All posts tagged ‘android’

Review: Google’s Nexus 7 Tablet

The Nexus 7 delivers the finest experience we’ve seen yet from an Android tablet. Photo by Ariel Zambelich/Wired

Note to all tablet makers not named Asus: This is how you make a 7-inch tablet.

The Nexus 7, the first tablet to wear Google’s Nexus brand, sets a new standard for smaller slates, proving that just because it isn’t as big as Apple’s iPad doesn’t mean it can’t be just as useful, as fast, or as fun. If you’ve been on the fence about Android, or tablets in general, this is the tablet you’ve been waiting for.

If you’ve been on the fence about Android, or tablets in general, this is the tablet you’ve been waiting for.

While the Nexus 7 isn’t a full-on iPad-killer, it far out-classes anything else offered in the 7-inch category, and most 10-inch tablets too. The Nexus 7 does this by offering smartly designed, powerful hardware and the best Android tablet experience to date. For those who only use their gadgets to surf the web, check e-mail, play games and update their social media feeds, the Nexus 7 might be an even better choice than an iPad, given how much easier it is to carry around.

But the feature that will probably be the most enticing to consumers is the price. The Nexus 7 sells for $200 with 8GB of storage. That’s the same price as the Amazon Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble’s Nook Tablet at the same storage capacity. If you want a bit more room to download HD movies, music, games and apps, you can get the 16GB version for $250. At these prices, the Nexus 7 is frankly a steal when you compare it to what else is out there at the same cost.

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Judge Upholds Sales Ban on Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1

Sales of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab 10.1 have been halted by a federal judge in a patent dispute between Samsung and Apple. Image: Samsung

Samsung is suffering an eight-day losing streak in its patent battle with Apple. The latest loss to be played out in a San Jose courtroom: A judge has rejected Samsung’s request to overturn a temporary sales ban on the Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 tablet.

On Monday, U.S. District Judge Lucy Koh shot down Samsung’s request to throw out her June 26 decision to place a preliminary sales stoppage on the Galaxy Tab 10.1 because she ruled it looked too much like Apple’s iPad, according to a Bloomberg report.

At the core of the ongoing patent dispute between the two rivals is Apple’s contention that Samsung’s phones and tablets are rip-offs of the iPhone and iPad. Both Samsung and Apple are also accusing each other of infringing on technology patents as well. In her decision to issue the sales block before the suit goes to trial, Koh said, “The Court noted that the GalaxyTab 10.1 is ‘virtually indistinguishable’ from Apple’s iPad and iPad 2.”

On Friday, Koh issued a preliminary sales ban on Samsung’s Galaxy Nexus smartphone as well. But that halt wasn’t issued because the Nexus looks too much like the iPhone. Rather, Koh ordered a sales stoppage to the Nexus due to Apple’s claim that the flagship Android phone infringes on a patent pertaining to “unified search” as seen in the iPhone’s voice assistant app Siri.

Officials at Samsung were unavailable for comment by press time. The patent fight is set to go to trial on July 30.

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Review: The Nexus Q, Google’s Media-Streaming Sphere

The Nexus Q is a simple sphere, and is sold with optional matching speakers. Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

The Google Nexus Q is a device most of us can ignore for the time being.

It does generate a lot of curiosity, which is deserved, as it’s a gorgeous product that demonstrates Google is getting more serious about two things: selling digital content, and making Android devices without touchscreens.

The Q is an austere, matte black sphere that streams music and videos from the cloud.

The Q is an austere, matte black sphere that streams music and videos from the cloud. The entire top hemisphere is an endlessly rotating volume knob that’s also touch-sensitive. (Tap it to mute the audio.) Around the equator is a ring of bright, colorful LEDs that dance to the music. The lower hemisphere is a die-cast zinc base with a number of ports — micro HDMI, micro USB, optical audio, Ethernet, and analog speaker connections — machined into the back. Inside are the guts of an Android smartphone and a 25-watt amp for powering a pair of speakers. The whole thing is made in the United States, and it represents a huge milestone for Google, as it’s the company’s first consumer product developed and manufactured entirely in-house.

