General Gaming Article

General Gaming Article

HTC Reveals New Strategy at Mobile World Congress – The HTC One, Dropbox, and Sense 4.0

Posted: 26 Feb 2012 05:25 PM PST

HTC One

HTC unveiled its 2012 Smartphone strategy at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, and the message was loud and clear. The EVO 4G, Sensation and many other devices did amazingly well in the market last year, but this scattershot approach failed to create the type of brand recognition Samsung has come to enjoy with the Galaxy S or, yes you know we have to say it, Apple and the iPhone. This year they plan to focus marketing efforts on a single lineup called the HTC One, which ironically enough, will ship in three variations.  

The HTC One X – High End – 32GB of Storage

The new flagship HTC One X is packing a ton of hardware, and will likely carry a price tag to match. The One X features a 4.7 inch 1280 x 720 Super LCD II display, quad-core NVidia Tegra 3 SoC running at 1.5GHZ, and support for 1080p encoding and decoding. The 9.27mm plastic body will house HSPA+ and LTE radios, along with 1GB of LPDDR2 memory. The 1.3MP front camera is capable of capturing video at 720p, however it pales in comparisons to the 8MP rear camera with a F2.0 lens assembly. HTC's response to Airplay requires an HTC Media Link HD dock connected to the TV, but otherwise should provide 1:1 mirroring of everything on the phone's display using a simple three finger swipe gesture.

The HTC One S – Midrange – 16GB of Storage

The HTC One S swaps out the Tegra 3 for a Qualcomm MSM8260A that is nearly identical to the Tegra 3 part, but without the LTE radio. The screen drops down to a 4.3 inch Super AMOLED PenTile display at 960 x 540, and the front camera also takes a hit dropping down to SD video only. The rear camera remains the same. 

The HTC One V – Entry – 4GB of Storage

The HTC One V is more or less a rebranded version of the HTC Legend which launched back in 2010, and rocks a measly 1GHz single-core processor. Optimizations to the camera  sound promising, but otherwise just check out reviews for the Legend.

Dropbox

iCloud and its puny 5GB of online storage might sound generous, but HTC's newly announced partnership with Dropbox sounds much more interesting. The handset maker will offer any new HTC One customer a free Dropbox account with 25GB of storage absolutely free for the first two years. Dropbox doesn't currently offer a pricing plan in this range, but doing a bit of back of the envelope math allows us to estimate an approximate value to you of $50 per year. Will Dropbox end up supporting the phone longer than HTC? Only time will tell.

Sense 4.0

HTC will still be skinning Android with its Sense UI, but they claim to have made many speed optimizations, in addition to increased support for Beats Audio, even in third party apps. Other improvements include redesigned camera utilities, along with an improved car experience which allows users to swipe between contacts, Google navigation, and music more effortlessly.

(Image Credit: TheVerge)

Nokia Surges Past HTC and Samsung To Become Biggest Windows Phone Manufacturer

Posted: 26 Feb 2012 12:48 PM PST

Lumia 800The Windows Phone team has been keeping the Champaign on ice for months now waiting for a reason to celebrate, and that moment may have finally arrived. According to market research firm Strategy Analytics, Nokia has surged pasted HTC and Samsung to become the single largest manufacturer of Windows Phone devices. This is pretty impressive when you consider that the Lumia lineup is only just now hitting the market in full force, and already accounts for 33 percent of all Windows Phone handsets sold. 

Many questioned Nokia's decision to throw its fate in with Microsoft, and while it's a bit too early to say Stephen Elop has saved the company, it is certainly a positive sign. With new handsets likely to be announced at next week at Mobile World Congress, the future is looking bright for the partnership which for all intents and purposes is only just getting started. 

RapidShare Throttles Download Speed For Free Accounts To Drive Off Megaupload Pirates

Posted: 26 Feb 2012 12:32 PM PST

RapidshareThe demise of Megaupload has left a bit of a void in the file sharing community, and rival sites such as RapidShare are beginning to struggle with ways to combat the influx of questionable content. Last month representatives from RapidShare boldly announced to Arstechnicia that they were "not concerned" with the government crackdown on Megaupload, because file hosting is a legitimate business if operated properly. Either way it appears as though they have had to make a few policy changes as a result of their new found popularity, and these measures are clearly an attempt to drive away the un-wanted traffic and legal attention that comes along with it.

RapidShare announced on Friday changes to the way free accounts are handled, and it will be interesting to see if it has the desired effect. "RapidShare has been faced with a severe increase in free user traffic and unfortunately also in the amount of abuse of our service ever since, suggesting that quite a few copyright infringers have chosen RapidShare as their new hoster of choice for their illegal activities," RapidShare said, according to the TorrentFreak article. "We have thus decided to take a painful yet effective step: to reduce the download speed for free users. We are confident that this will make RapidShare very unpopular amongst pirates and thus drive the abusive traffic away."

RapidShare may not be concerned with all the new traffic coming its way, but that doesn't mean they want to end up like Megaupload either.

Netflix Has No Plans To Support Blackberry, Or The Playbook

Posted: 26 Feb 2012 12:12 PM PST

NetflixBlackberry has seen its fortunes fade pretty rapidly over the last couple of years, but despite the trends pointing in the wrong direction, they still have millions of users around the world. Netflix rarely misses an opportunity to serve its content to such a large user base, however Blackberry users have always been left out in the cold, and according to Netflix support, that isn't likely to change anytime soon.

netflix

According to the @Netflixhelps account on twitter, "We don't have any current plans to support Blackberry devices, incluing Playbook." Questionable grammar aside, the statement is pretty succinct. Blackberry just recently released its long awaited Playbook OS 2.0 update which included support for Android Apps, however it sounds like an easy port isn't on the table. 

VP of Developer Relations for RIM Alec Saunders responded to some of the backlash, but only time will tell if it is enough to get Netflix to change its stance.

RIM
Posted by Shri Krishna

Total Pageviews

statcounter

View My Stats