All New Gadgets Updates

Tablets are getting more popular as time passes by and many traditional desktop and notebook manufacturers are also headed that way. Dell is one such company that is also working on tablets and has their Streak line of products with a new Streak Pro coming very soon.

V3.co.uk spoke with Bryan Jones, marketing manager for Dell in the consumer and enterprise segment for EMEA and during the interview, he mentioned that tablets were just a temporary phase like they were some three years back. He said that tablets would make their way into offices but they wouldn’t eliminate PCs and notebooks as the primary computing device. He said consumer devices like tablets don’t have the security features available on a notebook or a desktop PC, so these devices could not find a place in such an environment. He also said that for good levels of productivity, you would need a desktop or a notebook. He said that corporate would use tablets but as a secondary device and that desktops weren’t going anywhere.

So you've bought an Android tablet and can't quite figure out how things work in this strange new desktop environment?

HTC has been in the Android smartphone business since the very beginning. They’ve managed to keep themselves at the top of the game and their latest smartphone, the HTC Incredible S, aims at pushing their stock a few steps ahead of the pack. So if you’re wondering if the Incredible S is a smartphone that you should consider shelling out your hard earned money on, here’s a closer look at the device that should help you make a calculated decision one way or the other.

Form Factor
The Incredible S is right up there with the slick looking handsets in the Android community. It’s all black contoured design looks very polished and even a bit rugged. The slightly protruding rear panel, although quite unusual does give the handset a better grip and a certain feel-good-factor about it. A subtle but very interesting aspect about the Incredible S are the touch sensitive backlit keys under the 4-inch S-LCD display (480 x 800 pixels, 16 million color, gorilla glass encased) that change orientation along with the UI. These keys look seriously funky and are easily visible from all angles and in all lighting conditions. The same goes for the display. Very innovative.


A 3.5mm handsfree socket is located at the top of the handset right near the power/screen lock button. A set of volume/zoom keys along with a universal (charge PC interfacing) micro USB port are located on the left side of the device.  A hot swap slot for a microSD card (32Gb supported) is located under the rear panel. Incidentally the Incredible S features 1GB of internal storage. An 8 megapixel AF/Touchfocus camera with Dual LED flash is strapped onto the rear while a secondary 1.3megapixel camera is located in front to support video calling.

Features and Performance
Interface
The Incredible S is equipped with a 1 GHz Scorpion processor and an Adreno 205 GPU but is, for now, not loaded up with Gingerbread so you’ll have to suffice with FroYo. Speed is however a non issue as everything from accessing menus and apps to multitasking is fluid. Android still hasn’t been able to offer users a smoother orientation transition from Landscape to portrait and vice versa. The iPhone has them all beat overall UI fluidity.

HTC’s Sense UI with SenseUI.com are truly designed to offer users a very hands on experience with an Android handset. Normally I’d swap the existing UI for something like LauncherPro to simplify usability and speed up overall functioning, but there was really no reason to do so with HTC Sense. It’s smooth and very layered with plenty of options like HTC Scenes that are preset version of the UI designed for a variety of uses – Work, Play, Travel, Social Networking etc. There’s also an option get more. Of course you can create your own according to your own preferences. HTC scenes are essentially themes for Sense UI. Specialised HTC Sense UI widgets, sound sets etc. are also available pre-loaded and downloadable make the interface extremely customizable.

Another interesting thing I noticed about HTC was the UI’s ability to remember and recall data like usernames, email address etc. making retyping them in some places quicker. This is what one expects from a ‘Smart’ phone. Simple things like pre-inserting ‘gmail.com’ when typing ‘g’ immediately after the ‘@’ symbol makes you appreciate the UI more. Needless to say, it was a pleasure to use on the whole.

Media
I’ve never had an issue with HTC’s audio quality for both calls as well as media. When it comes to media the Incredible S offers a wide range of services. From a very receptive FM radio that took less than 12 seconds to locate all 9 of our available stations and store them as presets to a video player equipped to handle DivX and XviD encoded files and enhance audio with virtual surround sound via SRS WOW HD effect settings, you’ll want for nothing. Well almost nothing. In this particular case the lack of Video Out via HDMI is sorely missed.
Audio quality via the native music player is excellent. Tones are quite in-depth with a resound thump in the bass line and well balanced higher and mid levels as well. EQ presets are also available for those looking to customise their experience to an extent. The player also allows you to connect to YouTube to watch videos of a track you’re currently listening to. With DLNA support you can also hook up the handset to a media server or other DLNA certified devices to stream media or share media.

