Dell Streak – Compact Entertainment Gadget

“We fit the whole world into a 5-inch screen”
Dell says this to be The perfectly-sized, go-anywhere entertainment, social connection and navigation device.

• Widescreen display optimally designed for mobile web, video and movies
• Integrated social networking widgets and apps, plus tons of apps through the Android Marketplace
• Crystal-clear damage-resistant Gorilla®  glass screen
• Google MapsTM  with navigation and text-to-voice, turn-by-turn directions with Street View
• Multitasking Google Android OS that gives you the freedom to do what you want

A brilliant 5″ screen lets you surf, watch videos and stay connected1, with less squinting and pinching, plus front-and-back cameras capture photos and videos on the fly with 5MP2 resolution. Watch streaming video on YouTubeTM , then post your own movies directly from your Streak.

With compact 6″ wide x 3.1″ high x .4″ thin dimensions, there’s plenty of space to take full advantage of the multi-touch display, plus the high-quality scratch-resistant Gorilla®  glass means your view stays crystal clear.

Ultra-intelligent facial proximity and ambient light sensors automatically adjust screen brightness, optimizing your battery life. The Dell Streak ensures that you can multitask and play without delay (including music and games), with the powerful yet efficient 1GHz Qualcomm SnapdragonTM  processor speeding things along using Google’s Android-based OS with multi-touch Dell user experience.

3G mobile broadband, WiFi and Bluetooth®  mean you’ve always got an easy way to connect, while swappable microSD memory cards mean virtually limitless storage for movies, music and pictures — up to 42 movies, 32,000 photos or 16,000 songs3 on each of your individual 32GB memory cards.

Facebook® , TwitterTM , Gmail, a phone call — however you like to stay connected5, the Streak keeps the lines of communication open. The Streak is a full-function 3G phone with IM and SMS/text capabilities, plus you can take photos for sharing using the rear-facing camera with dual-LED flash. Integrated real-time Facebook and Flickr® upload abilities put your photo or video online in no time.

Motorola Droid : The latest Android phone

Motorola droid is one of the most hyped and talked about smart phones that is going to make its way to the market on 6^th Nov 2009. The phone is powered with the Android version 2.0 and is expected to show a noticing leap in the over all performance as compared to other android mobile phones. This CDMA phone comes with Verizon wireless network. Let’s see what makes it better or at least at par with other smart phones.

The Tech-Spec:

• The processor: Arm Cortex A8 (600MHz, OMAP 3430). This brings a significant improvement in the speed specially while switching from one app to another.
• It possesses 256MB RAM and 512MB ROM.
• Screen: 3.7 inch touch screen with a resolution of 480 x 854. It is not a multi- touch screen, a point worth noting.
• Keyboard: It sports both a physical and an onscreen QWERTY keyboard. The sleek slide out physical keyboard has a toggle bar similar to RIM’s Blackberry trackball where as there are no enhancements in the onscreen keyboard.
• Camera: It is coupled with a 5 megapixel camera having 4X zoom, dual LED flash, automatic focus, image stabilization, real-time colour effects, scene modes, location tagging, and videos can be captured at 740 x 380 resolution, upto 24fps and playback up to 30fps. It also has image editing tools.
• Connectivity: It has Stereo Bluetooth Technology v2.1, WiFi 802.11, micro USB connector, provides support for Corporate calendar, email and contacts( Exchange 2003 and 2007), Google contacts, calendars, Gmail, Facebook contacts
• Battery power: Up to 385 min of usage time and standby time up to 270 hrs.
• Messaging: Includes email (corporate, Gmail, IMAP, POP3, Attachment and browser document viewer), MMS, SMS, IM (Gtalk), Voice mail.
• Navigation: It has come up with beta version of new navigation service that tells us the real-time direction, turn by turn in collaboration with Google maps. Google provides a good combination of its satellite, map, traffic and location info with text to speech directions. This is considered as one of the major enhancements.

With droid being the first mobile loaded with Android v2.0, it is a much awaited smart phone. Let’s wait and watch how well it grips the market.

