Gadgetory

an android phone with a hi-def screen an ipad with a Retina display amazon gone hollywood / tablets twitter and facebook at war again but this time over photos and an exclusive look at the next generation blackberry on video so many rumors so little time but that's why you've got us it's techno Buffalo's rumor roundup hey what's going on everybody I'm Noah Kravitz editor-at-large for TechnoBuffalo and I've got your rumor roundup for the week ending Friday jun 17 2011 lots to talk about so let's get right to it first off you can get more on all these stories over at our website technobuffalo com you can also follow us on Twitter on Facebook all that stuff you know the deal let's get to the news is there a new flagship Android phone coming and if so is it going to arrive in time to bring ice cream sandwiches your thanksgiving dining table it looks like that might be the case some ruhr surface this week about a phone being referred to as the nexus 4g which would be the next in google's line of nexus devices that are stock android phones meant to show off the capabilities of the latest version of the google android operating system now in this case that would be android 4.0 often referred to or refer to internally to as ice cream sandwich ice cream sandwich has been talked about and previewed a little bit back at google's i/o developer conference a month or so ago but there are no device is currently running Ice Cream Sandwich nor any official indication of when it will arrive and on what phones other than sometime this fall well a Thanksgiving launch of a new Nexus phone would certainly fit the bill and it looks like this phone is going to pack a full 720p HD display no information was given on what size the screen might be other than that its massive in a world where we've already got a 4.5 inch display on the Samsung Infuse I don't even want to know what massive my mean but apparently it's going to be full 720 720 p which would be 1280 by 720 pixels much more than the current high end android phones the pack of 960 x 540 qhd display also rumored for the phone is full 1080p video capture an advanced still camera sensor that's limited to only 5 megapixels but as superior low-light performance which as our own Mike Pearlman pointed out in his awesome article the megapixel conspiracy is much more important than pure megapixel count when it comes to catcher at capturing good photos especially on devices like camera phones where you can't fit in a giant camera sensor with with mechanical tools like optical zoom so whatever the specs are a next-generation camera sensor you've got that HD display you've got HD video capture and apparently this thing is going to be powered by a dual-core processor likely either a TI OMAP or a qualcomm snapdragon running it either 1.2 or 1.5 gigahertz now one thing about that name Nexus 4G would point to a true 4G experience there's already a nexus phone called the nexus s 4g which is sprint's version of the nexus s so that name might have to be changed to avoid consumer confusion but our early reports rumors are pointing to a possible Google AT&T partnership with the Nexus 4G being the first smartphone to run on AT&T LTE network which is what they're trying to move towards right now they've got hspa+ devices that they're calling for g but really that that's my sarcastic quotes because i don't think AT&T s 4g is really 4g at this point they're a array 18t is moving towards LTE like what Verizon has right now in the US and this might neither be their first device it would also be the first Nexus device to launch on AT&T so stay tuned I'm sure we going to hear much much more about whatever this phone is whenever it's coming but I like the idea of ice cream sandwiches to go with my pumpkin pie at Thanksgiving dinner speaking of massive displays with massive resolution some rumors of information coming out of the iOS 5 beta build that point to a possible full-on retina display and a forthcoming iPad now if you're a hardcore nerd just like to follow the hardcore nerd news you may already know that these beta versions of software particularly now in the mobile space are often treasure troves of all kinds of interesting information that our rumormonger nerds like me like to put together and try to make stories out of so a story came out this week that in the Twitter framework twitter is deeply integrated in Apple's new iOS 5 operating system and apparently in the Twitter framework section of the iOS 5 beta that's now available to developers or folks who signed up as developers and apples program there's some information pointing to a display resolution that we've never seen before in a build of iOS that display resolution is 1536 by 2048 which is double not double the actual resolution but double the dimensions of the current ipad and ipad 2 dimensions 1536 by 2048 would be an insane number of pixels but would give an iPad device something with that nine inch display a full-on retina display ready this way is the term that Apple made up when they launched the iphone 4 and wanted to explain that the pixel density on the iphone 4 screen is so dense there's so many pixels per inch that it's literally more than the human eye then the human retina can actually process and deal with and so what you get is just a maxed-out display in terms of pixels per inch something that the human eye thinks is the same as print or that's you know what Apple wants you to believe anyway and you know you can spend us facts and information facts are useful and emergencies to quote David Byrne but anyway what we've got is evidence perhaps pointing towards a Retina Display coming on an ipad size device an ipad 3 and i'll tell you what technobuffalo editor-in-chief