via Scoopertino.
CNNMoney: According to IDC, Apple’s share of the U.S. smartphone market share increased 12.3 percentage points to 29.5% in the first quarter of 2011. Android’s share on the other hand dropped from 52.4% to 49.5%. Needham’s Charlie Wolf:
In our opinion, this is just the beginning of Android’s share loss in the U.S. The migration of subscribers to the iPhone on the Verizon network should accelerate this fall when Apple coordinates the launch of iPhone 5 on the GSM and CDMA networks. The iPhone could also launch on the Sprint and T-Mobile networks.
The dual-display could be a huge productivity enhancer for a blogger like me: source on the left, post on the right.
Nokia Conversations: The Nokia N9 sports a 3.9-inch AMOLED display that looks like it will provide an exquisite visual experience. Another component that I’m very interested in is the camera. The N9 packs a Carl Zeiss Tessar lens. This isn’t the first collaboration between the two companies; the N73, N8, N86, N90, N95 smartphones all had Carl Zeiss optics. Most will agree that the iPhone 4 has one of the best camera system of any smartphone so I’m not so certain to what degree a Carl Zeiss-branded lens impacts photo quality.
Apple has realized that a hard key provides a better actuating experience than a soft key. With iOS 5 the volume up key will act as an actuator, a feature first seen on the original Camera+ iPhone app. I’m actually quite excited. Nokia is going the other direction: the company has removed the excellent half-pressable hard key and now is going with a soft button and continuous auto focusing. I think Nokia is making a big mistake here.
One area where the N9 beats the iPhone 4 is image capturing speed. From turning on the camera, getting the viewfinder ready, focusing on the subject, and finally capturing the image, the N9 takes just 2.6 seconds. The iPhone 4 takes three seconds; the HTC HD7 takes 8.3 seconds. From the chart above it looks like the N9 is even faster than the Canon S95. The image capturing speed of the N9 is impressive but that soft-button only actuator will seem “old-school” when iOS 5 comes out.
Lytro, a Silicon Valley start-up, unveiled its plan to commercialize a light field camera.
What is a light field?
It is the amount of light traveling in every direction through every point in space – it’s all the light rays in a scene.
So how does it work?
Recording light fields requires an innovative, entirely new kind of sensor called a light field sensor. The light field sensor captures the color, intensity and vector direction of the rays of light. This directional information is completely lost with traditional camera sensors, which simply add up all the light rays and record them as a single amount of light.
The two main benefits are: no fuss focus and speed.
Click away. Shoot first, focus after. That’s right, after. You can’t miss.
From sleep to snap in under a second. Instant on. Bye-bye shutter lag.
According to Ren Ng, Founder and CEO of Lytro, the company will commercialize a price competitive light field camera that will fit into a pocket later this year.
The screen resolution on Apple’s new iPad would be about one-third higher than that of the iPad 2 and will boast a more responsive touchscreen, one of the people said.
The current iPad sports a 9.7-inch 1024×768 LCD, which translates to a resolution of 131.96 ppi. About one-third higher would be about 171 ppi. The corresponding pixel format would be either 1280×960 or 1400×1050, both 4:3 aspect ratios. This doesn’t make sense.
Reason #1: How would Apple market this new display? It isn’t Retina-worthy. HD could be one, but why would Apple focus on just one aspect of the display (HD video) when the iPad is geared for almost anything. I think it’s Retina Display or nothing when it comes to a higher-resolution display on the iPad.
Reason #2: The developers will have a helluva time. Brand new apps would look fine. Any updated apps will require two versions. Old apps would look terrible. And the overall result would be a mess. Tightly coupled with Reason #1, I think Apple will double the pixels horizontally and vertically. The resolution would double to 263.92 and the pixel format would be 2048×1536. Developers will be happy, apps will look great, and the user experience won’t suffer at all.
Would driving 2048×1536 pixels require too much resources? I don’t think so.
