Find: NVIDIA Shield Review: At the Crossroads of PC and Mobile Gaming

Shield is a controller, display, android console, and streamer all in one. Uses a tegra 4 mobile soc. 

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// published on AnandTech // visit site

NVIDIA Shield Review: At the Crossroads of PC and Mobile Gaming

NVIDIA is doing something different with Tegra 4, very different. To bring up its silicon, each vendor usually makes a reference design phone and tablet with a selection of approved components, packages a BSP (Board Support Package), and ships that and some engineers to customers. Rather than never letting the reference design see the light of day, this time NVIDIA also made it into something they can sell directly, a portable gaming device called Shield.

It's no secret that Tegra 4 isn't exactly the success that NVIDIA probably hoped it would be. While the initial word was that Tegra 4 had an obvious set of design wins following momentum from products which shipped in 2012 through 2013 with Tegra 3, but it's obvious that Shield will now effectively serve as NVIDIA's launch vehicle for Tegra 4. It's an aspirational product and not an easy one to nail down – enthusiasts are picky about controllers, Android gaming is still largely an unknown, and the question remains what presence handheld gaming consoles will have in the future. To answer all those questions NVIDIA sent over Shield, a Falcon Northwest Tiki with GTX 760 inside, and Parrot AR Drone 2.0 for us to review. Read on for the full story.


Find: Warrantless Cellphone Tracking Is Upheld

The police can access your real time location without getting a warrant. 

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// published on NYT > Home Page // visit site

Warrantless Cellphone Tracking Is Upheld

The ruling is the first to address the constitutionality of warrantless searches of historical location data stored by cellphone service providers.

Find: The great Ars Android interface shootout

A nice survey of the various android ui skins. 

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// published on Ars Technica // visit site
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The great Ars Android interface shootout

Florence Ion / Aurich Lawson

It's been quite a year of surprises from Google. Before the company's annual developer conference in May, we anticipated at least an incremental version of Android to hit the scene. Instead, we encountered a different game plan—Google not only started offering stock features like its keyboard as separate, downloadable apps for other Android handset users, but it's also offering stock Android versions of non-Nexus-branded hardware like Samsung's Galaxy S4 and the HTC One in the Google Play store. So if you'd rather not deal with OEM overlays and carrier restrictions, you can plop down some cash and purchase unlocked, untainted Android hardware.

But the OEM-tied handsets aren't all bad. Sometimes the manufacturer's Android offerings tack on a little extra something to the device that stock or Nexus Android hardware might not. These perks include things like software improvements and hardware enhancements—sometimes even thoughtful little extra touches. We'll take a look at four of the major manufacturer overlays available right now to compare how they stack up to stock Android. Sometimes the differences are obvious, especially when it comes to the interface and user experience. You may be wondering what the overall benefit is to sticking with a manufacturer's skin. The reasons for doing so can be very compelling.

A brief history of OEM interfaces

Why do OEM overlays happen in the first place? iOS and Windows Phone 8 don't have to deal with this nonsense, so what's the deal with Android? Well, Android was unveiled in 2007 alongside the Open Handset Alliance (a consortium of hardware, software, and carriers to help further advance open standards for mobile devices). The mission was to keep the operating system open and accessible to all so users could mostly do whatever they wanted to do with it. As Samsung VP of Product Planning and Marketing Nick DiCarlo told Gizmodo, "Google has induced a system where some of the world's largest companies—the biggest handset manufacturer and a bunch of other really big ones—are also investing huge money behind their ecosystem. It's a really powerful and honestly pretty brilliant business model."

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Find: What's New in Android 4.3

OpenGL es 3. 
 
// published on AnandTech // visit site

What's New in Android 4.3

As expected, today Google made a management release for Android 4.2 official at their breakfast with Sundar event, bumping the release up to Android 4.3 and introducing a bunch of new features and fixes. The update brings everything that Google alluded was coming during Google I/O, and a few more.