Sean and I have a little side bet going on whether or not there's going to be a new iPad this year I say there will be a new iPad or an iPad like device from Apple this year and I'm saying is going to come at their September event that used to be all about the new iPads shawn says I'm crazy so the loser of that bed has to do something kind of fun and embarrassing to be put up on our on our video channel so stay tuned for that little I bet if you care about such things that will be decided to later on but evidence perhaps of an ipad 3 or a new device from apple with a Retina display stay tuned speaking of Twitter as you may know leading up to the iOS 5 announcement Twitter rolled out their own in-house photo-sharing service photo hosting service so now instead of using twitpic or yfrog or what have you twitter is encouraging folks and by default when you upload a photo to Twitter it goes to their own brand new service or will be it's being rolled out now to users their own service that they built they've built in conjunction with photobucket so this led to the announcement of deep Twitter and Twitter integration including photos and all kinds of other things in iOS 5 not necessarily as a response to that but the timing is interesting some information leaked earlier this week about a supposed new photo sharing photo management app for iphone that Facebook is building this is important because photo sharing photo hosting has become huge especially in the past six to 12 months instagram has taken off like a rocket like we said Twitter's decided to go in-house so that they can control and they can build the database of photos and whatever we're going to do with it the integration they needed to launch the iOS 5 stuff and you might not know this but Facebook has an insanely huge database of photos uploaded by their users one statistic I read said that facebook users are currently uploading six billion not six million but six billion photos every month to Facebook that's on top of some 80 billion photos already hosted on facebook I mean that's crazy but if you think about anything about the number of facebook users out there and the number of idiotic photos of your night out on the town that you posted i think i'm talking about myself last week and you know it adds up pretty quickly the six billion photos a month a lot of those coming from iphone users because there are a lot of iphone users a lot iphone users who use facebook and apparently facebook's working on they've been working for a while on this brand new native iphone app to deal with it all from the screen grabs and the data that i saw it actually looks pretty cool you go over to TechnoBuffalo comm check out our coverage on it it links out to some further coverage from some other sites around the web but screen grabs and information it looks like you can do it all you can upload you can tag people's faces you can caption the photos you can like and tag other people's photos I think you might be able to deal with our videos as well as photos but then you can group the photos arrange them according to the time of the events the location of the events the people who were tagged in the events all kinds of stuff you can set your privacy settings who you share the photos of the thing you know all that kind of stuff from an app that looks very native iOS 5 is interesting some of the comments on the story we ran about the supposed photo app didn't even deal with the photo app and they said you know you think Facebook would fix all the bugs in their normal facebook app for iphone before they worried about building a photo apps so you know you can win out with your own experience using the facebook app on that one but it looks like we may be seeing a brand new comprehensive photo sharing photo management tool for iphone users from facebook in the near future speaking of videos and I wasn't really speaking of videos but you know everything's converging so much photos and videos and tablets and phones and and using Twitter and Facebook and all them that is easy for me to make up transitions and segues from one story to the next yeah it's good enough i mentioned video when i start about the facebook app and speaking of video there it is more rumors about the Amazon tablet that we all a TechnoBuffalo definitely believe is coming a believe is coming sometime this year and I even think it's going to be running Android on Intel we've seen Android on Intel demoed but this may be one of the first if not the first real big product to run android on an intel chipset for mobile we'll see I don't know anyway android tablet only almost certainly coming sometime this year whether it's branded is a color kindle or something separate that has a kindle app whatever it is we're almost sure to see it and some reports this week that the project is codenamed hollywood inside of amazon and one of the reasons maybe that amazon is going to sweeten the deal for people who buy the device or maybe for the early adopters who buy it first and offer free movie streaming service with the purchase of the device Amazon's got you know they've got all kinds of stuff they've got their their video on demand service they've got now a certain subset of that available for free if you're an Amazon Prime subscriber of course they've got their own appstore for android they've got their cloud music player with the music locker and everything and it looks like they're prepping a device a piece of hardware to bring this all together under the amazon flag we've been talking about this internally like I said Tecna Buffalo for a while some articles on the site you can go back and read I wrote one about how I think Amazon is actually poised to battle Apple head-to-head