he Android tablet wars are starting to heat up, and Acer has entered the fray with its Iconia Tab A500. Priced at $449--$50 lower than the iPad 2--this slickly designed 10.1-inch Honeycomb slate features a brushed-metal design and a full-size USB port, plus Nvidia's powerful Tegra 2 processor. But can this tablet stand out in a field that's already crowded with devices bearing the same OS and specs?
Design
Acer wrapped the Iconia Tab A500 in an Alpine Silver brushed-aluminum casing that extends from the back to the nicely rounded edges on the top and bottom (when held in landscape mode). It's a good look, but this slate is rather bulky. At 1.7 pounds, the A500 is 0.4 pounds heavier than the iPad 2 and 0.3 pounds heavier than the ASUS Eee Pad Transformer. Measuring 10.2 x 7.0 x 0.5 inches, it's not that much larger than the Xoom (9.6 x 7.5 x 0.5 inches), but the difference was noticeable. We found the tablet a little unwieldy when attempting to use it while standing on a subway platform or waiting in line.
We like that the A500's power button sits on the left side right underneath your thumb, glowing white when the tablet is on and orange when charging with the display off. However, the volume controls are on the top of the tablet, which makes them somewhat awkward to access. (ASUS puts its volume rocker right underneath the power button on the left side.) The top also houses an orientation lock switch and a microSD card slot, which has a cover.
One especially welcome feature on the A500 is a full-size USB port, which lines the right side of the tablet along with a microUSB port and power jack. The headphone and microHDMI ports sit on the left. The docking port on the bottom mars the smooth curve a bit, but not egregiously.
The only thing interrupting the smooth, glossy front glass is a 2-megapixel front-facing camera, brother to the 5-MP camera (with LED flash) on the back. Two speaker grilles flank the bottom.
Display and Audio
The A500's 10.1-inch, 1280 x 800 WXGA screen has an aspect ratio of 16:10 and good color depth. Brightness and clarity matched that of the Motorola Xoom, but the 8.9-inch T-Mobile G-Slate's display seemed a bit crisper when we compared the two side by side, and the iPad 2's display was far brighter. In some cases, too, the A500's screen was a little washed out. Among 10-inch Android tablets, some may prefer the IPS panel on the Eee Pad Transformer which promises wider viewing angles.
We encountered a curious issue with the A500: Whenever we laid it on a flat surface, the touchscreen struggled to recognize input. When tapping or dragging, the response was either jerky or nonexistent. Picking up the Tab or sitting it at an angle solved the problem immediately.
Powered by Dolby Mobile technology, the speakers on the lower back of the Iconia Tab pumped enough volume to fill a small room at around 70 percent. While playing Jill Sobule's "Cinnamon Park" and Zoe Keating's "Sun Will Set," we noted that the layers of music remained separate. The Dolby Mobile audio drivers allowed us limited equalizer settings for fiddling with treble and bass. When switched off, the audio quality dulled noticeably.
Software and Interface
The Iconia A500 doesn't promise the "pure" Honeycomb experience that the Xoom offers, but Acer didn't mess around too much with the user interface. On the home screen are four icons meant to help organize apps by type: eReading, Games, Multimedia, and Social. Pressing one leads to a sub-interface, where, just as with Android's Home screens, users can add and remove apps by tapping and holding. At the bottom of each screen is a desk with items on top representing that category. For instance, Games includes a ball and a Playstation-like controller, and Books has some books resting on top. Overall, it's a nice attempt to replicate the iPad's folders, but it's a little too involved.
By default, the home screen shows shortcuts to pre-installed apps and an interactive bookmarks widget for launching one of your favorite sites with a tap. A search box sits on the top left of the screen, and an Apps button for seeing all of your apps is in the top right corner. To add more widgets to any of the five home screens, change the background, and make other tweaks, just press and hold on the desktop or tap the + button.
As with other Android 3.0 tablets, the system bar at the bottom of the screen is persistent. That's where you'll find the Back, Home, and Recent Application buttons (which look like space-age line drawings) on the left side. The bottom right houses the notification area, where you can do everything from glance at incoming e-mail alerts and skip to the next song to adjust settings such as brightness. When you open an app, the Action Bar will appear, which presents contextual menu items at the top of the screen.
There have been many gadgets on the market, especially mobile clever air-smartphones aka Android OS, most of those who want to use the gadget has its own reasons, whether it be for business purposes, for social networks. Sometimes we are a bit confused to choose what we want Android smartphones, but there are factors that hamper. You can comparasi from various brands available. then I will give you tips for those of you who want to buy air-Android smart phone.