On the graphics side, the big change is inclusion of support for OpenGL ES 3.0 in Android 4.3. Put another way, Android 4.3 now includes the necessary API bindings both in the NDK and Java for ES 3.0. This release brings the numerous updates we've been over before, including multiple render targets, occlusion queries, instances, ETC2 as the standard texture compression, a GLSL ES 3.0, and more.

 

We've also talked about the changes to the 2D rendering pipeline which improve performance throughout Android, specifically intelligent reordering, and merging, which cuts down on the number of draw calls issued to the GPU for 2D scenes. This improvement automatically happens with Android 4.3 and doesn't require developer intervention, the pipeline is more intelligent now and optimizes the order things are drawn and groups together similar elements into a single draw call instead of multiple. In addition like we talked about, non-rectangular clips have hardware acceleration, and there's more multithreading in the 2D rendering pipeline.

Google has been trying to increase adoption of WebM and along those lines Android 4.3 now includes VP8 encoder support for Stagefright. The platform APIs are updated accordingly for the ability to change settings like bitrate, framerate, and so forth. New DRM modules are now added as well, for use with MPEG DASH through a new MediaDRM API.

 

On the connectivity side we get a few new features, first is the WiFi scan mode which we saw leaked in a bunch of different ROMs. This exposes itself as a new option under the Advanced menu under WiFi settings, and during initial out of box setup. This new scanning mode allows Google to continue to further build out its WiFi AP location database to improve WiFi-augmented location services for its devices.

Like we saw hinted not so subtly at Google I/O, 4.3 also includes support for Bluetooth low energy (rebranded Bluetooth smart) through the new Broadcom-sourced Bluetooth stack. This OS-level support for BT Smart APIs will do a lot to ease the API fragmentation third party OEMs have resorted to in its absence.

Likewise Bluetooth AVRCP 1.3 is now included which supports better metadata communication for car audio and other devices, as well as better remote control.

Security gets improvements as well, Android 4.3 moves to SELinux MAC (mandatory access control) in the linux kernel. The 4.3 release runs SELinux in permissive mode which logs policy violations but doesn't break anything at present.

A number of other security features are changed, including fixes for vulnerabilities disclosed to partners, better application key protection, removal of setuid programs from /system, and the ability to restrict access to certain capabilities per-application. Lastly there's a new user profiles feature that allows for finer grained control over app usage and content.

We'll be playing around with the new features on the new Nexus 7 as well as the other Nexus devices getting the update (Nexus 4, Nexus 10, Nexus 7 (2012), and Galaxy Nexus). Google has already posted the factory images for those devices as well if you're too impatient to wait for the OTA and want to flash it manually. 

Source: Google

Find: The first few hours with the Lumia 1020’s camera

Zooms great. And don't forget that downsampling makes for less noise and better low light pictures. 

This is better than people realize. 

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// published on Ars Technica // visit site

The first few hours with the Lumia 1020's camera

Thanks to UPS shenanigans, I've only had our Lumia 1020 review unit for a few hours. I'll have a full review up in due course, but during these few hours, I've had a chance to do the thing the Lumia 1020 is really designed for: taking photographs.

I took some pictures this afternoon with the Lumia 1020, a Lumia 920, an iPhone 5, and a DSLR, my Canon 50D. For the most part, I used the default apps with the default settings (occasionally I suppressed the flash explicitly, but otherwise left it automatic). The DSLR was in programmed mode, where it picks the best combination of aperture and exposure time. It had the flash permanently disabled, as the built-in flash casts a shadow with the lens I had attached, and I didn't want the extra bulk of my external flash..

The Lumia 1020 was configured to generate two pictures each time: a full resolution image (coming out at around 33.5 MP with 16:9 framing), and a resampled 5MP image. Outdoor pictures were largely taken in the brutally harsh Houston sunlight.

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Nokia now sells more Lumias than BlackBerry sells phones [feedly]

A good thing. 

