cars, motorcycles, and pedestrians devolve into gelatinous forms are they wobble across the screen in the resulting output, with considerable distortion as you pan the phone around. That’s made all the more frustrating by the fact the compression is actually pretty good, with no obvious artifacts and only a very minor amount of noise. Sure, the output isn’t as sharp as 1080p video you’ll find on other smartphones, but most phones in this category are shooting 720p with far worse results. Audio quality is great too, with stereo AAC encoded with a constant bitrate of 320Kbit/s.

Phone and Battery

Call quality was good on the San Diego, with those on the other end coming across without any issues and reporting the same for me. As is often the case, the earpiece could do to be slightly louder, but it’s a minor detail.

We weren’t unable to perform tests across multiple carriers on the San Diego due to the simlock that Orange has placed on the device. We did reach out to Orange and ask for an unlock code so we could better test the phone, but they were unable to provide one. As a result, we were stuck on Orange and T-Mobile’s combined 3G networks and were met with less than impressive results. Speeds never broke the 2Mbit/s barrier no matter where we were throughout London, with tests often falling well below 1Mbit/s matched with occasionally high pings. It’s the same story with real world performance, with websites taking longer to load on average when compared against O2 or Three.

Battery life was a mixed bag, to say the least. Let’s get the video rundown out of the way. We took a 1080p H.264 High Profile L4.1 clip with a bitrate of 20Mbit/s and played it on loop, with WiFi/3G left on, brightness set to 100%, and headphones left plugged in with volume set to 50%. The San Diego managed 2 hours and 43 minutes before dying. That’s well below what even the most modest devices are capable of achieving, so we re-ran the test with a less demanding 720p H.264 Baseline L3.1 clip with a bitrate of 2Mbit/s, this time managing 3 hours and 59 minutes. That’s a tremendous difference, and comes down to the Atom chip’s video decoding capabilities. ARM-based chips typically have dedicated video decoders that only have a small difference in power drain depending on the complexity of the video clip, but it looks like it’s a pretty huge variance in Intel’s case. That’s backed up by the temperature of the phone too: the phone was much warmer to the touch after the 1080p test than the 720p, so the Atom chip was definitely feeling the strain despite video playback being perfectly smooth. Even if you take the better of the two results, the battery falls short of other handsets.

In more typical usage, we could definitely get a full day out of the phone and survive for most of the next too, although the overall drain does seem to be ever so slightly higher than average. Part of the blame can be assigned to the power hungry screen, and during the idle time the phone matched what ARM-based chips had to offer. Web browsing, Twitter updates, push Gmail, and a handful of text messages did see the battery fade away a little quicker than we would have liked, however.

Wrap-Up

Intel deserves some credit. The company has been trying to make x86 work in mobile devices for quite some time, and has finally proven that the whole package is possible with good performance sans ridiculous battery consumption. Now the company needs to start working on refining the process and bringing battery drain up to speed with competitors, because they’re certainly not standing still.

As for the San Diego, it feels more like an experiment or the result of a happy accident that somehow made it into full scale production for general sale. It’s a quirky little device that features a good screen and decent longevity, but suffers tremendously from Gingerbread and a mediocre camera. Orange, however, has priced it pretty much perfectly. You’ll be paying well above the £199 asking price for phones that rectify those problems, or sacrificing key features and specs if you dip below it. In a nutshell, it’s good value for money if you can live with being stuck on an old version of Android for the foreseeable future.

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Orange San Diego Review is written by Ben Kersey & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.


NEC’s LaVie Z Ultrabook has definitely lost weight: just 875 grams and priced from $1,600 in Japan

NEC's LaVie Z Ultrabook has definitely lost weight just 875 grams and priced from $1,600 in Japan

No one complained when we reported NEC’s initial claimed weight of 999 grams (2.2 pounds) for its LaVie Z Ultrabook, but it turns out that statistic is brutally unfair. The 13.3-inch laptop actually tips the scales at just 875 grams (1.9 pounds) thanks to the magnesium lithium alloy used in its 0.59-inch chassis — not bad when you consider that there are still 1.3kg netbooks wandering the planet. Of course, in line with Intel’s official Ultrabook spec, you’re getting a minimum Core i5-3317U processor (yes, that’s Ivy Bridge) and 128GB SSD, plus USB 3.0, SDXC slot, HDMI out and a claimed battery life of 8.1 hours. There’s no word on US pricing yet, but that base spec will set you back ¥130,000 ($1,600) in Japan, while the top model with Core i7-3517U and 256GB SSD will add another ¥30,000 ($375) to your bill.

