Hasta La Gadget!

Behold: Razr redux.

Tuesday morning, Motorola announced its new flagship Android smartphone, the Droid Razr. Now, after spending some quality hands-on time with the phone, I can say it’s poised to become a formidable competitor in the Android space — if not also a challenge to Apple’s much-lauded iPhone 4S.

Motorola is celebrating the new Razr as the world’s thinnest smartphone, and its slim packaging is the first thing I noticed as soon as I picked it up. At 7.1 mm, the Razr dethrones the previous “thinnest device” title holder — Sony Ericsson’s Xperia Arc — by a full 1.6 mm. It’s difficult to tell just how thin the Razr is from promotional press shots, but considering the amount of high-end hardware packed inside — a 1.2GHz dual-core TI processor, 1GB of RAM and 32GB of storage (16GB care of a microSD card) — the phone’s svelte shape is impressive.

In order to slim down the phone’s profile, Motorola used threaded Kevlar fiber on the Razr’s back casing. This material, most famously used in bullet-proof vests, helps maintain structural integrity while keeping the phone’s figure trim.

With Kevlar on one side and a sculpted Gorilla Glass display on the other, the Razr is built for durability, yes. The phone’s innards, however, are also sealed inside a stainless steel interior chassis for extra shock absorbancy and all-around toughness. The phone is named after one of the most successful gadgets in Motorola history – a product famous for its iconic design — and it’s clear that Moto paid attention to all design features in order to elevate the Razr to a marquee-level status worthy of its namesake.

Here you can see the Razr's Kevlar surfacing — as well as the top portion of the phone, which exceeds Motorola's category-besting 7.1mm thickness.

But how does this curious object feel? Well, however attractive its hard edges and boxy aesthetic may be, the squared-off chassis did feel a bit awkward in my hands. The display measures in at 4.3 inches. It’s by no means the largest screen on the market, but the phone itself feels considerably larger than what a 4.3-inch display should suggest. But I did enjoy the Razr’s Kevlar backing. The woven material is soft to the touch, with a pleasingly grippy surface quality.

I loved the image quality of the screen. Photos render in crisp detail, with bright, brilliant colors. Shah said in order to save on battery life, the design team went with Samsung’s Super AMOLED display, which is famous for its modest power requirements. Considering that the phone comes with a battery-sucking 4G LTE radio, you’ll want every bit of power conservation that Moto’s engineers can muster.

One of my favorite Razr features is Motorola’s Smart Actions app. In essence, it’s a user-friendly scripting tool that helps control all the phone features that suck down battery life. Using Smart Actions, you can set up automatic tripwires that will adjust screen brightness, Wi-Fi, 4G and GPS settings when power conservation becomes critical. For example, you can set the Razr to automatically lower its display brightness as soon as battery life drops below 30 percent.

Smart Actions also contains settings that have nothing to do with battery conservation — for example, automatically switching your phone from vibrate to ringing mode when GPS detects that you’ve arrived at home. How ’bout them apples, Siri?

This full-frontal shot shows how the Razr compares to an iPhone 4/4S. You get a much bigger screen, and the Razr even weighs 13 grams less.

As with most of Motorola’s high-end devices since the debut of the Atrix in January, the Razr will launch with a slew of peripheral options. Back again are the webtop and lapdock stations. Like those that work with the Atrix, Photon and Bionic handsets, the webtop dock allows you to plug the Razr into an HD charging station and connect to an external HD monitor. As such, you’re able to use the phone as makeshift computer. Moto’s patented webtop environment is a nifty desktop-style UI, complete with the ability to surf the web using Mozilla’s Firefox Browser.

The new dock comes correct with Ethernet and USB support among other business travel-friendly goodies.

Shah said Motorola learned from user experience studies of previous lapdock-capable phones, and, as a result, its two new docks include extra ports and connectivity option. Specifically, the Razr-compatible Lapdock 500 Pro now features an Ethernet port and multiple USB ports. In essence, it has most of the I/O attributes of an actual laptop.

The company has bet big on connectivity and peripheral hardware options before, and failed miserably in execution (see Atrix, Xoom, et al.). But after these first impressions, it seems Motorola’s Razr redux may have gotten peripherals right.

For the first time in six years, Apple’s quarterly earnings missed analyst estimates. Apple’s explanation? iPhone sales slowed down as consumers entered a holding pattern in anticipation of Apple’s next smartphone release. In an earnings call Tuesday afternoon, Apple blamed rumors for the drop in sales, saying that product speculation “reached extreme highs.”

Apple reported profits of $6.62 billion this quarter, or $7.05 per share. Analysts predicted that Apple’s profit per share would reach $7.31, making this the first “disappointing” quarter in the company’s past 64. Apple sold 17.07 million iPhones during the quarter, notably short of predicted sales of about 20 million.

During the call, CEO Tim Cook said, “We can’t tell you with precision how many units we would have sold without the rumors, if people hadn’t been expecting a new iPhone. But I would say it’s substantial.”

