Huawei MWC 2012:

Huawei Ascend D quad hands-on

Here's the Android smartphone everybody will be talking about this year. The Ascend D quad is Huawei's first true attempt at becoming the king of the Android hill.

And at first glance it ticks all the boxes. It's built around a 4.5-inch IPS+ display rocking a 720p (1280x720 pixels) HD resolution and 330 ppi pixel density. With this kind of screen specs, it's poking fun at the iPhone 4S.

The display is simply gorgeous and Huawei claim the sunlight legibility is awesome and at this point we are inclined to believe them.

   

Under the hood, the Ascend D quad, as the name suggests, features Huawei's very own quad-core K3V2 processors with 1.2GHz and 1.5GHz clock speed variations. The Chinese have coupled this with 1GB of RAM and, as a result, the Ascend D quad literally flies through everything in Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich.

Speaking of ICS, Huawei haven't done a lot of work to it, which could indicate that they won't be any custom skins or other addons when the device starts shipping. We tried playing a full HD 1080p video and the Ascend D quad didn't break a sweat. Even when randomly jumping from the start to the middle and the end, and back, lags and stutter were virtually non-existent.

   

The Ascend D quad measures 129mm x 64mm x 8.9mm and, with its 130 grams of weight, it hits the sweetspot for a Droid with such powerful internals.

The design of the device is pleasant and doesn't exude cheapness. The back of the Ascend D quad is especially nice with its special texture, which feels good to the touch. The red outline of the camera unit and the red speaker grille are nice accents.

   

Speaking of the camera, it's a 1080p video-capable 8MP auto-focus unit with a dual LED flash. At the front, there's an 1.3MP HD camera, which can shoot 720p video, if you ever need it to.

Huawei also bragged about their special dual-microphone noise cancellation technology dubbed earSmart. Add that to the 1800mAh battery, Bluetooth 3, Wi-Fi 802.11n and 5.1 surround sound with Dolby Mobile 3.0 Plus and the Ascend D quad becomes quite a package.

     

Huawei Ascend D1 hands-on

The Huawei Ascend D1 debuted right after the flagship Ascend D quad and sets aim at the mid-range Androids out there. This time around, it's not powered by a Huawei chip, but by a TI OMAP 4460 with a 1.5GHz dual-core processor and 1GB of RAM.

Display-wise, the D1 packs a 4.5-inch, 720p IPS+ screen of 330ppi.

   

At the back, the Ascend D1 features an 8MP, 1080p video recording camera with dual LED flash. A 1.3MP snapper at the front takes care of video conferencing and does 720p video, too.

Huawei MediaPad 10.1 hands-on

As cruel as this is, Huawei only allowed a glimpse of their 10.1-inch version of the MediaPad tablet. They teased everyone on the floor by saying it's a quad-core slate with a 1080p (1920 x 1200) IPS display that can easily match the iPad 3. Run, ASUS Transformer Prime!

Jokes aside, the MediaPad 10.1 uses the same Huawei K3V2 processor to hum along coupled with 2GB of RAM. At the back we find an 8MP camera with 1080p video recording abilities.

Storage is just 8GB, but don't despair, there's a microSD card slot on board. As you'll see from the photos below, the MediaPad 10.1 is quite slim held in the hands of the beautiful Huawei model.

The MediaPad weighs 598 g and is 8.8 mm thick and is encased in an aluminum unibody.

Connectivity options include LTE and HSPA+, probably in separate variants depending on the market.

       

The MediaPad will be globally available to users in Q2 of 2012.

Nokia announces PureView 808 with a 41 MP sensor

Today at their MWC2012's press event, Nokia brought the PureView teaser to fever pitch with the 41 megapixel camera of the Symbian Belle-running Nokia PureView 808.

The Nokia 808 PureView uses a 41 MP sensor, which captures image data from seven adjacent pixels and condenses it into one, resulting in stills at around 5 MP resolution with amazing detail and low noise levels. The optics are Carl Zeiss and there's Xenon flash and a LED one acting as a video light.

Technically, the sensor is able to capture 3 MP, 5 MP, 8 MP, 38 MP at 4:3 aspect ratio and 2 MP, 5 MP [Default], 8 MP, 34 MP at 16:9.