The point is if you want to buy Android is as follows:
Adjust your budget just got today.
See the specs clearly between the desired, certainly in the same android price range. (there are features such as wi-fi or other).
See the support of its service (depending on the vendor what would you choose).
See community support (no, no, developing, or already developed), this factor is quite important like you have a problem and want to solve, then just ask the community who was a senior.
See the updated version of the Android support, be it official or non official (affecting warranty).
Customize your need for your Android with their respective interests, whether Android is only used for routine (phone, sms, internet) from which you can later know which way the Android wants you later, you can adjust the budget.
So the point is before buying a smartphone Android, adjust to his needs.
A tablet computer is a type of gadget that is currently favored by most people . Some people will choose a tablet computer to support their work , while some others use it so he can remain mobile , whenever he needed it. Therefore do not be surprised if we can find it easily in the commodities market. On the other hand , some tablets are also sold at affordable prices , as well as a variety of applications that are each capable of supporting the work you are doing . On the other hand , various support services such as android tablet repair can be found easily through certain online resources as well .
In a broader perspective , tablet repair service is one of the supports which of course will facilitate you when it intends to repair the damage on your tablet computer . Here, you can access an online resource such as Sandiegopchelp.com , through which the latter , you will get different types of repair services such as : Acer Tablet repair service , repair service Amazon tablets , tablets Android repair service , Apple tablet repair service , HeroTab tablets repair service , HP tablet repair service , and many more . With a variety of service types , then you can certainly have a lot of options, including if you want to use one type of services such as Motorola tablet repair .
As the complementary , the emergence of computer tablet triggered by one brand called Apple Inc., in which through its tablet product, it has reached a broad market share . The fact had shown to us that Apple was first brand who introduced a computer tablet products to the public. The latter step, as we know, then followed by another provider , and in a short amount of time , the tablet became a popular commodity in the community . At this point , if you are a user of Apple tablet , then you could probably use a service such as remote mac services to secure your data and online identity .
Whether you need software repair, hardware repair/upgrade, liquid spill repair or tv repair san diego, San Diego PC Help is the best choice for you as they also have a remote support. Common laptop problems include malicious software, dead LCD screen, spilled fluids and dropped laptop. They are experts in their field, just like their "No Geeks. Just Pros." slogan. So, don't worry to use their service, you'll be satisfied.
Some of the shift was triggered by demographics that also revealed the low current share for Windows Phone 7. Although it has almost entirely replaced Windows Mobile on shelves, Windows Phone 7 had just one percent of the field and was tied with the defunct Palm OS for share. Nielsen's new division of share gave Windows Mobile the largest share outside of the top three at nine percent where HP's webOS and Nokia's Symbian were tied at two percent.
The stasis wasn't directly explained but corroborated NPD data that showed a slight drop in market share in the early spring. Most have attributed the slowdowns to the introduction of the Verizon iPhone. The second US carrier activated 2.2 million iPhones and may have blunted Android's growth by giving an option to those who wanted an iPhone but had refused to switch to AT&T. Apple's presence also took away Verizon's previously undivided attention to Android marketing.
In a step outside of its usual comparisons, Nielsen found that Android users were also the most data-intensive of platforms. An average owner used 582MB per month, significantly over the 492MB of an iPhone owner. The BlackBerry's compression helped it use the least of all at about 127MB a month, although it wasn't helped by its work focus, a historically poor web browser, and a lack of apps.
Both Android and iPhone users were far more likely than anyone else to download apps. The discrepancy may have been helped by the narrower range of multitasking on iOS, since users on that platform were overall more engaged in media streaming, music downloads, and other tasks that normally use a large amount of content. Blackberry owners were the least involved.
if you are familiar with previous Chatroulette and Omegle, which is a social networking site that allows anyone to chat with the person of his choice. You who like a social network, here I will bring you to a new site iMeetzu.com that is almost similar with Chatroulette and Omegle. However, iMeetzu.com also adds a social network so that users can save their favorite new friends. With iMeetzu you can chat truly broaden your horizons about Internet users.
Like Chatroulette, iMeetzu offers a more personal experience than a standard anonymous chat room because users utilize webcams to see one another. It’s amazing what you will see using the program as you will encounter people from all around the world of different ages, from 14 to 35. The word roulette in the service’s name is truly fitting as you never know if you’ll come out with a successful encounter or with an awkward experience you’d rather have forgotten.