When a new iPhone didn’t make an appearance at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in June, current and prospective iPhone customers became antsy. Rumors began flying about Apple’s upcoming device. Supposedly an iPhone prototype was lost at a San Francisco bar, but because it never made its way into the public eye, Apple’s next iPhone largely remained a mystery. The iPhone 4S finally made its press debut on Oct. 4, and has since shown record-breaking sales: one million sold in its first day available for pre-order, with four million sold during its opening weekend. Unfortunately (for Apple), iPhone 4S numbers didn’t make it into this quarter’s figures.

And the iPhone wasn’t the only Apple product to see less-than-stellar sales.

iPod sales continued on a downward slope, falling 27 percent from this time last year to 6.62 million sales. iPads fared well, but fell just below estimates at 11.12 million units. Mac computers, meanwhile, posted a record-breaking 4.89 million sales, likely bolstered by the popularity of the latest MacBook Air, which was released in July.

Michael Obuchowski, chief investment officer at First Empire Asset Management, wasn’t too perturbed by Apple’s quarterly earnings. Obuchowski told Bloomberg, “That the company can maintain the growth rate that some of the analysts envision is not very realistic.”

Apple expects to hit new company records for both the iPhone and the iPad as the holiday season begins. With a successful iPhone 4S launch under its belt, those expectations don’t seem far-fetched.

Image: Jim Merithew/Wired.com

UPDATED October 19 at 8:17 a.m. PST: Apple’s quarterly revenue was $28.27 billion, quarterly profit was $6.62 billion.

No, the iPhone 4S won't replace your pricy DSLR, but it does take great HD video. Image: Robino Films

The iPhone 4S is receiving rave reviews for its fantastic camera, which can record surprisingly good video at 1080p. One videographer, in fact, was so impressed with the camera’s performance, he decided to test how it measures up to a full-fledged DSLR camera used for HD video capture.

Robino Films compared the HD video shot with an iPhone 4S with the video from a Canon 5D MK II, a popular DSLR, on similar settings. The iPhone 4S, which can shoot 1080p video at 30 frames per second, could theoretically give amateurs a great way to capture high-quality video, even in various tricky lighting situations — much like the iPhone 4 did for still photography.

“I was blown away by how good the video quality was,” said Robino Jones of the iPhone 4S’ video capabilities. “The resolution was nice. There was very little aliasing and moire was not visible. I really think that Apple made an amazing 1080p video camera, and to be able to carry that much power in your pocket is awesome.”

Knowing that the iPhone was “crippled” in comparison to the DSLR, Robino did his best to use similar settings when comparing the two cameras. The Canon 5D Mark II was set with an ISO of 160 to 640 and an F-stop of 7 to 22 (varied to match that of the iPhone). The DSLR was also set to a shutter speed of 1/60 of a second, automatic white balance, standard picture style, and 1080p at 30 fps.

Despite its great-for-a-smartphone camera specs (which we describe below), Robino Films said the iPhone fell short of the DSLR in six areas: compression (the iPhone 4S produces noisy video, even in daytime shots); sensor size (the iPhone’s is extremely small); lens quality (great for a smartphone, but nowhere near that of a DSLR); and the inability to adjust frame rate, shutter speed or picture style. However, Jones said, “the iPhone 4S is holding very well against the 5D’s standard picture style.” The smartphone also produces a warmer image overall.

Jones said the iPhone scores points on resolution (which is better than on the 5D) and portability. He also praised really great dynamic range. The 5D’s video has a softer overall look, and more aliasing and moire.

In a comment on Vimeo, Jones said, “This test is really only to show that the 4S is coming close to the 5D but in NO WAY is it better. The iPhone is a great 1080p pocket camera and shows us where technology is heading. Give it two, three years, and we should see some interesting micro high performance cameras.”

As for the iPhone camera of today, the 4S features impressive specs. It shoots 1080p video with real-time image stabilization (to help mitigate the problems of a wobbly hand) as well as temporal noise reduction (to enhance low-light capture). The camera boasts a maximum aperture of f/2.4 and five lenses for sharper, brighter photos with a shallower field of focus. A backside-illuminated sensor paired with an image-processor on the phone’s A5 chip help things run quickly and smoothly.

Check out the video below to see how the iPhone 4S and Canon 5D Mark II’s 1080p video footage measures up side-by-side. Vimeo’s HD content only goes up to 720p, but you can download the 1080p footage to check it out yourself.

iPhone 4S / Canon 5d MKII Side by Side Comparison from Robino Films on Vimeo.

via TUAW

Droid RAZR vs. Droid vs. iPhone 4… fight! originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 18 Oct 2011 13:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |   | Email this | Comments

Wilson Electronics has released the infographic you see below to illustrate the evolution of the cell phone from a literal brick to the svelte smartphones that we have today. It may be hard to believe, but cell technology has been around since 1973, when the first mobile call was placed by Dr. Martin Cooper. What is […]