Video recording goes as high as FullHD 1080p at 30 fps and there's also 720p@30fps. Video is H264 encoded and supports stereo sound. The large image sensor allows 4x zoom in 1080p and 6x in 720p.

   
Nokia 808 PureView

The Nokia 808 PureView has a single-core 1.3 GHz processor and 512 MB of RAM and runs Symbian Belle. The display is a 16:9 4" AMOLED unit of nHD (640 x 360) resolution covered with curved Gorilla Glass.

There's NFC, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth 3.0, USB on the go and 16 GB of onboard storage.

The Nokia 808 PureView should be on the shelves around May 2012.

The amazing science behind the Nokia 808′s mammoth camera sensor explained

In terms of mobile imaging, the Nokia 808 is a revolutionary device. Not only is it capable of taking images of up to 38MP, but it can also make use of a technology called oversampling, which means that out of several pixels of information it captures, it commits to memory a single resulting pixel, which hopefully, is picture perfect.

There are three outright advantages to this oversampling thing: amazing image quality, lossless zoom, and superior low light performance.

Maximum resolution matters

The Nokia 808 can capture 4:3 images at up to 38MP and 16:9 images at up to 34MP. The sensor size at 1/1.2″ is impressive, and is more than double what’s found on the N8. And if you gotta know, that means an estimated pixel size of 1.26 microns, as opposed to the 1.75 micron sized pixels on the N8.

Yes, the 41MP sensor of the Nokia 808 is impressive, but as evident from the above, you won’t be able to take 41MP photos. Here you can see all the different image aspects and their respective resolution. The sensor has a total active surface of 7728 x 5368 pixels, which does amount to 41MP, but depending on the aspect ratio you choose, it will use either 7728 x 4354 pixels for 16:9 images or 7152 x 5368 pixels for 4:3 images/videos.

Actually, the default shooting mode for the camera is 5Mp in 16:9 aspect ratio. But you also get other options as well, including a full-res mode.

Pixel oversampling is like miniaturization but prettier

But enough about maximum resolution, let’s get back to image quality. The Nokia Team have given a lot of thought to how to improve the image quality on size-constrained mobiles. With ever decreasing pixel sizes, the challenge for engineers is quite clearly to overcome the negative effects like high digital noise levels and the resulting poor low light performance. Enter pixel oversampling.

Oversampling is different from mere cropping as it doesn’t simply use part of the sensor to produce a lower resolution image. Instead, it still uses the full sensor, but downsizes the resulting image to say, 5MP on the Nokia 808. The benefit of this is that this process of downsizing removes digital noise, while preserving the same level of detail you might get by shooting with the best 5 megapixel camera.

But there’s more to having such a huge sensor.

And it goes all zoom-zoom

Since the Nokia 808 captures so many pixels and is able to produce lower res photos, it’s only natural that it tries to tackle one of the other most wanted features in cameraphones – the lossless zoom. Instead of focusing on the traditional ways of delivering image zooming such as digital interpolation or optical magnification, the Nokia team went for the highest resolution sensor ever found on a mobile.

Everybody has tried regular digital zoom, it’s no good. Some have even attempted optical zooming, but it’s way too bulky, noisy and even slow and prone to geometrical distortion. The only viable solution was the 2x digital zoom that was offered by the N8 in video mode (via pixel binning) but even that involved interpolation of sorts. But to be able to offer any zoom levels in still images, you need to have a solid sensor with a huge amount of extra pixels compared to the nominal output resolution. And lots of processing power.

To meet the immense processing requirements (over 1 billion pixels per second and 16x oversampling), the Nokia team developed a special companion processor to the sensor that handles pixel scaling before sending the required number to the main image processor.

Once that’s out of the way, you get lossless zooming with the same effective viewing angle – in 35mm equivalents, it’s 28mm in 4:3 aspect ratio and 26mm in 16:9. And depending on the resolution, you get a variety of zoom levels. In 5MP stills, for instance, you get around a 3x zoom.

I’ll let the Nokia team deliver their explanation of this new zoom method, they simply nail it in rather simple words:

With the Nokia 808 PureView, zoom is handled completely differently — like nothing that has been done before. We’ve taken the radical decision not to use any upscaling whatsoever. There isn’t even a setting for it.