better than anybody else in the space because if they can get a piece of hardware going they've already got the rest of the ecosystem when it comes to selling content they sell music they sell movies they sell books and then they sell something that nobody else including Apple can offer which is lawnmowers and barbecues and diapers and all kinds of stuff so I mean if they bundle in you know a prime membership and some free movies and some deals of the day and all that kind of stuff they kind of hinted at this with the the Kindle that you can buy for was it 25 bucks cheaper if you deal with some Amazon ads kind of hinting at that I think they may go kind of full-on on a tablet with bundling and all kinds of extras that only amazon is really situated to offer that might I don't know might redefine the idea of what it takes to compete with the ipad which whether you think it's the best or than or not it's the leading tablet out there in the market right now so very interested to see but but new fuel for the fire for the rumor fire this week about Amazon and a tablet and some sort of free streaming music service movie service rather being part of the deal want to mention real quick before I get to the last bit of rumor news this week since I was talking about Amazon the Kindle my gadget of the week my favorite gadget this week is actually the barnes & noble nook the new nook they just released the smaller screen touchscreen lower price point everything the PR folks were nice enough to send me one of these to test out and review i did a first impressions article on techna buffalo you can check it out but i've been reading a lot this week i've been reading the this new book the oral history of ESPN which i'm not the best book in the world but really interesting if your sports not like i am or just new broadcast me and stuff but that aside this device is awesome and it's awesome I think for two reasons or three reasons really won the new display eating pearl is great and the folks at Barnes & Noble did a lot of work under the hood to reduce the amount of flashing that happens when you flip pages and move through screens you can see that flash one of the things that is most frustrating to people who use e-ink devices but but Barnes & Noble really did a lot of work to minimize the flashing and it's great it makes for a smoother reading experience to the touch screen combined with the buttons make it really intuitive and easy to flip pages and also get around the menu system and then three this thing is so small and lightweight and inexpensive that it's really for me this is the first period where I've used or I don't care that it actually doesn't have you know web browser and a music player and that kind of stuff I just want to read with it because it's small enough to carry with one hand to throw in your bag to not worry about it and then you know you've got the whole thing with it you can shop right on it via Wi-Fi everything it's a great device I think barnes and noble did a bang-up job on this and so far the battery life's been awesome so there you go quick aside now to get back to the news last but certainly not least our own jon rettinger got his hands on the next generation of blackberries the blackberry torch to running the latest build of blackberry OS this thing is not on the market yet but John was able to get one had it for a little while did either bunch of photos and impressions of it but there's a video tour hands on video tour of the blackberry torch to on techna Buffalo definitely check it out if you're interested in the future of Lac very very interesting if you recall the torch not their first touch screen device that was the storm the ill-fated not so well-received storm at least by most people I know one mobile tech blogger who really liked it but at me not so much but the torch was interesting because it combined a touch screen in a vertical slider the screen slit up and revealed a full blackberry keyboard underneath so you kind of had the best of blackberry with the software and then the hard keyboard but then also the best of the new generation of smartphones with a full touchscreen the torch to takes that that whole formula refines it a little more power under the hood little more refined experience new build of the BlackBerry OS and very interesting to see what blackberry does the rest of the year especially now since I don't want to keep invoking Apple but I messenger may be a big deal poised directly to take on BlackBerry's blackberry messenger of witches you know according to some people kind of black BlackBerry's last foothold in the enterprise is what BBM can do that nobody else can do so interesting to see what blackberry does I to stay pace with the iphones and the androids of the world that are really just light in the mobile market on fire the torch to definitely one of the first steps towards that next chapter in blackberry history so check it out on TechnoBuffalo com exclusive hands-on video tour of the torch to with our own jon rettinger all right that'll do it for the rumor roundup for this week as always lots more over on the site and you can follow us on go to our Facebook page and like us follow us on Twitter and of course now you already know you can watch us on revision3 we are so psyched to be here every Monday Wednesday Friday ask the Buffalo whats the apps and rumor roundup I may have to change my name to John to fit in John Q John R and myself Noah we're psyched to be here thanks for having us rev3 and you all watching please let us know what you think how we can improve all that good stuff until next time we'll do the rumor roundup again next Friday I'm Noah Kravitz the site's TechnoBuffalo we'll see you later bye bye