The Apple iPhone/iPad rumors continue to swirl, with further evidence pointing to a high-resolution version of the iPad set to launch later this year. Talk earlier today of an “iPad 2 Plus” has been echoed by This is my next, whose sources say the tablet – which they claim will launch as the iPad HD – will have a 2048 x 1538 double-resolution screen and be targeted at graphics pros such as those in video and photo production. Meanwhile, there’s also more news on the iPhone 5/iPhone 4S saga.
To celebrate the iPad HD launch, it’s said, Apple plans to release an iPad version of Final Cut or Aperture. What’s definite is that this isn’t the iPad 3, but an attempt to broaden the iPad range in the same manner as the MacBook and MacBook Pro.
Meanwhile, the iPhone 5 is tipped to be Apple’s sole new smartphone, rather than there being “5″ and “4S” versions. Set to launch in September, the sources corroborate, the story is that Apple has confused tipsters by cladding the iPhone 5 components – which “are built for a smaller and lighter device” – in an iPhone 4 shell, similar to the iPhone 3GS casing that the prototype iPhone 4 handsets sported during field testing.
Apple’s top-tier management is apparently tired of the iPhone 4 styling, and that’s prompted a significant redesign. Among the changes are a 3.7-inch or thereabouts display, something that – at casual glance – might not look too different to what’s on the iPhone 4 now. We won’t know for sure until September, of course.
You may or may not have noticed, but we’re once again in the thick of earnings season, and today Samsung’s in the hot seat. The company has reported that its second-quarter profit fell 26 percent year-over-year to 3.7 trillion won ($3.5 billion), largely thanks to underwhelming sales of flat screen TVs and, to a lesser extent, semiconductors. That’s a shade worse than the whiz kids over on Wall Street were expecting, according to Bloomberg. In fact, the demand for televisions was so disappointing that it overshadowed what was actually an impressive quarter for the outfit’s mobile division — sales of feature and smartphones quadrupled year-over-year to 19.2 million units, putting the company on track to further narrow the gap with Nokia, the world’s bestselling handset maker. All told, this balanced out to a modest growth in revenue — an uptick of 2.9 percent to 39 trillion won ($36.7 billion). Makes sense to us — handsets aren’t exactly big ticket items, ya know?
As bizarre, brilliant ideas go, “iPlayer for Kindle” has to be one of the best. Despite initially sounding like an April Fool – video content on an E Ink ereader? – it’s actually a real project by Frisnit Electronic Industrial, taking TV shows and converting them into a digital comic strip of sorts, complete with subtitles.
The system takes a DVB digital TV feed along with subtitle information and initially pulls out just the frames where there’s dialog. Interspersed with those are extra frames picked out by scene-detection software that works out a mid-point between anything with speech, so as to capture moments where characters are staring at each other longingly, weeping, or being silently furious.
Everything is then cooked up as an HTML file that can be printed or converted into a PDF, with timestamps and subtitles overlaid, perfect to be dropped onto your Kindle. A 30 minute show works out to roughly a 20MB file, bigger than the average ebook of course, but a lot smaller – and more E Ink friendly – than a video file.
We’ve tried it out on our Kindle, and it actually works pretty well, despite being in greyscale. Two frames per page are shown, and the second-gen Kindle handled the sizable file with no sluggishness. Whether we’d reach for this rather than iPlayer on a cellphone or tablet is debatable, but as crazy proof-of-concept projects go, it’s utterly fantastic.
Onkyo knows you love a flagship, and so it’s packed more than the average abilities into its new top-tier Blu-ray player, the BD-SP809. As well as playing Blu-ray – including 3D titles – DVD and CD discs, the BD-SP809 will play DivX HD, MP3 and WMA files from USB drives or, indeed, stream photo, audio and video content over a network thanks to DLNA 1.5 compliance.
There’s also on-demand media streaming support, including Netflix, Blockbuster, VUDU and Film Fresh, in up to HD quality, and Onkyo has used Marvell’s Qdeo processor for 1080p upscaling, deinterlacing and noise reduction. Ports include two HDMI outputs, so as to make hooking up – and flicking between – an HDTV and a projector more straightforward.
DTS-HD Master Audio and Dolby TrueHD, along with THX certification, round out the key specs, though as you’d probably imagine there are plenty of other ports on the back including digital and analog audio outputs.
And what would you pay for this rich, creamy, uncommonly good Blu-ray player (disclaimer: we haven’t actually tried it; it could be rubbish)? Onkyo will be asking $599 when the BD-SP809 lands in August.