Not only that, there are many interesting features such as Chat rooms to talk to your new friends worlwide, it's called chatroulette, yes that's true, you can connecting the world via chatroulette. You can also using your web cam to cam to cam chat, imeetzu.com also can be called as omegle, what does it mean? it means website which randomly connects you to an anoymous stranger in order to chat. So i think this is the most unique way to make friends online without being worried that you are being deceived.Are you ready start making new friends?meet your old friends?look for serious relationship?look for new business partner?so there is no doubt that this site is the right place to get those things.
Day one everything I heard about mobile development was performance, memory optimization, and battery consumption. Spread all over the internet are a variety of articles and presentations with a variety of [great] optimization techniques.
As with my previous posts on performance optimization I like to focus on the big gains and these techniques that are practical. I say practical because you can’t always spend a year working on each component and optimizing every interaction, but what you can do is focus on the big gains and when time permits – the details. I don’t mean to play down the importance of code optimization; especially for mobile applications optimization is of the highest importance.
In no particular order of importance let’s look at some excellent places for performance and memory allocation gains.
Keep framerate as low as possible
For anyone that hasn’t looked into it, the default framerate for the Flash Player is 24 frames per second. That means that 24 times every second new code is being executed, regions are being redrawn, and user interactions are being calculated. So it stands to reason that the quickest way to reduce memory consumption, code execution, and redrawing algorithms is to reduce the framerate and therefore the amount of times per second that all these calculations are being run.
What few developers know is that you can change your framerate dynamically dependent on what is happening within your application. The first recommendation is to set your framerate to something low but tolerable – like 4 frames per second. Then when a transition or other animation is going to play increase your framerate to keep your animation smooth.
stage.frameRate = 4;
Monitoring your framerate is very important as many flash designers want to ramp up the framerate to 60 frames per second because it will make the animations “pretty”.
Avoid timers
Each timer that you add and use in your application connects into the Flash Player environment and calculates time on each frame, thus adding additional computations on each frame for each timer you create. Real fast you can multiply these calculations if you aren’t careful.
To improve performance avoid high rate timers, this will reduce the amount of events being fired and the quantity of code being executed.
The second performance increase is to have one timer for the entire application. Think of it as a heartbeat for your application keeping the internal timing for all your functions. This will reduce the amount of timers you have and the amount of time calculations taken from the Flash Player environment.
Blends and Filters
It has long been known that as filters and blends cause for an extra amount of lifting from the Flash Player, lifting that can truly slow down performance. So where possible avoid blends and filters. “But I want to have a 2px drop shadow around this box.” Does it really need to be a filter? Can you not use a dark line that is 2 pixels thick? I know this sounds elementary but many people seem to forget that there are other more creative solutions that might get you to the same goal.
Cache As Bitmap
If you’ve been in the Flash Player world for a while you will remember the day you saw Adobe’s cacheAsBitmap presentation and how quickly everything rendered. My mind was blown and I had found my magic bullet to all my slow rendering woes.
Well not exactly. cacheAsBitmap is amazing and in many situations can be very helpful. How does it achieve it’s amazing win? By caching a bitmap off screen that can be used as opposed to needing to recreate the bitmap over and over again. The issue comes if you change the alpha/rotation/colors on your bitmap. Now the renderer needs to make a new bitmap to cache and you are doing extra lifting to cache and draw rather than just draw. What this means for you is if you are going to be making lots of alpha/rotation/colors changes then you might not want to set cacheAsBitmap to true.
myBall.cacheAsBitmap = true;
One other little used cache method is cacheAsBitmapMatrix. Similar to the cacheAsBitmap this will also cache the x, y, rotation, scale, skew properties. Keeping the Flash Player from having to redraw the object. Again, if you make any changes to alpha/color or the children sprites matrix the object will be redrawn and you will be spending more time and memory to cache an object that is constantly redrawn.
myBall.cacheAsBitmap = true;
myBall.cacheAsBitmapMatrix = new Matrix();
Asset Management
Asset management is extremely important with mobile because all those images can eat up memory quick.
First: Make sure your images are the right size. I’ve seen many developers take icons that are 40×40 and just resize them to 20×20 at runtime. I know this seems picky and obvious but this is a quick way to double your memory and hurt rendering performance with unnecessary calculations. Just make sure that images are set to their proper size.
