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- Samsung Wave hands on preview
- Sonic 4 delayed but heading for iPhone
- Google Pac-man tribute doodle: homepage playable today only!
- iPad UK: First iBooks appear on UK store
- Samsung Galaxy S preorder open now: available for £10 a month
- iPad UK launch one week to go: how will you use yours?
- Why Google TV has Apple down, but not out
- No More Heroes 2 lingerie: eyeful or awful?
- Lunchtime lowdown: Red Dead Redemption, Android Froyo avalanche, Samsung Wave hands on
- HTC Desire Android Froyo update promised, other phones to follow
| Posted: 21 May 2010 12:07 PM PDT The Samsung Wave is the first Bada-powered handset. It’s a high-end phone that goes head-to-head with the HTC Desire and Apple’s iPhone in the global conflict we like to call the smartphone war. Will it lop off an Android head or two? We nabbed a pre-production model to see for ourselves. Read our Samsung Wave preview to find out, and have your questions answered!
Underneath the bronze-tinted, brushed metal casing of the Samsung Wave lies the Bada operating system, the new and much hyped smartphone platform from the South Korean company, with its latest Touchwiz user interface draped over the top. It gives you five home screens to fiddle about with from the off, and the option to add an extra five if your appetite for widgety goodness isn’t sated. This may sound just like Android, but Bada’s home screens aren’t quite as flexible. In practice you only have half a screen to pack widgets into because of other immovable interface elements. Down at the bottom of the Samsung Wave’s screen there’s a static, but customisable, shortcut dock that mitigates for your inability to dump simple shortcuts directly onto the home screen. Bada isn’t an OS that lets you set up shop on your home screens and forget about the standard app menu. Calendars, clocks and web feed widgets are included, but without the treasure trove of widget treats you’ll find in established app stores to dive into, you’ll find yourself heading to the app menu just as often as you glide between home screens. It’s a good job this is done with a simple tap on the Samsung Wave’s central navigation button then. The simplification of home screen customisation in Bada isn’t all bad though. With a swipe at the top of the screen and a quick tap, you can turn Wi-Fi, Bluetooth and Silent mode on and off. To do this in most Android phones, you’d either have to snoop into the Settings menu or drop some dedicated widgets on a home screen. If the home screen side of Bada’s user interface is based on the Android operating system, the app menu is based on the iPhone OS. It’s split into pages, denoted with Apple-flavoured pips at the top of the screen, and this is where you choose which shortcuts grace your Samsung Wave’s icon dock. There’s a handful of apps included as standard, including a GPS navigation app, FM radio, YouTube player and the obligatory social networking Twitter/Facebook combo. It’s not bad as a starting point, but it’s not enough to put you in smartphone nirvana as soon as you get your hands on the Samsung Wave. At present, the Bada app store won’t help you much on that front either. Samsung’s clearly making the effort to try to establish Bada as a valid smartphone platform, as there are several games on the Bada app store – accessible through your Samsung Wave directly or a PC – that are on-par visually with top iPhone games, 3D and all, but there’s hardly anything on there. If you’d like a browse yourself, install the Kies phone sync program available on Samsung’s site. Aside from letting you browse through and download apps, it also converts vids and sends them, along with music files, to the Samsung Wave. Not that you’ll necessarily need to be converting movie files, mind: video is an important part of the Samsung Wave’s appeal, and its support for different file types easily betters the smartphone norm. It will play the standard selection of WMV, H.263 and H.264 files, but we got it to play Divx, Xvid and even MKV container files too, including 720p HD ones. There is a fatal flaw though – in the prototype handset we tested, the videos wouldn’t play back at the full frame rate, but with a 1GHz CPU powering the Samsung Wave, we suspect this is a firmware glitch rather than anything more permanent. Fingers crossed it’ll be fixed by the time the Wave hits shelves. Although the Samsung Wave’s 3.3-inch screen isn’t huge by today’s smartphone standards, it does a great job of rendering detail thanks to its 800×480 resolution and wonderfully bright Super AMOLED display. AMOLED screens are infamous for their poor performance in direct sunlight though, so we took the Samsung Wave out for a stroll out in the sun with an iPhone, which uses a standard LCD TFT, to see how they compare. When not in sunlight, the Wave shames the iPhone in contrast terms – blacks are so much blacker on the Super AMOLED screen – but in sunlight reflectivity is noticeably better on the iPhone. It’s not a deal breaker though, especially when you can switch on the Wave’s Outdoor Visibility mode. Outdoor Visibility cranks up colour saturation, and while it looks absolutely hideous when you’re indoors, it does the trick when out in the sun. This mode is available in the Wave’s features that rely most on screen visibility, such as the video player and camera. Take the Samsung Wave out in the sun to take a few snaps and you’ll get great results. In a well-lit scene, the 5-megapixel sensor comes up trumps. The macro mode is especially impressive, and can compete with decent compact cameras. The Wave gives you a