Samsung’s D8000 was our TV of choice back in 2011, and the company is hoping to repeat its success with the new 2012 flagship, the Samsung UN55ES8000. A 55-inch behemoth, though with strikingly delicate design, the ES8000 ticks just about every box you’d expect for a modern Smart TV, and then some more after that. It also has a hefty $3,749.99 RRP, so can the quality live up to the cost? Read on for the SlashGear review.
Hardware
Handsome and imposing: Samsung’s 2012 design language involves plenty of silver metal and narrow bezels, allowing the LED LCD panel to speak for itself. The stand does away with the splayed legs of the last-gen model and replaces them with more discrete curving bars, though the ES8000 is no less stable for it.
The screen itself measures – on our review model – 55-inches and runs, unsurprisingly, at 1920 x 1080 Full HD resolution. Overall, the set is 1.2-inches thick, excluding the detachable stand (that’s 8.3-inches deep) and stands 30-inches tall and 48.4-inches wide.
Even those with multiple external sources to hook up should have no issues connecting the ES8000. The ports are arrayed in an L-shape along the lower left side of the rear of the set, emerging parallel to the back so as to keep things flat and slim. There are three HDMI, a VGA, component, two sets of composite, three USB 2.0, optical digital, DVI and PC audio, and RF inputs, along with ethernet and integrated WiFi. If we were being picky then we’d liked to have seen a fourth HDMI, preferably side-mounted for impromptu use. Samsung bundles four pairs of active shutter 3D glasses.
There’s also what Samsung refers to as its “Evolution Kit”, a new addition for 2012 models. In effect a – currently empty – expansion bay, the idea is that as Samsung releases new features it can retroactively upgrade its existing models with the use of plug-in boards. Of course, as a new idea it’s untested, and so we’ll have to wait to see if it addresses upgrade anxiety along the line.
For the best results, it’s still sensible to ignore the integrated speakers in any TV and rely on a proper surround sound system – or at the very least a solid 2.1 setup – if you want your ears to be as well-treated as your eyes. Still, the two 10W down-firing speakers on the ES8000 aren’t the worst we’ve heard. There’s also a webcam on the top edge, built into a discrete bump, and flanked by two microphones.
Remote Controls
Samsung includes not one but two remotes with the ES8000, along with a discrete joystick-nub on the right edge for controlling the set up-close. The regular remote is long and thin, encrusted with buttons for navigating menus and channels, controlling volume, attached DVD/Blu-ray/DVR boxes (via HDMI link) and is backlit for nighttime use.
The second “Smart Touch Remote Control” is far more interesting. Shorter than the regular model, it pares back the controls to the bare minimum: there are volume and channel scrolls; power, home, timer and source keys; back, voice control and number shortcuts; all around a trackpad surface. With it, you can swipe your way around menus, but thanks to its integrated microphone you can also give the TV voice commands. We’ve covered that comprehensively in our Samsung Smart TV hands-on.
There are also some non-standard options for those who want even more control. The free Android Smart View App runs on phones and tablets, and as long as your ES8000 is on the same network – either wired or wireless, since the TV has both options – you can control it from your touchscreen. There’s also a Samsung wireless keyboard, which gives you full-sized text input as well as media control buttons with a Bluetooth connection, though we did not have that as part of our review package.
Samsung Smart TV Voice Gesture and Face Recognition hands-on
Performance
Samsung’s 2011 D8000 impressed us with its panel quality, and we can see ourselves recycling the hyperbole for the 2012 ES8000. Brightness is generally even, though there’s a little bloom around the edges, but it’s the accuracy of the colors and the detail that particularly wow. The default settings tend toward the over-saturated, as usual, but after spending some time adjusting them we were very pleased with how accurate flesh tones and other hues appeared.
Samsung quotes a meaningless dynamic contrast ratio – 30,000,000:1, no less – but the D8000 handles itself with aplomb. Whites are clean and pure, while blacks are almost as inky and saturated as we’re used to from Samsung’s AMOLED phones. There was no blurring in fast-moving scenes or sports.
Obviously there’s 3D support as well, using Samsung’s preferred active-shutter technology. That rapidly obscures and opens each lens alternately, matching the TV’s own flicking between frames intended for each eye. It works well, and we were able to watch 3D movies back-to-back without the sort of eye-strain headaches that can often result from poorly-synchronized content. A nice touch is that Samsung charges just $19.99 for each subsequent pair of active-shutter glasses, a far cry from the early days of $50 or more.
Of course, few people rely solely on live TV and DVD/Blu-ray for their entertainment these days, and so Samsung has built in multiple options for the internet age. Scroll through the (somewhat busy and intimidating) menu and there are options for VUDU, Hulu Plus, Netflix, MLB.TV, Pandora, Ustream, CinemaNow, MTV Music Meter, YouTube and more, some of which require a subscription to access. You also get a web browser, Facebook and a “Fitness” app that replicates a little of the Wii Fit experience.
It’s a mixed bag of usefulness – we can see Netflix and Hulu Plus being of most use to most owners – though the navigation experience itself can be sluggish and frustrating at times. We particularly liked the Skype support, which turns the ES8000 into a huge video conferencing system. Audio quality from the microphones by the webcam proved surprisingly clear, even when we were sat across the room. Samsung offers numerous downloadable apps through its own app-store to augment the Smart TV experience, though as it’s the company’s own system rather than, say, Google TV, it’s questionable how many third-party companies will come onboard.
Wrap-Up
Samsung’s ES8000 is a worthy update to its predecessor, and the company demonstrates its edge over much of the competition with the Smart TV functionality. Is it worth the humongous RRP? That’s a null point, given retailers are already discounting it by more than $1,250. You’re still paying a lot for a TV, but it’s less than the D8000 was at roughly the same point in its lifecycle, and that strikes us as a comparative bargain. The more unusual control options are mixed in their usefulness, but the core range of streaming and on-demand content choices are hugely impressive and broaden the ES8000′s appeal beyond the usual TV, movies and gaming.
It’s time to take a look at Jabra‘s newest effort with the Supreme UC, a bluetooth headset that’s made not just for your home computer, not just your smartphone and tablet, but both! This device is priced at a premium $149.99 and is crafted to make you love that you’ve just exchanged such a sum for great sound. It’s got a completely collapsable chassis, comes with a carrying case as well as an extra earpiece, and works with a universally acceptable micro USB for power.