The Media Gallery is designed to let you easily switch between your images and albums stored on your handset or memory card or those stored on cloud services like FB (YOURS AND YOUR FRIENDS albums), Picasa and Flickr. HTC has preloaded a very user friendly and easy on the eyes, ebook reader that includes quite a few titles pre-loaded and the ability to sign up, create and account and download more.

Connectivity
There are plenty of connectivity settings built into the Incredible S. Firstly it’s a 3G enabled (HSDPA, up to 14.4 Mbps) handset that works just fine on slower connections like EDGE or GPRS. You can also tether the handset to other devices or create a 3G Wi-Fi hotspot. I already mentioned DLNA support. GPS capabilities offer all of Google’s pre-loaded content from Maps and directions to Places and Latitude and more. HTC has also thrown in a ‘Car Panel’ app that also has a host of handy GPS enabled functions (integrates) to offer that include maps for India and other locations with directions, a digital compass and plenty more sub-options inside. Data might need to be downloaded so I suggest using Wi-Fi and not eating into data usage.

Social networking functionality is also very evident with HTC’s Friend Stream app and widget that combine FB and Twitter for am amalgamated listing of updates and simultaneous posting to both your accounts. Standalone apps for Facebook and Twitter (Peep) can also be used. HTC has also thrown in Plurk which is a consolidated app that pulls feeds, news updates and social updates into one neat app. HTC’s Hub and HTC Likes offer applications from the App Market and HTC’s online services that HTC believes would help enhance your Incredible S experience. It’s a bit redundant but doesn’t really hurt.

Bluetooth with 2.1 with A2DP + EDR and USB 2.0 make up the rest of the handsets fundamental connectivity solutions.
Misc. Features
In the extras I found that all the basics – Calendar (syncs with Google and FB), calculator, Alarm, world Clock, Adobe Reader and QuickOffice (editing and creating Word and Excel sheets allowed) are all present. A Stock Market application and News readers are also provided. Weather apps, Teeter (HTC’s favourite game), a Voice recorder and Sound Hound for music details are also thrown in. HTC has also included a Data Transfer application that allows you to transfer all of your important details from any phone to this one. It took unusually long though to transfer just the contacts from the Motorola MILESTONE to the Incredible S so it was much easier to just download it off of Google’s servers. Social networking integration between your contacts and your networks was a simple, noontime consuming and uncomplicated process.


Camera
HTC has started adding quite a bit of additional functionality to their cameras. A little special features option provides features like - Depth of Field settings, Distortion, Vignetting, Vintage options and more effects. Touch focus for both the still and video camera are also available. Face detection, Geotagging and other simple settings are all included. Image quality was quite good with focus that was quite sharp wherever selected or normally.

720p video recording @30fps with touch focus also worked out quite well and quality was once again, nothing to complain about.

Battery Life
The Incredible S’ battery was just one more asset with an average talk time of almost 7 hours on a single charge.  I was able to use the handset for a good two days with a few calls, social networking, music, messages, web browsing and emailing.

The Bottom Line
With a price tag of Rs. 28,000 (MOP), I can highlight just one issue with the HTC Incredible S and that’s the absence of HDMI and TV Out. At this price, HTC should have considered including it over and above DLNA. Other than that, the handset is loaded to the hilt with all kinds of useful and very relevant functionality, all packed away into a very appealing shell. But the lack of video out could be deal breaker for some. If you can get passed it, the Incredible S is a superb handset and defiantly worth the money.

With everyone changing phones frequently these days, data loss is possible, and in many cases inevitable. There is always a high risk of losing important data such as contacts and text messages in the process. In this workshop, we show you how you can take a complete backup of your important data, including phone contacts, text and multimedia messages, calendar data, applications, application data and settings, and settings for alarms, network, etc.

