Tech Nukem

Besides announcingbeTouch E210 Android smartphone, Acer has also announced a new Android smartphone which is named as Acer Liquid Mini. The Acer Liquid Mini has been designed to run on Android 2.2 Froyo operating systems and powered by a 600MHz Qualcomm 7227 processor.

Featured with a 3.2-inch HVGA touchscreen which operates at 480 x 320 resolutions, the Acer Liquid Mini is also equipped with a 5-megapixel camera with capability of 480p video recording. It boasts a GPS, has built-in stereo FM radio, 512MB RAM, supports HSDPA and DLNA connectivity and comes with a battery that provides up to 6.5 hours of talk time and up to 20 hours of standby time. In addition, it is Bluetooth enabled and supports up to 32GB of microSD memory card.

Available in five vibrant colors such as jet silver, royal blue, piano black, lime green and light pink, the Acer Liquid Mini is expected to be available on 11 April in UK . However, the price of the Android smartphone is not yet announced.

Motorola Droid Bionic is the first LTE 4G Android smartphone from Motorola. The smartphone has been designed to run on Verizon’s new LTE network. The Android smartphone is runs on Android 2.2 Froyo operating systems and powered by Dual core 1000 MHz Processor.

Key features of the Motorola Droid Bionic includes:

A 4.3-inches capacitive Touchscreen display with 540 x 960 resolutions.
Supports Wi-Fi 802.11b/g/n and A-GPS.
Bluetooth 2.1 enabled with EDR and A2DP.
3D graphics hardware accelerator.
Computer synchronization, OTA synchronization and DLNA connectivity.
A front-facing VGA camera and a rear-facing 8-megapixel camera with AF and LED flash.
Supports HD 1080p video recording.
Supports HTML5 and Adobe Flash Player.
Supports MP3, AAC, AAC+, eAAC+ and MIDI audio formats and MP4, H.263, H.264 video playback.
Comes with a Li-ion 1930 mAh battery, 16GB of internal memory and 512MB RAM.
Supports up to 32GB of microSD card memory.
Has built-in 3.5mm audio jack, micro USB 2.0 and HDMI port.
The Motorola Droid Bionic with dimensions of 125.9×66.9×13.3mm and weighs 158 gram is expected to be available in second quarter of 2011. However, the price of the Android smartphone is not yet announced.

Microsoft corporation has unveiled its new multitouch mouse, named as Microsoft Touch Mouse, which is designed specifically to extend your Windows 7 usage with the ability of clicking, flicking, scrolling and swiping, providing an easy and fun way to interact with your Windows 7 PC.

Key features of Microsoft Touch Mouse:

New multitouch surface allows users to snap, navigate and control content by using natural gestures
New flick scrolling functionality enables users to quickly scroll and pan through windows and documents
New improved, simple task switching on Windows 7
BlueTrack Technology for tracking virtually anywhere, anytime
Ambidextrous design for use with left- or right-hand
Snap-in USB nano transceiver supports a range of 30 foot
Microsoft Touch Mouse is now available for pre-order at Microsoft Store online and Amazon.com, expected to hit the market in June 2011 for around $80.

Watch the demo video for Microsoft Touch Mouse:

If you are Apple’s iPad lover but think that its weight is too heavy to be carried around, the recent rumor of having a 7-inch smaller size iPad seems to get solid confirmation with reliable source from Taiwan. Economic Daily News, a major newspaper publisher in Taiwan has recently disclosed a few potential vendors that are already working on iPad 2 with its targeted availability date by end of this year or early of next year.

According to the source, a number of Taiwanese vendors have won the contract to manufacture the long anticipated iPad 2. One of them is Chimei Innolux, a famous LCD manufacturer that will be supplying the 7-inch LCD panels utilizing IPS (in-plane switching) with significant color and viewing angle improvement. At the same time, its capacitive touch sensitive display layer will be provided by AU Optronics, making it a complete touch panel solution for the next generation tablet. If you wonder whether Foxconn (Hon Hai) will still be its contract manufacturer to assembly the end product, but surprisingly the Cupertino based company seems to outsource it to different vendors, Compal, a famous e-book and tablet PC maker in Taiwan.

While there is still a lot of unfinalized details, but preliminary specifications indicated that the next generation iPad will be much lighter with merely 1.1 pounds (versus 1.5 pounds for existing model) thanks to its smaller panel at diagonal 7-inch as compared to 9.7-inch for current iPad. However, it will be redesigned with much powerful ARM Cortex-A9 (current version is based on Cortex-A8 architecture) with 512MB memory RAM with unknown storage capacity.

No exact pricing and availability yet, the iPad 2 could be reaching consumer market as early as end of this year or early next year.