You’ve got a single button on the boom for basic voice controls, a giant multifunction button on the facade of the unit, and two volume buttons at the back surrounding the covered micro USB port. The device is an extremely high quality piece of hardware by all outward appearances, and it is rather comfortable to wear. Be sure to check out our hands-on with the Supreme UC from earlier this year – the main man himself gives an introduction!
This device is not designed for an extremely active person. Try to do a couple of flips or go for a jog and you’ll find yourself wishing you had a bit more of a firm grip around your lobe. If you’re the type of person to sit at your desk all day long or to walk without bobbing your head uncontrollably, you’ll have a perfectly well-suited device on your head. The design of this device also allows for left or right-eared users, with a hook attachment able to work with the earpiece on either side.
Folding the boom in turns the device off, folding it back out turns it back on, and pairing with any number of devices is quite simple. The device is automatically in pairing mode the first time you turn it on, and from that point forward you’ve only to tap the multifunction button and say, “pair new device” and you’ll be ready to go.
The sound quality is certainly decent on its own with any device, but really shines when you’re using your Jabra Connect Android app where you’ll have the choice of several voice cancellation and sound profiles. Sound on the other end of the phone is superb, even in the middle of a coffee shop packed to the brim with hipsters. The person you’re calling will think you’re in an empty room when you’re chatting with them with the Jabra Supreme UC.
Wrap-Up
It’s difficult to consider spending $150 on a headset when you could just pull your phone out of your pocket instead in most situations, but here’s the killer feature: the USB dongle that comes with the device will allow you to completely skip buying a second unit. The Jabra Supreme UC replaces your in-office headset as well as your mobile headset in one swoop. With excellent sound quality for you (the best if you’re on Android) as well as great sound quality and noise cancellation for the person you’re speaking with, the Jabra Supreme UC might just be the buy for you.
Grab this device at any number of local retailers near you and online. This device is going to be available worldwide immediately if not soon, to get to it!
This week we’ve gotten the chance to take a peek at the next in a line of rather popular conservatively sized powerhouses from HTC, this time called the DROID Incredible 4G LTE. We’ve had a look at the Incredible 2 as well as the original DROID Incredible, now it’s time to decide if this HTC One-era device is up to the task of bringing the DROID brand name back up to snuff. As Verizon has no other HTC One device, with T-Mobile and AT&T getting the prizes this time around from that manufacturer, it might be high time Big Red gets its own taste of the Sense (4.0, as seen in this hands-on with the HTC One S) we’ve been using for weeks.
Hardware
Though this device is being released at the same time as the HTC One series is on the market and does indeed use essentially the same software as those devices do, it’s the HTC Rezound that matches this device’s hardware best. Have a peek at our full review of the HTC Rezound to see what I mean. Compared to the HTC One series, you’ll think these devices were born of different mothers:
The Incredible 4G LTE has a 4-inch super LCD qHD display which gets brighter than you could possibly need it to be, that also being 275ppi dense – not quite as good as the Galaxy S III at 306ppi or the One X at 312ppi, but beating out the 256ppi of the One S by just a tiny notch.
You’ve also got a microUSB port on this device that’s also MHL, this meaning that if you’ve got the right converter, you’ll be able to watch 1080p video via HDMI. In the past we’ve not had the best luck with MHL from HTC – in regards to the HTC Jetstream specifically (though technically it wasn’t listed as MHL compliant), but this time around the manufacturer has done quite well – the picture and sound quality are fabulous.
Software
Though the software on this device is essentially the same as we’ve seen on the HTC One S and HTC One X, it seems just a bit slower here on the Incredible 4G LTE. Perhaps it’s the smaller physical size of the screen, maybe it’s just the expectation that a slightly less expensive device without the HTC One branding on it will be less impressive, but there’s something about it that doesn’t ring the same bell as the S and the X. Have a peek at the following benchmarks and you’ll see a slightly different story, however.
This device runs a Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 1.2GHz dual-core processor, not unlike the HTC One S (USA and International), HTC One X (USA version), and Samsung Galaxy S III (USA). The difference between them is the S4 on the latter three devices is clocked at a higher 1.5GHz instead of 1.2 – not much of a difference in everyday use, but for you hackers and testers out there, that factor is in play.
Next you’ll want to take a peek at the device’s inner workings in this hands-on and rapid unboxing we filmed earlier this week. This device has no giant surprises if you’ve had your hands on the HTC One S or X, but if you’re coming up from the Incredible 2, you’re in for a wallop of excellence. HTC presents not just Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich here, but their own Sense 4.0 user interface as well. This is HTC at its best.
This device, again, feels a lot more like the HTC Rezound than it does the HTC One series. The camera is quite a bit better than that device though – almost as if this Incredible has a bit more power behind the scenes in the processor architecture? In fact Qualcomm does have dedicated hardware in this machine inside their Snapdragon S4 chip that’s made specifically to work with photography – this same hardware exists in all S4 processor-toting smartphones on the market thus far as well.
Camera
Though this camera doesn’t have the same ImageSense chip we’ve been loving ever since it was introduced on the HTC One S and X, it does have the same ImageSense software. This means you’ve got to rely on the Qualcomm Snapdragon S4 processor for all your camera action – this being more than enough, of course – and you’ve got all the same effects and shooting modes you had before as well. The hands-on video above should also show you that the shooting speed is as undeniably amazing as it was on the HTC One series as well.
Have a peek at several examples of this camera’s finess below:
Battery and Data Speed
It seems that the brain-sucking madness that ensued with the battery life on the HTC Thunderbolt back when 4G LTE was a brand new baby is now essentially gone entirely. Thank the Snapdragon S4 processor for that, and be sure to note that you’ll just be charging this device once a day almost no matter what – of course if you’re the kind of person who streams video all day every day, you might have a different situation on your hands. If you’re a normal user, you’ll have at least a day’s worth of use with no charges needed.
This device’s connection to Verizon’s 4G LTE network is fabulous. The following example is essentially the average of what we’ve been getting all over Minnesota, with the closest ping point here being Saint Cloud (my home town!) just about an hour away from the Twin Cities where we’re prone to test most often. You’re going to be downloading and uploading as fast or faster than you’ve ever done on a smartphone before – without a doubt. Supposing you’re in a 4g LTE area, of course.