NEC’s LaVie Z Ultrabook has definitely lost weight: just 875 grams and priced from $1,600 in Japan originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 03 Jul 2012 10:04:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Samsung Series 7 AiO gets Ivy Bridge refresh in South Korea

Samsung has announced that it’s releasing an update to its existing Series 7 All-In-One PC that will bump the Intel processors up to Ivy Bridge and also add discrete graphics from AMD. The new version of the Series 7 will add one of Intel’s Ivy Bridge Core i5 CPUs, and graphics will be handled by an AMD Radeon 6470M GPU. A 1TB hard drive is also onboard for all your storage needs.

The design of the PC otherwise remains unchanged. The 23-inch display has a 1920×1080 resolution and is capable of 250 nits of brightness. It’s also touch enabled, which will come in handy when Windows 8 drops later this year. The Series 7 adds JBL speakers for improved sound, and features a DVD drive, HDMI input so that it can double as a television, and its own HDTV tuner.

This refreshed version looks to be a Korean only model for now, with the PC costing 1,740,000 WON (~$1,529). You’ll just have to sit tight for now and hope Samsung brings the new version to the United States.


Samsung Series 7 AiO gets Ivy Bridge refresh in South Korea is written by Ben Kersey & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.


Samsung announced the launch of its “Retro” Style Series 7 Desktop

If you where anxiously waiting for Samsung Series 7 All In One Desktop you will be please to know the Samsung Korea officially launch this new “Retro” desktop computer and its 80’s like lines. Anyway the Series 7 desktop comes with a nice 23” Full HD Monitor with LED Backlight, JBL Speaker, an AMD Radeon 6470, an HD TV Tuner, 1TB of HDD, 8GB of RAM, and a Core i5-2390T for just $1,199 (MSRP).

NEC New LaVie Z Ultrabook now officially official! Act 2, Scene 1

Announced early May, then officialized early June, Today (Early July) NEC finally gave its LaVie Z its definitive launch date and price line-up. So technically speaker nothing much has changed here, the LaVie Z is still an ultrabook and still comes with a Core-i7-3517U or Core i5-3317U, SSD, a 13.3″ screen with a 1600×900 resolution and lithium-magnesium alloy but comes now in an even lighter package and now weight just 875g instead of the 999g previously announced!
Anyway the first …

Carnegie Mellon researchers develop robot that takes inventory, helps you find aisle four

Carnegie Mellon researchers develop robot that takes inventory, helps you find aisle four

Fed up with wandering through supermarket aisles in an effort to cross that last item off your shopping list? Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University‘s Intel Science and Technology Center in Embedded Computing have developed a robot that could ease your pain and help store owners keep items in stock. Dubbed AndyVision, the bot is equipped with a Kinect sensor, image processing and machine learning algorithms, 2D and 3D images of products and a floor plan of the shop in question. As the mechanized worker roams around, it determines if items are low or out of stock and if they’ve been incorrectly shelved. Employees then receive the data on iPads and a public display updates an interactive map with product information for shoppers to peruse. The automaton is currently meandering through CMU’s campus store, but it’s expected to wheel out to a few local retailers for testing sometime next year. Head past the break to catch a video of the automated inventory clerk at work.

Continue reading Carnegie Mellon researchers develop robot that takes inventory, helps you find aisle four

Carnegie Mellon researchers develop robot that takes inventory, helps you find aisle four originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 30 Jun 2012 19:53:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  sourceMIT Technology Review  | Email this | Comments

Maingear Pulse 11 review: a small and surprisingly powerful gaming laptop

Maingear Pulse 11 review a small and suprisingly powerful gaming laptop

Gaming laptops are strange beasts. While they may have been lugged all the way to the LAN party, they aren’t too much fun to use on a plane. That was, until the advent of Alienware’s 11-inch M11x, which kept the fast internals at the expense of weight and battery life. When it was unceremoniously yanked by parent company Dell, it left a gap in the market for people who really did need a gaming laptop on the go.

Fortunately, Clevo stepped in with its W110ER, an 11-inch laptop that companies like Maingear and others have tweaked to sell as their own. Packing an Ivy Bridge CPU, NVIDIA’s Kepler-based GeForce GT 650M and the same 1366 x 768 display as the M11x, it’s obviously trying to step into Alienware’s shoes. So, is this the new standard-bearer for small-yet-powerful gaming laptops? Does it really blow us away with its power? Will you want to part with a minimum of $999 to get hold of one? Read on to find out.

