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The camera we’ve been waiting for
PUBLISHED: 16 Oct 2013 17:00:00 | UPDATED: 17 Oct 2013 17:15:08PUBLISHED: 18 Oct 2013 PRINT EDITION: 18 Oct 2013John Davidson
There has been some debate here in the Labs about whether our Brian, the Sony Alpha 7R, is indeed the ‘messiah’ camera.
Now you listen here. He’s not the Messiah, he’s a very naughty boy.
In the few, short days that we had Sony’s new Alpha 7R digital camera in our laboratories, we took to calling it Brian.
“Have you done the studio tests on Brian?” we would say. “Take a look at the incredible photo I took on Brian!” we would say.
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Toshiba’s Encore 8-inch Windows tablet preview
PUBLISHED: 16 Oct 2013 12:51:02 | UPDATED: 16 Oct 2013 17:28:55PUBLISHED: 16 Oct 2013 PRINT EDITION: 16 Oct 2013John Davidson
Are the stars beginning to align for the Microsoft/Intel crowd?
Toshiba just announced a new 8-inch tablet running Microsoft’s soon-to-be-released Windows 8.1 operating system and Intel’s just-released Bay Trail Atom processor, and between the three of them, they seem to have come up with a pretty compelling alterative to the iPad mini, especially for those of us who use Windows on a daily basis.
Encore, as the tablet is known, runs the full-blown version of Windows, rather than Windows RT, meaning it will run any one of the gadzillion Windows desktop applications that are out there, not to mention the colourful “Modern” apps that made Windows 8 so (in)famous.
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What? Amazon is making a smartphone?
PUBLISHED: 16 Oct 2013 07:43:41 | UPDATED: 16 Oct 2013 12:51:26PUBLISHED: 16 Oct 2013 PRINT EDITION: 16 Oct 2013John Davidson
Amazon is working on a smartphone as part of its effort to compete with Apple and Google, according to a report in the Financial Times .
The world’s biggest book seller, which almost single-handedly changed the tablet market by selling heavily subsidised Kindle tablets, has paired up with HTC, the maker of one of the nicest smartphones ever to grace this world, the FT says.
The thing I like most about this story is I get to re-use a graphic I spent hours working on more than a year ago, the last time I blogged about Amazon smartphone rumours. It didn’t come true then, but it’s bound to come true this time. Where there’s smoke, there’s definitely . . . smoke.
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Why Samsung’s Galaxy Gear smartwatch isn’t so smart
PUBLISHED: 15 Oct 2013 00:05:29 | UPDATED: 15 Oct 2013 11:08:37PUBLISHED: 14 Oct 2013 PRINT EDITION: 15 Oct 2013John Davidson
The true measure of how finished the Gear is overall has to be how often you have to get your phone out of your bag when you’re wearing the watch.
As a professional gadget reviewer, I have only one thing to say to Samsung about its Galaxy Gear smartwatch: thank you, thank you, thank you. Maybe that’s three things.
Things had been looking a little grim in my occupation. Smartphones have become so consistently good, you practically can’t buy a bad one nowadays. Who needs the services of a gadget reviewer when you can’t go wrong? The same is getting to be true of digital cameras. Image quality has been more or less nailed, leaving exactly what for the professional reviewer to opine about?
But along came the Galaxy Gear, a new product so far from finished that I’m now looking forward to a steady income for years to come.
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Skinny MacBooks, high-res iPads in wind
PUBLISHED: 14 Oct 2013 08:13:31 | UPDATED: 14 Oct 2013 13:38:23PUBLISHED: 14 Oct 2013 PRINT EDITION: 14 Oct 2013John Davidson
Ming-Chi Kuo has been sniffing the wind again, and this time he’s caught the scent of MacBooks even thinner than the MacBook Air, iPads with displays even sharper than the current Retina display, and, yes, he’s even caught a whiff of the elusive iPad mini with Retina display.
The KGI Securities analyst, who has a bit of a knack of accurately predicting Apple’s every move, says that Apple will next year release a 12-inch MacBook with a high-resolution display, that will nevertheless be “lighter and slimmer than the existing MacBook Air to further highlight ease of portability in the cloud computing era”.
Historically there’s been a tradeoff between screen resolution and device size. You can either have a very slim, very light machine, or a machine with a super-high-resolution display, but you can’t have both. But Apple is said to be moving to a new screen technology, known as indium gallium zinc oxide (IGZO for short) that allows for very-high-resolution displays that don’t use a lot of power. If the move to IGZO goes ahead, we should expect a new generation of machines that don’t require a huge battery to power their screens, meaning customers would no longer have to choose between ultra-portability and ultra-clarity. We would get both at once.
