O2 rolls out Android 2.3.4 for HTC Sensation owners

Updates ahoy

20 September 2011 13:48 GMT / By Hunter Skipworth

Owning a flagship Android handset doesn't necessarily mean enjoying the latest version of Google's operating system.
In the case of the HTC Sensation, many have been waiting for an Android 2.3.4 update to bring it in line with other leading dual-core competition. Vodafone users were first to gain the latest version last month, next in line are O2 customers, who have been reporting 2.3.4 making an appearance on handsets this morning.
You will want to get yourself hooked up to a Wi-Fi network to download the update smoothly. Changes include Google Talk support as well as bug fixes and general stability improvements.
We particularly liked the HTC Sensation before the update, so expect it to be even better now. Shame that it no longer retains the HTC flagship title, this has been usurped by the HTC Sensation XE, which includes a faster 1.5GHz processor and 1GB of RAM. There is also Beats Audio stuck inside the new XE and a pair of Beats headphones shipped out with the handset.
source: http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/42157/o2-htc-sensation-234-update

APP OF THE DAY: Facebook Messenger (Android)

Cleaner Facebook chatter

20 September 2011 18:00 GMT / By Chris Hall

  Facebook has found its way into almost every phone, with custom apps, a mobile site and entire operating system updates dedicated to accommodating Mark Zuckerberg’s social network.
Replicating all the features that Facebook offers is accommodated well on Android, with sharing options hooking into your photos, for example.
The Facebook app has been on Android for as long as we can remember (even if it seems barely functional in its current guise). Breaking out from this comes Facebook Messenger, giving you your own app just for chatting to friends, supplanting the existing provision for Facebook Chat.

Facebook Messenger

Format

Android

Price

Free

Where

Android Market

The app launched in the US back in August and has made it over to the UK for all to enjoy. Now, before you get exciting about something shiny and new, this is essentially a service you already have on your phone.
It replicates the Chat section of the website which appears in the corner of Facebook in a browser, with messages appearing in both places simultaneously. Facebook Chat has been part of the Facebook for Android app for a while, but Facebook Messenger is a much cleaner way to use the service as you don’t have to negotiate the rest of the Facebook app.
As such, we did find some oddities we’ve seen before with Facebook integration on Android. Notifications seems to be a slight stumbling block, as we found Facebook for Android (the main Facebook app) alerted us to some conversations instead. Tapping that notification takes you to Chat within the main app, rather than Facebook Messenger.

  

You can tell the difference between the two because Facebook Messenger uses its own logo, whereas Facebook for Android uses the face of the person talking to you, which to be fair, looks better. To resolve the problem, head into the settings of each app and you can manage the notifications.
Facebook Messenger is convenient, as you can take a conversation with you from desktop to mobile or vice versa. We found it had no problems when we switched between the two within the same conversation.
Conversations can be refreshed if you think something is missing, and pulling down the main list will update it, just as it does in apps like Twitter. You can include your location in messages, add pictures and things like links are live, so you can share URLs and the like.
We also like the fact that as a "new" app, it will log-in automatically (assuming you have logged in to Facebook for Android already) and your existing Chat history will be in place, so you can pick-up a running conversation on Facebook Chat previously or the previous incarnation of Messages on Facebook - we ran it back to 2007, which is quite a history of inane chatter.
When you select someone to talk to, you get the option of sending a Facebook Message or an SMS to a phone number. We found that SMS didn't work, returning the same error every time we tried it, that Facebook doesn't support sending SMS messages to this number.
Slicker, cleaner and more efficient than the existing provision for Facebook Chat, if you use Facebook to talk to your friends, then Facebook Messenger is a must - just make sure you tweak the notifications so you don’t stumble back into the wrong app.
source: http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/42154/facebook-messenger-chat-android-review

