Hasta La Gadget!

Sony’s new smartwatch, which is actually named the SmartWatch 2, has been a known quantity since its official announcement in June at the Mobile Asia Expo in Shanghai, and now the Samsung Galaxy Gear has been itemized by its creators in Berlin at IFA. Meaning it’s time for the two to square off in our blogger arena of champions for a spec and feature showdown.

Sony Smartwatch specs

• 1.6-inch, 220×176 display
• Aluminum body
• Micro USB charging
• Compatible with most Android phones
• NFC and Bluetooth 3.0 for connectivity
• 3 to 4 days battery under normal use
• €199 ($262 U.S), Ships in late September
• No camera, mic or speakers

Samsung Galaxy Gear specs

• 1.63-inch, 320×320 display
• Stainless steel body
• Snap-on, proprietary USB 3.0 charger
• 800MHz Exynos single-core processor
• Bluetooth 4.0 LE
• Compatible with new Galaxy devices, previous gen Galaxy support coming soon
• Around 1 day of use
• 4GB of onboard storage
• $299
• Ships in September (October for U.S.)
• 1.9 megapixel camera, 720p video recording, speaker + 2 mics
• Gyroscope and accelerometer for workout tracking

The SmartWatch 2 isn’t cheap at €199; in fact, it’s the same price as the newly-reduced 8GB Nexus 4 model. Samsung’s is $299 and much more full-featured, with Samsung managing to pack a whole host of A/V equipment in its device. It also runs a number of Android apps out of the box, which have been redesigned specifically for the watch.

SmartWatch 2 does have NFC for easy pairing with Android devices that support it, as well as more battery life, a better, higher resolution screen, and water/environment resistance that should keep your device protected from general grit and submersion at 3 feet for up to 30 minutes. Sony’s also doing a big push for bringing third-party apps to the SmartWatch software platform, which could help narrow the gap there.

Overall though, as you can see from the list of specs above, there’s not really much of a competition between the two devices in terms of features; but Sony’s SmartWatch 2 has an edge in battery life owing to its much more narrow feature set, and it offers wider support for other Android devices out of the box.

These are two very different definitions of the term “smartwatch,” with the more ambitious vision coming from Samsung. Aside from the steep requirement of apparent (temporary?) platform lock-in, I’m definitely much more intrigued by the Gear, but I also suspect both devices will find a mostly limited receptive audience among consumers.

Samsung’s big Unpacked Episode 2 event is underway, and as expected, the company has used the venue to announce the Galaxy Note 3 smartphone. The Note is the original phablet, and the new version continues the tradition of big screen gadgets best-suited for big-handed people.

The new Galaxy Note 3 features a design with extremely slimmer bezels and sharper angles on its rounded edges, marking a slight departure from Galaxy device design language thus far. It’s thinner than its predecessor and lighter (168g), despite offering a larger screen at 5.7-inches. It also offers more battery life than the Galaxy Note 2, and there’s a new and improved S Pen, too. Plus it supports faster, and more “seamless LTE” with multi-band support.

The camera has 4K video recording capabilities with a new CRI LED flash that should improve low-light photography. Samsung claims nearly four more hours of battery life when playing back video, and performance in general during normal use should also extend battery by up to 40 percent over the previous generation.

Samsung was emphasizing craftsmanship with the Galaxy Note, which features a stitched leather rear cover (available in black, white and pink). It also has a metallic rim running around the edge, and there’s a flip wallet accessory available in 10 different colors that also features a larger S View window cover for checking messages, making calls and accessing more info at a glance without having to activate the whole display.

The new S Pen is designed to work with the larger screen. Samsung called it the “key” to unlocking Note features and power. This works via a number of new interface controls. There’s a dot on-screen that appears when you can activate “Air Command,” which is a tool wheel that provides quick access to memo, scrapbooking, screenwriting, and a finder search function. There’s also something Samsung calls “circle,” which uses a circle drawing gesture to capture content you want to save to your scrapbook, as called up via Air Command. Box is a way to multitask, that lets you do two things at once via essentially a picture-in-picture interface.

