I recently laid hands on the Asus Eee Pad Transformer. It’s an Android tablet from Asus, uniquely characterized by its optional docking station which contains a keyboard and that transforms the Transformer into sort of a netbook form. If you ever thought that the new slate of keyboard-less tablets would be rather inconvenient to do “real work” (i.e. writing emails, documents, etc), the Transformer essentially gives you the best of both worlds.
I was quite intrigued to learn that the Nexus S is carried by our local telcos, and sold subsidized with 2-year contract plans. The Nexus S is made by Samsung, and it is the second Google flagship phone. I decided to hop over to HardwareZone Forums to check out and hear from the experiences of our local buyers. That’s when I discovered something rather shocking about the Nexus S. I was quite surprised, because I’ve not heard anything about this…
My Nexus One is over a year old now. My mobile contract is up for renewal. The Nexus One’s hardware specifications are still pretty good, even considering the second Google flagship Nexus S. But there’s always room for improvement, like faster CPU, more memory, longer battery life, more megapixels, etc. Perhaps, even more hardware like adding a front-facing camera or NFC, things that only became standard expectations on the Android platform much after the Nexus One was launched.
The big news last week, apart from Mubarak stepping down, is Nokia jumping ship. There had already been some speculation, before their Feb 11 announcement, that Nokia would tie up with Microsoft. Yet, I still found their press release on Friday quite startling. Nokia had, after all, always been standing staunchly behind Symbian all these years. Symbian has very much been a sinking ship, and most people are describing Nokia’s efforts as “rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic”. Well……
I finally got around to baking Gingerbread. Not the edible sort. But Android 2.3, based off Cyanogen’s git repositories, for the Nexus One. With the final CM6.1 already released, and Gingerbread sources also available publicly, much development attention has already turned toward the upcoming CM7. My nightly automatic builds of CM6 from git repositories have started to stagnate (i.e. little material changes)… so I thought at some point I should start to dip my feet into Gingerbread too.
Google has released Maps 5.0. Yup, a bump in the major version number, so you’d expect that this update brings about some significant new features. In a nutshell, the new features are compass mode, 3D maps (and pan/rotate viewing options), and offline map caching. Not all the new features are fully available on all devices though. Some “older” phones, which unfortunately includes my Nexus One, only support a partial list of the features.
The first thought that came to my mind when I held the HTC Desire Z: It feels absolutely plasticky. It doesn’t have the solid feel like its HTC Desire cousin. Coming from a Nexus One, the HTC Desire Z doesn’t have anything really outstanding, except perhaps for its one star feature, the slide-out QWERTY keyboard. I’m not a fan of QWERTY keyboards, unless they are full-sized like in a notebook, which of course is impractical in a mobile phone.
I’m often amused overhearing conversations between sales people and potential customers. Especially when it comes to selling IT or other tech products. So I eavesdropping at this SingTel dealer this afternoon. There was a Samsung Galaxy Tab demo unit on display (the reason I took notice and stopped by). A middle-aged lady customer was showing an interest in that Galaxy Tab, and the salesgirl was trying to answer her questions. So is this like the iPad? Oh yes, the salesgirl…
It’s not so much about being able to listen to FM radio that I’m excited about. In fact, I don’t imagine I would do much of radio listening. (Perhaps it might be because I couldn’t previously, and now that I can, maybe I might start doing so.) It is about this newfound FM radio functionality on the Nexus One that was not marketed to have such a feature, and until today, I couldn’t use to listen to FM radio. It…
I was running a network workshop yesterday. During the break, I spotted someone with a HTC Desire phone. So, I thought to conduct an impromptu poll of Android and iPhone users. There were, surprisingly, 3 HTC Desire users, as well as 2 HTC Magics, and 1 Nexus One (me). Even more surprisingly, there was just 1 lone iPhone user. So it seems, Android outnumbered iPhone by a 6:1 ratio. How interesting. Notice, also, that all the Android phones where made…