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Ultra-high definition TV the way of the future
PUBLISHED: 10 Oct 2013 01:49:10 | UPDATED: 10 Oct 2013 07:18:26PUBLISHED: 11 Oct 2013 PRINT EDITION: 11 Oct 2013John Davidson
LG’s new, 65-inch Ultra High Definition TV has a picture quality so high it’s hard to believe you’re not staring through a wormhole.
There’s a video playing over and over on the TV I have sitting in my office. Though, the TV might as well be sitting on my office, it’s so large. Between the TV and the box it came in, I can barely squeeze in front of my PC to write to you.
The video is of beautiful European cities. One by one, places such as Florence, Paris, London, Milan and Venice all flash by on the screen. (I’m going from memory here, but I’ve seen the thing so many times now, I’m pretty sure that’s right.)
The images are so vivid, so detailed and rich, you’d swear the TV was some sort of wormhole, a door you could climb through to get to all those cities, quicker and cheaper than flying there. The only telltale sign that it’s not a portal, really, is that all the footage is in fast motion, full of cars and people zipping about at breakneck speed. But then again, who’s to say that a wormhole doesn’t speed up time?
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Is Apple making iPad notebooks, PCs?
PUBLISHED: 09 Oct 2013 08:39:07 | UPDATED: 09 Oct 2013 17:46:23PUBLISHED: 09 Oct 2013 PRINT EDITION: 09 Oct 2013John Davidson
Will we see a 13-inch version of this 5-th gen iPad? sonnydickson.com
Apple will launch its latest generation of iPads on October 22, The New York Times has reported. The question is, will it take the opportunity to announce bigger, 13-inch iPads that can be used as notebooks and PCs?
It should, says Barclays Equity Research Ben Reitzes.
Apple’s recent move to 64-bit processors in its iPhones paves the way for the company to replace its iconic Mac computers with large, powerful iPad tablets, re-igniting interest in notebook and desktop computing, Mr Reitzes reportedly wrote in a research report to investors.
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Apple’s new iMac cold to the touch
PUBLISHED: 07 Oct 2013 14:40:35 | UPDATED: 08 Oct 2013 11:46:54PUBLISHED: 07 Oct 2013 PRINT EDITION: 08 Oct 2013John Davidson
Everything about the manufacture of the new iMac is as close to perfect as is robotically possible.
Is there anything more cruel than loving something that refuses to love you back, than wanting to touch something that doesn’t want to be touched?
Yes, of course there is. Puppy mince pie, just off the top of my head, is more cruel than that.
But in the sorry list of life’s many cruelties, wanting to touch something that doesn’t want to be touched is right up in the 95th percentile, maybe even the 96th.
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Why Samsung should buy BlackBerry (please!)
PUBLISHED: 07 Oct 2013 09:07:22 | UPDATED: 07 Oct 2013 14:40:22PUBLISHED: 07 Oct 2013 PRINT EDITION: 07 Oct 2013John Davidson
Not content with a takeover offer that would take it private, BlackBerry has been shopping itself to a list of potential buyers including Google, SAP, Cisco, Intel, LG and Samsung, according to a report from Reuters.
Anyone interested in buying BlackBerry would have to come up with a preliminary expression of interest early this week, the report says.
Let’s hope it’s Samsung, because most of the rest of the potential buyers on that list would surely mean the end to your favourite smartphone brand.
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Dell dives headfirst back into tablets
PUBLISHED: 03 Oct 2013 10:46:12 | UPDATED: 03 Oct 2013 15:18:03PUBLISHED: 03 Oct 2013 PRINT EDITION: 03 Oct 2013John Davidson
Dell’s Venue 8 Pro, with stylus option
UPDATED: First came the Dell Streak, a phone/tablet so far ahead of its time it bumped into itself on the return journey. Now, three years later, Dell is getting back into the small tablet market, this time with so many Windows 8.1 and Android devices that at least one of them has to be successful.
Surely.
My money is on the Dell Venue 8 Pro, an 8-inch Atom-based tablet running the soon-to-be-released Windows 8.1 operating system. But there’s also a Core-based, 11-inch version, known (unsurprisingly) as the Dell Venue 11 Pro. Both of those come with keyboard and stylus options, and support proper enterprise integration with features like Dell Enterprise Services and Trusted Platform Modules.