The backed-up data is stored in a separate folder on your SD card and can be restored on your new phone. The whole process takes a few minutes (depending on the amount of data and type of data selected). There are a few backup applications available online and presently two well-known utilities seem the most powerful - Titanium Backup and MyBackup Pro. While Titanium Backup features a lot more than just backup and restore, it is not as simple as MyBackup Pro. The two applications cost nearly the same. In this workshop, we’ll walk you through he backup process on MyBackup Pro.

Download and install MyBackup Pro from the Android market. Start up the application and you will be greeted by the home screen, which has all the necessary options — Backup to create backups; Restore to restore previously backed up files; Manage to view and delete stored backups; View to view stored backup contents; Schedule for scheduling automatic timely backups; and MyToolbox, where you can select system apps and non-system apps and clear their cache or data.

NOTE: MyBackup Pro will work on all Android mobile devices regardless of whether or not they have root access. Users who have a rooted phone can backup apps, individual data and settings as well as Market links.

To begin with, click on ‘MyToolbox’ and select the system apps you also wish to backup. This is purely optional as some users might want to backup their system apps and data too. Once done, go back to the main menu and click on ‘Backup’. Here, you have a choice to select ‘Applications & Media’ or just the ‘Data’. Select the ‘Applications & Media’ and the next screen will prompt you to select the destination for the backup files. Those who prefer ‘Online’ may do so, else, select ‘Local’, wherein MyBackup Pro will store the backups in a default folder ‘Rerware’ under the ‘/mnt/sdcard’ folder.

MyBackup Pro will scan all the apps in your phone and highlight ’Apps’ and Photos’ on screen. Since the photos are already on your SD card, we can skip them unless you want to back these up online. Remember that you get only 100 MB free space online for your backups and can purchase more if needed. Backups take up a lot of space, so select your backups accordingly. You can either select the checkbox that will select all apps or you can click on the pull-down menu to select individual apps. Once done, click ‘OK’ and the next screen will prompt you to give the backup a name. The next screen will prompt you for the type of backup you want. Select between ‘APKs, Data’ or ‘APKs + Data’ accordingly. The app will start backing up data content and storing it on the destination folder, which will take a few minutes. When it’s completed, a summary of the apps and their data and any other issues will be listed on the screen. If an app is not installed via the Android Market, you’ll get an error stating that the market link is not valid or available. This is normal.

That’s it! Your data is backed up and you can simply copy the contents of the folder to the other phone’s memory, or simply swap the memory cards. To restore, start the Android Market, download ‘MyBackup Pro’ and select the restore option. Follow the on-screen wizard and restore your data on the new phone. Using the scheduler option, you can create a rule to backup data automatically at a given time. Select the time and day for the backups and choose the number of data backups to keep.

For you Chrome browser fans that are also iPad users, since it won't look like Google will release a version of Chrome for the iPad anytime soon, there's iChromy. iChromy is an app that looks and feels like the Chrome browser with tabs on the top of the screen and an omnibox that will allow you to perform searches as well as enter URLs. Pages can be saved and read offline, as well as they can be sent to other third party applications like Facebook, Twitter, Instapaper and Diigo. Diigo is the creator of iChromy.

There are, as expected, some features that are missing from this tablet browser that others have such as the ability to set a web page to the homescreen. The speed and stability of iChromy, however, work pretty well which is useful for tabbed browsing. iChromy reloads tabs that need to be accessed dynamically to avoid memory issues with having multiple browsers open. The app is currently free but Diigo, the developer says that they will release a premium version of the app, with more features in the near future.

Search engine giant, Google has announced that '+1' is here and can be used by websites. +1 is Google's sharing system and what's interesting is that when a user clicks on the +1 on a page or an ad, that page becomes priveleged in relevant searches performed by their Google contacts. Google's already rolled out the +1 feature to websites like Rotten Tomatoes, Reuters and Best Buy, as well as to Add This, the service that consolidates all the various social networks in one application that you can add to your website. Other Google properties like YouTube, Android Market and Blogger will also have the +1 feature. The tab will appear right next to the Facebook 'like' tab and Twitter's 'tweet' tab.

Webmasters are welcome to add the +1 feature to their sites. To read more on that, click here. The whole point behind this feature, according to Google, is to allow easier sharing of content, as well as have more relevant search results. This second part, of course is a huge bonus for webmasters and is an interesting turn of events where users directly have some responsibility in relevance of search results.