by Paul on March 14, 2012
I was lucky enough to get my greasy hands on a Nokia Lumia 800 recently to review. Up until a month ago I knew a whole sum total of one person who had a WP7 device; a HTC Trophy. I must admit, I was impressed with it, the OS was silky smooth and the apps had a really nice design to them utilising the paged appearance where the adjacent items can be slightly seen poking out of the right of the screen. As said, I liked it, however, I was a bit disappointed by the hardware though. The phone looked a tad boring with Microsoft obviously keep very tight wraps on even the hardware specs of the devices allowed to run the OS and HTC failing to inspire the world with the phone design.
So, move along about a year and I find myself un-boxing a nice shiny Nokia Lumia 800. From the packaging it's clear Nokia have aimed to produce a high end device. The packaging is small, neat and sturdy with the contents well organised. It seems the days are gone when phone packaging was the size of a shoe box. The accessories are all fairly standard, with some black headphones and a wall charger/USB cable. Here lies a small gripe though...the charger looks very similar to an iPhone charger. Now this isn't a huge problem, except the phone is black, the USB cable is black, the boxing interior is black and yet the mains charger is a small white triangle almost identical to the iPhone's. Why Nokia didn't you make it a small black triangle? Black is classy, it would have looked so much better! [click to continue…]
Apple has announced that the new iPad will go on sale at 8am local time on March 16 in 10 countries. The launch date has been known for the last week now as well as what countries it will arrive in. But, the 8am is the new piece of information here.
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I'm still not convinced this will happen, but Samsung has chimed in a little in a comment made about a possible smaller version of the iPad... commonly rumoured to be the iPad mini. The device is said to have a 7.85 inch screen and sit between the iPad and the iPod touch.
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It appears that Samsung is the sole provide of Retina displays for the new iPad. The report comes from Bloomberg that said:
Samsung Electronics Co. will supply the touch screen for Apple Inc.’s new iPad after LG Display Co. and Sharp Corp didn’t meet the U.S. company’s quality requirements, according to an analyst with iSuppli. Samsung, the world’s top flat-panel maker, currently is the sole vendor of the display for the 9.7-inch device, said Vinita Jakhanwal, a senior manager at iSuppli, a unit of Englewood, Colorado-based IHS Inc.
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Apple has announced that iWork.com will be closing on July 31 2012. When that date passes it will be no longer possible to log in and use the service. Any documents still in there will be gone.
Apple is now encouraging users to switch to iCloud. Full text below.
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The new iPad is expected to be delivered this Friday in several countries to those who pre-ordered in time. We are starting to hear some info that indicates some of the UK orders might be shipping a little later though with some readers of Macrumors getting new dates of March 20 instead of March 16 in their original email.
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In the UK, Apple has sold out of the first batch of pre-orders of the new iPad. The shipping estimate is now set at 2 - 3 weeks on all models in the UK.
For those in the US, there's still some stock available for delivery on launch day with most options showing March 16 delivery although a few of the AT&T models are showing March 19 delivery dates which indicates that plenty of people are pre-ordering.
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Apple has launched the next gen Apple TV. The new device is very similar to the older Apple TV that was just retired other than a few bumps in specs.
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Apple has released iPhoto for the iPad, iPhone and iPod touch. The new app allows you to browse, share and edit photos with the key being the ability to use multitouch to manage the pictures.
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Apple has uploaded a video of the iPad/Apple TV announcement yesterday. The keynote is about 90 minutes in length and is available to watch on the Apple website.
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Along with the iOS 5.1 update, Apple has now increased the download limit from 20MB to 50MB. The 20MB limit applied to any media or app downloads/updates that were done on the iPhone or the iPad on 3G/4G networks. The reason for the update is because the new iPad now has a Retina display which means graphics add quite a bit of bulk to the overall size of an app. Those apps that were close to the 20MB download restriction are now pushed to about 35MB which means that those who updated on the move would now need to update those apps over WiFi.
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After a few months of iOS 5.1 being in beta 3, Apple has now publicly released iOS 5.1. The latest version of iOS is available for the iPad, iPod touch and iPhone and brings several new features although Siri users might be left a little disappointed.
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