Continue reading Maingear Pulse 11 review: a small and surprisingly powerful gaming laptop

Maingear Pulse 11 review: a small and surprisingly powerful gaming laptop originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Jun 2012 14:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Intel’s Ultrabook Design Induces Growth In Premium Laptop Market

Ultrabook Share of $700+ Windows Notebooks (NPD Group)

When Intel introduced the Ultrabook brand and accompanying rules and guidelines, many were skeptical and talked about it being a marketing “gimmick”. Data shows that they could not have been more wrong. First of all, although relatively modest in terms of overall volume, the Ultrabook products are really important because they generate higher profits and that’s what keeps PC makers going.

NPD, a research company, says that Ultrabooks now represent 11% of all $700+ Windows laptops. The $700+ category has grown by a modest 3%, and the $900+ category has grown by 39% year-over-year. This is no small feat, nor it is small (dollar) numbers. Some interesting lessons can be learned from this: (more…)

By Ubergizmo. Related articles: Intel plans to standardize Ultrabook battery cell design, Gigabyte U2442V and U2442N Ultrabooks – Hands-on,

ASUS’ Cedar Trail-loaded EeeBox EB1030 nettop keeps your desk clean, thumbs green

ASUS' Cedar Trail-loaded EeeBox EB1030 nettop keeps your desk clean, thumbs green

We’ve seen a fair share of space-saving nettops pass through our very own crowded halls, so what’s one more to add to the list? Especially when it’s one being flaunted as the most eco-friendly, energy-efficient PC. That’s exactly what ASUS thinks of its EeeBox EB1030, which aside from sporting a relatively minimalist design (as is usually the case with nettops), it’s also boasting Intel’s latest batch of Cedar Trail CPUs. To go along with those Atom processors (1.86GHz), ASUS is making this mini machine as configurable as it could get, giving users the option to load it with up to 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive combined with 32GB of SSD goodness. Ports-wise the unit’s pretty standard, offering options such as an HDMI, VGA, microphone, audio jack, card reader and four USB two-dot-ohs. Of course, the amount of cash you’ll have to shell out will depend on the setup of choice, with pricing set to start at €296, or around $370 in American dollars.

ASUS’ Cedar Trail-loaded EeeBox EB1030 nettop keeps your desk clean, thumbs green originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 29 Jun 2012 12:38:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink Notebook Italia  |  sourceASUS  | Email this | Comments

Google admits MacBook Chrome crash bug

Google has admitted that its Chrome browser is the cause of MacBook stability problems, with an incompatibility between the app and the integrated Intel graphics leading to crashes. “Work is proceeding to find and fix the root cause” a Google spokesperson told Gizmodo, though the company does splash a little of the blame onto Apple itself and the way OS X Lion is handling kernel issues.

“Radar bug number 11762608 has been filed with Apple regarding the kernel panics,” the Google spokesperson continued, “since it should not be possible for an application to trigger such behavior.” Apple is yet to comment on the issue.

Google is taking a two-pronged approach to dealing with the glitch. Chrome users should have already received a patch on Thursday afternoon, that temporarily shuts off some of the browser’s use of GPU acceleration on machines with the Intel HD 4000 graphics.

Meanwhile, work is underway to come up with a more lasting fix with full GPU acceleration functionality still in place. There’s no timescale for its release, however.

Yesterday, at its second Google IO keynote, Google confirmed that Chrome now has 310m users worldwide, making it the most popular browser around according to all the metrics the search giant said it could find.

Google Statement:

“We have identified a leak of graphics resources in the Chrome browser related to the drawing of plugins on Mac OS X. Work is proceeding to find and fix the root cause of the leak.

The resource leak is causing a kernel panic on Mac hardware containing the Intel HD 4000 graphics chip (e.g. the new Macbook Airs). Radar bug number 11762608 has been filed with Apple regarding the kernel panics, since it should not be possible for an application to trigger such behavior.

While the root cause of the leak is being fixed, we are temporarily disabling some of Chrome’s GPU acceleration features on the affected hardware via an auto-updated release that went out this afternoon (Thursday June 28). We anticipate further fixes in the coming days which will re-enable many or all of these features on this hardware.”


Google admits MacBook Chrome crash bug is written by Chris Davies & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.