Tech QQ

The guys at Omio claim to have came over a large release schedule from the UK. In it are some interesting tidbits, including info about upcoming Windows Phone 7 devices.

All major manufacturers are claimed to be represented in the roadmap, and a varying setup of handsets.

The Windows Phone 7 related handsets seems to be a HTC Gold, coming out in November. And that's a bit later than the release in October that we were hoping for.

But there is also a device being released in October of which little is known, the HTC Ace. Now if we are really lucky the Ace might be their first WP7 handset. I guess all we can do is hope now...

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Check out the post at Omio here.
Check out more Windows Phone 7 handset info here.

HTC has released their quarterly figures, and they are looking good.

A few years ago HTC was just a small Taiwanese phone maker that few people had heard of. But with the rise of Android and all the good devices they have released for the platform, they are now a major force to be reckoned with. (Of course it's not only good Android devices they have made, let's not forget the mighty HTC HD2!)

This quarter the figures confirms what we already knew, HTC is doing good. The revenue reported at $1.9 billion are up by a whopping 58% compared to the same quarter last year. The net income also increased, but "only" with 33% up to $268 million.

With the awesome EVO 4G not yet released world wide, one can only assume business is going to improve for HTC.

And while we are at it, let's hope the HTC engineers outdoes themselves and trumps the EVO 4G specs with their upcoming Windows Phone 7 devices!

The previous week Futurama aired a funny episode, with some nice pokes at the gadget mania going on. And a few special pokes at a certain fruit related company ant their latest phone launch.

For you that missed it, here's a clip from YouTube(embedding not allowed unfortunately).

Above, installing the eyePhone in Attack of the Killer App.

During the week that passed rumors about HTC HD3 surfaced again. The below image was spread on a lot of blogs and tech news sites.This very same picture was circulating a few months ago, like three or so. It's made by a xda-developers forum member that goes under the name of NAK(see the lower right corner of the picture?).

Question is how all those tech blogs could re-post this and claim it being a leak possibly from HTC, even if they hadn't seen this three months ago?

The clues:
1. Spelling errors
2. HTC - simply powerful
3. NAK designs
4. 800*1280 screen resolution

Sure, all blogs post rumors that turn out to be faulty at times, but when you already have published articles about the very same content over and over again?

I have been moaning a good while that my old laptop is unusable, and talking of buying a new one. Yesterday I finally made good of my promise to myself.

My old laptop was from the early 2000's. I decided to reinstall it a few months ago and put Windows 7 on it. I also got a USB memory and used it for Ready Boost(I've written about it in a very early post in this blog). But in the end it just had to little memory to be usable for anything more than one program at a time. (And if I didn't want to multitask I could just get an iPad, right?)

After thinking a lot about what to get, going from the low budget across the spectrum to the high end gaming laptops. I finally concluded that what I wanted was a rig with 4GB memory at the very least, a decent processor and an SSD drive for rapid application loading and also to help with battery life.

As I want the laptop to code on I figured I didn't need any real graphics power, and the processor I felt would be good to have at least a dual core to if I need to test any multithreaded applications. So even though it would been nice with an core i7 processor, it felt like overkill.

Eventually I ended up getting an Acer Aspire 5739G. With a dual core 2.2GHz processor, the power felt acceptable, and it has 4GB memory as I wanted. The battery life was stated to be around 2 hours, which I felt was a bit weak. So the aim was to extend on those two hours. The machine itself was refurbished, and hence cost less than 25% of the listed price!

Before I even booted it I swapped discs in it, and replaced the drive with a Kingston SSD Now V+ 128GB drive. I gave a it a fresh Windows 7 install without all the crapware regularly being installed on laptops by manufacturers. And after a session of finding out some undervolting limits, I now have an expected battery life (at low processor usage) of over four hours!

I was a bit surprised that it wasn't faster when I was installing Windows and my developer tools. But I'm surprised at how fast it is to boot the OS and to load all applications! I must say I'm very happy with the performance, and I think it's about time to get an SSD drive for my gaming rig as well.

So now that I got my machine sorted, I no longer have an excuse for working on my Windows Phone 7 app, hopefully it will be done by release time :)

In an official letter Apple announced that the antenna issues are an illusion. The illusion is courtesy of faulty software and a erroneous formula used to calculate reception strength.

The sudden drop pf 4-5 bars that some people experience when holding the phone over the small band in the left lower corner, is only due to them not having good coverage to begin with. They do admit that there is a small loss of reception when holding the phone, but that the people that see those sharp drops already has a bad reception.

In reality the reception should only show a bar or two, and the drop should be a bar or so, but the faulty formula makes the phone show 5 bars instead of 2.

I'm guessing the Steve will put some developers in the dog house now...

Rumors of Google releasing version 3.0 of Android as early as this fall is surfacing all over the net. The largest focus is said to be on the user interface, and there is talk of Google making a lot of choices that Microsoft has been doing with Windows Phone 7.

The Gingerbread build is said to be requiring a certain spec from the phones it's going to be installed on, for instance a 1GHz processor seems to be one of those requirements.

There will most likely be a minimum spec for the screen as well, to help developers a bit and not force them to cater to every screen resolution released so far. Just like Microsoft is setting minimum specs.

It's also rumored that Google want to avoid the UI fragmentation going on in the Android scene where almost every manufacturer are delivering their own custom made UI. The way to do this is by focusing on providing a better stock UI, and then prevent device manufacturers from releasing phones with customized UI's. This is the way Microsoft is handling Windows Phone 7 as well.

This is of course something that will help regarding the time to market for the newer Android builds. Because as it is now, all manufacturers have to tweak all their added software and home cooked UI's after Google releases a new version of Android, which leads to longer time to market.

Rumor has it Gingerbread will be available as soon as October. The existing Froyo build is said to still be available, but kept as an OS for the lower spec range of phones.