Let's Talk Tech
Just a quick hands on video for your viewing pleasure. The HTC One is a gorgeous phone, but it can be a bit nerve wracking to use if you’re trying to keep it free from scratches. Plus, sometimes it’s just fun to personalize.
Slickwraps covers are adhesive plastic guards which cover just about every surface on your phone. Available for a number of devices, in a number of styles and colors. Let’s see what it looks like on the most attractive phone in the Android ecosystem!
No sooner do I finish up a monster camera smartphone comparison video, than this photo beast gets announced for the United States. Typical.
The S4 Zoom is an interesting beast. One part mid-range phone one part zoom point and shoot. While companies like Nokia went with huge megapixels and cropping to simulate zoom, Samsung just bolted a mechanical zoom lens onto the back of a smartphone. Learning from their experiences in building the Galaxy Camera, now you can have a similar experience which is a touch more pocket-able.
The phone side is decent enough, a qHD 4.3″ AMOLED screen is a bit low res these days, but should help performance stay snappy when paired with the dual core processor on board. There’s 8GB of storage built in and you can add more via MicroSD. All in all somewhat ho-hum for an Android phone these days.
Where Zoom gets interesting is in the camera hardware. A 16MP BSI CMOS point & shoot style sensor is paired up with a 10X hardware zoom, which is controlled via a manual ring. There’s even a proper Xenon flash on board for low light and indoor shots. Sammy makes some decent camera gear, so this pairing looks like it could be formidable. Slamming Android into a proper camera experience is a fun way to shoot, edit, and share photos while you’re out and about. Adding support for LTE on AT&T’s network is just icing.
This adds to AT&T’s increasingly interesting device portfolio, and Big Blue now stands as having one of the widest selection of Android and Windows Phones around.
The Galaxy S4 Zoom is available starting November 8 for $199 on a two year contract. The Zoom will also be eligible for AT&T’s current promo where you can snag yourself a free Galaxy Tab when signing up for a new plan. More info at: www.att.com/galaxys4zoom
Full PR and a video hands on after the jump.
Continue reading “AT&T scores exclusive on Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom”
Just a heads up for all you frugal smartphone shoppers out there. Nokia’s littlest smartphone is on sale at Radioshack!
The Lumia 520 is a handy entry level phone, basic specs, but Windows Phone runs very smoothly, and it’s one of the few Windows Phones with an SD card slot to expand the storage. On it’s own, it’s not going to “wow” anybody…
Until you look at it’s price.
If you shop it at Radioshack you can walk out the door with a perfectly capable dual-core phone with a decent screen, good battery life, and a 5MP camera all for $80. I know what you’re thinking. That’s NOT $80 on a two year contract. $80 out the door and you own it. Outright. It’s yours.
You could even shop a phone like this as a “weekender” if you didn’t want to take your nicer phone out for fear it might get messed up out at the beach or on a hike.
If you’re just looking for the basics, phone calls, email, some social networking, it’ll be hard to top this bang for buck player.
Lumia 520 on sale at RadioShack
Related:
Real Person Video Review: Tom Costello chats about his Nokia Lumia 521
It’s happening!
The same day the FAA announced it no longer was bothered by devices being used in airplane mode during all stages of flight, we have two companies vying for our mobile electronics affections.
Delta and Jet Blue rushed out to let us know they’ll be allowing us to use all of our mobile glowing rectangles from the moment our butt is in a seat to the moment we’re throwing elbows to get off the flight. We can be sure the rest of the airlines are looking to make the same play soon. Most of my credit card points are tied up with United, so they better make the jump PDQ…
Bloomberg has a great write up detailing all the business concerns, and I’d just like to take this moment to remind all of my readers that just because this rule has opened up, it doesn’t mean you get to be a douche bag about your tech. Listen to the flight attendants, follow instructions from the pilots, fly safe.
Be a good tech citizen.
[Golf clap] Well done Nokia.
