If you envision Ice Cream Sandwich — the latest iteration of Android — as a revolutionary update that satisfies every single one of your geeky lusts, we sure hope you’ve been aching for a photo editor.
It appears that AndroidPolice has hunted down a variety of icons and logos presumed to be associated with the feature, but it’s not certain if these will actually appear in the final build. The icons hint at a smattering of image editing tools: crop, sharpen, flip, rotate and a selection of 19 possible photo effects are among the options.
Again, this is highly speculative, and rumors such as these will likely ramp up as we approach the official announcement. ‘Course, we won’t scoff at the idea of a native photo editor in Ice Cream Sandwich, but we’re sincerely hoping this won’t be the coolest thing about the new OS at Tuesday’s announcement in Hong Kong.
Mozilla’s director of engineering Jonathan Nightingale has informed the Firefox community that future versions of Firefox for Android will get a native UI instead of the current XUL-based interface.
According to Nightingale, the native UI will allow Firefox to achieve better startup times, reduce memory consumption and become much more responsive. The mobile browser has been heavily criticized for its generous memory consumption and slow startup in the past.
Of course, this change will ring in another round of discussions that will center around add-on support. Nightingale said that the change to a native UI is still in its early days and there are talks with the Add-on SDK team how support extensions. While this could be another painful switch for developers, Mozilla stresses that its discussions are open and that it welcomes participation from the community.
There is no information when the new UI will be available. According to Nightingale, Firefox 8 and 9 will still ship with the XUL and tablet UI.
How did you spend your weekend? If you’re Apple, the answer is simple, really: selling a whole lot of iPhones. Cupertino this morning announced that iPhone 4S sales have reached four million — quite an impressive number compared to what its predecessor was capable of, a fact no doubt helped by the addition of some carriers, like Verizon and Sprint here in the States. The handset is currently available in the US, Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Japan and the UK, with plenty more countries coming by the end of the year. Whatever happens, Apple has supposedly upped its order from manufacturer Pegatron, increasing its original shipment request by 50 percent, up from 10 million units to 15 million.
AMD may be unveiling its first 28 nm graphics chips before the end of the year. Industry sources told Germany’s heise online that AMD is targeting December 6 as a launch date.
There was no information which architecture these new GPUs will be based on, but there appears to be reason to believe that AMD may be unveiling performance desktop boards, which will become available in very limited quantities in December, heise said. Due to 28 nm transition problems, it may take some time until there is enough supply to meet demand.
If heise’s sources are correct, then we assume that the announcement in December will be about AMD’s Southern Island GPU family, which is expected to be called the Radeon HD 7000 series. We are expecting these GPUs to use Rambus’ XDR2 DRAM memory instead of GDDR5, MIMD instructions instead of VLIW, support for PowerTune as well as x86 addressing and Partially Resident Textures.
TSMC reportedly increased its pricing for 28nm products as it noticed substantially higher demand than the company initially expected. Xbit labs speculated that TSMC’s capacity for 28nm wafer production is only 7000 to 10,000 units during the current fourth quarter.
Over in Japan, automakers – working with partners – as well as companies in other industries are researching technologies to improve the performance of storage batteries for use in both vehicles and homes, according to a report.
Toyota is one of these; working together with the Tokyo Institute of Technology and the High Energy Accelerator Research Organisation, the automaker has come up with a prototype next-generation storage battery that’s based on a solid core instead of a liquid one. Because it doesn’t have an easily combustible liquid core, the new-gen battery doesn’t require fire-retardant materials, which will allow the use of a simple structure to lower costs.
The battery can easily be processed into sheet form, and is able to store several times the amount of electricity, volume for volume, than the current generation of electric vehicle batteries, its developers say. The extra capacity could thus enable a higher maximum driving distance per charge for compact EVs to around 1,000 km, from the 200 km or so now, the report added.
Toyota and its partners aim to further improve the battery and commercialise it sometime in 2015 to 2020, and adds that the tech can also be used to design compact, home-use storage batteries.
Meanwhile, Mazda – together with Hiroshima University – has come up with a new electrode material that it says can boost battery capacity by roughly 80%. The material, which is based on molecular spheres of carbon measuring several hundred nanometers in diameter, can approximately halve a battery’s weight but maintain the same levels of storage capacity. Mazda says the new electrode material is likely to be commercialised in about five years.
Besides the two automakers, electronics giant NEC says it has developed a lithium-ion battery with an electrode that uses manganese instead of cobalt, which is more expensive. It has also altered the composition of the battery’s electrolyte and improved its durability, making it possible for the unit to be recharged 20,000 times.
This will make for the development of household storage batteries with a 13 year life span, compared with seven to eight years right now – NEC is looking at getting the durability up to 20 years, and have the battery out into the market in five years.
I can’t think of a single thing I’d rather F1 engineers doing with their downtime than building grills designed with F1 dynamics in mind. They only thing that could make Brennwagen grills more desirable would be guns to shoot your meat while you cook it.
Former F1 engineers Florian Wagner and Daniel Ernst got together to create these wonderful meat-burning machines. They’ve got “low profile tires, drop-center rims, center nuts [and] safety brakes,” and the top-of-the-line GTX 1500 looks a smidge roomier than my first car. The smallest grill, the GTC 500, is diminutive enough to pass as a piece of carry-on luggage, and would probably be enough to give your local TSA agent a mild stroke.
Brennwagen’s site isn’t super-clear about the prices, but they do offer this lovely illustration of how they think trucks deliver will the grills.
Right, the video above is a report from Hong Kong, and is Cantonese, so let us rephrase what’s being reported. Well apparently AT&T, Rogers, and Vodafone are selling iPhone 4S unlocked straight out of the box, which is different from the case of the original iPhone 4 that came locked last time.
The first batch of iPhone 4S that arrived on Hong Kong is fresh from Australia, and they’re already selling like hot cakes in the open market. A woman has just bought two unit of iPhone 4S at a staggering price of HKD 23,600, which is about MYR 9,525 or USD 3,034 if you’re from the states. That’s about USD 1,500 for each unit!
Also, a person from mainland China has just paid HKD 860,000 for 82 units of iPhone 4S. Suddenly, I’m thinking that these retailers are actually making more profit out of the iPhone 4S compared to Apple.
Now here’s a funny fact. She knows of the staggering price, but she thinks it’s worth it because the 4S is much faster than the previous model and comes with more feature. I’ll bet that she’ll cry in disappointment when she realizes that Siri can’t understand her terribly broken English. What’s more, she’s calling the phone the iPhone 4GS instead of the iPhone 4S, which just proves that the common crowd is so clueless of what they’re buying.
When the video was recorded, the price of the iPhone 4S goes like this. A 16GB unit is priced at HKD 10,800 (MYR 4,359), while a 32GB unit will cost you HKD 12,300 (MYR 4,964), and the 64GB will cost you HKD 13,800 (MYR 5,570).
According to the retailers, in average there’s a profit margin of HKD 4,000 (MYR 1,600) for each unit of iPhone 4S that they sold. Another dealer said that he sold 250 units in less than an hour, which is about HKD 1,000,000 (MYR 128,577) profit in an hour! I guess I’m in the wrong field. The retailers mentioned that more units are coming in from Canada this Monday.
Mozilla’s director of engineering Jonathan Nightingale has informed the Firefox community that future versions of Firefox for Android will get a native UI instead of the current XUL-based interface.
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