It’s clear that after killing off unlimited smartphone data plans, Verizon realized it had a walloping PR mess to clean up. Alas, the carrier isn’t budging on its decision to impose usage-based plans, which go into effect today, but it is making nice the best way it knows how: by checking in frequently to let you know just how many megabytes you’ve burned through. Starting this week, smartphone owners with new (read: not unlimited) data plans will begin receiving free text message alerts informing them when they’ve consumed 50, 75, 90, 100, and 110 percent of their monthly allowance. People with My Verizon accounts can request email alerts instead, the same way they would with mobile broadband cards and netbooks, though either way you can only disable the alerts for the 50 and 75 percent makers — those 90, 100, and 110 percent milestone markers appear to be mandatory. In addition, you can, as always, keep tabs on your usage by entering “#DATA”, downloading the Data Usage widget for Android and BlackBerry, using the online data calculator, or availing yourself of the My Verizon portal. Hit the source links to find those last two, and best of luck with that gigabyte diet.
I wholeheartedly endorse the iPhone 4 as a lightweight, always-on-hand P&S digital camera alternative. But this might be taking things a bit too far. For a mere $190 from Photojojo you can get this iPhone 4 case featuring an adapter allowing you to use either Nikon or Canon lenses with your smartphone. On one hand you no longer have to rely on an app to fake a shallow DOF in your photos, but on the other, look at what you’ve done to your sleek, svelte phone!
I’m desperately looking for any sign that this is a leftover April Fool’s Day prank, but from what I can tell, it’s 100% real. And, 100% ridiculous. The removable aluminum case even includes a loophole on either end allowing you to attach a camera strap and hang this Frankenstein of photography around your neck like an actual DSLR. Just remember that autofocus is out of the question, and the tiny sensor on the iPhone 4 is not going to perform anywhere near as well as the one in even the lowest-end DSLR.
BeBook is a company better known for its ereaders, but the lure of the tablet has proved too great. The BeBook Live is a low-cost Android slate, still proclaiming its ereader heritage but also hoping to earn itself a place as your browsing, multimedia and gaming gadget of choice. With a price significantly lower than that of rival tablets, can the BeBook Live really replace both your iPad and your Kindle in one fell swoop? Check out the full SlashGear review after the cut.
Hardware
At £229 in the UK, it’s too much to expect metal for the BeBook Live’s construction, though the 140 x 202 x 11 mm, 426g plastic slab is at least creak and flex-free. The 7-inch display is the only glossy part of it, too; the back panel is a sensible – if uninspiring – matte finish expanse of black, with only the (poorly) printed logo and an adhesive serial number label to break it up. Most of the controls and ports are around the silver plastic edge, with the power button, recessed soft-reset button, volume keys and a useful screen rotation lock switch on the top, then the mini HDMI, microSD and miniUSB ports along the side. BeBook’s use of a mini rather than microUSB port for charging/syncing is a frustration, as is the fact that there’s no HDMI cable included in the box.
To the left of the display, midway down, is the front-facing 2-megapixel camera; there’s no rear camera on the BeBook Live. While it may have the pixels, the quality is only middling, though 720p HD video recording is supported. On the right, near the top, are three Android buttons for back, menu and home. These are basically cut out of the bezel plastic, but still manage to be clicky enough that you know you’ve hit them.
The touchscreen itself is a 7-inch 800 x 600 panel running at 4:3 aspect, and with a capacitive touch layer and TFT LCD panel underneath. It’s not, frankly, the best display we’ve ever seen on a slate: the resolution falls short of what even Samsung’s aging original Galaxy Tab offers, and viewing angles are poor. In landscape orientation it’s reasonably bright, though the blacks aren’t as rich and deep as the better LCDs of late (never mind what AMOLED can manage) but in portrait orientation it suffers the same washing-out as the Advent Vega demonstrated late last year. Considering the BeBook Live’s ambitions as an ereader, that’s a big problem.
Inside there’s a 1GHz single-core Cortex-A8 processor paired with 512MB of RAM and 4GB of storage. There’s also WiFi b/g/n, Bluetooth, an accelerometer and a pair of speakers, along with a 3.5mm headphone jack on the left edge. No 3G, however, nor GPS.
Software and Performance
While the Android tablet world has moved on to 3.x Honeycomb, the BeBook Live is stuck on an earlier dessert course, namely 2.2.1 Froyo. Intended for smartphones, it obviously lacks the tablet-centric modifications Honeycomb brought. BeBook has left the OS well alone, and you get what amounts to a stock build of 2.2.1; there’s also Android Market access, along with the official Gmail and Google Maps apps, which other budget tablets have launched without in previous months.
BeBook Live demo:
The user experience is basically identical to what you’d get on a Froyo phone, with five homescreens, a pull-down notifications bar (lacking any of the useful shortcuts or toggles we’ve seen other companies like Samsung and HTC add) and various homescreen widgets to choose from. Obviously there’s no phone support, but you can install Skype from the Android Market (or any of the other VoIP apps there), while Fring will handle video calls.