When you zoom with the Nokia 808 PureView, in effect you are just selecting the relevant area of the sensor. So with no zoom, the full area of the sensor corresponding to the aspect ratio is used. The limit of the zoom (regardless of the resolution setting for stills or video) is reached when the selected output
resolution becomes the same as the input resolution.

For example, with the default setting of 5MP (3072 x 1728), once the area of the sensor reaches 3072 x 1728, you’ve hit the zoom limit. This means the zoom is always true to the image you want.

The level of pixel oversampling is highest when you’re not using the zoom. It gradually decreases until you hit maximum zoom, where there is no oversampling.

Here’s an example of the amazing level of detail the Nokia 808 allows with its high-res shots.

In video, at FullHD 1080p resolution you get 4x lossless zoom, at 720p HD video you’ve got 6x lossless zoom, and for nHD (640×360) video there’s the impressive 12x zoom. And you can bet video quality will be great, since the 808 encodes the video in up to 25Mbps worth of bitrate.

The Nokia 808 camera has some other impressive specs too

Even without these amazing features, unseen before in a mobile phone, the Nokia 808 has some serious imaging potential. You’ve got a Carl Zeiss certified lens, a relatively large F2.4 aperture, and a Neutral Density filter for those high-intensity lighting scenes.

The added mechanical shutter minimizes the disadvantages of a rolling shutter such as the vertical stripes that appear in the highlights of high-contrast images also known as smear, as well as the wavy “Jell-O” distortion that sometimes appears if you move the camera while shooting.

Also, the large sensor size and the longer focal range of 8.02mm in combination with the large aperture delivers more blurry background in closeup shots as opposed to most regular cameraphones, which is exciting on its own.

Wrapping it up

As Nokia puts it, the Nokia 808 presents a “quantum leap forward in cameraphone performance”. Indeed, it introduces concepts we’ve never thought possible on a mobile phone. It’s not about the piles of megapixels but rather what you can do with them, such as producing picture perfect low-res images or lossless zooming in both stills and videos (including after-the-fact zooming and cropping). It’s one helluva camera and we bet it will be able to challenge most point-and-shoots on their own turf. Too bad they’ve picked Nokia Belle as the OS of choice. But we remain positive, as today Nokia representatives promised on stage at the MWC 2012 that this technology will get implemented in future products as well.

Sony releases Android 4.0 Beta ROM for certain Xperia handsets

Sony Mobile has released a beta of the Android 4.0.3 ROM for certain Xperia handsets. These include the Xperia arc S, Xperia neo V and Xperia ray. Compared to the alpha ROM released back in December, the beta enables GSM radio and FM radio functionalities, which means you can make and receive calls and browse the web. However, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth functionalities are still unavailable.

The new beta ROM includes features such as the new lockscreen, which includes the ability to control the music player and launching the camera. Sony will also include the face unlock feature found on the Galaxy Nexus in the final version, but it is currently unavailable. Other new features include the ability to bring up a list of messages that you can send after you decline a call and a new dialler app which features the highly useful quick dial mode.

Apart from this you get the usual Ice Cream Sandwich goodies, such as the new multi-tasking view and notification screen where you can use the swipe gesture to remove items from the screen. The beta ROM does not include the usual Google applications, however, such as Gmail, Google Maps, Android Market, etc. but they will obviously be added in the final version.

The ROM is now available for download on Sony's website but before you go ahead and download it do keep in mind all the limitations of the current ROM mentioned above. There are also some issues, such as having to unlock the bootloader, which means you won't be able to download the final version when it comes out a couple of months later. So make sure you go through all the warnings and instructions in the source link below before you install it on your phone.

LG MWC 2012:

LG came to the MWC with a new tagline: "LTE, it's always LG". LTE is one of the main attractions of LG's new mobiles and they proudly call themselves the first and foremost choice for LTE phones and promise that the revolution continues.

They didn't forget to remind us either they were the first to put out a dual-core phone, but quad-core is king now. We got our hands on the Optimus 4X HD and will be benchmarking it shortly.

The phones LG have on display range from the small Optimus L3, through the 4.3" and 4.7" screens of the L7 and 4X HD, all the way to the 5" screen of the LG Optimus Vu phoneblet.