Reason #1: With more pixels on the same display light transmittance decreases. Yes, if you use the same TFT. But LG Display (LGD) has already announced production LCDs called NOVA that makes use of Fine Black Matrix technology. This reduces the TFT lines from 9 microns to 7. Thinner TFT lines means more light transmittance. So the backlight won’t need so much brighter, which also means it doesn’t need to consume that much more power.
Reason #2: 3M introduced new optical films that simplify the LED backlight unit (BLU) structure, reduce the number of LEDs needed, and improve light transmittance.
Reason #3: LED manufacturers have continued to improve light output while maintaining or reducing power consumption.
Reason #4: The Apple A5 chip is up to 9x the performance of the A4. Let’s assume the new Retina Display requires all of that 9x performance gain. That just means we’ll end up with performance that’s only like what we experience on the original iPad. I can live with that.
There are probably more reasons, but even from my limited knowledge there is very little reason why a 9.7-inch 2048×1536 Retina Display cannot be driven without much of a performance hit, which if any would have almost no meaningful impact on the user experience.
Now does this mean a Retina Display-equipped iPad would start at US$499? Probably not. I think Apple will bifurcate the iPad line and introduce an iPad Pro.
An N-finger translation gesture is detected on or near the touch screen display. In response, the page content, including the displayed portion of the frame content and the other content of the page, is translated to display a new portion of page content on the touch screen display. An M-finger translation gesture is detected on or near the touch screen display, where M is a different number than N. In response, the frame content is translated to display a new portion of frame content on the touch screen display, without translating the other content of the page.
This describes how single, multi-touch, and gestures works on a capacitive touch display. Apple was awarded patent #7,966,578. Implications for the competition could be huge.
The Leica M9-P now features an extremely scratch-resistant, almost unbreakable, sapphire crystal cover for its LCD monitor display. Sapphire crystal is one of the world’s hardest materials and so hard that it can only be worked with special diamond-cutting tools. The antireflective coating on both sides of the monitor cover glass further improves image reviewing, particularly in unfavorable lighting conditions.
Gorilla Glass by Corning probably wasn’t good enough. I’d love to see a cover glass made with extremely scratch-resistant, almost unbreakable, sapphire crystal adorn an iPhone.
Supreme technology. Timeless elegance. US$7995.
Yesterday we made a code update at 1:54pm Pacific time that introduced a bug affecting our authentication mechanism. We discovered this at 5:41pm and a fix was live at 5:46pm. A very small number of users (much less than 1 percent) logged in during that period, some of whom could have logged into an account without the correct password. As a precaution, we ended all logged in sessions.
In other words, for almost four hours anyone could have logged into any Dropbox account with any password. Maybe I am overreacting but I don’t have any patience for cloud-based service security issues like these. I’ve deactivated both of my Dropbox accounts. And that means I’ve deleted PlainText from my iPhone; I will be using Pages instead. I hope iCloud is drop-dead robust.
The Clear Black AMOLED display is truly a sight to behold, with stunning viewing angles, a curved Gorilla Glass front, and some pretty excellent (for AMOLED) performance out in the sunlight. We compared it side by side with a Super LCD-equipped Incredible S and the N9 more than held its own. The screen is easily one of this new phone’s great strengths, though we’d argue the intuitive UI, responsiveness, and eye-catching industrial design are pretty high up on that list too.
The Nokia N9 sports a largish 3.9-inch OLED display called Clear Black AMOLED. The bit depth is eight so you get 16 million colors and the pixel format is a respectable 854×480 with a 16:9 aspect ratio. There is an anti-glare polarizer that helps viewability out in the sun. The display seems to be excellent, but.
Four and a half years after Apple announced the iPhone, Nokia has now announced a worthy rival. And it’s based on the Meego OS that apparently is a dead-end, as the company prepares to focus on Windows Phone 7.
Why Meego? Why now?
Update:
We wanted to design a better way to use a phone, and it comes down to one simple gesture – a swipe.
Check out the “Nokia N9 design story” video that shows the concept of “just a swipe away”.
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