Wrap-Up
It’s a real toss-up right now on Verizon whether you’re going to want to hit up the HTC Rezound or the Incredible 4G LTE if you do indeed want 4G LTE connectivity on an HTC device. They’re both essentially the same in many ways – though for the most advanced vision of an Android device on Verizon as presented by HTC, you’ll probably have to default to the Incredible simply because it’s got Android 4.0 and Sense 4.0 right out of the box while the Rezound still might need an update to Ice Cream Sandwich when you open it up.
This device is not made to be the most powerful smartphone on the market, nor is it made to look the most impressive in the hand. Instead it’s made to attack the market for 4-inch screen lovers with no less than one of the most powerful mobile processors on the market and Verizon’s 4G LTE. This device is not made to be flashy, instead it’s made for people who want long battery life on a 4G LTE smartphone that’s also got HTC’s lovely user interface on a reasonably sized – not to big, not too small – handheld display.
This device is available starting today (July 5th) online with in-store sales starting immediately if not soon across the nation as well. Grab it!
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?
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.
This week we’re having a look at the Nexus Q, a Google device released during the 2012 Google I/O developers conference both for free to all attendees and for $299 to anyone wanting to buy one from home from the Google Play store. This device is a mid-point between your media devices (like your HDTV or stereo) and your Android device(s). We’ve also got the Google Nexus 7 as well as the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, both of them running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean and the Nexus Q app – downloadable now to everyone running Jelly Bean at the moment.
Hardware
It’s a two-pound beast, if you’re thinking about carrying it around, but since it’s designed to remain stationary – it doesn’t really matter how much it weighs. It’s also a sphere, or nearly a sphere, this allowing the Nexus Q to look and feel completely unique in a tech world saturated with rectangles and squares in the living room. The Nexus Q has a ring of LED lights around its center, this lovely display of color showing you the status of the device as well as indicating when its being touched.
The top half of the Nexus Q currently works as both a volume knob and a power on/off button, while the center hole near the top also acts as a light sensor – this and touch-responsiveness across the whole top half allow you to mute the device. The bottom has a rubbery stopper so that you’re not rolling about, and the back of the device has all manner of connection ports.
You’ll see on the back that you’ve got two ports for right and two for left for your audio, you’ve got an optical out port, Ethernet port, microHDMI port, and microUSB port. Below all of that you’ve got a power port which connects with the cord you’re given in the box. This unit also ships with a microHDMI to full-sized HDMI converter cord so you can use the whole thing right out of the box.
This device cannot be used on its own.
To activate the device – and to control it – you’ve got to download the Nexus Q app from the Google Play store with a device running Android 4.1 Jelly Bean. This minimum software requirement is sure to change rather quickly as it actually says that only Android 2.3 Gingerbread is required in the app’s description in the store, but for now, you’ll need a Galaxy Nexus (with the software upgrade) or a Nexus 7 tablet – which we’ve also reviewed in full here.
Actually connecting your Android smartphone or tablet to your Nexus Q is simple – it just requires that you have your Wi-fi connection’s password and that you enter it once (or twice if you’ve never set up your own device’s connection to the Wi-fi in your home). From there, you’ve got a near-instant connection between the Nexus Q and your Android device for playing YouTube, Google Play Music, and Google Play Movies – these are the only three apps that work with the Nexus Q at the moment (unless you want to hack.)
Software
There is no software – so to speak – unless you hack past the basic settings that the device comes with. What you use this device for, then, is a conduit between your Android device and your stereo or television. If you’ve got the Nexus Q hooked up to your television and are letting it sit without playing music or video, you’ll get a simple sleep screen with a collection of blue orbs spinning around one another in an organic pattern (as seen very briefly in the hands-on video above.)
If you do play some music from your Android smartphone or tablet, you’ll get a visualizer showing some spectacular colors and shapes representing the sound. If you play a video, you’ll get the video up on the screen – same goes for YouTube videos. The Nexus Q certainly does not mirror your device’s display – instead it shows a stream of media from your smartphone or tablet that’s controlled by your smartphone or tablet.
We’ve had an amazing experience with connection speed and playback with the applications that work with the Nexux Q thus far. Audio sounds fabulous in every way, be it through your HDMI connection alone or through the audio ports provided. The video, on the other hand, doesn’t appear to be tuned quite as well as it could be just yet.
Above: While you’ve got something playing via your smartphone or tablet, your Notifications window lets you know – this notification then links back to the player it associates with.
The word “murky” comes to mind with video playback – but just a bit. The blacks are just a bit too overzealous in taking over the screen while the other colors seem to be quite ready to take a dip. Playing streaming video worked perfectly well, with no hiccups other than when our actual web connection failed – with no fault of Google’s at play. Playing video from our device’s own memory worked similarly well, with a slightly too-dark image but perfectly quick playback speed.
The software is fairly straightforward when it comes to working on your device, with a little Play icon appearing at the top of YouTube, Google Movies, and Google Music once the Nexus Q software was installed – tapping once makes your interface Blue and active, tapping again turns it Gray and no longer connects to the Nexus Q.
Adding more than one device to one Nexus Q is a bit more of a challenge, as once the Galaxy Nexus was connected to the Q it took a couple tries to make the Nexus 7 connect as well, but it’s nothing a tiny bit of troubleshooting didn’t fix.
Wrap-Up
The Nexus Q is an absolutely gorgeous looking device, and one that’ll be sought after long after it’s been left for dead by Google in the future. But know this: that’s a long, long time away from now. Google will hopefully take the capabilities of this system and embrace them wholly, because the Nexus Q is exactly what Google needs to bring the public’s perception of Android to the nexus level. With this device you’ve got an Apple TV for nearly every single Android device on the market, and since it is a Nexus device, Google has in so many words encouraged us to hack it.
Once the floodgates open, the Nexus Q will be capable of so very many things that it’ll be on every developer’s holiday season wish list without a doubt. The device feels great physically, only has a few software-related issues here before its big launch, and will be ready to entertain for many years to come. Will people buy it at $299? That’s a different story entirely. Is it worth $299 from our perspective? If you’re the sort of person who spent $199 on your smartphone and $499 on your tablet when you bought them both in the past year, then yes, the Nexus Q is worth every penny.