BeBook preinstalls a few non-standard apps, including the Ebuddy multi-service IM client, Tank Hero, Angry Birds and Egg Savior games, Rockplayer, ES explorer and ES taskmanager for handling files, and both FBReader and Aldiko ebook reader. The latter supports titles secured with Adobe’s DRM, though of course you can also download Amazon’s Kindle app or other software if you already have an ebook library you want to access.
Unfortunately, there’s nothing to guide you through the ebook process, or indeed any of the BeBook Live’s talents. The homescreen on our unit lacked any shortcuts or icons bar the Google search bar and the basic Android tips widget, and we can see novice users feeling unclear as to what they should do first. Some well-placed shortcuts would help, or at least a tutorial page. One of the strengths of a dedicated ereader like the Kindle or NOOK is that it’s easily approachable even for those with little technical knowledge, and we wish BeBook had catered for that fact even as it added other functionality.
Performance from the 1Ghz processor is not going to give Tegra 2 any sleepless nights, but it’s sufficient for the BeBook Live’s needs. We were able to play Flash video stutter-free in the browser, while the tablet is also capable of playing locally-stored MPEG4 video clips at up to 1080p HD resolution. Unfortunately it’s fussy about file types: beyond MPEG4 it’s a no-go, at least for the stock media player apps. Playback through the HDMI port works well, mirroring the tablet’s screen, so again it’s a shame BeBook chose to save a few pennies and not bundle the cable.
Battery
Official figures for the BeBook Live’s battery life are conspicuous by their absence. In practice we managed less than a day of use before the tablet expired. Standby times were also marred by an apparent greed even while sleeping; whereas we can leave the original Galaxy Tab, the iPad or the new breed of Honeycomb slates for several days, and have them lose minimal charge, the BeBook sucked down a full battery in only 2.5 days with little use beyond turning the screen on to check the battery status. Returning to full charge took 2-3hrs.
Wrap-Up
As a potential iPad and Kindle rival, the BeBook Live falls short on both fronts. Battery life is weaker than either, while the display is arguable less comfortable for ebook use than an E Ink panel and is generally far less impressive than the IPS LCD screens we’ve seen on recent tablets. Conversely, the browsing, Android Market flexibility, email support and multimedia playback makes for considerably broader flexibility than the Kindle, and the price is nearly half what you’d pay for an entry-level iPad.
Access to the growing catalog of Android apps goes a big way in rescuing the BeBook Live’s honor. Stick to landscape orientation – which the hardware design seems to favor anyway – and the display’s shortcomings are less of an issue too. In fact the biggest threat is probably the WiFi-only Galaxy Tab, currently retailing for just £30 more yet offering dual cameras, a higher resolution screen, four-times the internal storage and stronger battery life. If BeBook can shave away at the price until the BeBook Live slips under the £200 mark then it could stand a chance, but it will face strong competition from the Samsung stalwart as well as Archos’ upcoming 80 G9 with the benefits of Honeycomb.
Some ideas are undeniably sensible, and zero-click WiFi roaming across carriers and countries is one of them. That’s why iPass has set itself the unenviable but likely profitable task of convincing global telecoms giants to overlook their differences and form an “Open Mobile Exchange” based on its cloud-based authentication technology. It won’t be the first to embark on such a voyage of persuasion: Skype is already on the case and Boingo is too (at least, sort of), but there are still plenty of fragmented hotspot services out there waiting to be crushed and blended by an effortless roaming technology. We just hope iPass has perfected its pleading email template: “Dearest Carrier, have you considered…?” Full PR after the break.
Online auction giant eBay has bought mobile payments specialist Zong, spending $240m on the startup despite already having PayPal onboard. According to eBay, the interest in Zong is down to its existing connections with mobile operators, which allows users to charge items directly to their monthly bill.
“Commerce is changing. With mobile phones, we walk around with a mall in our pockets” PayPal president Scott Thompson said of the deal. ”PayPal helps to make money work better for customers in this new commerce reality – no matter how they want to pay or what device they’re using. We believe that Zong will strengthen this value by helping us reach the more than 4 billion people who have mobile phones, giving them more choice and security when they pay.”
eBay does already offer mobile payments, with apps for iOS and Android, but the Zong technology would enable a second payment method for those uncomfortable with registering their credit or debit card, or their current account, with PayPal. There’s also the possibility of using carrier-billing in other ways, with the Zong service enabling payments to be made not on the handset itself, but by punching in the user’s cellphone number into a site. Zong already offers users the ability to buy Facebook Credits, for instance.
That obviously requires some sort of tie-in between Zong and online retailers, and it’s that which eBay already has through PayPal. No word on when the functionality will merge, though eBay says it expects the deal to be final by the end of Q3 2011.
