In Hong Kong today, Google and Samsung introduced a new smart phone
and operating system that could represent a potential rival for Apple's
new iPhone 4S.
Samsung's Galaxy Nexus, which will go on sale next month, will be
the most advanced smart phone from the Korean giant. It will also be the
first phone to run Google's latest operating system, Android 4.0, also
known as "Ice Cream Sandwich," following alphabetically from the earlier
Gingerbread and Honeycomb.
Face time: Android 4.0 lets users unlock a phone through facial recognition.
The hardware includes a 1.2 gigahertz dual-core processor, a
4.65-inch HD Super AMOLED display at 1280 by 720 resolution, a
five-megapixel camera, HD 1080-pixel video, with one gigabyte of RAM and
16 gigabytes or 32 gigabytes internal memory. Depending on the region,
it will support LTE or HSPA+, two 4G mobile communications standards. It
has Bluetooth 3.0, USB 2.0, Wi-Fi, as well as near field communication
for payments and data sharing.
As for Android 4.0, rather a lot has been done to enhance the
operating system. Google's Android director of user experience, Matias
Duarte, showed off some of the new features. He began with the design of
the new typeface, called Roboto. This is a sans-serif font that was
specifically designed for small screens to make it easier for the user
to read.
One of the most talked about features of Apple's iPhone 4S is the
voice-operated personal assistant, Siri. At the Hong Kong event, Duarte
demonstrated text-to-type by talking into the Galaxy Nexus to send a
text message: "Hey, man. I'd love to talk right now, but I'm a little
bit busy. I'll catch up with you later period, smiley-face," with which
the sentence ended with just that: a period and then a smiley face. The
crowd of journalists gave him an ovation for that.
His attempt to show that Face Unlock, which is supposed to unlock the
phone when it recognizes the user's face, did not fare quite so well.
His partner tried to unlock the phone but failed, which is what was
expected. When Duarte then put his face up to the camera, it still did
not recognize him. He put that down to the "bright makeup" he needed for
the event.
He was quite successful with Android Beam—another crowd-pleaser. By
putting two Android phones back-to-back, a user could tap on the screen
of one to send content to the other phone. He did this with a Web page
as well as a Google Map and a photo.
Lan Lau, the director of Zip2Zap Communications,
a Hong Kong-based company that develops mobile applications and works
with both Android and Apple's IOS, said she was keen to use the new
Android OS as well as the new phone from Samsung. "The screen real
estate is better for building more complex applications, and we are very
much looking forward to building new applications that take advantage
of the new big screen."
In defining what Android is about, Andy Rubin, Google's senior vice
president of mobile, said: "We want to do better than what people are
referring to as smart phones today. So we take all the innovation that's
available at Google—everything we offer in cloud services—and make it
available on your cell phone 24 hours a day."
Analyst firm Gartner recently said that Android was number one in the
second quarter of 2011, with 46,775,900 units sold (43.6 percent of the
market). Symbian was second with 23,853,200 units sold (22.1 percent)
and IOS was third with 19,628,800 units sold (18.2 percent).
By Danyll Wills, Hong Kong
From Technology Review
0 comments:
Post a Comment