Hasta La Gadget!

With the Samsung GALAXY S 4 the company has focused on four key areas that they’ve found are most important for everyday life fulfillment, the first being Enjoyment. Creating and nurturing relationships is the second, Everyday Convenience is the third, and the fourth and final pillar is Health and Wellness. With this release, Samsung isn’t just creating a smartphone that you’ll integrate into your life, they’re creating a conduit through which you’ll be living your life in a more pleasant, healthy, and convenient way.

In the release of the Samsung GALAXY S 4 you’ll have noticed the look and feel of the device to be largely similar to what we’ve experienced before with the Samsung Galaxy S III and the Note series after the Note II. This is done to keep you in the Samsung natural-feeling aesthetic, one that’s proven itself to be monumentally successful over the past year in many products.

This device works with a 5-inch display and has had its bezel minimized – it’s smaller than it’s been on any Samsung device before. This minimized battery creates a feeling that you’re using one massive display rather than a display embedded in a smartphone. Covering the display you’ll find the most advanced reinforced protection with Corning’s Gorilla Glass 3.

This viewing experience is enhanced to the max with Full HD Super AMOLED display technology. You’ll be working with 1080 x 1920 pixel resolution, that’s 441 PPI across the 5-inch display and by far the sharpest smart device display offered by Samsung thus far. This is also one of the sharpest displays on a smartphone in the industry today, right up next to the HTC One (468 PPI) and the DROID DNA (440 PPI).

As for photography and videography equipment, you’ll be starting with a 13 megapixel rear-facing camera and a 2 megapixel front-facing camera. These cameras work with a set of new software outlined in the timeline below, specifically in the “Enjoyment” section – a must-see!

Inside you’ll find that the battery is more powerful than before (2600 mAh, mind you) while the overall device is thinner than the Galaxy S III. The GALAXY S4 weighs in at 130g and is slim as ever with just 7.9mm to its name.

The GALAXY S4 is lighter than its predecessor and it’s more powerful “in all ways” as Samsung notes. This device works with a Qualcomm quad-core processor clocked at 1.6GHz as well as a Samsung Exynos 1.6Ghz “Octa” processor depending on where you get the device – you’ll know final location and hardware when release information is final in your area of the planet.

You’ll also be backed up by 2GB RAM per the standard fare in essentially every top-tier smartphone on the market today. The GALAXY S4 will be released in three different internal storage capacities, 16, 32, and 64GB, each of these coming with a microSD card slot for 64GB memory expansion. Depending on the carrier you’re working with, one, two, or all three versions will be available to you starting in early April, 2013.

As the GALAXY S4 supports HSPA+42 Mbps as well as 4G LTE, you’ll find this device released on many – if not all – of your favorite carriers around the world. Inside the USA we’ll see the device released on each of the top four mobile carriers as well as Cricket, the cutest of the USA carriers.

Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean will be coming with the device right out of the box with the company’s newest version of TouchWiz integrated for a fully Samsung-friendly experience. For more information on the software side of this device, you’ll want to check out the four pillars of excellence mentioned in the first paragraph of this post. Each of these four pillars can be found in the timeline below – check it out!

SlashGear 101: The Samsung GALAXY S 4 is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

This week we’re seeing HTC come into the light with a massively important new device by the name of HTC One, and with it, a new collection of features included under the “HTC UltraPixel Camera” umbrella. With the features we’re working with here on the HTC One hero phone’s implementation of HTC UltraPixel Camera, you’ll find that image quality is, first and foremost, not solely dependent on the amount of megapixels a camera has. HTC UltraPixel Camera technology is here demonstrated with an UltraPixel Sensor, HTC ImageChip, f/2.0 Aperture, and Optical Image Stabilization.

UltraPixel Sensor

HTC is bringing what it calls its first UltraPixel sensor to the market with the HTC One, showing off the full setup in the image you see below. This image shows the HTC ImageChip architecture (not unlike what we saw with each of the HTC One models in the past), the UltraPixel Sensor itself, an f/2.0 Aperture, and the HTC One’s lens. With the UltraPixel sensor, you’ll now be working with larger pixels than the average camera.