Google’s newest version of its mobile operating system Android 4.1 Jelly Bean is what essentially equates to a fine tuning of the version that came immediately before it. Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich pushed the Google mobile OS world together, with Android 3.0 Honeycomb and Android 2.3 Gingerbread, made for tablets and smartphones respectively, making a single system that’s made for all devices, regardless of their screen size. Android 4.1 Jelly Bean takes what Ice Cream Sandwich has and bumps it up a notch in a handful of ways.
Notifications
The first thing you’ll notice when you get into your Nexus 7, your brand new Galaxy Nexus, or whatever device you’ve got at home that’s been updated to this newest bit of software, you’ll see that your notifications pull-down menu is updated significantly. One new feature here is a set of shortcuts connected to apps such as your calendar – when a new event comes up in reminder form, you’ve got the option to email the other people included in the event or call them.
Several apps either are or are about to be updated to work with this new notifications pull-down menu – you’ll notice right away that each new screenshot you take will be previewed in part with a bit of a chopped-off segment of its full self, for example. Each update is also expandable based on its content, with your Gmail updates showing snippets of your messages instead of just showing that you’ve a certain number of messages in your inbox.
Camera / Gallery
While the camera remains essentially the same as it was with the basic version of Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean tunes your ability to go back and view photos and quickly erase them if you’re not thrilled with your results. This feature is extremely similar to what both the iOS and Windows Phone cameras use with a swipe across the camera to see photos just taken. This feature is called “filmstrip view” and it is pretty slick.
Keyboard
This update is a direct strike at keyboard titans like SwiftKey and Swype, with a “more accurate, more relevant” language model for some new and improved instant guessing for the words you’re about to type. This version of the keyboard “adapts over time” which means it’s learning based on your keying of characters at all times – it’s relatively impressive, though we’ll likely be sticking with SwiftKey until they’ve got a more diverse range of learning skills – or more options for keyboard colors, of course.
The Keyboard here in Jelly Bean is also connected to text-to-speech – or speech-to-text if you want to make a bit more sense of the term. You’ll now no longer need to be online to use voice dictation, so you’ll be able to type by talking to your device wherever you’re at, mobile data or not.
Widgets
Your home screens have had widgets for quite a while now, and with the newest updates to Android you’ve got the ability to resize – this time you’ve got automatic resizing and pushing icons out of the way to make room when you’re moving widgets. Say you’ve got four icons in the middle of your screen and you pull over your Gmail widget – they’ll automatically be pushed up to the top or the bottom of your screen to make way. If you’ve got icons running up the side and the top of your screen and want to put a widget that’s too big int he center, it’ll be resized down and to the right to fit.
Android Beam
Just as it was with Android 4.0, here in Android 4.1 you’re able to beam photos, items in certain apps, and contacts with a touch. This update ads a collection of sharing abilities such as Simple Secure Paring for connecting to Bluetooth devices as well as the sharing of YouTube videos, directions, and videos.
Google Now
We’ve got a full hands-on sort of review of Google Now separate from this post, if you’d like to take a peek, otherwise you can have a look at this video review we’ve got instead of the whole shebang!
See the full Google Now hands-on for more information. Voice Search is also included in Google Now, both of them tying together to bring you a next-level guided experience for Android.
Project Butter
Without a doubt, one of the most impressive items on this list is what Google is calling Project Butter. This implementation of several next-generation elements has made the Galaxy Nexus and the Galaxy 7 both look and feel as smooth or smoother than any Android device we’ve worked with before, without a doubt. Google’s next generation Android system is able to work with a framerate of 60 frames per second (FPS). Google has implemented Vsync to make this 60FPS possible, with a 16 millisecond Vsync “heartbeat” not allowing you to see the time between one task and the next.
Jelly Bean also implements Triple Buffering, this element making sure that each of the main three hardware components are working in sync and to their maximum potential. The three main hardware components in this case are CPU, GPU, and display, and everything from scrolling through pages to watching videos online to flipping through a game have been improved either just a tiny bit or one whole heck of a lot.
Touch Responsiveness is also part of Project Butter and has been improved as well, with a new algorithm that anticipates your next finger touch. This algorithm will get rid of the sluggishness you might be familiar with that occurs after you bring your device out of sleep mode. Jelly Bean will give your CPU a boost in these cases so that there’s no latency whatsoever.
Wrap-Up
This update, once again, is more like an in-between sort of tweak festival for the most part, but it does have its big advances as well. I’ve found myself quite a few times already in the short time we’ve had my hands on Jelly Bean utilizing Google Now and working with Voice Search as if I’d always had it (and them) on hand. Users with Nexus devices will hopefully be getting this update relatively quickly, while the rest of the Android world will probably be waiting several months (or weeks, if there’s a miracle in the wind) before they get to use it. Unless you’re a fan of hacking, of course, as there are already ROMs out there with Jelly Bean and its feature up and running now!
This week at Google’s developer conference, Google I/O 2012, they’ve released the next big bump for the Chrome universe: iOS compatibility. A brand new Chrome web browser made for the iPad and the iPhone. This version has all the thrills of the Android version that preceded it, and comes forth with the first non-beta release of the Android version as well: will Apple‘s mobile device users take the time to download Google’s web exploring king?
This web browser is a replacement for Safari, the built-in web browser on both the iPad and the iPhone. Strangely enough, both browsers are built on the same model, with their shared base being iOS WebKit, a bit of Apple software which brings on web browsing much in the same way that Google’s Android WebKit browser (with that same general name) has up until this Chrome release. So this Chrome will not be bringing you a whole new experience on the backend, the user interface is a step up without a doubt.
As this is a modern web browser, you’ll find that there isn’t a whole lot a developer can do to make it unique – unless they want to attempt to convince the whole world that a whole new interface is worth the trouble of learning how to browse the web all over again. In this case, it’s one simple flip of the browser tabs from hanging below the URL bar (in Safari) to sitting above it (in Chrome). Of course like Chrome on your desktop then, too, you’re able to search for items in the same text space as you enter URLs – Safari has two spaces for this.
You’ve got the full Chrome experience here from the tabs to the syncing to the new blank tabs having your most visited sites ready to go. Syncing occurs when you’ve got a Google login with which you’ve logged-in to Chrome with in any of its many iterations before. Your Chromebook working with Chrome OS is also synced with your mobile Chrome browser in Android and your Chrome browser on your desktop computer. Your settings transfer between each of them instantly, as we saw demonstrated this past week at Google I/O 2012.