good level of control over your pics too, letting you determine the ISO setting, white balance, contrast and colour saturation. Bring the light level down and performance quickly starts to suffer. Keep the flash off and the Samsung Wave will start having trouble focusing, even under reasonable light levels, and the darker areas of your images will suffer from purple fringing. The LED flash will help these issues, but won’t provide even lighting for anything close-up. The Wave can capture 720p video too, but reverts to fixed focus when in video mode. This means that while your scene will be in focus if your subject’s an arm’s length away, anything close to the lens will be, and will stay, blurry. Just like the Samsung Wave’s stills camera feature, it’s perfect for larking about in the sun with though. Back to the build: the Samsung Wave uses a capacitive touchscreen, like the iPhone and virtually every other high-end smartphone set for release this year. These screen can vary wildly in responsiveness and accuracy but thankfully, the Samsung Wave’s panel is great on both fronts. At times Bada isn’t lightning fast in transitioning between menus, but this is a result of the OS rather than a failure of the touchscreen. The responsive touchscreen makes typing on the Samsung Wave on-par with the fab HTC Legend. In portrait mode, you do start wishing for an extra half-inch of screen real estate, but the keys respond reliably to the lightest of touches. We spent hours fiddling away with 3G and Wi-Fi enabled and only managed to make a one-bar dent in the Samsung Wave’s battery life. Under normal usage, this is a smartphone that certainly lasts more than a day between charges. Smartphone veterans will be used to this sort of lifespan, and the necessity of charging up every night, so Bada gets a pass on this front. If you want to save power a little bit more though, you can always use a dark wallpaper – thanks to the way AMOLED works, it’ll use less battery than a bright white one. After all the hype and anticipation, are we pleased with the Samsung Wave? We love the high screen resolution, the vivid display, the touchscreen responsiveness and the mix of slinky class and robustness that its metal-clad body provides. With prices starting at around £25 per month (At least on Vodafone), the Samsung Wave could suit a low maintenance mobile user just fine. But Bada is a newborn baby, and smartphone aficionados may be frustrated at its lack of customisation options. If you want apps as well as movies, it might be best to wait this one out for a few months, and see if third party software support take off ends up matching the iPhone’s – or the Palm Pre’s. 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| Sonic 4 delayed but heading for iPhone Posted: 21 May 2010 08:30 AM PDT
Over on the Sega's official blog, a statement has popped up saying that Sonic 4 will be released until "in late 2010". That's bad news for retro gaming fans but Sega has sweetened the deal by confirming that the mystery platform that it had teased us with will be…drum roll…the iPhone OS. So when Sonic 4 does finally drop it'll be available on the iPhone, iPod Touch, Wii, Xbox 360 and PS3. If you want to remind yourself of what we're all waiting for, take a look at our Sonic 4 gallery of classic boss battles reborn. And if you're really pining for the spiny hero, the Sonic 2 iPhone app recently hit the iTunes App Store. Let us know whether you think Sonic 4 will be worth the wait in the comments. Which other classic gaming characters are due for a resurrection? Related posts:
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| Google Pac-man tribute doodle: homepage playable today only! Posted: 21 May 2010 08:00 AM PDT
Google has given over its logo in a Pac-man tribute. Head to Google.co.uk now and you'll be greeted by a Google doodle packing a playable Pac-man game celebrating the little yellow fella's 30 anniversary. And there's a hidden feature too… Let the Google homepage sit for a moment and the Google Pac-man doodle will come to life letting you play the game with your arrow keys. It’s even got the original music. The Google Pac-man tribute also replaces the I'm Feeling Lucky Button with one marked Insert Coin. Press it and you'll get a two player version featuring Ms Pac-man. Head over there now to give it a go and wallow in the retro-gaming glory. Out now | £free | Google Related posts:
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| iPad UK: First iBooks appear on UK store Posted: 21 May 2010 07:30 AM PDT With iPad UK launch day now less than a week away, Apple is still beavering away at the iPad UK app store with the first iBooks hitting the virtual shelves. We've been wandering through the virtual stacks to take a peak at the first UK iBooks… Rather starting than new books, Apple is beginning to fill the iBooks store with the free Project Gutenberg titles. We're promised 30,000 classic texts to choose from when its finished. We've already spotted virtual tomes by Dickens and Sir Walter Scott. Just like in the iPhone apps and iPad apps sections of the store, the iBook store will offer up some featured titles. Currently it's showing Sun Tzu's The Art Of War (which Steve Jobs should read in the wake of Google TV) and recommending Jules Verne. Surf the iBooks store now on with an iPad and you'll also find a selection of categories to choose from. Many of them including Arts & Entertainment are still empty at this point. We also noticed that the broken link to the iBooks app which had been lingering in iTunes has now disappeared. By this time next week, the shelves should be brimming with books as Apple has promised that the iBooks app will available to download on iPad UK launch day. If you've already grabbed your an iPad, surf over the store yourself and let us know if you spot anything. If not, take a look at our gallery above and tell us what titles you're most hoping to see headed for the iBooks store. Out now | From £free | Apple Related posts:
