Hasta La Gadget!

Yesterday’s lab installment gave us an opportunity to pit the Lumia 920 against competing smartphones in a low-light capture scenario, but Nokia’s standard battery of tests is used to evaluate and improve far more than stills shooting. Several stops throughout the day brought us to a foam-filled sound chamber tasked with analyzing call quality in a variety of environments, a room with industrial freezers and ovens used to push the limits of operability, and a rig that can shoot with interchangeable sensors and apply image quality algorithms in real-time, without a handset in sight. Unfortunately, due to proprietary technologies and processes, we weren’t permitted to photograph these first facilities, though we did manage to snap away at two other stations — a platform that shifted up and down at adjustable speeds to test the Lumia 920’s optical image stabilization, and a machine that drops smartphones against a block of concrete, used to simulate that all-too-frequent occurrence of handsets plunging towards pavement.

We’ve seen plenty examples of the 920’s OIS capabilities this week, so we won’t go into much more detail on that front, but specialized (and pricey) equipment enables engineers to introduce consistent processes — this machine simulated hand shake at different speeds, and even with exaggerated movement, the benefits were clear. A separate building contained the drop test contraption, which releases devices from an adjustable height, letting them land directly on a block of polished concrete. We tested both the 808 PureView and a Samsung Galaxy S III in this manner (with roughly 100 Lumia prototypes currently available, Nokia wasn’t quite willing to risk sending one to its death). Both smartphones remained in perfect working order following the drop, so it’s likely that they’ll be able to handle a similar fall during regular use as well (company reps offered to test our iPhone 5, but we declined handing it over). That wraps up our week at Nokia’s facilities in Finland — there will be plenty more to explore once we have a Lumia sample in hand, but you’ll find the OIS test and concrete plunge videos ready right now, posted just after the break.

Continue reading From the lab: Lumia 920 image stabilization and 808 drop test at Nokia R&D (video)

Filed under: Cellphones, Cameras, Mobile

From the lab: Lumia 920 image stabilization and 808 drop test at Nokia R&D (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 27 Sep 2012 17:27:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Every last detail can help make a computer-generated character seem more realistic. So a team of researchers at Cornell University have developed a simulator that can accurately recreate the sound of cloth so that the CG characters you see on screen also sound as authentic as possible. More »

Google’s Android smartphone OS is facing a lot of challengers in the low-cost smartphone segment, from Huawei, ZTE, Samsung and Nokia at the vendor end to Mozilla coming from its position in browser software. But for the short term it appears that there is little for Android to worry about from any single contender. Research out today from Strategy Analytics notes that one of these, Firefox OS, Mozilla’s mobile effort, will only sit on 1% of all global smartphone shipments in 2013, versus 67% for Android, and it could take up to two years for it to turn that around.

To be fair, Firefox has made some headway with carriers and OEMs with its low-cost focused smartphone OS — those that backed the company’s mobile OS efforts in July include Telefonica, Sprint, Deutsche Telekom and ZTE. The low-cost, sub-$100 device smartphone segment is a growing one, with Deloitte projecting there will be 500 million of these sold this year alone.

But that growth, for now, is a story with Android as the protagonist. Strategy Analytics says Firefox OS will continue to remain “niche” because of low brand awareness, a limited retail presence (especially in the U.S.) and an ecosystem of developers that is still too small, says the analyst group, challenges that will also give it problems growing market share in tablets, too — an area where it also hopes to make some headway against the iPad but also lower-cost Android-based tablets.

The first handsets built on Firefox OS are expected to come out in the first half of 2013. They will be targeting the low-cost smartphone segment rather than doing battle at the higher end with Apple and Samsung’s Galaxy line. That is an area that up to now has been largely dominated by Android, with phones costing as little as $100 or less without any subsidies. Among other challenges, Nokia is trying to take its still-strong position in the feature phone market and leverage it better in the smartphone segment, where it has been struggling for years.

Firefox OS, like Android, is open-source and rather than looking at creating a native ecosystem it is putting its eggs into the HTML5 mobile web basket. But is coming into the low-cost market at a time when Google has cornered it in just about every region. “Overcoming Android will not be an easy task,” says Neil Mawston, analyst with Strategy Analytics.

But he also points out that this doesn’t mean Firefox is doomed — just that Mozilla and its partners will need to remain patient to see whether it takes off. “It took Android just two years from commercial launch to overtake Symbian and go from new entrant to established global leader, so things can change extremely fast in the smartphone industry,” Mawston told TechCrunch. Android launched commercially in Q4 2008 and was number-1 by Q4 2010, according to SA’s calculations.

And the challenges are not exclusive to Firefox OS. “At the moment, none of the emerging smartphone platforms, such as Firefox and Tizen, has the hardware, software and services capabilities to match Android or Apple,” he continues.

But as the smartphone market continues to grow, it will see further price pressure, especially from developing markets full of first-time smartphone buyers. That presents a  chance for growth. “[Firefox and Tizen] are cost-competitive and this gives them an opportunity to make some gains among price-sensitive mass-market consumers in the early phases of their strategies.”

Still, he notes that new platforms like Firefox OS and Tizen are “Android challengers rather than Android killers at this stage.”

We’ve seen the Kinect put to use to help you find your groceries, but the sensor’s image processing capabilities have some more safety-minded applications as well. The fine minds at MIT combined the Kinect with a laser range finder and a laptop to create a real-time mapping rig for firefighters and other rescue workers. The prototype, called SLAM (for Simultaneous Localization and Mapping) received funding from the US Air Force and the Office of Naval Research, and it stands out among other indoor mapping systems for its focus on human (rather than robot) use and its ability to produce maps without the aid of any outside information, thanks to an on-board processor.

Continue reading MIT’s real-time indoor mapping system uses Kinect, lasers to aid rescue workers

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MIT’s real-time indoor mapping system uses Kinect, lasers to aid rescue workers originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 25 Sep 2012 13:16:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Anyone who’s dropped a cellphone in the bath knows that water and microelectronics don’t usually mix well. But at IBM’s Swiss lab in Zurich, marrying the two is becoming almost commonplace: microprocessors with water coursing through microchannels carved deep inside them are already crunching data in SuperMUC, an IBM supercomputer – with the heat that the water carries away used to warm nearby buildings. More »