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 // published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

Nokia now sells more Lumias than BlackBerry sells phones

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With this quarter's mixed financial results, Nokia revealed that Lumia sales were up to a record high of 7.4 million. That means that the company sold more Windows Phones last quarter than BlackBerry sold phones. Just one year ago, BlackBerry was selling almost two phones for every one Lumia Nokia sold. It's a stark change of fortunes for the Canadian manufacturer, and appears to reaffirm Microsoft's statement that Windows Phone is now the third-place platform for smartphones. Of course, sales and shipments aren't everything; both companies are currently struggling to turn a profit, and face different challenges to reverse their fortunes.

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Spotted: Designing for interactive and collective mobile creativity

Mobiles creating a shared sort of creativity? 

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// published on Creativity and Cognition-Latest Proceeding Volume // visit site

Designing for interactive and collective mobile creativity

Ju Hyun Lee, Mi Jeong Kim, Mary Lou Maher

This paper introduces the concept of mobile collective creativity in Mobile Augmented Reality (MAR), with a focus on the interaction and contribution of the audience in digital exhibitions. This paper identifies key dimensions of mobile collective creativity and develops a framework to characterise existing and design new MAR artworks. Through case studies we show that the notable characteristics of MAR artworks are Tangible Manipulation with Expressive Representation towards Enhanced Intelligence. Our collective creativity framework contributes to a better understanding of mobile collective creativity as well as proposes design guidelines for this novel kind of creativity.

Find: Android Fragmentation Concerns Overblown, Says Guy Who Helped Develop Android


 
// published on AllThingsD // visit site

Android Fragmentation Concerns Overblown, Says Guy Who Helped Develop Android

pile_o_androidsAndroid fragmentation. It might be a legitimate concern for developers and OS zealots — and a marketing point for Apple in its smartphone platform battle with Google. But to the broader market? Not an issue, says Android co-founder Rich Miner.

Speaking at a Massachusetts Technology Leadership Council event this week, Miner — now a partner at Google Ventures — acknowledged that some fragmentation in Android is inevitable given the platform's wide popularity. But he said that concerns that Android is being undermined because of it are overblown. While the tech savvy might wonder if that's the case, the broader market could probably not care less.

"Us techies read the blogs and know what features we may be missing," Miner said, according to Xconomy's transcription of his remarks. "I think if you asked a consumer, 'Do you feel like your phone OS needs to be updated today?' they're pretty happy with the results and the performance they're seeing. So I'm not sure it's a major issue."

That's a fair point. Most consumers don't spend much time thinking about which version of Android they're running.

But a lot of developers do.

Because if you want to sell your app to the largest possible Android market, you've got to develop for three different versions of the OS — Gingerbread, Jelly Bean and Ice Cream Sandwich. Take a look at the chart below:

Android_distribution

Add to that a multitude of manufacturer hardware and overlay variations, and concerns over Android fragmentation don't seem quite as overblown as Miner would characterize them.

After all, variability, lack of cohesion and higher development and customer support costs aren't exactly the qualities developers covet in mobile platforms — even dominant ones.


Find: Some Thoughts About the Lumia 1020 Camera System

Finally, this innovative camera gets onto a major os. 

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 // published on AnandTech // visit site

Some Thoughts About the Lumia 1020 Camera System

Today Nokia announced their new flagship smartphone, the Lumia 1020. I've already posted about the announcement and details, and what it really boils down to is that the Lumia 1020 is like a better PureView 808 inside a smaller Lumia 920 chassis. In fact, a quick glance at the About page on the Lumia 1020 shows exactly how much the 1020 is the 808's spiritual successor – it's erroneously named the Nokia 909.

Anyhow I thought it worth writing about the imaging experience on the Lumia 1020 in some detail since that's the most important part of the device. We're entering this interesting new era where the best parts of smartphone and camera are coming together into something. I've called them connected cameras in the past, but that really only goes as far as describing the ability to use WiFi or 3G, these new devices that also work as phones are something more like a smartphone with further emphasized imaging. Think Galaxy S4 Zoom, PureView 808, and now Lumia 1020. For Nokia the trend isn't anything new, for the rest of the mobile device landscape to be following suit, is.