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| Samsung Galaxy S preorder open now: available for £10 a month Posted: 21 May 2010 07:00 AM PDT
The Samsung Galaxy S is an Android titan with an AMOLED screen, a 5MP camera capable of HD video as well as GPS and a 1GHZ Samsung processor to keep everything in orbit. It's also got DNLA certified WiFi for media streaming and will come with 8GB of storage if you plump for a preorder now. Mobiles.co.uk has the Samsung Galaxy S listed with deals from Vodafone right now. Tariffs start at £10 a month but that does mean paying £289 for the handset. You'll need to stump up £40 a month on an 18-month contract or £30 a month on a 24-month contract to get the Samsung Galaxy S for free. The Samsung Galaxy S is set to ship on or before June 4 with Mobiles.co.uk offering up the Sony Ericsson Xperia Mini X10 on the same day. Let us know what you make of the Samsung Galaxy S and hop over to our Samsung Galaxy S questions post to tell us what we should focus on in our upcoming review. Due June 4 | From £free on contract | Mobiles.co.uk Related posts:
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| iPad UK launch one week to go: how will you use yours? Posted: 21 May 2010 06:30 AM PDT
A survey of US iPad users by US research bods Changewave found that 83% use their tablet for surfing the web, 71% for grabbing email and 48% for watching video. Those figures took us by surprise – 83% actually seems like a low figure for web browsing. Is going online likely to be your biggest use for the iPad? If you've scoured the newly opened UK iPad App Store, what apps are you planning on picking up first? Only 33% of people in the US iPad survey said they use theirs for reading. Do you see yourself stocking up on iBooks and keeping your iPad stationed beside the bed? The biggest strengths of the iPad according to the US users were its display (21%), its ease of use (15%) and its size and weight (12%). The biggest criticisms were the lack of Flash (11%) and issues with internet connectivity (9%). Hit the comments to let us know what model you've plumped for, how you plan to use it and what iPad accessories you're expecting to grab too. If you're yet to be convinced, free free to hurl invective at Apple's "revolutionary" slate… Related posts:
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| Why Google TV has Apple down, but not out Posted: 21 May 2010 06:06 AM PDT
Steve Jobs' pet project, which he constantly refers to as a "hobby", has been waning for months. Languishing out of sight on Apple's own web store, its tellybox is listed simply as an "accessory" to the iPod, and despite showing it off like a proud father whenever its software is tweaked, Jobs has yet to give his televisual offspring a seat at the top table. Now though, Jobs has a new set of parents to impress, and some serious set-top competition. Google's own TV offering sets the bar high, offering broadcasters a simple box to stream their content to using their existing on-demand offerings. Flash is supported. It comes with a full web browser, and can even run apps. Meanwhile Apple TV totters along, turning a blind eye to the web, baulking at apps, and downloading full movies while we sit and wait to break out the popcorn. Jobs and Co shouldn't be completely discounted though. Yes, the Apple TV is a lame duck, but it's only failing is the software inside. The exterior hardware remains gorgeous, stuffed with connectivity and more than capable of answering Google's battle cry. What's more, while Google has a standing start, Apple TV sales have been quietly trickling in since the Mac-maker launched its set-top box over three years ago. In its most recent financial powwow, Apple revealed Apple TV sales had grown 35% in the last year, and although it's yet to let slip actual numbers shifted there's an installed base of owners waiting for a more fully-fledged offering, when Apple chooses to roll out new features. "We're continuing to invest in it because our gut tells us there's something there," said Apple COO Tim Cook in March, and with Google now breathing down Apple's neck, there's more pressure than ever for Cupertino to make its TV star perform. Of course, hardware is one thing, and software's another. But what're you going to watch on the next-generation of set-top boxes? Google has been quick out of the gate, letting Google TV play nicely with standard TV tuners, as well as offering integration of Netflix and Amazon VOD, and IR blasters for separate set-top boxes. Google TV's built-in Chrome browser can play back video content from any webpage, so most broadcasters' catch-up services will work just fine. On the surface, Google has content licked! However, it'll take time for some broadcasters to re-format their pages, or build integration for Google TV. Likewise, hardware manufacturers say the first Google TV set-top boxes and televisions aren't quite ready yet. Logitech's first set-top box is still being refined, and they're yet to show off their all-important QWERTY remote that'll go with it. Sony's first Internet TV products, running Google's software, won't arrive until "Fall" in the US. The company will produce a Blu-ray player with Google TV functions, and a TV with the software inside too. But