With the UltraPixel Sensor collecting UltraPixel-sized pixels, you’ll be getting the ability to capture “300% more light than many of the 13 megapixel cameras on the market.” Each pixel contains more light and more data than ever before, all this with a sensor whose size is equivalent to that of a standard 8MP or 13MP smartphone camera. This UltraPixel Sensor is a CMOS BSI and is classified as having a 1/3′ sensor size.

Each photo you’re going to be taking will be 2688 x 1520 pixels in size on the HTC One at a 16:9 aspect ratio, and you’ve got a 5 piece lens element setup with a focal length of 3.82mm. Each one of the pixels you’re picking up here is a 2.0 micrometer UltraPixel. These pixels have “effectively” twice the surface area of the standard pixels you’re working with on 8MP and 13MP setups, those being generally 1.4 micrometers and 1.1 micrometers respectively.

In effect, you’ve got the same size photo, but instead of creating smaller pixels to fill the area as larger megapixel cameras are doing, HTC is creating larger pixels to fill the area. This results in the HTC One’s camera being 4MP strong, but creating photos that are the same size – and better quality – than the larger megapixel solutions. File sizes are smaller for the HTC-taken photos here as well.

HTC ImageChip

With the newest edition of HTC’s own ISP (Image Signal Processor), you’ll find that the HTC ImageChip feature collection has expanded since the HTC One X arrived on the scene right around a year ago with ImageSense. The first big innovation is a rather speedy 200ms full distance scan for use with Continuous Auto Focus. That’s quicker than a human blink – you’ll have a harder time being out of focus than you will getting instant focus.

Next you’ll find Real-Time Video HDR – with a dynamic range that can be cranked up to a lovely -92dB, you’ll be able to “match the human eye capability” as you capture interlaced frames at 60fps. You’ve what HTC notes is “always on” HDR here for video, even at HD 1080p. Due to the nature of the curved lens, darker spots appear near the edge of your photos almost no matter what – HTC has compensated for this with an algorithm designed specifically for the HTC One’s hardware.

This newest HTC ImageChip also works with de-noise processing on both the front and the back-facing camera on the HTC One. With this simple concentration of effort, HTC says noise is cleanly removed at all times.

f/2.0 Aperture

HTC shows quite simply how the HTC One uses the largest of three apertures available in some of the best selling smartphones on the market today, with the Galaxy S III working with an f/2.6 and the iPhone 5 utilizing an f/2.4. With the HTC One’s f/2.0 size, one whole heck of a lot more light is able to be let in, this resulting in better results in low-light photo conditions.

Optical Image Stabilization

The HTC One’s camera setup allows its camera to capture a full sized photo as fast as 1/48 of a second. This compares with the current market standard of 1/30 of a second, that speed also the best the HTC One X can do currently. Along with this you’ve now got a real-deal physical optical image stabilizer (OIS) on the HTC One working with the smartphone’s dedicated imaging gyroscope.

With its own OIS, the HTC One’s lens physically moves according to what the dedicated imaging gyroscope tells it, this countering the inevitable shake that happens when someone takes a photo without a tripod. This OIS is different from the more common digital stabilization used on many competitor model solutions, those solutions opting to cut out shaking bits of the photo, reducing the resolution of the photo in the process.

The HTC One’s OIS works at an “unprecedented” frequency of 2000Hz and has been made small enough to fit inside the HTC One’s relatively thin chassis. Working on two axis, this OIS detects pitch and yaw movements and counters them at 2000 times a second. Video quality is also significantly improved over past solutions as the OIS effectively removes background shakes and mimics smooth panning, top to bottom.

More on the HTC One

Below you’ll find a timeline of HTC One hands-on or otherwise in-depth explorations from SlashGear. We’ll also have a full review of the HTC One up sooner than later, so be sure to stick around for the big drop! Seeya then!

SlashGear 101: HTC UltraPixel Camera Technology is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Just yesterday the 2013 Super Bowl revealed the very first glimpse most of the world had at Apple’s URL-shortening “AppStore.com” in the Star Trek Into Darkness teaser – and lucky you, you’re already signed up! The AppStore.com structure is not one where there will be a massive “land grab” as often is the case with these sorts of things, instead Apple has opted for a more automatic sort of push, with URLs like http://appstore.com/slashgear being active automatically. That particular address will bring you straight to the iTunes App Store listing of the SlashGear app – easy as pie!