Second: Don’t embed fonts/images/media you aren’t using. It’s easy to forget about all the items you are embedding. Be an asset nazi.
Third: Compress Compress Compress. Do you really need that high quality sound file? Or that PNG with the transparency layer when there is no transparency? Compress those media files. Use JPGs rather than PNG when possible. And if you are just trying to see the background through an icon, think or building the icon with the correct background already in the file. Transparency is another calculation that isn’t necessary if you can be sure of the end goal.
Don’t forget that images split by the power of 2 are going to be more efficient on memory than odd sized images. This can’t always be avoided by it’s good to remember. This is definitely a nit-picky thing.
“Make bitmaps in sizes that are close to, but less than, 2n by 2m bits. The dimensions do not have to be power of 2, but they should be close to a power of 2, without being larger. For example, a 31-by-15–pixel image renders faster than a 33-by-17–pixel image. (31 and 15 are just less than powers of 2: 32 and 16.)”
-From the Developing Air Apps for Android Guide.
Events and Bubbling
I’m really interested to see how Mate responds to this one. We’ve known for a long time that events are costly and that lots of events and event bubbling through deeply nested component trees can lead to bottle necks and performance issues.
A quick way to deal with these issues is to not bubble your events when possible and when you do need to bubble, stop propagation when the events have reached a point that they don’t need to bubble anymore.
event.stopPropagation();
Simplifying your display tree whenever possible is a great way to improve performance. Don’t do this for just the events but for your entire application.
One other thing you can do is prevent mouse events (that are set to bubble by default) from effecting children you weren’t intending. Try setting mouseChildren and mouseEnabled to false.
Drawing API
For you masochists that love to write out Actionscript drawings I’d take particular notice of this part. Watch out how much you draw dynamically because each drawing is drawn to the stage and then rendered in the rasterizer. When you build assets at authoring time your assets are rendered and stored in memory rather than created on the fly.
Color Selection
This gain is specifically to do with battery life. The color white takes more power to show than the color black. Am I saying to have all your applications look like tributes to The Dark Knight? Nope. Just giving your designers a warning that their decisions directly effect performance and battery consumption.
Embedded Fonts and Device Fonts
Android devices have fonts that are embedded within the system, these fonts will require the smallest amount of memory because it won’t require embedding any additional fonts and they render remarkably fast. Use these fonts when possible.
But what if you have a picky designer that has to have the fonts his way? Embed your fonts for the fastest rendering and follow best practices to limit the glyphs that you include with your embed.
You can find out what fonts your Android system has in the /system/fonts folder.
Garbage Collection
First off I think I need to say “stop running the garbage collection”. Yes developers, I know you want your application to clean itself up immediately. However, I’ve seen more than one app become sluggish because of an over worked garbage collector. So all those tricks that you’ve found to run the garbage collector, stop. The Flash Player runs the garbage collection when it needs to. If something isn’t going away the way you expect maybe you should check for other leaks caused by listener references or other common leaks.
Memory Allocation
Not enough programmers take advantage of Object Pooling. This is probably why I was impressed with PushButton Engine right from day one, everything is based off object pools. This is an easy and tested way to reuse objects and save your application from the costly ‘new’ function.
What do I mean by the costly new function? Whenever you use the “new” function and create a new object you are running a costly operation. Multiple things happen deep within the Flash Player including heap/memory allocation, garbage collection, and component creation. If you know you are going to be creating and destroying something frequently make the change to Object Pools early and save yourself the memory and performance woes.
A few months back I wrote another article doing a series of performance tests. I devote an entire section of tests to the “new” operator in Practical Performance Tweaks.
Video
This is something that your designers are going to hate: stop messing with the video player! All those crazy graphics, overlays, and blends that you may put over your video to add the grunge border will need to go. If you are worried about performance these are a quick way to cause redraws and layering calculations on each video frame.
When encoding your video thing of the final endpoint. Most devices have a native codec (usually H.264) that will help improve decompression and playback on the hardware level rather than the software level. Make sure to target these native codecs and see the performance and battery life improvement.
Show Redraw Regions
This is pretty low on the priority list but very important if you get it wrong. Flex visual components build off of the Flash Sprite class. As such they are interactive objects without animation timelines. However, when working with Flash based components, Flex developers often forget the MovieClip Class – the lowest class to include a timeline. This class can be set to run causing all sorts of redraws on each frame of animation until it is eventually told to stop playing.