New BBC homepage coming for smartphones, tablets and TVs too

And new site to roll out in coming months

21 September 2011 10:37 GMT / By Paul Lamkin

  If you thought that the BBC's new homepage looked like it'd be a perfect fit for a smartphone or a tablet, then you'd be right. The homepage was built with Auntie's "1 service, 10 products, 4 screens" policy in mind - and a smartphone, tablet and even, possibly, a TV version will be coming soon.
"It shares a design principle that we've seen in tablets and mobile phones and we've heard from reviewers during testing over the last couple of months that it feels quite natural to them because of that," said James Thornett, product manager for BBC Homepage.
"We are already looking in advance, and thinking about how this would appear on a mobile platform. With the user interaction and design, you can see how tablets could easily be adapted and we are also talking with our colleagues across the business of TV. There are interesting discussions around the converging of TV platforms in the future as well."
Thornett also explained how the redesign of the homepage is part of a wider initiative, and is a configuration that will be eventually spread across the wealth of the BBC's online platforms.
"Visually and in terms of the technology used, this is the biggest change that we've made," he explained. "We built it from the ground up and we believe it to be an intuitive, time and location based experience for users.
"When we set up the strategy in January, we set up a very clear user experience vision to run alongside our technical product delivery and you're starting to see some of that bare fruit now.
"I would expect you to see, within the course of the next few weeks, months and years, the rollout of the design front and this kind of interaction and style across all of our sites."
Thornett explained that a blanket redesign of all of the BBC's sites in one go was an impossibility, not just down to the size of the task, but because there would be a risk of alienating the huge readership.
source: http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/42161/bbc-homepage-smartphones-tablets-tv

Acer Iconia A100 review

Can Acer impress?

20 September 2011 20:49 GMT / By Ian Morris

  Steve Jobs doesn't like 7-inch tablets. Hardly surprising, given that Apple only has one tablet, and it's not 7-inches. But Pocket-lint likes all tablets, especially ones that give the people what they want: choice.
The Iconia A100 is Acer's most recent entry into the Honeycomb tablet market. It's small, sturdy and powerful too. It costs around £300 for the Wi-Fi only model we're testing here, comparable with Samsung's 7-inch, Wi-Fi only Galaxy Tab, the P1010.

Mostly buttonless

As is the trend, the A100 has only one "hardware" button. This is an Apple-esqe design decision that sort of works, but strikes us as a little pointless. Either have no buttons on the face of the device, or festoon it with the little chaps. There seems to be no point in going halfway. Also, because the home button is a touch-sensitive control, it's all too easy to press it when you're holding the tablet. This means you'll often find yourself dropping out of what you were doing, because you pressed the home button by accident. There's a reason Apple has a physical key on its devices.

Away from the front though, there are plenty of flaps and buttons on the A100. At the top, there's a power button and headphone socket. On the right-hand side, there's an orientation lock switch as well as a volume rocker switch. At the bottom of the right side, there's a socket for a microSD card. There is also what looks like a SIM card socket, which has a blanking plate over it. Clearly, there will be a GSM A100 at some point in the future. Indeed, the user manual makes mention of installing a SIM card before you turn the device on.
At the bottom of the A100, there is an HDMI output, proprietary dock connector and USB socket. You can also see the twin-speakers and the daft proprietary power connector. It's worth mentioning the sound here too, because although it has Dolby Mobile, the built-in speakers aren't all that powerful. Headphones tell a better story though, and audio quality is pretty good.

Weighty but compact

One of the other things we noticed about the A100 is its decent heft. At 470g, it's quite a lot more weighty than the Galaxy Tab 7-inch - which was 380g. The problem, however, is not so much what it weighs, but that it really feels like it weighs a lot.
It does, however, have the advantage of fitting in to much smaller spaces than an iPad or Motorola Xoom would. This means that carrying it around is much more practical, and we think that as a result of that, you're much more likely to carry it around than a 10-inch tablet.

Dim screen and other issues

During our testing we noted that the A100's screen wasn't really very bright. Indeed, it was so dim that we had to turn off the automatic brightness control and stick it to the maximum setting. This was inside too, so outdoors, you're really going to struggle to see what's going on in bright light.
With the device on less than full brightness, we also noticed a slight shimmer on the screen. This made it slightly more difficult to use the device, and again required we boost the backlight to full to mostly get rid of the problem.