This structure also works for the Mac App Store. If you head to http://appstore.com/mac/osxmountainlion/, you’ll be taken to the Mac App Store’s listing of OS X Mountain Lion, also launching the Mac App Store as the iTunes App Store links launch the iTunes app. This shortened link structure includes both names of apps and names of companies. You’ll be able to link to link in three different ways to two different kinds of final locations as follows:

http://appstore.com/companyname/

http://appstore.com/companyname/appname/

http://appstore.com/appname/

As the iOS Developer Library lets us know, each of these also works with the “mac” inserted to head to the Mac App Store instead of the iTunes App Store. The Mac App Store, for those of you that don’t know, is made for desktop apps rather than mobile apps – while your iPhone apps come from the iTunes App Store, your MacBook apps come from the Mac App Store.

http://appstore.com/mac/companyname/

http://appstore.com/mac/companyname/appname/

http://appstore.com/mac/appname/

The way you’ll get the correct app or company name for this structure is to remove all whitespace, make sure all letters are lower-case, and make sure all copyright, trademark, and registered mark symbols are taken out. You’ll be replacing the ampersand with the word “and”, and all of the following punctuation must be removed: “!¡”#$%’()*+,\-./:;< =>¿?@[\]^_`{|}~”. You’ll need to replace all accented and “decorated” character with their most basic form (elemental character) while all other characters are left as is. So make your title as basic as possible and it should, by all means, link easily.

Above: Star Trek Into Darkness trailer displays first-ever appearance of an AppStore.com/ vanity url.

If you have trouble finding the correct structure for your app or company on either app store, be sure to let Apple know at http://developer.apple.com/bugreporter. There you’ll want to tell them the full current or desired URL you’re hoping to work with, the countries your app or company works in, and the iTunes-generated long URL you’ve been working with up until now (http://itunes.apple.com/us/app…). You can get this longer URL by right-clicking or control-clicking the little triangle next to the app’s price in your respective app store and selecting the “Copy Link” option.

Sound all good to you? Let us know if you’re pumped up about this simple yet powerful measure Apple is taking to keep links to their app stores clean and quick!

SlashGear 101: How do I get an Apple AppStore.com vanity url? is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

Right this very moment you’re probably seeing a few Vine videos popping up on your Twitter feed wondering what on earth these tiny videos are taking hold when previous (rather similar) apps and services have done it so many different ways before. There are several reasons why this service is catching the public’s taps at a furious rate, the first of them being the fact that Twitter acquired the company and decided to tell their entire userbase to go ahead and make Vine videos as much as possible, right away! The second is the iTunes App Store choosing Vine as an Editor’s Choice download just yesterday.

Vine is an app that allows you to record videos from your smartphone or tablet device (though it’s optimized for smartphones) in segments or all at once. You can hold your finger down on the screen (also a viewfinder) to record one long 6 second video, or you can hold it down in bursts, recording as many short moments as you like inside 6 seconds total. These videos are processed extremely rapidly and are able to be uploaded to the internet (hosted by Vine) quickly as well.

Once you’ve created a video in Vine, you have the option to do several things with it, the first being absolutely nothing at all:

1. Save only to your device, a 6 second video existing on your smart device on its own.
2. Upload to Vine only.
3. Upload to Vine and share on Twitter.
4. Upload to Vine and share on Facebook.
5. Upload to Vine and share on Twitter and Facebook at the same time.

At the moment unless you exit the Vine app and upload the resulting video through some other non-Vine service, you’ll need to upload to Vine in order to see your video shared anywhere else. Also at the moment the two services you’re able to share with (besides the app-centric Vine itself) are Facebook and Twitter. Vine is very similar to the app Instagram in that you’re able to create media and share it only with your other friends in-app, but unlike that environment, Vine makes no effort to hide the fact that everything you upload to the web is, indeed, entirely public.

If you upload anything you record with Vine to the internet, it will be public. That’s the long and short of it. According to Vine’s Privacy Policy, anything you choose to share with Vine is considered information (and media) that you choose to be made public. This includes data of all kinds, video, location information, the profile you create, and everything in-between.

If you like Vine but you’d rather create your miniature moving images in gif form (that’s less like a video and more like a moving photo file), you may want to check out Cinemagram. They’ve been open for business for many months at this point and have just (this week) revealed a new way to create media called “Shorts” which combine several of their own “cine” clips to create a mini movie – that’s not a coincidental release at all – no way!