Counterpoint Technology Market Research did a tally of shipped phones for Q3 2013, and the numbers were somewhat surprising. Behind Apple (33.7%), Samsung (33.6%), and LG (8.6%), Nokia has clawed its way up to number four with 4.1% of the USA smartphone market. Not bad at all considering how slow the consumer response has been in warming up to Windows Phone. Great news for a company which had less than one percent of the market’s share this time period last year, as it even manages to unseat Google owned Motorola.
We can probably count on the $100 Lumia 520 for a good chunk of those sales, but mind share in general is up for the brand as people have praised Nokia’s cameras. With the entry-level market healthy, we might see even more growth for the brand at the premier level as they prep the Lumia 1520 for a holiday release. Plus the Microsoft ecosystem is improving, with apps like Vine and Instagram joining the fold later this year.
Even more startling however is the continued slide of HTC, as the brand falls to ninth behind companies like ZTE and Huawei. Its likely that Apple and Samsung will continue occupying the top two spots for a while to come, but that last 30% of the pie is completely up for grabs this holiday buying season.
(via Reddit)
This has been exhausting. Trolling leaks and rumors, but it’s finally here and it’s finally real. Though I still don’t understand Google’s plan here, rolling out a device and a new OS without any kind of proper Keynote or event.
The Nexus 5 is now officially up on Google Play for your smartphone purchasing enjoyment. Pretty much all the rumors about this thing were true, which kinda takes some of the fun out of talking about smartphones.
The $349 sports a 5″ 1080p screen, 2GB of RAM, 16GB of storage, a Qualcomm 800 series quad core processor, an 8MP rear camera with OIS, wireless charging, and should play nice on T-Mobile or Sprint’s networks. Add $50 and you can double the storage.
So continues the price disruption of the Nexus line. $349 for an unlocked premier handset rocking bleeding edge internals is entirely unheard of. This is not an “On contract” price. It’s $349 out the door. You own it.
Plus they also released this nifty video:
So there you have it folks. Was there any better day to unveil a phone running an OS called KitKat than on Halloween? The wait was exasperating, I honestly didn’t know if we’d survive it, but we did.
More details on the Google Plus Devices Page.
Full PR after the jump:
Continue reading “Google FOR REAL Announces Nexus 5 and Android 4.4 KitKat”
I WANT THIS!
I posted a little while back about Phonebloks, a Lego-like phone concept allowing smartphone users to customize exactly the kind of phone hardware they want. I thought it was exciting as it would allow people to upgrade over time, while hopefully preventing a significant amount of e-waste. When one piece of your phone becomes obsolete or breaks, just swap it out for an upgrade. You don’t have to throw the whole phone out.
I got A LOT of cynicism on social media from a BUNCH of people who said it could never work, further reinforcing the notion that people online don’t really want actual NEW things.
Well wouldn’t you know it, today Motorola announces that they’ve been working on this very idea for over a year now! It doesn’t get much more legitimate as a concept device than that. Dubbed Project Ara, Moto is trying to push an open hardware standard which would compliment software like Android. In an age where increasingly our magic glowing rectangles are often glued shut, this would be a refreshing change of pace, especially for someone like me who still prefers building his own workstations.
Best of all Moto knows that they aren’t first in pushing this concept out to the masses, and they’ve reach out to Phonebloks to do some community building and partnerships, while moving forward during the development process. Really classy move.
Get the full scoop at Moto’s blog!
***UPDATE***
Now there’s a video showing Phonebloks and Moto working together!
I’m almost wrapped up with my full long term review of the 5S, but I thought I’d tease some of the videos we’ll be using to showcase the performance of Apple’s newest handset.
Starting off with the most comprehensive camera test you’ll find on this phone online, shooting in a variety of scenarios including bright outdoor scenes, low light, indoor, night time, tracking movement, and we played with slow motion video. If you’ve been curious to see how this new image sensor stacks up against Nokias and Androids, we have a ton of samples to show off!
Also, no discussion of a multimedia phone would be complete without some speaker tests. The iPhone is a svelte slab of phone. I was really curious to see if Apple could cram in a speaker which would be able to compete against recent outings from Nokia and HTC. I was very surprised by the results of our speaker test, and you can hear the iPhone playback movie clips and music in our video below.
Be on the lookout for our full long-term review in the coming days!