Surfing on the Internet sometimes can pose a danger as malware can easily violate the system without our knowledge. When we click away from one website, we could be led into another which compromises the security of our system. BitDefender QuickScan is a Google Chrome extension which can detect malware quickly and efficiently.

While a firewall or antivirus software application may easily detect common viruses, Trojan horses, worms or malware, some of the newer menaces may escape the net. BitDefender Quickscan can strengthen the security in the system without utilizing a great deal of the system’s resources. Besides, it detects active malware within a minute so that appropriate action can be taken by the user to eliminate the threat. However, BitDefender QuickScan does not offer a virus cleaning service and the user would have to use an antivirus software to remove the threat.

LG Mobile Phones and Verizon Wireless have announced the upcoming launch of the new LG Fathom VS750 smartphone, which combines the notable smart global capabilities with stylish design and full QWERTY keyboard, based on Windows Mobile 6.5.3 platform.

Main features of LG Fathom (Verizon Wireless):

Speedy 1GHz processor and sliding full QWERTY keyboard
Clear 3.2-inch WVGA touchscreen with tactile feedback and enhanced touch experience
3.2 megapixel camera with auto focus
Bluetooth 2.1 and Wi-Fi (802.11 b/g/n) connectivity
Voice-activated dialing and text to speech capability
VZ Navigator Global offers worldwide turn-by-turn directions
Windows Mobile 6.5.3 operating system
Windows Media Player 10 Mobile and video player
microSD memory expansion slot supports up to 16GB
The new LG Fathom smartphone which measures 115.5 x 56.5 x 17 mm and weights just 5.4 ounces is slated to hit Verizon Wireless stores on June 3 for $149.99, after a $100 mail-in rebate with a new 2-year service contract.

Apple’s iPad has been getting good traction with more than million units being sold within the first month after its official release. While most of the users are attracted with its great graphics performance (thanks to its A4 processor) with bunch of free games and apps support, some are planning to get one just to enjoy reading e-book on its large screen size. Good news now, Barnes & Noble, the world’s largest online bookstore has just released a new free app to iTune store targeted mainly for iPad users.

In order to utilize its large screen for much pleasurable reading experience, some features have been added as an extra bonus when comparing to other existing e-book reader like iBooks for iPad. For instances, users can easily access and browse to the desired e-book with list view in landscape mode before deciding to go further to read it. Besides, users can tap on any words or sentences to highlight, add notes or even put them into lookup search using Google or Wikipedia (with WiFi or 3G connected), making it much useful than plain e-book reader. However, don’t expect the multi-touch features to be working and there is no way to zoom in/out on the fly with two fingers moving on the screen. Also, there is no way to change the brightness of the screen while in the middle of reading without leaving the app. But anyway, this is just a free app and users can still rely on its internal menu (top right corner) to change the font size, types with margin depending on own preference.

The app is already available for free download at iTune store and good news for new account sign-ups, they will able to get few public domain book besides some bestsellers’ samplers for free without the need to really spend extra buck for online purchase.

Graphics capability is one of the most important elements besides the processor core power in both PC and mobile market. And in order to continuously stay competitively in this market segment, some ARM licensees and even X86 architecture chip maker has actually licensed the latest graphics technology solution from Imagination Technologies, which is famous for its advanced Powervr SGX GPU (Graphics Processing Unit) to be integrated into its processor core for sophisticated graphics processing. Just recently, TI (Texas Instruments) has taken an initiative to license the latest SGX Series5XT from Imagination Technologies for its next generation OMAP SoC (System on Chip).

The new SGX Series5XT is claimed to be able to boost from 100MHz to 400MHz, and is capable to deliver impressive performance with up to 35 million polygons per second. Besides, it will be available in multi-core (up to 16-core) and is compatible to almost every OS like Android, Symbian, WinCE, windows XP and even Vista with OpenGL 2.0, OpenVG 1.1 and the new OpenCL 1.0 support. If you remember, both Intel and Apple are eying on its advanced graphics solution and has already invested additional share into this company with the hope to get some influencing power in their future directions. Some of the famous ARM based processors that had been integrated with Powervr graphics IP include the recently announced Apple iPad’s A4 processor, TI’s OMAP series, Marvell’s PXA310/312, Freescale’s i.MX31, Samsung’s S3C2460/S5PC510, Renesas’s SH Mobile series and many more. From X86 architecture core perspective, Intel’s Pentium based CE3100/4100/4130 and 4150 were also having earlier version of Powervr, besides the US15W chipset that used to be paired with first generation Intel Atom Z5XX (codenamed as Silverthorne). Not to be surprise, there are already more than 250 millions of mobile devices in the market that being powered by Powervr graphics technology.

No official availability yet, but we should expect more and more ARM licensees as well as Intel to continue acquire its latest graphics technology ready for their next generation SoC suitable for multimedia centric applications.