Hasta La Gadget!

What’s the first thing you should do when you get the N8? Considering it packs the biggest image sensor embedded in a phone yet, Carl Zeiss optics, and an eight-digit pixel count, it seemed obvious to us that the answer was to take it on a picture- and video-taking stroll around London. On our way out we saw our iPhone 4 looking all sad and lonely, so we went ahead and brought it along as well. Below you shall find one gallery of pure, unadulterated N8 sample shots, another interspersed with the iPhone’s results for comparison’s sake, and a final one with side-by-side 100 percent crops from each image taker. Once you’ve digested all of those, we suggest hopping past the break and tucking into some tasty video comparisons for dessert.

Naturally, all the images are entirely unretouched (but for our masterly watermarking) and the iPhone 4’s HDR hocus pocus has been left off. We’ve also provided a zip file containing all the full-res imagery shot with the N8 in a link below.

A quick note is also merited about the N8’s resolution. The sensor’s display ratio is 4:3, which means that full 12 megapixel shots are only available in those dimensions. The camera software, however, defaults to shooting 9 megapixel snaps at the increasingly popular 16:9 ratio — this is done simply by cropping away the “excess” bars at the top and bottom of the image, meaning that the 9 megapixel images are giving us identical performance as the 12 megapixel ones, they’re just chopped down (from 4000 x 3000 to 4000 x 2248) for the sake of convenience. Now, on with the show!

Continue reading Nokia N8 vs. iPhone 4: camera showdown

Nokia N8 vs. iPhone 4: camera showdown originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Sep 2010 23:57:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The aftermarket cell phone accessory industry will nearly double in size in the next five years, crows CellphoneAccents.com, and it’s making sure that it’ll get its share. The site has ramped up its purchasing for the holidays. While it currently has over 45,000 different products available, including of thousands of designer cell phone faceplates (like this Ed Hardy fish), they expect that number to expand by 15 percent this holiday season.

The e-commerce company has been adding anywhere from 100 to 250 unique items to its product line each week for the past several weeks. If you’re looking for a case for yourself (or just a nicely inexpensive holiday gift), give the site a try.

We’re really going to miss Anssi Vanjoki when he leaves Nokia in a few months. The straight-shooting Finn brings a sometimes astonishing but always entertaining level of honesty and passion to an otherwise staid consumer electronics industry. Of course, we’ve all been wondering why Anssi announced his resignation from Nokia so suddenly after saying in July that he was “committed, perhaps even obsessed” with taking Nokia back to the number one position in high-end devices. Easy, “I didn’t become the CEO,” said the 20 year Nokia veteran in an extended version of the interview first published on Tuesday. Anssi then added, “You know who the guy is it’s not you… so what do you do, you stay or you leave. I decided to leave.” While not regretting the decision to stick with Symbian in the last few years, he does admit that it couldn’t compete with Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android in touchscreen smartphones — the Symbian rewrite took (or is taking, depending upon your perspective) too long. The second problem, he says, is Nokia’s absence from the US market. In particular, Silicon Valley, the “nucleus,” as he calls it, for the software development behind all those “crazy apps everyone keeps talking about.” Unfortunately, the 54-year-old Anssi has no future plans that he’s willing to discuss. “I need a plan. My plan is to plan,” he says.

Anssi Vanjoki on quitting Nokia: ‘I didn’t become the CEO. It is as simple as that’ originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 23 Sep 2010 04:19:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Android skins may be slow and tacky, but phone makers continue to use them. Now HTC has doubled down on the concept with a new version of its Sense user interface.

Along with the launch of two new phones Wednesday, HTC upgraded Sense, an Android add-on that provides home screen widgets to aggregate social networking feeds, display a user’s calendar, and provide access to apps such as the camera.

The revamped Sense UI will have a much faster boot time, DLNA support to allow streaming media to other devices, faster maps and a new website for device management, says HTC.

The new version of Sense will be seen on the Desire and Desire Z smartphones that has company just launched.

Android skins have raised the hackles of some smartphone enthusiasts. But HTC’s Sense upgrade is a sign that phone makers are likely to continue using custom Android skins, despite significant improvements in the latest versions of the Android operating system.

Other manufacturers are sticking with their skins, too. In July, Motorola said it plans to let go of the ‘MotoBlur’ brand name since it confused consumers. But it is staying firm on the idea of a skin that would customize the generic look of Android and meld it to the company’s tastes.

Here’s what HTC consumers can expect in the new Sense UI. The new version will boot under 10 seconds, says HTC. The company wouldn’t provide information on boot time for the older version. The move should help alleviate some of the complaints around skins slowing down the Android OS.

HTC has also added Locations, a mapping application that’s different from Google Maps. Locations has some unique features, says HTC. It includes cached maps, which can be handy for international travelers who don’t want to incur data roaming chargers.  Users can download the map information to their phone before they leave the country and still get GPS-based map information in a foreign country without using any data.

Locations also includes a compass mode to orient the map on the screen so it is aligned with the direction the user is facing.

HTC has improved the camera app in the new version Sense by adding different filters and effects such as line art.

“So, if you want to create an artistic Photoshop-ish effect to an image you are capturing, you can do it real time while you take the picture, rather than using a photo processing app after the fact,” says Keith Nowak, spokesperson for HTC.

Also, in keeping with how popular e-readers are now, the new Sense interface includes a widget for an e-book store powered by Kobo.

Remote device management is now become a must-have for all major smartphone makers. Motorola offers free online back-up and remote find for its lost Android phones. Apple does the same with the paid MobileMe. Now HTC is joining the bandwagon with the HTCSense.com service.

The service allows consumers to manage their phone from a computer and locate a missing phone by triggering the handset to ring loudly, even if it is set to silent, or to flag its location on a map.

Other services include remote lock, forwarding calls and texts to another phone and remote wipe can be done through the site. Users can also access archived mobile content such as contacts, text messages and call history from a PC browser.

See Also:

• OLED Shortage Forces HTC to Switch Displays
• Wired Video: HTC Evo 4G Dissected
• Overclocked HTC Evo Runs Almost 30 Percent Faster
• Strapped to Android, HTC Takes a Dizzying Ride to the Top

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

Intel CTO Justin Rattner just described a future where your devices know more about you — not just “where you are,” but “where you’re going,” to use his words. Intel’s working on a context-aware API that uses not only physical smartphone and tablet sensors (like accelerometers and GPS) but also “soft sensors” including social networks and personal preferences to infer what you’re doing and what you like, and deliver these inferences to a “context engine” that can cater to your tastes. It’s presently being tested in an app by travel guide company Fodors on a Compal MID that dynamically delivers restaurant and tourism suggestions based on these factors, and also in a social cloud service (demoed on a prototype tablet) that can show you what your friends are up to (using game-like avatars!) on the go. Rattner told us that the API itself is not quite like the typical experiments out of Intel Labs — while there aren’t presently plans to make the API publicly available, he said the context engine was made to commercial software standards specifically so it could become a real product should the technology pan out. In other words, Intel just might be agreeing to do all the heavy lifting for a new generation of apps. How sweet.

Intel testing context-aware API for smartphones and tablet PCs, teams with Fodor on dynamic travel app originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Sep 2010 13:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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