tehkSEVEN Blog

This week was MacWorld 2010. By this week, I mean February 9th to February 13th. MacWorld was held in San Francisco, California, United States. Instead of Steve Jobs opening MacWorld with a keynote this year, New York Times’ David Pogue did.

There was still the same exhibit floor of new accessories for Mac products, like always. There were 11 total ‘best of show products’ this year at MacWorld 2010.  

A new mysterious Nokia has been rendered and uploaed to the interweb. This so called Nokia N98 looks to be an upgrade to the Nokia N97, and is said to feature a 4-inch capacitive touchscreen (similar to the Nokia X6) and 32GB of on board storage (similar to the Nokia N900). Interestingly enough, this mechanical ninja turtle of a device seems oddly similar to another rumoured Nokia phone, the Nokia N8.
 

Pictures of the HTC Legend gets leaked on the interweb. The Legend appears to be the successor of the rather popular HTC Hero and features many of the same features specs. However, the screen is rumoured to have been updated to a AMOLED screen, and the processor gets a tiny boost to 600MHz instead of the previous 528MHz. Another upcoming HTC device that gets mentioned would be the upcoming HTC Scorpion or HTC Olympian. There isn’t a lot of news about this device yet, but it is suspected to having a 1.5GHz Snapdragon processor and WiMAX capabilities. All of this and more in this episode of Phonage! All of the links, images, and videos can be found in the YouTube’s video description.

See you guys on Friday!

LG has been making brilliantly designed phones lately, but one which caught my eye was the latest LG Chocolate in the “Allphones” magazine. However, it doesn’t specify what model it is. But, I believe it is called the LG Chocolate BL40, and it has a stunning design. It resembles a chocolate bar and it’s tempting to buy, but of course it depends on the price. It has a surprising 21:9 ratio display, which is unusual to find on a smartphone. It features the S Class UI but it also features “Dual Screen User Interface” – meaning you can view two screens at once without switching the display. I am actually considering buying this phone to replace my Nokia N97 because the quality, aesthetics, and UI. I just really hope this phone is worth the price. The form factor is very nice – it is slim and it seems compact so it will slip in to your pockets very easily.
 

HTC rumoured Legend was spotted thanks to an ”anonymous tipster”. So far the pictures we’ve seen reveals that the phone runs HTC Sense UI. HTC appears to have slightly changed the Legend by adding aluminium to its back and front with the HTC logo embedded on the back cover. But this could all be a prototype, there is nothing official about the Legend yet.

Google Buzz is the new Google social networking service that is integrated with Gmail, Twitter, and other services. With Google Buzz, you can follow other’s status updates, much like Facebook, and comment on them and like them. You can also post pictures and YouTube pictures. Google Buzz is an excellent mobile location service and you can transmit your GPS location and area with your statuses to show where you are at the moment. Google Buzz can be used on every computer, plus all android devices, and the iPhone. In the future, Google Buzz will be able to be used on Windows Mobile, Blackberry devices, and the Nokia S60.

You can view more links related to Google Buzz in the description of the video located here.

Congratulations to Symbian!

The Symbian Foundation has successfully shifted Symbian from being a closed sourced platform to now an open sourced platform – “It is a significant milestone,” Lee Williams explains from Symbian Blog. The Symbian Foundation has done a brilliant job on getting the Symbian OS open, as they “have done so 4 to 5 months ahead of scheduled”. It was a plan that alot of people in the industry said could not happen. Symbian now delivers free source codes “Tens and tens of millions of lines of codes developed over 8 to 10 years” have all been migrated to open sourced, “given away to the world for free, for development, for advanced evolution” which was planned aggressively. The Symbian Foundation presents more codes than any other platforms.
 

The Apple iPad was quite a disappointment for most tech enthusiasts out there. The promise of multi-tasking, camera capabilities, and overall “netbook”-esque features kind of fluttered away when Steve Jobs demonstrated that the iPod was really nothing more than a glorified iPhone – minus the call feature. One of the things the Apple iPad is missing is flash support. However, this is intentional as Jobs has called Adobe, the owner of Macromedia Flash and Adobe Photoshop, “lazy” for continuously pushing for Flash when HTML 5 is the future. The relationship between Google and Apple has also gone a bit sour after the release of the Google Nexus One. Apparently, the word “Android” has become a 4-letter word in the world of Apple. According to the developers, applications with the word “Android” will most likely not get approved during the AppStore approval process. Wow..

All this and more in this episode of Phoneage. All of the news, videos, and download links can be found in the sidebar of the YouTube video. Stay tuned for Wednesday’s episode!

Welcome to TTM’s new series – Applications of the Month. Once a month, he will upload a video spotlighting a cool new applications he likes. This is the first episode where 2 free applications are spotlighted. These are both fantastic speech-to-text applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The applications are called “Dragon Search” and “Dragon Dictation.” Both applications are made by the developers “Nuance” and can be downloaded on the iTunes app store. For downloads links of these applications, please refer to the sidebar of the video located here.

The Google Nexus One gets a firmware update that adds OS wide multi touch to the device. Multi touch works in various applications in the phone, not just the web browser. So now Nexus One owners can pinch and zoom in photos and Google Maps, just like the Apple iPhone. It is notable that the zooming does not seem as fluid or “organic” compared to the iPhone. However, it is more than satisfactory, and can easily be improved over time. Various devices have also been recently hacked; such as the Nokia 5700 to run Blackberry OS 4.6 from the Blackberry Pearl Flip, and the Sony Xperia X1 to run Android 2.0.1. Last, but not least, would be the Nokia N900 “hacked” to programing a group of poll dancing robots! For more information, please check out the video – all of the news sources and video links will be the video’s description.

See you guys on Monday!