You’ll be able to download Vine from the iTunes App Store right this minute for free, if you feel the urge to jump in on this mini movie party – it’s optimized for iPhone and iPod touch, but you can use it on your iPad too if you don’t mind the tiny layout. This app will almost certainly be coming to Android very soon, and we wouldn’t be surprised if Windows Phone 8 got a taste of the joy before Summer rolls around.

SlashGear 101: What is Vine, and what does it do? is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.

At CES 2013 we saw the unveiling of the NVIDIA Tegra 4, a mobile processor the company suggested was the World’s Fastest, it containing 72 GPU cores, five CPU cores (one of them an A15 “companion”), and the ability to work with 4G LTE. The Tegra 4 will be working with the NVIDIA Icera i500, that being a 28nm HP, Category 3 LTE (4 in the pipeline) Soft Modem. These two pieces of architecture together will be NVIDIA’s hero technology for mobile devices throughout 2013.

NVIDIA Tegra 4

The NVIDIA Tegra 4 System-on-Chip with five ARM Cortex A15 cores – four of them with 1.9GHz max clock speed, a fifth synthesized to work at lower power. The technology working around this fifth Companion core is similar to the Tegra 3, and for the lay person, it may as well be presented as the same due to how similar it really is. The fifth core is not visible to the operating system you’re using (be it Android, Windows, or something else), acting as more of a “Shadow Core” or a “Ninja” as we’ve been apt to call it, just as it was with Tegra 3.

Above you’re going to see a rundown of what Tegra 4 is, how it compares to Tegra 3, and what the future holds for mobile processing. The talk you’re seeing above is with NVIDIA Technical Marketing Director Nick Stam who presented us more of a detailed look at the Tegra 4 and what it means for mobile devices in 2013 (and beyond.)

For those of you that want to get rather technical with it all, you’ll be interested in knowing that the die size here in this new model is 80mm^2, ever so slightly larger than Tegra 3, but a whole lot denser as well. The cores you’re seeing here work on 28nm HPL, that being 28nm low power with high-k plus metal gates. What that basically means here is that you’re going to get one extremely optimized experience, made for high performance and low power consumption – as every great processor should.

The Tegra 4 processor will be working with “Always-On” HDR camera technology as well. You’ll find a rather interesting set of details in our initial reveal post, and we’ll be seeing this technology in-person sooner than later. It’s then that we’ll be seeing what it really means to be able to instantly take a shot with multiple exposures at once!

NVIDIA Icera i500 Soft Modem with 4G LTE

The NVIDIA Icera i500 Soft Modem is what the company describes as 40% smaller than a conventional die – this referring to other modems they’ve worked with from companies other than themselves, of course. The Icera i500 will work with Soft Modem technology, starting with UE Category 3 LTE (100 Mbps downlink on 20 MHz FDD-LTE) and moving forward to UE Category 4 LTE in the very near future. VoLTE is supported with other voice mode technologies, and the modem will be paired with a new never before seen transceiver built on 65nm LP CMOS.

The NVIDIA Icera i500 Soft Modem is built on TSMC’s 28nm high performance High-K Metal Gate process, and the company is able to power gate each of its cores individually. Depending on the needs of each device’s software package, each of the NVIDIA Icera i500′s 8 cores can be used or not used, gating based on changing load conditions.

Following Tegra 4

Those of you getting pumped up about Tegra 4 and NVIDIA’s full 2013 experience, you’ll have a fabulous time hitting up our massive Tegra Hub. There you’ll find not just your everyday NVIDIA Tegra mobile processor news, but featured hands-on articles, must-read up-to-the-minute updates, and reviews of Tegra-toting devices of all kinds.

Right this minute you’ll find several stories on the first device to have been revealed working with the Tegra 4 processor: NIVIDA’s own Project SHIELD. You’ll find plenty of awesome Project SHIELD action in the immediate future and up with its final name some time in Q2 of this year. Also have a peek in the timeline below to see the first important detail articles to have come down the line here in the first week since Tegra 4 was first revealed – Project SHIELD included!

SlashGear 101: NVIDIA Tegra 4 in detail is written by Chris Burns & originally posted on SlashGear.
© 2005 – 2012, SlashGear. All right reserved.