When working with visual components from Flash or especially components that are based off of Movieclip make sure to stop the timeline when the component is not visible. Even when invisible the timeline is running and redraws are occurring. Using the Show Redraw Regions will expose this.
movieClipComponent.stop();
It is also best practices to look over your application as a whole and make sure that components aren’t needlessly being redrawn. This may be caused by a bad property or a misbehaving function. Check that only regions that change are actually getting redrawn for some pretty nice performance increases.
Open To Comments
I’d be interested to see where else others have seen visible improvements when using specific performance improvement methods. Feel free to comment! All the methods displayed above I have personally tested and seen the difference between using them and not using them.
Recently there has been a flood of Android based Smart phones in Indian market. The most of the Android phones in India is less than Rs. 15000 price range. These phones contain a lot of latest features like 3G, GPRS, dual camera, Video chat etc. The costs of these phones are also very low. I have given details about 10 such android based mobile phones.
1.Android Based Low Cost Mobile from Intex :
Intex is launching an android based Smartphone at a very low cost of Rs 5500. The Smartphone is expected to be released in February 2011. It will be running on Android 2.2 operating system and has a 3.2 MP front camera. Supports 3G, Wi-Fi, GPS and has expandable storage space.
2.Maxx MR440:
Maxx MR440 is an android based Smartphone from Low cost mobile provider Maxx we estimate the MA440′s price to be between Rs. 6,500 – Rs. 7,500. Runs on Android 2.1, has a 3.1’ inch touchscree and supports 3G, GPRS. Wi-Fi.
3.Micromax Andro A60:
Micromax Andro A60 is one of the cheapest Android based mobile from Micromax. Priced at Rs.8000, runs on Android 2.2 has a full touch screen of 2.8 inches. It is a dual sim phone ans supports Wireless connectivity via 3G, HSUPA, HSDPA, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth
4.Vodafone 845:
Vodafone 845 is an Android 2.1 based Smartphone launched by Vodaphone. Its price is around Rs 10,000 .Some of its key specifications are it has a 2.8 inch touch scree, 3.2 megapixcel camera , supports connectivity like Wi Fi , GPS HSPDPA.
5.LG OPTIMUS:
LG Optimus is a low cost android mobile from the Electronics giant LG. The phone is priced at Rs.11,000 and runs on Android 2.2 Froyo . It has a 1Ghz NVIDIA Tegra 2 Dual-core Processor ,a WVGA touch screen of 4 inches ,8 MP back camera and a 1.3 MP front camera
6.Videocon Zeus:
Videocon has launched it’s own low priced Android based Smartphone Videocon Zeus Evolve or v7500 at an affordable cost of Rs 12,900. It is powered by Android 1.6 and can be upgraded to Android 2.1 Eclair. It has a 5 megapixel back camera with LED is also flash and capable of HD video recording.
7.Samsung galaxy i899:
Samsung galaxy i899 is an Android based Smartphone from the electronics giant Samsung with a price tag under 20,000 Indian rupees. Has a dust resistant 3.2” touch screen with a resolution of 320x480 pixels. Supports Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, GPS and almost all video and audio formats.
8.Huawei U8300 and U8500:
Huawei is a Chinese mobile company that is launching cheap Android based mobile in India. It’s chief marketing officer, Mr Victor Xu said “With the Indian telecom industry growing at the rate of 20 million subscribers each month, and poised to reach 1 billion by 2015, Huawei sees traction in the Indian telecom device segment,”
specifications of Huawei U8300 are
•QWERTY keyboard
•Wi-Fi connectivity
•3.2 megapixel camera with LED flash
specifications of Huawei U8500 are
•Full touch screen
•3G, Wi-Fi, HSPDA and GPRS supported
•3.2 inch WVGA display
•3.2 megapixel camera
The cost of both these phones are expected to be around Rs 10,000
9.Huawei Ascend:
Huawei has also introduced the cheapest Android based mobile Phone called Ascend. It is costing only $149.99 in the US which works out to around Rs 6700 in Indian currency.
Specification:
•HVGA capacitive touch screen of 3.5 inches
•3.2 MP camera with fixed focus and digital zooming facility
•Has special Physical Android related buttons for Send, Back, End, Menu and camera.
10. Sony Ericsson Xperia X10 Mini:
Xperia X10 mini has an impressive 5 megapixel camera and is priced at Rs.12899. It has 2.5 inch screen size and a 3.5 hours talk time is just not a good bargain. Xperia is powered by Qualcomm’s 600 MHz processor.