Once again however, Nokia has set a new bar with the Lumia 1020 – it combines the 41 MP oversampling and lossless zoom features from the PureView 808 with Optical Image Stabilization (OIS) and WP8 from the Lumia 920 / 925 / 928 series. And it does so without making the device needlessly bulky, it's actually thinner and lighter than the Lumia 920. When I heard that Nokia was working on getting the 41 MP profile camera I have to admit I pictured something resembling the PureView 808 with the same relatively large bulge, but just running Windows Phone. The camera region still protrudes, sure, but the extent of the protrusion isn't nearly as big as that of the 808.

Camera Emphasized Smartphone Comparison
Samsung Galaxy Camera (EK-GC100) Nokia PureView 808 Samsung Galaxy S4 Zoom Nokia Lumia 1020
CMOS Resolution 16.3 MP 41 MP 16.3 MP 41 MP
CMOS Format 1/2.3", 1.34µm pixels 1/1.2", 1.4µm pixels 1/2.3", 1.34µm pixels 1/1.5", 1.12µm pixels
Lens Details 4.1 - 86mm (22 - 447 35mm equiv)
F/2.8-5.9
OIS
8.02mm (28mm 35mm equiv)
F/2.4
4.3 - 43mm (24-240 mm 35mm equiv)
F/3.1-F/6.3
OIS
PureView 41 MP, BSI, 6-element optical system, xenon flash, LED, OIS (F/2.2, 25-27mm 35mm eff)
Display 1280 x 720 (4.8" diagonal) 640 x 360 (4.0" diagonal) 960 x 540 (4.3-inch) 1280 x 768 (4.5-inch)
SoC Exynos 4412 (Cortex-A9MP4 at 1.4 GHz with Mali-400 MP4) 1.3 GHz ARM11 1.5 GHz Exynos 4212 1.5 GHz Snapdragon MSM8960
Storage 8 GB + microSDXC 16 GB + microSDHC 8 GB + microSDHC 32 GB
Video Recording 1080p30, 480p120 1080p30 1080p30 1080p30
OS Android 4.1 Symbian Belle Android 4.2 Windows Phone 8
Connectivity WCDMA 21.1 850/900/1900/2100, 4G, 802.11a/b/g/n with 40 MHz channels, BT 4.0, GNSS WCDMA 14.4 850/900/1700/1900/2100, 802.11b/g/n, BT 3.0, GPS WCDMA 21.1 850/900/1900/2100, 4G LTE SKUs, 802.11a/b/g/n with 40 MHz channels, BT 4.0, GNSS Quad band edge, WCDMA 42 850/900/1900/2100
LTE bands 1,3,7,20,8

To get that thickness down, Nokia went to 1.12 micron square pixels, as opposed to the 1.4 micron pixels on the PureView 808. This results in a smaller overall sensor (from 1/1.2" in the 808 to 1/1.5" in the 1020) which in turn lets the optical designers make a thinner system – it's entirely physics constrained.


Lumia 1020 CMOS (left), Lens system (right)

To make up for the loss of sensitivity, Nokia moved to now-ubiquitous BSI (Back Side Illumination) pixels for the Lumia 1020. I didn't realize it before, but the 808 used an FSI (Front Side Illumination) sensor. Nokia tells me that the result is the same level of sensitivity between the two at the sensor level, add in OIS and the Lumia 1020 will likely outperform the 808 in low light.


Left to right: Lumia 1020 Module, Module cut in half, lens, CMOS sensor

At an optical level the Lumia 1020 is equally class-leading. The 1020 moves to an F/2.2 system over the 808's F/2.4, and is a 6-element system (5 plastic aspheric, 1 glass), with that front objective being entirely glass. Nokia claims to have improved MTF on this new system even more at the edges and resolves enough detail to accommodate those tiny 1.12 micron pixels. Nokia has also moved to a second generation of OIS for the Lumia 1020 – it still is a barrel shift, but instead of pushing the module around with electromagnets, the system now uses very small motors to counteract movements.