Samsung’s Knox mobile security feature, which is designed to help increase enterprise and consumer security via partitioned software for consumer and business use for BYOD device users. The Note 3 will ship September 25 in 149 countries around the world.

Samsung’s smartphone fortunes are the subject of major scrutiny at the moment, since the company is perceived as possibly having hit a ceiling in terms of growing its overall share of the market. The company is hosting a meeting with investors and analysts to discuss its long-term plans in the face of these fears, and the Note line drives quite a few sales, though not as many as the flagship Galaxy S4. Estimates for break-out sales of the Note 2 on its own are hard to place, but Samsung has in the past said it anticipated the device would pass 20 million units shipped.

Galaxy Note 3 specs:

• 151.2mmx79.2mmx8.3mm
• 5.7-inch SuperAMOLED 1080p display with 368 ppi pixel density
• 2.3GHz Snapdragon 800 processor, or 1.9GHz Samsung Exynos Octacore depending on market
• Android 4.3
• 13 megapixel rear camera, 2 megapixel front camera
• 3GB RAM
• 32 or 64GB storage
• MicroSDXC card storage expansion
• Bluetooth 4.0, WiFi 802.11ac, LTE Category 4
• 3,200 mAh battery
• LED/IR combo

No information on Galaxy Note 3 availability just yet beyond the September 25 date, and the official Samsung press materials around the launch says only that it’ll make it out to all major U.S. carriers “later this year.”

Developing…

Smartphones have cameras. But they’re mostly garbage when compared to a dedicated camera. Besides the Lumia 1020, of course. The cameras on smartphones have tiny image capture sensors and low-quality glass, the sum of which equals pictures that are just good enough — not impressive. It’s convenience over quality.

Enter the Sony QX10 and QX100 lens camera.

This system is more than just a lens. The QX10 and QX100 also pack an image sensor, thus allowing for much higher quality photographs. They simply clip onto a smartphone and communicate wirelessly.

The $250 QX10 features a 1/2.3-inch 18-megapixel sensor paired with an f/3.3-5.9 lens. The $500 QX100 has a high-quality 1-inch 20.2-megapixel Exmor R sensor and a f/1.8-4.9 Carl Zeiss lens. This line is based on fantastic Sony point-and-shoot cameras with the QX10 looking most like the WX150 and the QX100 grabbing most of the RX100m2′s magic.

The QX10 and QX100 are essentially two thirds of a camera. Each lens camera clips onto a phone and communicates through WiFi or NFC. Or, they can act as a wireless camera. They also have a microSD and Memory Stick slot, tripod mounts and include optional clips for the back of phones. The remaining bit is your phone, acting as the viewfinder, shutter trigger, and backup storage. And that makes a lot of sense.

Think about it: Point and shoot cameras still sell in large numbers because they hit a sweet spot of portability and quality. They still lack communication, though. Pictures are stored on a memory card. The photos need to be dumped to a computer. That’s a hassle. And doesn’t make for timely sharing.

With Sony’s new system, users have the ability to take high quality pictures and then share them through their smartphone. It’s the best of both worlds.

The QX10 and QX100 work with both Android and iOS phones. Sony built the products to be device-agnostic, thus increasing their shelve life and mass appeal.

As I pointed out yesterday, this has been done before. There are countless examples on Alibaba and eBay. Will.i.am and Fusion Garage (and CrunchPad engineer) Chandra Rathakrishnan announced the i.am+ foto.sosho V.5 late last year. Thankfully it doesn’t appear to have ever hit the market. Thankfully. It was ludicrous and smelled of vapor from the start.

Sony likely doesn’t expect this product to be a mass hit, but there is definitely a market for it. Now Sony just has to convince consumers to ditch the pocket shooter, and carry a lens instead.

Sony has named a new flagship in its Android-powered Xperia smartphone line up which focuses on beefing up camera capabilities.  The 4G Xperia Z1, roundly leaked under the moniker ‘Honami’ but officially confirmed today at Sony’s IFA press conference in Berlin, is a follow up to the 5-inch, quad-core Xperia Z unboxed at the start of the year at CES.

