Apple and Samsung's court battles are well documented in the blogosphere, and in the very latest, Apple has been granted an EU-wide injunction preventing sales of Samsung's Galaxy Tab 7.7.
Two new Smart Cover-like Nexus 7 cases have been outed by a UK accessory retailer, with the two protective options both featuring similar magnet technology that allows the tablet's screen to be turned on or off based on the case's position and orientation.
Android smartphones have, till recently, been notorious for their terrible power management and resulting awful battery life. This problem became apparent with earlier high end smartphones like the Nexus One and HTC Desire HD, became worse with 4G LTE devices like the HTC Thunderbolt on Verizon, improved a little with the Galaxy Nexus and has now, finally, reached a state where one can use a Galaxy S III and One X without carrying an extra charger to work. This is mostly thanks to newer hardware that sips less power.
Last week, we reported on murmurs started by Samsung that August 15th would be the date for a significant product launch, and now, BGR has learned via a "source close to" the Korean company, that said product will indeed be the rumored Galaxy Note II.
With a quad core processor, 1GB of RAM (2GB in certain variants), a 4.8” Super AMOLED HD display, 8 MP / 2 MP optics and being based on Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich, the Samsung Galaxy S III is one hell of a powerhouse. The general public, it seems, has agreed to this fact as, according to sales figures, the Galaxy S III is selling like ice-cool lemonade on a hot day.
Developers who produce software for mobile smartphones and tablets are always looking to push the boundaries and are readily including the-next-big-technologies in their apps. In the past, we have seen apps reduced to minimalistic works of beauty, decisions made to remove buttons and houses navigation handled entirely by user gestures, and more recently, we are starting to see the serious emergence of augmented reality in mobile applications.
Anyone who is an avid user of the top of the range smartphone or tablet such as the iPhone 4S, iPad or the new Google Nexus 7 tablet will appreciate the difference that a beautiful looking app can bring. Functional apps are all well and good, after all, we expect a purchase or download to fulfill its purpose but an app that does what it says on the tin while looking beautiful pushes the user-experience to a new level.
Of all the features that arrived when iOS 5 reached the end-user back in October of last year, iMessage has been arguably the most significant, and by now allowing messages to be sent and received in a faster, more secure manner across a variety of platforms, it has to go down as one of the best in the business. Granted, it has its occasional downtime, but it's not bad as is, and with the service also arriving to the Mac with OS X Mountain Lion, it will almost certainly become the sole mode of quick communication to many Apple enthusiasts.
VLC Media Player from VideoLAN has long stood out as the media player of choice among consumers. Famed for handling just about any media format you could care to throw at it, it’s certainly the best in the business, and although the VLC Media Player app was tossed from the App Store by Apple, VideoLAN as bounced back, offering an iteration for Google’s Android platform.
Although Android is quite a distance ahead of the competition in terms of reach and overall user numbers, it does have its caveats, and one glaring issue prominent from the beginning has been that of audio latency. Android Jelly Bean (4.1) has just released to a number of devices, and although it is a significant improvement on previous iterations (ICS saw playback latency of around 88ms), the audio lag issue still exists.