The Lumia 1020 also has two flashes - an LED for video and AF assist, and xenon for freezing motion and taking stills. Although I still hesitate to use direct flash on any camera, even if it's xenon and not the hideously blue cast of a white LED, this will help the 1020 push considerably into completely dark territory where you just need some on-camera lighting to get a photo. A lot of the thickness constraints of the 808 I'm told were due to the capacitor for the xenon, the 1020 moves to a flat capacitor.


(Bottom to top: Lumia 1020, Lumia 920, PureView 808, N93, ?)

Nokia laid out the entire optical stack in the open in numerous demos and meetings at their event. The module in the 1020 is big compared even to Nokia's previous modules. It looks positively gigantic compared to the standard sized commodity modules that come in other phones. The amount of volume that Nokia dedicates to imaging basically tells the story.

One of my big questions when I heard that 41 MP PureView tech was coming to Windows Phone was what the silicon implementation would look like, since essentially no smartphone SoCs out of box support a 41 MP sensor, certainly none of the ones Windows Phone 8 GDR2 currently supports. With the PureView 808, Nokia used a big dedicated ISP made by Broadcom to do processing. On the Lumia 1020, I was surprised to learn there is no similar dedicated ISP (although my understanding is that it was Nokia's prerogative to include one), instead Nokia uses MSM8960 silicon for ISP. Obviously the MSM8960 is only specced for up to 20 MP camera support, Nokia's secret sauce is making this silicon support 41 MP and the PureView features (oversampling, subsampling, lossless on the fly zoom) through collaboration with Qualcomm and rewriting the entire imaging stack themselves. I would not be surprised to learn that parts of this revised imaging solution run on Krait or Hexagon DSP inside 8960 to get around the limitations of its ISP. I suspect the Lumia 1020 includes 2 GB of LPDDR2 partly to accommodate processing those 41 MP images as well. Only with the next revision of Windows Phone (GDR3) will the platform get support for MSM8974 which out of box supports up to 55 MP cameras. 

Of course the hardware side is a very interesting one, but the other half of Nokia's PureView initiative is software features and implementation. With the Lumia 1020, Nokia has done an end-run around the Windows Phone platform by including their own third party camera application called Nokia Pro Cam that leveraging their own APIs built into the platform.

 
Default camera setting (left), Stock camera still exists (right)

The stock WP8 camera application is still present, it's just not default (though you can change this under Settings for Photos + Camera). This way Nokia gets the chance to build its own much better camera UI atop Windows Phone.

Nokia Pro Cam looks like the most comprehensive mobile camera UI I've seen so far. Inside is full control over white balance, manual focus (macro to infinity), ISO (up to 4000), exposure time (up to 4 seconds), and exposure control. While there are other 3rd party camera apps on WP8 that expose some of this, none of them come close to the fluidity of Pro Cam, which adjusts in real time as you change sliders, has a clear reset to defaults gesture, and will highlight potentially hazardous to image quality settings changes with a yellow underline. Of course, you can optionally just leave all of this untouched and run the thing full auto. The best part is that the Lumia 920, 925, and 928 will get this awesome Nokia camera app with the Amber software update.

The analogy for the PureView 808 was that it was a 41 MP shooter that took great 5 MP pictures, this remains largely the case with the Lumia 1020 through the use of oversampling. The result is a higher resolution 5 MP image than you'd get out of a 5 MP CMOS with Bayer grid atop it. By default, the 1020 stores a 5 MP oversampled copy with the full field of view alongside the full 34 (16:9) or 38 (4:3) MP image. Inside Windows Phone and Pro Cam (Nokia's camera app) the two look like one image until one zooms in, and of course there's the ability to of course change this to just store the 5 MP image.