Chrome has an incognito mode that’s just as effective as Safari’s similar function, the difference here being that you’ll be able to get to it a whole lot easier. In Safari you’ve got to head back down to your iPad or iPhone settings outside the app itself, while Chrome has this option in the menu list in the upper right inside the app. Chrome also allows you to wipe out your browser history and set options for webpage pre-loading and text prediction from inside the app as well.
Chrome is also able to save your passwords for any and all places you visit on the web that need a password to function. Chrome also, strangely enough, makes use of the iPad and iPhone’s speech recognition functionality while Apple’s own browser does not. You’ll just have to tap the microphone icon in the right of the URL bar, speak a url (like slash gear dot com) or say some keywords and you’ll either be brought straight to that URL or you’ll be brought into a Google search – simple!
All of this is fabulous and of course makes us want to head to Chrome without batting an eye, but there’s one rather significant factor in play that’ll hold a lot of hardcore web browsing folks back: benchmark performance. In the JavaScript benchmark SunSpider (version 0.9.1), we found Safari to average right around 1840ms – with Chrome hitting the mark just about 7000ms: and smaller is better in this test.
The difference in real-world tests, on the other hand, have been showing little difference as far as webpage load speeds. Subjectivity comes into play here heavily when a user is deciding on one of the two of these web exploring apps as far as speed goes. In other words – it’s the unique features each of these apps have that you’ll be wanting to pay attention to most.
You can download Chrome web browser for your iPad and iPhone today for free from the iTunes app store right over here: [download Chrome for iOS now!] Be sure to have a peek at our big collection of Chrome-related news bits from this past week at Google I/O 2012 in the timeline below as well!
This week the folks at Google have revealed a device manufactured by ASUS and made for the media-consuming public: the Nexus 7. This tablet is the first of its kind in several ways. First in its value proposition: an NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor inside a tablet with a price that up until now has been reserved only for devices with much, much less to offer. Second, the Nexus 7 represents Google’s first attempt at a tablet for their Nexus series. Third, it’s the first tablet to be working with Android 4.1 Jelly Bean.
Hardware
This tablet certainly isn’t the thinnest 7-inch tablet in the world at 0.41″, but it’s extremely light, and the relatively soft plastic back is super comfortable to handle. This device is sized at 7.8″ x 4.72″ x 0.41″ so you can fit it in your back pocket if you wish, and the display, at a whopping 7-inches with 1280 x 800 pixel LED-backlit IPS (216 ppi), is more than fabulous enough for your HD-loving eyeballs. For comparison’s sake: the Galaxy Tab 7.7 is 196ppi and the iPad 3 is 264ppi, so you’ve got a device that’s right up there in the big leagues.
It’s brighter than you could possibly need it to be in any average day’s activities indoors, comes in a couple different color combinations: black and black (though our Google I/O edition with a black/white combination may be a sign of things to come), and feels really nice to work with. The back-facing camera is certainly OK, but isn’t a vast improvement over anything we’ve seen before, with quality just high enough that we’ll not be taking many photos with it at all – a good thing, too, since this device does not come with a camera app installed because of its push for Google+ hangouts – and eventual Project Glass interaction.
You’ve got a bit of a hidden bonus in the fact that this is one of the only tablets on the market today that uses a standard microUSB for charging. You’ll want to use the included power converter from the package, of course, but running through that little standard port is good for everybody. The speakers are generous on their own, with a single slit running down the back for blasting, but as you’ll come to realize through this review, this device was made more for sharing to other devices – like the brand new Google Nexus Q, introduced at Google I/O 2012 right alongside the Nexus 7. Have a peek at the Q in action here:
Software
Inside of this device you’ll find Android 4.1 Jelly Bean, an updated version of the Google mobile operating system that takes what Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich did for both the smartphone and the tablet and pumps it up with a few applications and features that make it all just a bit more tasty. This device is focused heavily on the Google Play store, as it will be immediately apparent once you’ve had a peek at this hands-on video:
This device is also ready to rock with the TegraZone for games. NVIDIA’s gaming portal TegraZone is a place we’ve visited quite a few times in the past few months here on SlashGear – have a peek at games such as Max Payne Mobile and Renaissance Blood to see what beasts await your game-loving fingers.
Then other than the Jelly Bean upgrades you’ve seen above, there’s not one whole heck of a lot here that wont be available to the rest of the Android universe immediately if not soon. If you loved Ice Cream Sandwich on your tablet – or even if you loved Honeycomb on your tablet, you’ll be pleasantly surprised by how this device’s software takes advantage of everything great from those previous versions of the OS and adds a bunch more in all the right places.
Have a peek at a few benchmarks from this device as well to see how the software and the hardware add up with one another:
Connectedness
Though we’ve seen this device connect with the Nexus Q, and quite impressively so, we’ll need a bit more convincing before it’s time we call this a device better at sharing than the HTC One series or the Galaxy S III. Sharing is indeed at the center of this device’s launch, on the other hand, moving forth with mostly its hands on music and videos at parties and in the home. We saw this device demonstrated once and then demonstrated again with its ability to connect via Wi-fi to the Nexus Q. With the Nexus Q in tow, this tablet appears quite apt to control your whole home media experience quite easily – and it’s fun, too!
Battery
We generally want to be clear with you on how well the battery performs in a device after we’ve had that device for an extended period of time. As we’ve not yet had this tablet as long as we normally would for such a test, we’ll be filling this section in later – check back soon!
Wrap-Up
What you’ve got here is a fun machine. Google worked with ASUS and NVIDIA here to bring on a media beast like no other, offered at a price that, sold exclusively through the Google Play store online (for now), is almost undeniable. Even those who want a tablet just to fiddle with should and probably will be considering this device first in the near future – unless they want an iPad.
With the iPad and the Amazon Kindle Fire being this device’s biggest competitors, you’ll want to know: which one is worth buying? There’s no perfect answer, but if I had a choice between the three and would get the chosen product for free, I’d of course pick the iPad – it costs more than 2 times this device’s base price for a reason. If I had to choose between the Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire, I’d not think twice about picking the Google product. Every single feature on this tablet, unless you’re an Amazon junkie, is better than the Fire.
