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[Video] See For Yourself Who Wins The iPhone 4S Vs. Samsung Galaxy S II Drop Test...

Nobody likes to get their expensive smartphones like Apple iPhone 4S or Samsung Galaxy SII get dropped and damaged. But if you want to know which phone fairs good when dropped from same height, here is a "drop-test" video between the two to get a clear winner - also don't miss the part video part where the tester asks "Siri" (the iPhone 4S virtual assistant feature) about the drop.

Sony CMOS Sensor Found in the iPhone 4S

Since the iPhone 4S was officially launched, many were astounded by its mind-boggling features – particularly Siri, the revered “humble assistant” that can listen, understand, and execute tasks including sending text messages, setting up your schedule via the Calendar and Reminders app, checking the weather and even the stock market. But while others are still waiting in line to get the awesome device, the folks over at Chipworks, a technology company that specializes in reverse engineering and patent infringement analysis, were already studying the genius behind the iPhone 4S. Chipworks did a teardown on the iPhone 4S and took its 8 Megapixel camera under an infrared microscope. And guess what they found out – SONY.

Free iOnRoad Augmented Driving Application For Android Promises A Third-Eye On The Road

Augmented Reality is no longer a science fiction or lab-technology, thanks to augmented reality applications like Atol les opticiens, Kinect Magic Mirror or AR Business Cards the technology is increasingly making it's way to the mainstream usage into our daily lives.

To get the ball rolling forward, an uber-cool augmented reality application for Google Android is now available for free to users (free during limited period beta) - named "iOnRoad Augmented Driving". The winner of 2011 Mobile Summit App contest allows users to make use of their device camera, processing the captured data via an real-time image recognition algorithms to auto recognizes the vehicle in front, measuring the time-gap and warn the user in-case a danger is detected. The dynamic augmented reality driving and real-time collision detection application delivers a visual radar by combining realtime day/night machine vision with sensor fusion to provide better road-safety.

Augmented Reality Driving On Android

The All New Powerful Windows 8 Task Manager

Apple has dominated the tech news of late and, as its fairly certain that Apple will continue to sell every iPhone the company can make, as Monty Python would say; Now for Something Completely Different. The Windows 8 development team is planning a major overhaul of the venerable Task Manager. The handy program has saved many a Windows user from a system reboot over the years and has come a long way from its humble beginnings in Windows 3.0 looking like this:

Windows 3 Task Manager

to the current version in Windows 7 here:

Windows 7 Task Manager

The Windows 8 team started their planning process by seeing how real world users make use of the tools provided in Task Manager, such as killing applications, determine what processes were taking up the most memory and CPU resources , starting up or terminating services, checking network issues, and general system-admin tasks. Shockingly enough, approximately eighty-five percent of users’ main feature of choice in the Task Manager was to terminate programs. Included in that number was monitoring processes as well, since in many cases a misbehaving program or process is eating up memory and processor cycles thereby causing the system to be sluggish or even freeze.

[Video ] Checkout How new Apple iPhone 4S compares with iPhone 4 when it comes to speed

While "Siri" - the Apple iPhone 4S voice-recognition virtual assistant, would be one of the most promising new feature of this new mobile device the iPhone 4S also greatly boosts the hardware specs when compared to the older iPhone 4 models.

While application launching is a basic task that doesn't show off the real potential of this new hardware's high-performance graphics and other capabilities, it is without a doubt "the most used" task when using a smart-phone. Here is an extensive video comparison between Apple iPhone 4S Vs iPhone 4 giving a good picture of the everyday performance improvements one should expect between the two devices.


Full-video after the jump.

BlueStacks - A Free Utility To Run Android Applications On Windows PC

BlueStacks LogoThe application eco-system of Google's mobile operating-system Android is increasing by leaps-and-bound everyday, to take advantage of this ever-increasing application base virtualization on platforms like Windows OS is already getting attention. To get things moving forward on the front, a new software application for Windows platform BlueStacks is out now enabling users to run android applications on Windows computers.

Android Apps On Windows

BlueStacks allows users to run Android OS apps on Windows PCs with instant switching between the two. BlueStacks helps PC manufacturers to ride the Android momentum by enabling Android apps on x86-based tablets, netbooks, notebooks, convertibles and AiO Windows PCs. With the new hybrid convertible form factors, BlueStacks completely eliminates the need to carry two devices. The end consumer benefits from getting both Android and Windows at the price of a single PC.

