The Droid DNA is a monster of a phone that successfully raises the bar for manufacturers looking to release a new flagship device. When it comes to sheer horsepower, the mighty Android from HTC simply blows away a lot of competition – all the way from its mind blowing high-res screen, to the CPU that it employs, to the sensors and ergonomics that it carries.
The Samsung Galaxy S III may only have released in the middle of this year, but it's certainly been out long enough for us to justify turning our attentions to its eventual successor. Naturally, it's presumed to be called the Galaxy S IV, and accompanying a stash of recent rumors, comes the apparent insight into the S VI's hardware thanks to leaked benchmark results.
Those who regularly keep abreast of what is going on in the smartphone industry will be more than aware that Samsung and Apple are constantly battling it out for sales supremacy, with Samsung managing to come out on top thanks to their array of extremely popular Android powered devices. Samsung have relied on their Galaxy S II and S III smartphones to bring in the big sales numbers, but it was only the start of this month that they announced the Galaxy Note II had been received extremely well with three million units sold. Less than four weeks later, the statistics are back with Samsung announcing that an additional two million second-generation Notes have flown off the shelves in November.
If you’re into shopping at all, and online version of it in particular, Black Friday and Cyber Monday would be nothing unfamiliar or new to you. Every year, retailers, brand manufacturers, stores and supermarket chains, wireless carriers, and almost everyone else, goes on a sale spree for the shopping frenzy that both these days are. Cyber Monday, in particular, caters to the digital crowd, and aside from the sales on goods that it brings, the app crowd can also rejoice, for this year’s no exception – both the iTunes App Store and Google Play Store – the conveyors of world’s biggest share of smartphone apps – are seeing massive sales on apps that have gone on pricing diets to mark the celebration weekend. We brought you a compilation of all the greatest iOS apps that went free for Black Friday a couple of days back, and now it’s time for its Android counterpart, the Google Play Store.
I’ve been a long-time fan of the notoriously-popular sitcom, “F.R.I.E.N.D.S”. In fact, so much that I have a re-mastered DVD set of all the 10 seasons of the TV show, and owing to that, I have watched it multiple times. I fondly recall that one episode where Joey, who was the least informed about everything amongst his friends, and consequently awkward in general discussions, spends his last $50 on an encyclopedia just so he can be a part of his group’s conversations. How that played our for him, I’ll leave it for you to see for yourself, but the fact remains that staying abreast with happenings around you, or in your field of interest, is pretty important not just for social reasons, but for one’s own mental well-being, too. To that purpose, RSS feeds are a great help, and I’m sure that you might be using at least some of them, or you won’t have been reading this article in the first place.
Mobile phones with great cameras have been around for a good many years now, and while the units mounted atop the likes of Apple’s iPhone 5 and 4S, Samsung Galaxy S III or Sony Xperia lineup have been nothing short of impressive, Nokia PureView 808’s 41-megapixel shooter had, indeed, taken smartphone photography to a whole new level. Add to the mix the powerful noise reduction algorithms that these cameras come with, the variety of photo applications they have their disposal, and the connectivity for wireless and cloud sharing that they offer, makes one absolutely believe that this is the future of general photography, no matter what point-and-shoot cameras might have you believe.
Sometimes, even little things that we usually don’t pay much attention to, can have a significant impact over anything. Take the Android 4.2 update, for example. It was an incremental update – technically not much feature loaded – but it brought some things that captured the audience much more than many prior major updates combined. The feature that I am talking about in particular, however, is not a game-changer – it’s merely a convenience that has been added to the AOSP, making lives easier in the process for millions of Android users. I am talking about the ability to display widgets on lock screen and launching camera directly from the same.
When the Nexus 4 was announced as next Android flagship, there was no mention of any 4G/LTE support. Then, when the phone came out mid-November, there was, again, no LTE support again – not very surprisingly, though, since supporting 4G would have essentially meant manufacturing multiple versions of the device to make it agreeable for all the different 4G bands around the globe – an approach that Apple had to adopt with the iPhone 5. LG, however, decided to avoid going down that road, and hence, Nexus 4 stuck to the plain old 3G bands.
As smartphone cameras have continued to improve, software developers have worked tirelessly in researching ways to make usability just that little bit easier. We've all been there - the photo opportunity comes along, and in the moment, we lose our bearings and forget exactly where our camera app is situated. That, or it takes a while to navigate, takes ages to load, and by the time we're done, we've missed that all-important Kodak Moment. AN.droid.KIT, the guys behind QuickShot HD Camera for Android, believe they've finally solved this issue, and have offered an interesting workaround for that common problem of firing the snapper up exactly when required.
Using an Android phone is no east feat, I tell you. Apart from the fact that if you’re a fond of playing around with the intricate workings of your operating system, and consequently flash a new ROM every week (can be even day, in extreme cases), one major annoyance that you’ll feel is the battery, which essentially drains faster than any other smartphone OS that I’ve played around with. It’s not really necessarily the device’s fault – a simple code inspection actually establishes that it’s how the AOSP is built which causes the battery to drain faster, and perhaps it’s Google’s acknowledgement of this fact that they’ve decided to take up Project Roadrunner after the successful implementation of Project Butter with Jelly Bean.