Consider this tablet the next time you’re getting prepped for a new tablet experience, and one that’s inexpensive enough to toss down a couple of bills without hesitation. Hackers – this is your key to the future, there’s no other choice.
Also remember that, as it is with all of our reviews: this isn’t the end. If you’ve got questions you still need answered, want us to do additional tests, please feel free to ask or request – we’ll do our best! Meanwhile don’t forget to hit up our Android portal for more Google mobile OS action through the future!
Excitement, about a Symbian phone? The Nokia 808 PureView has forced many to reconsider their platform loyalties by virtue of its big number boast: 41-megapixels of camera goodness. The surprise stand-out of Mobile World Congress, the 808 PureView is the first public evidence of a five year labor of love inspired by ultra-high-resolution satellite photography. There’s compromise galore involved, however, to join the early PureView train, so is it worth it? Read on for the full SlashGear review.
Hardware
Miniaturization can only get you so far: if you want 41-megapixels – and Nokia really does – then you have to accept some heft with it. As a result the 808 PureView is a chunky phone, measuring in at 123.9 x 60.2 x 13.9 mm and 169 grams, though it’s biased toward the lens section with its oversized sensor. In the hand, though, it’s actually quite a pleasant thing to hold: the textured plastic back cover feels high-quality and sturdy, and your forefinger butts naturally against the curve of the camera hump.
That’s not to say you don’t notice it when it’s in your pocket. In contrast to the slimline devices we’ve grown used to, the 808 PureView makes for a considerable bulge; we could fit it into a jeans pocket, front or back, but it wasn’t the most comfortable we’ve ever been.
Controls include a three-button strip along the front, for call, menu and end/power, along with a volume rocker, lock switch and dedicated two-stage camera key on the right edge. Along the top there’s a micro HDMI port (for use with Nokia’s CA0198 HDMI kit) under a flap, a microUSB port for charging, and a 3.5mm headphone socket. Nokia includes a wired hands-free kit of decent audio quality, though we had no issues using third-party headsets with the phone.
Up front there’s a 4-inch AMOLED ClearBlack display clad in a sheet of Corning Gorilla Glass. As with all OLED-based phones it has great viewing angles, contrast and color saturation; however, it’s also running at a mere 360 x 640 resolution, and that means individual pixels are inescapable. The grittiness is visible from the outset, as soon as the start-up Nokia logo appears, and permeates throughout the phone experience. Considering the imaging focus of this phone, it’s a disappointment.
Inside, the 808 PureView packs one of the fastest processors to grace a Symbian device, a single-core ARM 11 running at 1.3GHz. It’s paired with 512MB of RAM and 16GB of storage, expandable with up to 32GB microSD cards. Connectivity includes pentaband HSPA (up to 14.4Mbps down/5.76Mbps up, networking depending) which means support for both AT&T and T-Mobile 3G in the USA, along with Bluetooth 3.0, WiFi b/g/n, NFC and quadband GSM/EDGE. Slot in the optional microUSB to USB Host adapter and you can attach peripherals like USB drives, and there’s A-GPS/GPS for navigation and photo geotagging.
Software and Performance
Software is the 808 PureView’s Achilles’ heel. Symbian, rebranded Nokia Belle in this latest iteration, is old in the tooth and considered outclassed by all but the staunchest of fans. With its UI borrowing some elements of Android – such as the drop-down notifications bar and the differently sized homescreen widgets – and sharing the squircle iconography of MeeGo on the N9 it’s certainly the best looking iteration of Symbian to-date, but day-to-day usability is still a pain.
What’s arguably the deal-breaker for Nokia Belle here is the performance. On the Nokia 700, which also runs Belle on a 1.3GHz single-core, we found ourselves conceding that it could make a reasonable entry-level device for the fledgling smartphone audience. Somewhere along the line, however, the 808 lost whatever turn of speed the 700 managed to squeeze from the processor.
The homescreen is fairly swift, but the 808 soon runs out of steam once you get into the apps. In the messaging app we’d sometimes have hammered out a half-word or so before the on-screen keyboard caught up; scroll fast through a full gallery and you’ll see nothing but placeholder thumbnails, turning navigating images into guesswork.
It’s the browser that’s the big nightmare, however, capable of paper of handling full sites but struggling with anything more complex than their mobile versions. Pinch zooming becomes trial and error, tedious since given the low resolution you’ll probably be doing plenty of it. Swipe around the page and you have to wait a second or two for the screen to catch up with you. Flip from portrait to landscape orientation, or back again, and the lag shows itself once more. Most annoying though is how prone to crashing it is, the app periodically shutting down altogether. We didn’t experience a full phone lock-up, but altogether it was enough to make us save our web browsing until we were home.
Oddly, we didn’t experience the same sluggishness on the 808 PureView units running non-final software on our trip to Carl Zeiss several weeks ago. Then, the Nokia seemed as responsive as the 700 had been. It’s possible that the final software tweaks have erred toward scaling back performance in favor of battery life, and if so we’re hoping Nokia sees sense and tips the balance back a little toward usability with a firmware update.
Camera
Make no mistake, the Nokia 808 PureView is all about photography. Nokia’s imaging team spent five years developing PureView – hence it being stuck with Symbian rather than getting Windows Phone like the Lumia series – and took the principles of mobile cameras back to basics in order to improve on quality.
We’ve covered the technology behind PureView on the 808 comprehensively here, but the brief version is that it’s a rethink of how lossless zooming can be supported on a phone. Traditionally that would demand an optical zoom lens, involving bulky moving parts; PureView does it instead with a surfeit of pixels. In PureView mode, the 808 uses its 41-megapixel sensor to capture more typical 2-, 5- or 8-megapixel shots, and in fact Nokia expects most owners to stick at 5-megapixel quality.
Nokia 808 PureView technology:
At 1x zoom, each pixel making up the final frame has around seven pixels on the sensor to feed into it, reducing the likelihood of a glitch or noise making it into the image. PureView can simply ignore any obvious outliers, making for more accurate shots. However, if you want to zoom in, the 808 can take a full-resolution (i.e. 2-, 5- or 8-megapixel) subset of the whole frame, similar to how a digital zoom magnifies a portion but with no loss in detail.