It’s a visual and tactile joy, and a marvel of engineering. But beauty is only skin-deep, and the Nexus Q’s functionality is so severely limited out of the box, it’s difficult for all but the most hardcore audio gadget fanatics to justify the $300 price tag.


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Verizon’s HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE launching on July 5

HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE

Verizon’s HTC Droid Incredible 4G LTE — long name, but an impressive phone. Photo: Nathan Olivarez-Giles/Wired

HTC’s Droid Incredible 4G LTE finally has a release date and price: It will be available July 5 for $150 on a 2-year Verizon Wireless contract.

The new Droid Incredible 4G LTE (yeah, that’s quiet a long name) is a follow-up to the original Incredible and the Incredible 2, two handsets that were well received by Wired. And we’ve got high hopes for the new Incredible, after being impressed with the new phone at the CTIA Wireless convention in New Orleans back in May.

The upcoming Incredible boasts a 4-inch touchscreen with a 960×540 “qHD” resolution, a 1.2GHz dual-core Qualcomm Snapdragon CPU, 1GB of RAM, and an 8-megapixel rear-facing camera. Being an HTC smartphone, the Incredible will run Android 4.0 (Ice Cream Sandwich) skinned in the hardware maker’s Sense 4 user interface. The phone also features Beats Audio technology, which in our past testing hasn’t necessarily made music sound better, but rather simply louder.

We should be getting a review unit into the Gadget Lab here in the next few days, so stay tuned for a full review soon.

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iOS 6 vs. Jelly Bean: Which New Mobile OS Reigns Supreme?

Jelly Bean is Google’s answer to iOS 6 — but is it enough? Photo: Ariel Zambelich/Wired

June has been a huge month for mobile OSes. The major players, Apple and Google, have both demonstrated and released betas of their latest smartphone/tablet operating systems.

But which OS deserves the King of the Mobile World title? We tossed each new system build into a Thunderdome-style ring to determine which one lives, and which gets tossed into the badlands while Tina Turner sings an epic ballad.

Before we start, a few caveats: Apple’s NDA prohibits Gadget Lab from writing about unannounced features in iOS 6. So, if iOS 6 has a remarkable feature that doesn’t appear in the list, it’s because we respected the developer embargo. Also, neither OS is completely locked down and final, so features can be updated, changed or even removed before the final build. Finally, we’re only comparing new features that directly go head-to-head. For example, Android has much more robust data-management features, but because iOS doesn’t even really try in this area, we didn’t include data management as a mini-battle in this article.

With all that said, release the beta-code hounds!

Siri vs. Google Now Voice Search

Google didn’t give its new challenger to Siri an official name. Instead, the voice-dictation and information-sleuthing tool is wrapped up in Jelly Bean’s Google Now search feature — and it’s just, well, there without a lot of fanfare. Perhaps Google opted out of giving voice search a name because the feature is bereft of personality. The female voice of Android’s search feature is more human-sounding than Apple’s robotic Siri, but there’s nothing very engaging about Google’s new functionality.

Siri is still queen of voice-activated search. Here we see Apple’s new graphical approach to sports-related Siri queries. Photo: Jon Phillips/Wired

Siri is like a friend with a slight hearing impediment. The Google Now voice is a robot that sounds really good.

Voice quality aside, results are hit-and-miss for each system. Siri soars at presenting facts and minutia from Wolfram Alpha, while Google Now hits the more pedestrian Wikipedia for its information. On the surface, both sources are great for quick bites of knowledge, but Wolfram Alpha’s high-precision results and Siri’s presentation make Apple the go-to platform for trivia.

Unfortunately, once you receive your information in Siri, that’s about it. There’s no way to expand upon the information or search the internet unless Siri offers up search in the first place. On the flipside, Google Now presents not only the snippets of information it decided you needed, but also quick access to Google search results with an upward swipe. As for pure voice-recognition prowess, Siri has an easier time understanding natural speech queries, but Google Now was able to decipher the names of our favorite Mexican restaurants. This is something Siri was unable to grasp.
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