Smarter Cloud Based Google Translate 2.2 For Android Now Comes With Speech-To-Speech Translation Between 14 Languages

Google TranslateWhile Apple iPhone 4S featured some clever marketing done for their "virtual assistant" software-bot "Siri" but only time will tell how practical the solution will be for common-users specially when it comes to non-native US-English accents. To counter the iPhone 4S feature (Siri) Google has now released the latest version of "Google Translate For Android App" featuring an intelligent and practical feature of "Speech-to-speech" translation between 14 languages to overcome the language barrier, although not exactly similar to "Siri" the technology can be extended further having advantage of multi-accent Google's Voice Recognition technology.

Google Translate

The new Conversation Mode allows a user to speak into their phone’s microphone in their native language, and the Translate app will translate and readout the translation loud - the person you’re speaking with can then reply in their language, and Conversation Mode will translate what they said and read it back to you. The "Google Translate Android App 2.2" now supports translation between English, Spanish, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Mandarin Chinese, Polish, Russian and Turkish languages - a video demonstration of this new feature is posted below.

iPhone 4S Grills Android in Browser and GPU Performance Tests

While Apple is facing demand-and-supply capacity issues with iOS5 for the time-being. Apple do have another powerful ally in the battle for supremacy in the mobile space, we’re a bit curious how the game has changed and how Android’s line of devices will manage to retain its advantage over the iPhone. Many things have happened over at Cupertino County lately. Although Apple’s legendary co-founder passed away to everyone’s grief, the tech giant managed to release the iPhone 4S – an entirely revamped version of the iPhone 4 and is expected to alter the course of the game. The folks over at AnandTech managed to conduct a series of tests with the newly release iPhone 4S and compared it with the top of the line Android devices including Samsung’s Galaxy S II and the Galaxy Tab 8.9 – both of which are the leading contenders of the iOS. The said series of tests initiated by the popular benchmarking site was all about browser speed and GPU performance. And boy it sure looks interesting.

iPhone 4S benchmark

iOS 5 update rained on by iCloud?

Apple iCloud Logo

The Apple iOS 5 update dropped today and Apple was not ready for the demand. As of this writing, there have been no confirmed reports of any successful updates by the tech media or users based on reports and Apple discussion groups. Apple has admitted that the installation problems are on Apple's side, and the consensus is that the iCloud servers are simply unable to completely process and verify the installation process. This does not bode well for either the estimated three million iPhone 4S devices that will be seeking communion with iCloud to get activated (and in all likelihood need software updates) or the inauguration of the Apple iCloud music service at the end of the month.

Apple has put a lot of time, treasure and credibility into the iCloud initiative. Apple envisions iCloud as follows:
"This is the cloud the way it should be: automatic and effortless. iCloud is seamlessly integrated into your apps, so you can access your content on all your devices." In order to fulfill this vision Apple has to be able to have the content accessible on demand and to accomplish that, they created a huge server farm in the state of North Carolina in the United States, spending over a billion dollars USD according to some estimates.

Windows 8 wants to do more with less

The Windows 8 team is working to do something rare in operating system development, maintain the same system requirements as the prior generation. In this case the Windows 8 group is designing the next version of Windows to operate on the same hardware as Windows 7, which itself was less demanding than the real requirements of Windows Vista. In other words, the user should be able to adequately run Windows 8 with a 1 gigahertz processor and 1 gigabyte of RAM for a 32-bit version and 2 gigabytes for the 64-bit version.

The reason for this change of engineering attitude is the proliferation of mobile devices; laptops and tablets. Also, from a corporate standpoint if you are running fleets of computers running for the most part twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week even marginal savings per machine can add up across the enterprise. Microsoft Program manager Bill Karagoumis indicates in a blog posting that managing memory is the key to the team’s efforts.

Reducing the memory footprint is not usually the first thing that comes to mind as a way to reduce energy costs, particularly when you are expanding the feature set of the operating system. The Windows 8 team is doing this in a variety of ways. One, is change Windows services from an “always on” to a start on demand or even a manual startup. Like not leaving ones car idling while parked saves on petrol, these changes to how the operating system services are invoked saves on the amount of system memory is in use at any given time. This leaves more memory available for multitasking and other operations.

(Click to enlarge)

Windows 7 Vs Windows 8

A second technique is what is described as memory combining, the consolidation of duplicate memory blocks into a single copy. Duplication of data occurs when a program anticipates that certain data will be required and that data is initialized and allocated. Even if the data is never actually used, it remains cluttering up memory like several copies of the same book on a bookshelf. Memory combining by the Windows 8 operating system can free anywhere from tens to hundreds of megabytes of RAM according to Mr. Karagoumis.

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