The Xperia Z1 has a 20.7MP camera on its rump (vs the 13.1MP on the Xperia Z) coupled with a 1/2.3-inch Exmor RS CMOS image sensor, Sony’s G Lens (27mm wide angle, f2.0 aperture) and Bionz image processing engine which Sony users in its standalone cameras. There’s also 3x “clear image zoom” — with Sony claiming its optical zoom delivers “zero distortion”.

Sony is making big boasts for this lens combo — claiming it offers “best in class imaging” and is the “world’s leading camera in a smartphone” (Nokia may however disagree; its Lumia 1020 smartphone has a 41MP lens). NB: Sony’s odd wording here — “camera in a smartphone” — can be explained by its simultaneous attempts to extend phone camera smarts via a hardware add-on lens system that clips onto any phone, including the Xperia Z1.

Sony is preloading a series of camera apps onto the Z1 to extend its camera capabilities on the software side — including Social Life, a camera streaming app to broadcast what’s going on around you to Facebook; a Timeshift burst mode to take multiple images so you can choose the best shot from several; a visual search app called Info-Eye to get more info on snapped products/landmarks; and an augmented reality app called AR Effect to overlay customised animations onto images.

Sony is clearly following in the footsteps of rivals’ strategy here, including Nokia (with its PureView imaging push) and Samsung, which has also focused on making its own suite of imaging apps for flagship devices such as the Galaxy S4. But as well as making its own apps, Sony’s hoping to get developers working for it on the camera front too. “It’s built with an open SDK and we’re already working with a talented group of app developers that will extend its capabilities,” it said today.

Elsewhere, the Xperia Z1 looks to be a slightly beefed up version of its earlier sibling, with the same size 5-inch 1080p display — albeit this time including newer Sony screen tech that it has also brought to the Xperia Z Ultra phablet. Sony’s Triluminos screen tech apparently supports a greater range of colours with natural shades. The Z1 also features Sony’s X-Reality technology for improving the viewing experience of low res video.

The Xperia Z1 runs Android 4.2 Jelly Bean at launch. Under the hood it has a 2.2Ghz quad-core Qualcomm Snapdragon 800 chipset. There’s also 2GB RAM, 16GB internal storage –expandable via a microSD card slot — and a 3,000mAh battery. Design wise, the Xperia Z1 shares the look and feel of the rest of Sony’s Xperia range — with clean lines and blunt edges, although Sony says it’s evolved the design, most notably by adding a one piece aluminium casing to all the plastic.

Oh and the Z1 is also waterproof, as is its predecessor. To ram that point home, Sony apparently thought it was a good idea to entertain IFA attendees by getting some ladies to cavort with some phones in some water. As sexist displays go, it’s pretty impressive — even by tech industry ‘booth babe’ standards — so well done Sony for alienating ~50% of potential buyers. It better hope the other 50% gets so distracted they end up buying two phones apiece.

On the size front, neither the Xperia Z1 or its numeral-less sibling is the largest handset Sony makes, although their five inch displays sits on the cusp of phablet territory. The Sony enormo-phone award goes to its palm-stretching Xperia Z Ultra: a 6.4 inch phablet that’s so large Sony sells a Bluetooth handset accessory for it so you can comfortably take calls.

Sony said the Xperia Z1 is due to hit shelves “starting this month”.

Dig out your camping gear and stake your spot in line now, ladies and germs. The Xbox One is hitting stores on November 22. And for those keeping track, that’s almost a full week after the PS4′s November 15 retail launch. Because that matters.

Don’t live in the U.S.? No problem. Microsoft has said that the console will be available in 13 markets, and shared some pricing details for those living across the pond. Folks in the U.K. can claim their One for £429, while those in the rest of Europe will pay €499.

The Xbox One is hitting the following markets on November 22nd: Australia, Austria, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Spain, UK, and USA. Many more markets will follow in 2014.

Gaming consoles are set to be this year’s big ticket item with the PS4 and Xbox One both hitting stores around the same time. Nintendo also dropped the price on the Wii U which has so far seen underwhelming sales — but also setting the scene for an interesting retail price point battle with the Wii U at $299, the PS4 at $399 and the One at $499.

Or, buyers could opt for a Nexus 7 or iPad mini for about the same price.