On the whole, the screen was sharp though, which we really liked. It has the same resolution as rival ViewSonic's ViewPad 7x at 1024 x 600, but that's really not bad for a 7-inch tablet. Interestingly though, like the ViewSonic, the viewing angle is very strange on the Acer. In one direction, it's quite good. But flip it the other way, and it washes out really badly. This is confusing, and irritating, because we found that holding it with the home button on the right, and tilting the tablet backwards was the worst angle. But this is the very angle at which most people will hold the tablet.

Wi-Fi troubles

In our test environment we use two routers to provide two Wi-Fi networks. For web browsing, we had no problem on either. When it came to access Google's services like Gmail and the Android Market, we came unstuck. The market kept asking us to authenticate as a Google user, while Gmail refused to allow us to access new mail.
Other Android devices on our test network have no such problems. We have several Android phones and a Samsung Galaxy Tab all working fine, and we've never seen anything like this before. A full reset fixed the problem, but it could easily come back again later.This could have simply been a Google authentication error, but its persistence was troubling.

Camera

There are two cameras on the A100. The rear-mounted is 5 megapixel, with the front-facing one offering 2 megapixels. This is good news for people looking to make video calls, although the number of apps that support this functionality are pretty small. Skype is adding support for new devices all the time though.
The rear camera is fine for basic uses. We don't think many people will use a tablet as a camera all that often, so we're not too concerned with the quality. It is, however, not very good, so if a good camera is important to you, this isn't the tablet for you.

On the plus side, the camera app is gloriously simple to use, reacts quickly and doesn't confuse with lots of options.

Nvidia Tegra power

Although the processor in the A100 isn't the most powerful we've seen, Tegra certainly helps the performance of the tablet no end. Games, in particular, are very slick and speedy. As are the menus, indeed, the whole device feels very slick indeed, and we like that.
There are options open to Tegra-powered devices too, there's a special gaming zone where you can grab games and demos, which is handy if you're looking for a little more content to cheer up your day.
The Processor is a dual-core A9 ARM chip, which runs at 1GHz along with the Tegra GPU, which handles the graphical donkey work. There's only 512MB of RAM though, which could be a performance issue if you're using complex apps and multi-tasking.
The A100 has 8GB of storage too, for file storage. This can be expanded by an additional 32GB via a microSD card slot. We'd be inclined to grumble about the slightly mean internal capacity, but with SD cards costing so little these days, we're more inclined to keep our mouths shut and pop online to get some more removable storage cards instead.

DLNA and clear.fi

In our testing we discovered one crucial thing, clear.fi is utterly useless for most things. If you've never heard of this app before, then we should explain that it's just another way of describing DLNA. If you want to send video, music or photos from your PC to your tablet, it should, in theory be easy to do so.

In fact, we did manage to grant the A100 permission to access the files on our Windows 7 machine, but it still refused to actually do so. To confound us further, we were easily able to get files from the A100 onto our PC. This is unusual, as DLNA functioning in one direction usually means everything is set up correctly.
But worse than the difficulty getting the devices to talk to each other, was the inexcusably dreadful clear.fi app. It seems to have been written with the sole purpose of generating confusion and misery. Perhaps, in fact, it isn't a media streaming app, but a programme designed to demotivate and hamper morale in advance of an attack from space aliens.
Or it could be that it was designed by people who have never met another person. No one would be able to understand how this UI works, it's simply too illogical. Browsing various machines on the network looks simple enough, sure, but when it comes to actually seeing files stored on them it's near impossible to figure out what's going on.
If it's not clear, our advice is to avoid clear.fi at all costs. Try Skifta instead, which handles DLNA with minimal fuss and is free from Android Market.