LG Optimus 4X HD hands-on

The LG Optimus 4X HD is the company's first quad-core device and it's the result of LG's continued collaboration with NVIDIA. The 4X HD uses the new Tegra 3 chipset with the so-called 4-PLUS-1 technology.

The Optimus 4X HD flaunts a gorgeous looking 4.7" True HD IPS screen (also known as HD-IPS). The high resolution means that the screen pulls off 300+ ppi pixel density (312ppi to be precise), despite its large size.

Speaking of size, the 4X HD felt smaller than the 2X. We didn't have a 2X at hand, but we got a definite feel of a more compact phone. We're not big fans of the back though.

   
LG Optimus 4X HD hands-on photos

The LG Optimus 4X HD features 4 powerful Cortex-A9 cores running at up to 1.5GHz but also a low-power fifth core. This core runs at about 500MHz and is used only for background tasks. So when the phone isn't under strain, it will drain the battery as slowly as a phone with a single 500MHz core.

We ran a quick benchmark and the 4X HD outpaces most of the old dual-core phones. The Tegra chipset also packs a 12-core NVIDIA GPU, which benchmarks well even with a high-resolution 720p display.

LG Optimus 4X HD benchmark

There's a developer option that shows which cores are active. After even a short time with the Optimus 4X HD, it became pretty clear that the low-power core is active for decent stretches of time and it's very hard to push the 4X into firing all four Cortex-A9 cores.

We created a quick video to give you an idea of how quick the Optimux 4X HD actually is in real life.

LG Optimus 3D Max hands-on

The LG Optimus 3D Max is an incremental improvement over the original, but it still brings quite a bit to the table. It's thinner and lighter for one, with a more powerful chipset (slightly higher CPU clock and double the RAM). LG replaced the HDMI port with a MHL port, which we're not too happy about (MHL needs an adapter).

LG's HD Converter enables stereoscopic 3D experience in standard apps like Google Earth and Maps (so you can see those 3D buildings in actual 3D). There's a 3D Hot Key so you can instantly switch between 2D and 3D modes.

   
LG Optimus 3D Max hands-on photos

By using its two 5MP cameras, the LG Optimus 3D Max can do some cool stuff, like DSLR shot and the Smart Ruler augmented reality app. The DSLR shot mode uses the cameras to estimate how far each pixel is from the camera and blur out the background to simulate some depth of field (check out the two shots below to see the difference). This is usually only possible with cameras with large sensors (like DSLRs), but LG have found a clever way to do it on a phone.

Smart Ruler measures the distance between any two points in the photo. You can even do this at any point after snapping the photo.

   
Optimus 3D camera and DSLR shot feature • Smart Ruler augmented reality app

LG Optimus Vu hands-on

The LG Optimus Vu is the company's first foray into the phoneblet genre. The 4:3 aspect ratio of the screen is an odd choice in a phone this size. The 5" screen has 1024x768 resolution. The Vu is comparable in size to the Samsung Galaxy Note, but noticeably wider and less comfortable to hold.

The Optimus Vu is powered by a dual-core processor running at 1.5GHz, so it's behind the 4X HD performance-wise.

  
LG Optimus Vu hands-on photos

You do get a whopping 32GB of built-in memory and a card slot so there's plenty of room for multimedia, which LG claim is one of the Vu's main selling points. It has Dolby mobile technology to back up those claims, but we're not so sure - when playing 16:9 videos, you either lose a big part of the screen due to black bars or you lose part of the video due to cropping.

LG Optimus L7 hands-on

The LG Optimus L7 managed to impress us with its sharp screen and the "floating mass" technology that pushes the display matrix close to the surface of the screen looked great.

The phone is pleasantly thin at 8.8mm, but the plastic of the back was pretty cheap and that ruined the good impression (the same goes for the 4X HD and the Vu too).

   
LG Optimus L7 hands-on photos

LG Optimus L5 hands-on

The LG Optimus L5 has similar underlying hardware to the Optimus L3. While the 800MHz processor is enough for an entry-level device like the L3, we noticed that the L5 lagged occasionally.

  
  
LG Optimus L5 hands-on

LG Optimus L3 hands-on

The Optimus L3 was pleasantly snappy for an entry-level device, with its 800MHz processor and low-res 3.2" screen.

  
LG Optimus L3 hands-on photos