if experience is anything to go by, they'll be premium products, with a price tag to match. Meanwhile, Apple already has deals for iTunes distribution with every broadcaster, as well as streamlined processes for them to load on their shows as soon as they've aired. All that's really missing to match Google's offering is live TV, and streaming support for catch-up services, as well as an opening of its platform for developers to create apps. Rumours have been rife that Apple has some new entertainment offerings planned for its WWDC conference next month too. So far, the smart money is on an iTunes streaming service letting you listen to music you've purchased whether or not you have the files with you. However, since WWDC is a developers' conference, we'd expect news on the app front too. There have been mutterings that the iPhone OS could graduate to Apple TV too, meaning it already has an arsenal of games, TV streaming software and of course, a fully-formed browser in the shape of Safari at its disposal. Could Apple be about to bring Apps, the full web (except Flash, of course), and a ream of new media streaming skills to Apple TV? The technological stars seem to be aligning. For the first time, Apple has a reason to fire a rocket up its TV streamer's backside. The battle for your living room is well underway, and while Google has spilled the entire contents of its playbook, Apple still has several sucker punches left to land. Related posts:
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| No More Heroes 2 lingerie: eyeful or awful? Posted: 21 May 2010 05:00 AM PDT No More Heroes 2 lingerie could be either the most tawdry video game tie-in ever or a stroke of genius. The makers of the Wii action adventure game have teamed up with the designers at Bedroom Flirt to make a make a range based on the game's rather ridiculous outfits. Take a look at our No More Heroes 2 lingerie gallery above and read on for the reasoning behind recreating pixellated pants in real-life… Ubisoft, which publishes the game in the US, usually specializes in titles like Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood and Splinter Cell: Conviction which feature gruff male protagonists but No More Heroes 2 also includes a trio of female characters alongside main man Travis. There's secret agent Sylvia, the deadly Shinobu and weapons specialist Naomi. For some odd reason they all like to strut about in next to nothing… That love of wearing very little came in handy for Bedtime Flirt. Designer Joanna Robinson says: No More Heroes 2 is the only game which suits a lingerie collection." There are outfits in the range for each of the three No More Heroes 2 characters and Robinson says she's interested to see which one's most popular. We'd be more interested to find out whether female gamers will go for the idea or blokes will be able to persuade their other halves to wear the range. Gaming tie-in underwear is certainly a lot more racy than a Metal Gear Solid: Peacewalker Walkman. But do you think the No More Heroes lingerie should be consigned to our list of worst gaming spin offs ever? The game is out next week but you can grab your No More Heroes 2 lingerie right now. Do so at your own risk… Due May 28 | £24 | Rising Star Games Related posts:
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| Lunchtime lowdown: Red Dead Redemption, Android Froyo avalanche, Samsung Wave hands on Posted: 21 May 2010 04:30 AM PDT
An army of Android stories marched our way this morning as Google unveiled Android Froyo, the tasty new version of the Android OS. We got word from HTC that an HTC Desire Android Froyo update is first in the queue. We also heard that the next version, Android Gingerbread is already in the works and took at look at Google’s plans for Android music synching and an iTunes-battling Android Market music store. If all that wasn’t enough, we got details on Google TV. Away from Google, our Samsung Wave hands on answered some of those burning questions about the bada OS-packing blower and our Red Dead Redemption review rode in to town. Finally, over in computing we looked at how to use a little laptop as your main computer using Q-waves‘ wireless screen streaming tech. Find out more about Q-waves. Hungry for more headlines still? Click on through to the homepage and help yourself to all you can eat! Not had your fill of Android news either? Check out our Android Invasion, starting with our robot romance video below! Related posts:
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| HTC Desire Android Froyo update promised, other phones to follow Posted: 21 May 2010 04:00 AM PDT
In an official statement HTC says: "If your phone was launched this year, we will most likely offer an upgrade for it to the Froyo version." The statement then names the HTC Desire as among the initial chosen ones. Other Android-packing HTC smarties like the HTC Legend and HTC Wildfire could still be in luck. The statement continues: "We will announce a full list of phones and dates once we are closer to launching the upgrades." The statement foes on to note that HTC is working with Google and other partners to make sure that the HTC Sense UI plays nice with Android Froyo. The long-delayed HTC Hero Android upgrade is apparently down to the difficulties of integrating Sense so we've got our fingers crossed that mixing it up with Froyo is a little easier. HTC says its hopeful that all the Android 2.2 upgrades will be completed in the second half of this year. Let us know what phone and version of Android you're currently toting. Related posts:
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