Exactly how much you can zoom depends on what PureView resolution you’re using – the 808 won’t allow you to get past the point where it can save a full-resolution image – so you get more range in 2-megapixel mode than you do at 8-megapixels. It averages at roughly 3x at 5-megapixels. The phone will also allow you to shoot at “full” resolution, either 34-megapixel 16:9 aspect images taken across the full width of the sensor, or 38-megapixel 4:3 aspect images taken across the full height of the sensor, though in that case you don’t get any zoom option.
The 808′s camera app has obviously changed from the Nokia Belle norm to accommodate PureView, and there are three key modes to choose between. Automatic strips you of all manual control bar toggling the Xenon flash between on/off/auto/red-eye modes, defaulting to roughly 5-megapixel frames, though you still get touch-focus. Scenes mode offers a choice of auto, landscape, portrait, sports, night, night portrait, spotlight and snow configurations, again with flash options and touch-focus.
Finally, there’s Creative mode, where the guts of PureView are opened up to more avid tinkerers. The 808 can be toggled between PureView mode – with the choice of three resolutions and both 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios – and Full Resolution mode – with either 16:9 or 4:3 settings – and save in either Normal or Superfine JPEG quality modes. Color tones can be switched between normal, vivid, sepia or black & white, and there’s optional bracketing, interval or self-timer modes. With interval, the 808 becomes a time-lapse camera, capable of shooting up to 1,500 images every 30 minutes (or as low as every 5 seconds).
Then there are sliders for saturation, contrast and sharpness, while icons on the preview screen control flash, exposure, lighting type, ISO (from 50 – 1600, with an Auto mode) and the ability to turn off the neutral density filter. Once you have a clutch of settings you prefer, you can save them to one of the three custom shortcuts for easier retrieval.
Is it worth taking the time to play? Oh yes, yes it really is. We reluctantly left Carl Zeiss and our last experience with the 808 PureView wowed by quite how capable the new Nokia is, and nothing from our review unit has convinced us to think otherwise. This isn’t just “good for a phone-camera” either; the 808 is easily able to produce shots that put dedicated point-and-shoots to shame.
Noise is almost non-existent, colors are as accurate as we’ve ever seen from a phone, and – as long as you take the time to tap the screen to set focus – crisp detail. Low light performance is hugely impressive, even before you bother turning on the (excellent) Xenon flash, as PureView squeezes all the extra pixel data into the final image.
In full resolution mode, meanwhile, you lack zooming ability but you get images of a scale that would traditionally demand a dedicated camera. There’s something near-magical about being able to glance across an image, think “what’s going on there?” and zoom in without facing a screenful of pixelated mush. At 34/38-megapixel resolution there’s no PureView finessing going on – there aren’t the extra pixels to enable it – but it does demonstrate just how capable the sensor and companion Zeiss optics are.
As for video, the 808 PureView will record in Automatic, Scenes (auto, low light, sports, spotlight and snow) or Creative modes, at 360p, 720p or 1080p resolution. A choice of 15, 24, 25 and 30fps frame rates are supported, plus the same color tone options as in stills mode, together with exposure and contrast. Since even 1920 x 1080 Full HD resolution doesn’t come close to what the 808′s sensor is capable of capturing, the same PureView oversampling is used to improve video quality, and just as with stills the evidence of that comes through in the final frame.
Nokia 808 PureView 1080p HD video sample:
Our only complaint is the somewhat sluggish continuous autofocus, which has a tendency to wander and is occasionally slow to refix. You can, however, tap to manually set a focus point. While your fingers are near the screen, it’s worth playing with Nokia’s clever zoom control: you can pinch-zoom, of course, but we found it easier to use the single-finger zooming where sliding your thumb up and down adjusts the degree of magnification. It’s easy to keep both hands steadying the 808 and still zoom in, and when you’re zooming during video capture the actual magnification doesn’t happen until you lift your finger, allowing you to precisely frame without the hunting of regular systems. Alternatively you can use the zoom rocker, and unlike the stepped zoom levels of some devices, it’s a silky-smooth transition.
Nokia 808 PureView 1080p HD video sample:
Audio during video recording is often overlooked, but Nokia has saved a little magic for that, too. The PureView has twin microphones for capturing stereo sound, but it also includes Rich Recording, a way to capture high-volume audio without suffering from distortion or clipping. In fact, Nokia claims the 808 is capable of handling four-times louder sound than regular phone microphones, without having to introduce the sort of filters that can leave the audio track weedy.
Going by Nokia’s spec sheet, the 808 PureView should be able to capture the sound of a jet engine from 100-feet away without any stereo distortion. Topping out at 145dB, in fact, it’s beyond the point where human ears would likely suffer permanent damage even if they’re equipped with hearing protection. An average rock concert, meanwhile, at a more humble 115dB should be no problem at all for the 808 PureView, though we’ll need to schedule one on our jam-packed social calendar to actually test that out.
Getting photos and video off the 808 is reasonably straightforward. The phone can be set to show up as a Mass Storage device when plugged in via USB, appearing on your PC or Mac as an external drive (rather than demanding a management app as per Windows Phone). However we were surprised to find transfers very sluggish to our test Mac: shuttling just over 440MB of photos and video took around five minutes, in fact. There’s no native option to automatically upload images to an online gallery.
Nokia has already confirmed that PureView technology won’t be limited to just the 808. However, that’s already prompted confusion around just what sort of resolution sensors we can expect in future Lumia Windows Phones. PureView does not necessarily mean 41-megapixels – Nokia picked that number to satisfy headlines and deliver a 3x optical zoom equivalent for 5-megapixel frames – but instead refers to the oversampling technology; a lower-resolution sensor would still deliver a lossless zoom, albeit with a smaller range, while allowing for a thinner device.
Phone and Battery
Nokia has a strong track record with phone radios, and the 808 PureView is no exception. We had no issues with keeping a signal, and the dual-microphones meant in-call audio was clear. The 808′s 1,400 mAh battery is rated for up to 6.5hrs of 3G talk time or 540hrs of 3G standby, though the actual sort of longevity you’ll see from it is very much dependent on how much you play with the camera. The Xenon flash in particular will chug through battery in short order. In practice, we managed a day of relatively eager use before we had to reach for the mains adapter.
Wrap-Up
Viewed as a modern phone, the 808 PureView is a recipe for frustration. It’s heavy and chunky, the screen lacks pixels, Nokia Belle is short on apps and long on aggravation, and even those apps that are onboard run with varying degrees of wretchedness on the wheezing processor. When the 808 starts to make more sense is when you flip it around, and consider it not so much a phone with an amazing camera, but an amazing camera with a 3G internet connection.