Sony Ericsson Satio 

 Satio, a Sony Ericsson product, launched in market on 7^th Oct, 2009 will definitely leave you amazed with it’s the startling features. You might call it a perfect blend of a whooping cyber shot 12.1 megapixel camera, a walkman music player and of course a touch screen mobile phone. It has all the multi media features you can think a phone can have. This phone was first introduced in Barcelona with a name ‘Idou’. Now to substantiate on the above claims, let’s have a brief overview of its tech specs: 

1. Camera:

• 12.1 Megapixel Camera
• Upto 12x digital zoom
• Auto focus, intuitive touch focus
• Xenon Flash
• Face and smile detection.
• Geotagging
• VGA 30 f/s Video recording
• Photo Editing
• Best Pic 

1. Dimension : 112 x 55 x 13.3 mm
2. Weight : 126 gm
3. Screen: 3.5 inches, 16:9 widescreen, TFT Screen, Accelerometer Sensor
4. Resolution : 640 x 360 pixels
5. Internal Memory: 128 MB, 256 MB RAM
6. Card Slot : MicroSD, expandable up to 32 GB
7. Colours : Black, Blue, Bordeaux
8. OS : Symbian Series 60, 5^th edition
9. CPU : ARM Cortex A8 600 MHz
10. Connectivity :

• In-Built Wi-Fi
• Bluetooth : v2.0 with A2DP
• USB : v2.0
• 3G : HSDPA, 7.2 Mbps; HSUPA, 3.6 Mbps
• TV Out

1. Keyboard : Onscreen QWERTY Keyboard
2. Battery Life :
3. Miscellaneous :

• Stand By : Up to 360 h (2G) / Up to 340 h (3G)
• Talk time : Up to 11 h (2G) / Up to 4h 50 Min (3G)

• HD and 3D Games
• FM Radio with RDS
• Facebook Application
• YouTube
• Google Maps
• Media Player, Bluetooth Stereo ( A2DP), Music Tones ( MP3/AAC)
• Web Feeds
• Document Readers/Editors
• GPS Positioning 

Satio comes with many other basic functionality along with the above mentioned ones. One striking change is the customization of the OS, as a result of which Satio features a tabbed homescreen with tabs that link to favourite app, gallery, contacts, network services etc. It comes with colour-matched Wireless stereo hands free. 

Satio provides you with ultimate multimedia experience, from HD Games to smooth High Definition video viewing, from GPS positioning to photo and document editing to a rich experience of a Digi Cam. What else do you want from a mobile phone? 

Last, but definitely not the least, its price – Rs 35,500 (Approx). Now, It’s for you to decide if Satio deserves to be your handset or not.

Android, a product of Open Handset Alliance (OHA) is a complete package of software for mobile devices. It is comprised of an operating system, middleware and mobile applications. The android operating system runs on open Linux kernel. It contains a set of APIs (Application Programming Interface) and libraries that gives users enormous facility to innovate new applications, for example: a developer can combine information from the web with data on an individual’s mobile phone — such as the user’s contacts, calendar, or geographic location. A developer can build an application that enables users to view the location of their friends and be alerted when they are in the vicinity giving them a chance to connect.

Android provides a software development kit (SDK) which is constituted of debugger, libraries, a handset emulator (based on QEMU), documentation, sample code, and tutorials.

Key features of an Android operating system:

• Handset Layout>: The platform is adaptable to VGA, 2D graphics library, 3D graphics library based on OpenGL ES 1.0 specifications, and traditional Smartphone layouts.
• Storage: The Database Software SQLite is used for data storage purposes
• Connectivity: Android supports connectivity technologies including GSM/EDGE, CDMA, EV-DO, UMTS, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi. 
• Messaging: SMS and MMS are available forms of messaging including threaded text messaging.
• Web browser: The web browser available in Android is based on the open-source WebKit application framework.
• Media support: Android supports the following audio/video/still media formats: MPEG-4, H.264, MP3, AAC, MIDI, OGG, AMR, JPEG, PNG, GIF.
• Additional hardware support: Android can utilize video/still cameras, touch screens, GPS, accelerometers, magnetometers, accelerated 2D (with hardware orientation, scaling, and pixel format conversion) and accelerated 3D graphics.
• Development environment: Includes a device emulator, tools for debugging, memory and performance profiling, a plug-in for the Eclipse IDE.
• Market: The Android Market is a store house of applications that can be downloaded and installed .Originally only freeware applications were supported. Paid-for applications have been available on the Android Market in the United States since 19 February 2009.
• Multi-touch: Android has native support for multi-touch but the feature is disabled at the kernel level. An unofficial mod has been developed that enables multi-touch, but requires superuser access to the device to flash an unsigned kernel.