Battery life

Half a day of light use had the Acer A100 down to 80 per cent battery. When we looked into the power source, we were a little bewildered to discover that Acer has put only a 1530mAh power pack in the device. Compare this to the 4000mAh in the original Galaxy Tab, and you can see that there's much less capacity here than we would hope for.
Each generation of Android gets better at managing power, of course, but putting in a low-capacity battery into a power-hungry device is never a brilliant idea. If you're heading off on a transatlantic flight, you've really got little or no hope of this machine lasting the whole journey. Our Galaxy Tab on the other hand can manage a good 7 hours, more with some brightness adjustments.
Really, you want longevity with a tablet. Phones cause enough problems with their twice per day desire to be charged, a tablet really needs to be ready to go when you are. And the A100 doesn't feel like it would be.
source: http://www.pocket-lint.com/review/5558/acer-iconia-a100-tablet-review

Samsung fights back - counter sues Apple in Australia

Return of the Mac

19 September 2011 10:17 GMT / By Hunter Skipworth

  Like two boys squabbling in the playground, tech giants Apple and Samsung seem to refuse to drop it, with the Korean manufacturer now counter suing on patent infringement in Australia.
Sammy chose the land down under to take Apple on over its wireless patents with the iPhone and iPad. The claim was filed in the Federal Court of Australia on 16 September and points to seven separate Apple patent infringements connected with wireless communication standards. The claims address virtually every single one of Apple's portable devices, including the iPhone 3G, 3GS, iPhone 4 and iPad 2.
Apple's recent claims against Samsung and its Galaxy Tab 10.1 are also said to be invalid and have been asked to be revoked by the court.
Australia is becoming a relative tech battle ground between the two companies, last month seeing the launch of the Galaxy Tab delayed following global patent disputes.
Samsung's Galaxy Tab devices appear to be becoming slight injunction magnets lately. Most recent of all has to be the problems over the 7.7 and IFA, which saw the device pulled following a 2 September injunction at a Dusseldorf court.
Shame that all this battling between the two tech leaders is done over the courts, we would much rather see conflict arise in the design and innovation department, that might lead to better devices reaching the consumer in the end.
source: http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/42123/samsung-counter-sues-apple-australia

Apple certified NFC case for iPhone hits South Korea

iCarte case released

19 September 2011 10:49 GMT / By Hunter Skipworth

  South Koreans have been enjoying the benefits or a properly established NFC structure for some time now, hence Samsung's obsession with sticking the chips in its devices.
Apple's decision to keep the iPhone 4 NFC-free has caused slight problems out in Korea, particularly amongst those who like being on the cutting edge of tech. As such network provider KT has announced the iCarte NFC case for the phone, which brings with it digital wallet functionality for KT customers.
The case was produced by Canadian manufacturer Wireless Dynamics and from the pictures, looks to us like an all black version of the current gen Mophie Juice Packs.
Pre paid "transit cards" will also be embedded into the NFC setup so you can use your Apple handset to pay for transport. Credit card companies are also looking set to get involved.
Korean network provider KT explained they expect to see NFC built into Apple handsets from next year.
source: http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/42124/apple-certified-nfc-iphone-case

Acer C6 Liquid Express spilled by Orange

Phone coming soon to the UK

19 September 2011 13:33 GMT / By Paul Lamkin

  Well, well, well, what do we have here? It's a brand spanking new Android Gingerbread handset from Acer that has slipped through the net virtually unnoticed - the Acer C6 Liquid Express.
And it's heading for Orange, with a coming soon page being added to the network's UK online store.
It's uncommon for a phone to slip straight into officialdom without a murmur, but the curious case of the Liquid Express seems to have done exactly that. Although we think the handset might be the E320 that had been doing the rumour rounds at the end of last week.
Whatever it is, it sounds like a decent mid-level device, with reports of a Qualcomm MSM Turbo 800MHz processor backing up the officially laid out spec of a 3.5-inch LCD capacitive screen, a 5-megapixel camera and Wi-Fi, 3G, FM and Bluetooth connectivity.
Measuring in at 13.4mm thick and weighing 135g - the Acer C6 Liquid Express will be available free on selected contracts.
source: http://www.pocket-lint.com/news/42134/acer-c6-liquid-express-orange