Just like with the PureView 808 there's also lossless zoom, which steps through progressively smaller subsampled crops of the image sensor until you reach a 1:1 5MP 3x center crop in stills, or 720p 6x crop in video (1080p is 4x). This works just like it did on the PureView 808 with a two finger zoom gesture.

Nokia used to earn a lot of kudos from me for bundling a tripod mount with the PureView 808, with the Lumia 1020 Nokia has gone a different direction by making an optional snap on camera grip and battery. The grip contains a 1020 mAh battery and well done two-stage camera button, and a tripod screw at the bottom. With the camera grip attached, the 1020 felt balanced and like a more stable shooting platform than without.

For a full walkthrough of the camera UI and features, I'd encourage you to take a look at the video I shot of Juha Alakarhu going through it, who presented on stage. I also took another video earlier in the day walking through some of it myself. It's really the only way to get an appreciation for how fluid the interface is and how much better it is than the stock WP8 camera app.

Although I wasn't allowed to pull images from the Lumia 1020 for later review, what I did see on-device was impressive. I think it's fair to say that once again Nokia has set basically set the bar for the rest of the smartphone imaging world – in terms of both hardware and software features. It's a step forwards from the PureView 808, and from the Lumia 920 / 925 / 928. Of course, the ultimate question is whether consumers are going to appreciate all of it and be willing to pay the premium for the Lumia 1020 over the Lumia 925 / 928 or another smartphone entirely. Although imaging quality is a big emphasis for smartphone shoppers, it isn't the only one, and the Windows Phone 8 pill is still a big one for me and many others to swallow.

Source: Nokia


Spotted: Glued to your cell phone? Research suggests it may reduce your physical activity and fitness

If mobiles make us more sedentary, maybe they should start encouraging us to move. 
 
// published on ScienceDaily: Mobile Computing News // visit site

Glued to your cell phone? Research suggests it may reduce your physical activity and fitness

Today's smartphones allow for increased opportunities for activities traditionally defined as sedentary behaviors, such as surfing the internet, emailing and playing video games. However, researchers have linked high cell phone use to poor fitness in college students.

Find: Health Insurer's App Helps Users Track Themselves

Mobiles for health tracking

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// published on Computing - MIT Technology Review // visit site

Health Insurer's App Helps Users Track Themselves

Aetna sees cost savings in helping people track their health and fitness.

A smartphone app that launches this week from the health insurance company Aetna helps users monitor their own health-tracking data. As costs spiral upward, health-care companies could eventually turn to such apps as a way to encourage healthy behavior.

Find: Infectious disease research gets a boost from websites, blogs, and social media

As creepy as tracking tech can be, it has many good applications. 

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// published on ScienceDaily: Mobile Computing News // visit site

Infectious disease research gets a boost from websites, blogs, and social media

Innovative new techniques for tracking the spread of infectious diseases are being developed with the help of news websites, blogs, and social media. Biologists describe the advantages and challenges of "digital epidemiology" -- a new field of increasing importance for tracking infectious disease outbreaks and epidemics by leveraging the widespread use of the Internet and mobile phones.

Find: Mozilla targets Android and Asha as first Firefox OS smartphone goes on sale

Here's wishing them success. A fully open mobile os would be a breath of fresh air. 

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// published on The Verge - All Posts // visit site

Mozilla targets Android and Asha as first Firefox OS smartphone goes on sale

Vld3271_large

After months in development, Mozilla's Firefox OS is ready for the public. Today, the company announced that the first two handsets running the open-source HTML5 operating system — the ZTE Open and the Alcatel One Touch Fire — will soon go on sale in limited markets. Consumers in Spain won't have long to wait after Telefónica-owned Movistar announced the 3.5-inch ZTE Open smartphone will go on sale from tomorrow, costing €69 / $90 (including €30 / $39 balance) for prepay customers.

Mozilla hopes that its open frameworks, HTML5 apps, and consumer-friendly approach will lure people away from low-cost Android, Asha, and Windows Phone smartphones — which offer similar pricing but may provide more in the way of features. Firefox...

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