Evolution of Android:

Way back, on November 5, 2007 a consortium of companies(whose count is 47 now) comprising of  Broadcom Corporation, Google, HTC, Intel, LG, Marvell Technology Group, Motorola, Nvidia, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, and Texas Instruments came into existence, coinciding with the release of their first product ‘Android’ with ARM Holdings Plc, Atheros Communications, Asustek Computer Inc, Garmin Ltd, Softbank, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba Corp, and Vodafone Group joining later. The latest entry in OHA is Acer.

Android is available as an entirely open source since October 21, 2008. Despite of the fact that it is an open source product, there are few developments happening in the product in a private development branch named ‘Cupcake’ (Its a read-only mirror branch for public view). This development activity will result in changes in download manager, the framework, Bluetooth, the system software, radio and telephony, developer tools, the build system and several applications, as well as a number of bug fixes.

On 30th April, 2009 another milestone was achieved with the release of 1.5 update for Android which led to following enhancements:

•  Ability to record and watch videos with the camcorder mode

•  Uploading videos to YouTube and pictures to Picasa directly from the phone

•  A new soft keyboard with an “Autocomplete” feature

•  Ability to automatically connect to a Bluetooth headset within a certain distance

•  New widgets and folders that can populate the desktop

•  Animations between screens

•  Expanded ability of Copy and paste to include web pages. 

Lets have some insight on devices already running on Android and those which would be running on it soon. HTC dream, HTC Magic, Chinese company QIGI I6, Geeks phone ONE (first Spanish android phone) are the ones which are already using android. The mobiles which are coming soon with android are Samsung I7500, HTC Hero, HKC Imobile. Acer is expected to release Android for the Acer One netbook in Q3 2009. Chinese ODM Yuhua’s first Android phone, the dual-SIM DSTL1 will be released in June.

Latest Buzz in the territory of android based device is the announcement of Android Native development kit version 1.0 which allows software or applications to run natively on the Linux layer below and the possibility of fennec (Firefox’s mobile version) to be a part of Android mobile OS.

With Android around we can customize our phones to our interests and has the capacity to incorporate almost all the technologies coming in future.

Already Report says Google Android to grow 900% in 2009. Keep watching … 

iPhone 3GS is here- Check out on its improvements!

 With Apple’s CEO Steve jobs recuperating and is about to resume work there is no dearth of ideas and innovation to get launched and connected with people. After the initial success and buzz of Apple’s iPhone, the company has thought to launch an upgraded version with higher network speed, more memory storage capacity and definitely extended battery life and a mirror image of Apple iPhone 3G. It is iPhone 3G S that is now storming in news and views. Again, the launch of iPhone 3GS definitely coincides with the release of iPhone OS 3.0.

 But one must know that iPhone 3G S is indistinguishable from iPhone 3G if you keep both the handsets next to one another with face up. However, it is the phone internals that have undergone changes. Remember that the S in iPhone 3G S stands for Speed.

 iPhone 3G S is redesigned with additional features with gaming capabilities scoring really high. One can now enjoy the cell phone features now in iPhone 3GS such as the voice dialing, video recording and multimedia messaging. From 2 megapixels, the iPhone 3G S is equipped with 3 megapixel camera and definitely improved imaging experience. RAM is doubled from 128MB to almost 256MB.  

The phone is available in the market with two memory capacities, 16GB and 32GB. However some of the flip sides to this smartphone is the call quality that is still uneven as 3G reception remains bumpy. USB transfer or storage device is still a far cry. No multitasking, no flash, no java in Apple iPhone 3GS. 

The bottomline therefore is should you buy this smartphone? also when there are other options like Nokia N97 

Need to read on more to take a well informed decision.