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How to turn your iPhone into a Gameboy
PUBLISHED: 02 Oct 2013 08:19:45 | UPDATED: 02 Oct 2013 12:32:12PUBLISHED: 02 Oct 2013 PRINT EDITION: 02 Oct 2013John Davidson
A front and rear view of what might well be a real product from Logitech @Evleaks
It’s just as well Apple stuck with tiny screen sizes for its latest iPhone 5s and iPhone 5c phones. Otherwise they wouldn’t fit in this little beauty: the rumoured iPhone game controller from Logitech.
Evleaks, one of the more reliable sources of leaked product shots in the Twittersphere, has published a couple of photos of the gamepad, which judging from the picture takes an iPhone 5 - and hopefully an iPhone 5s and 5c, too - and turns it into the mother of all gaming phones.
The controller would doubtless utilise a new feature in iOS 7, known as the Game Controller Framework, which allows games software developers to program their games so they can be controlled by “Made-For-iPhone” controllers just like the purported Logitech controller.
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Not ‘phoney’ Fuji’s X-M1 camera is the real deal
PUBLISHED: 02 Oct 2013 00:45:50 | UPDATED: 02 Oct 2013 19:14:21PUBLISHED: 04 Oct 2013 PRINT EDITION: 04 Oct 2013John Davidson
The absence of a viewfinder is a drawback but the Fujifilm X-M1 takes great quality photos.
It’s quite shocking, coming back to review a real camera after having reviewed almost nothing but fake cameras for what was starting to feel like an eternity.
By “fake” camera, I mean fake as in “phoney”, as in “related or belonging to a phone”.
Not that I have anything against the cameras in phones. They’re incredibly handy, and bit by bit, pixel by pixel, they are getting better. But there’s only so far you can go with a camera that’s squeezed into a tiny corner of a tiny device like a tiny little afterthought.
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Why the Samsung Note 3 is the best smartphone by a mile
PUBLISHED: 01 Oct 2013 00:05:52 | UPDATED: 01 Oct 2013 11:39:21PUBLISHED: 30 Sep 2013 PRINT EDITION: 01 Oct 2013John Davidson
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The Note 2 is an incredibly versatile, incredibly useful device, and the Note 3 is even more useful.
Another long season of mobile phone reviewing is drawing to a close.
As we do every year (though usually only in our imagination), it’s time to sit back, take stock, and ask ourselves the all-important philosophical question: if a nuclear war broke out and we had to jump on a plane to escape to Antarctica, and if for some reason there was room for only one smartphone per person on the plane, which phone out of this year’s crop would we take?
The iPhone 5s with its fingerprint scanner (hard to use with gloves on)? The waterproof Xperia Z1 (not quite so useful when all the water is frozen)?
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Xbox One, PS4 competitor emerges
PUBLISHED: 30 Sep 2013 08:24:20 | UPDATED: 30 Sep 2013 14:01:18PUBLISHED: 30 Sep 2013 PRINT EDITION: 30 Sep 2013John Davidson
This is the controller for Valve’s new Steam Machine games console, and it will coming soon to a living room near you.
Valve, the games software company behind the popular Steam software distribution platform, last week detailed its not-so-secret plans to enter the gaming console market, with a new gaming and entertainment operating system, SteamOS, and a new line of consoles to run it, known as Steam Machines. (The consoles are also known as Steam Boxes. It’s still not entirely clear what we’re supposed to call them. They’re not due out till next year, so we’ll have plenty of time to figure out the name, I guess.)
Now Valve has detailed the controller that you’ll use on your SteamOS-powered Steam Machines.
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One Windows to Rule Them All
PUBLISHED: 27 Sep 2013 08:44:26 | UPDATED: 27 Sep 2013 17:17:37PUBLISHED: 27 Sep 2013 PRINT EDITION: 28 Sep 2013John Davidson
Microsoft’s dream of having a single version of Windows across smartphones, tablets and PCs has taken a step closer to realisation: it’s about to launch a single, unified app store for all the different devices, according to reports.
At an internal meeting this week at Microsoft’s Seattle headquarters, the man in charge of Microsoft’s operating systems, Terry Myerson, demonstrated an app store that takes the apps from the Windows Phone 8 operating system, and the apps from the Windows operating system, and sells them in the one place, according to a report appearing in The Verge.
Whether that was Windows RT apps, or just Windows 8 apps, isn’t clear, but it does appear to be a small part of Myerson’s evil master plan, to have Windows RT running across all sorts of devices, including mobile phones.
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