With such mundane matters as messaging, internet browsing, multimedia and apps left to a more flexible (but less photographically-capable) platform like iOS or Android, that frees up the 808 PureView to do what it undoubtedly does best: take awesome photos and video. If you can find space in your pocket or bag for two phones, and you’re a keen shutterbug, then there are huge advantages to using the 808 rather than your regular phone camera.
Therein lies the rub: at $699 unlocked and SIM-free in the US, it’s an expensive second device. That would get you a good Micro Four Thirds camera, though blind testing suggests the 808 can produce photos as good as, or better than, such compacts. It would also be enough for an entry-level DSLR, though you’d lose any semblance of pocket-friendliness in that case.
In the end, though, even the fact that we’re comparing the 808 PureView to DSLRs is testament to Nokia’s achievement. Few people will actually go out and buy it themselves, but then the 808 is really a test bench for PureView technology, a proof-of-concept. Now that it has convinced us of its merits, Nokia can leverage the branding to differentiate its Windows Phone range. Frankly, the sooner it can do that, the better.
This week we’ve gotten the opportunity to take an up close and personal peek at the Acer Iconia Tab A700, an Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich tablet with a high definition display and the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor under the hood. This Acer device looks and feels rather similar to its predecessor, the Iconia Tab A500, but its components set it in a class all its own. This tablet has a 10.1-inch display with 1920 x 1200 pixels across it, this making it a 224ppi dense display-toting beast of a machine.
Hardware
While the display’s high definition resolution is obviously the real hero here, you’ll be glad to know that we’re now officially in an age where making a tablet that’s as thin and nice looking as the iPad isn’t so much of a hassle as it used to be. This version of the Iconia Tab is right around the same weight and shape as the A500, but here it’s got a bit more style.
The speckled back panel and the lovely detail in the glass panel up front as well as it’s surrounding plastic are all very well tuned. This tablet feels really nice to hold, as it were.
This tablet has several ports, each of them just about as far away from the others as they possibly could be. There’s a microHDMI, a microUSB, headphone jack, and a microSD card slot as well as a volume up/down button and a screen lock. The screen lock is a switch that holds your tablet in either landscape or portrait mode, and should you feel like heading down the road of the hacker, we’re sure you could find more than a few useful things to do with it in addition to its basic intent.
The power button sits at the top of the left of the device in the same place it did on the A500, and if one were to compare this tablet only to that older generation, one would applaud the efforts of Acer in pushing themselves to the next level. Compared to the iPad, you’ve got a surprisingly similar feeling machine, with just about the same weight and, at a distance at least, a really similar look.
Of course the power of any tablet doesn’t rest on its single specifications alone, and Apple’s iPad certainly relies on its software to beat the crowd. So how does Acer do with their new look at Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich?
Software
Inside this machine is Acer’s selection of applications including several pre-installed games, cloud-access apps, and music apps. Google’s collection of apps are here as well, this including Google Music (not often included right out of the box) as well as the common ICS additions like Google+.
The real heroes here are the additions made to Android 4.0 ICS by Acer. There’s a brand new lovely customizable lock-screen as well as a “Ring” that will allow you several new abilities including the screenshot, the ability to flip through web browser favorites in cards, and changing the volume on-screen. This Ring could very well be the reason you purchase this device – Acer has done a great job of pushing the limits of such a collection of functionalities for the discerning Android user.
You’ve also got the built-in ability to work with a printer to print whatever you’ve got on-screen to hard copy. We suggest to take a look at which devices will function with this connectivity, but from what we’ve seen, most modern wireless printers will indeed work. Acer has connected this device to the rest of its device suite with a simple registration app – this being a good example of why you’ll certainly want to be thinking about picking one Acer machine up if you’ve picked up the other as their device family continues to become more interconnected.
The NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor inside this beast will allow you connectivity with the NVIDIA TegraZone, a place where exclusive Tegra-only applications live, and you’ll find that they look quite fabulous. Have a peek at some benchmarks taken by this device to see how well you’ll be rolling:
Camera
This device’s camera is not all that different from the camera on the original A500, that also being a 5-megapixel shooter. You’ve got a 2-megapixel camera on the front as well, this as good as it was on the A500 as well for video chat. The back-facing camera does not have a flash and is able to auto-focus, but only after you’ve tapped the shutter button. Have a peek at a few pieces of media resulting from this setup:
Battery
This device is part of a new wave of battery-conscious devices that, with the NVIDIA Tegra 3 quad-core processor with 4-PLUS-1 technology, is able to sleep so deeply that you’ve rarely got a situation where the device runs out of battery after having been left alone for an extended period. Instead where you’ll find battery drain is in the other normal places like mapping and streaming video. Even then you’ll have a fabulously long amount of play-time on your hands.
The Acer Iconia Tab A700′s battery will last you though several days at least if you use it intermittently, or it can last you as few as 8 hours if you’re rocking streaming video non-stop. Either way, it’s impressive.
Portfolio Case
We were also sent the new Acer Iconia Tab Series Portfolio Case – one of the strangest cases we’ve seen on the market thus far. It’s strange in that it relies on a high-powered adhesive to stick to the tablet rather than clamping on with plastic claws as any of a million other cases would. You put your tablet down on one side, pull back the adhesive covering on the other, and push that second side closed onto the back of your tablet.
The adhesive sticks as hard as you could possibly want it to, but is also somehow removable when you want as well. It’s certainly not something you’re going to be able to use multiple times, as the adhesive will certainly get weak after a couple of stickings, but this solution certainly is unique, that’s for sure. The case then also is made of some high-quality rubbery plastics with magnets inside to hold it closed and in stand mode. Interesting stuff!
Wrap-Up
This tablet will cost you $449.99 at any of a variety of outlets, this ringing in just at or below the rest of the market offering similar solutions. You’ve got the most advanced options in an Android tablet included here, and Acer’s unique vision for Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich will not leave you wanting for multi-tasking and for standing out in the software crowd. We recommend picking up the Iconia Tab A700 especially if you’ve already got Acer notebooks or towers in your home – their software connects quite fluidly and makes your whole personal cloud experience all the richer.
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