Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini: No midrange slouch

Samsung's smaller Galaxy S4 Mini is lighter on features than the original flagship.

(Credit: Samsung)

If Samsung's Galaxy S4 is more phone than you think you need, the electronics giant has just offered up the smaller, more midrange -- and surely cheaper -- Galaxy S4 Mini.
Like a decaffeinated beverage, Samsung is hoping to give its lighter smartphone much of the same GS4 taste with just a little less oomph. Although the Mini has stepped-down specs compared to its flagship family, like a lower-resolution screen and an 8-megapixel camera instead of a 13-megapixel shooter, it's no slouch when it comes to the Galaxy S4's core features, like a built-in TV remote control.
As with the Galaxy S3 Mini that came before, this version is aimed more toward the mass market than the high-end sector. Here in the middle, the Mini plays the role of the lower price option compared to the marquee Galaxy S4, without sacrificing too many of the superphone's more defining features.
The CNET crew will first get our hands on the smaller smartphone in London at the June 20 launch event, and we'll have more thoughts to share when we do. Until then, here's what we know about the phone, and how it should stack up against the original Galaxy S4.

Design and build
Samsung's modest Mini is a wee bit shorter, thicker, and wider than the svelte Galaxy S4 but clearly cut from the same cloth. Like the round-shouldered original, the Mini retains its curved perimeter, metallic rim, and rectangular home button, and also comes in black and white versions.
Specifically, the global GS4 Mini stands 124.6 millimeters tall (4.9 inches) by 61.3 millimeters wide (2.4 inches) by 8.9 millimeters thick (0.35-inch) and weighs a lighter 107 grams (3.7 ounces, compared to the GS4's 4.6-ounce weight.) A 3G-only, dual SIM version will weigh a hair more at 108 grams.

The Galaxy S4 Mini has a 4.3-inch Super AMOLED screen. Inside is a 1.7GHz dual-core processor.

(Credit: Samsung)

The phone's screen quality is perhaps the first place you'll really notice the hardware differences between the Galaxy S4 and its little cousin. Don't expect the S4 Mini's 4.3-inch qHD Super AMOLED display to look as sharp at 960x540 pixels as does the Galaxy S4's 1,920x1,080-pixel resolution on its 5-inch screen. For all you pixel-hounds, that's a 441 pixel density on the Galaxy S4 compared with 256ppi for the S4 Mini.
Both Galaxy screens support the same color gamut and OLED display technology, though the Mini won't have the Galaxy S4's ultrasensitive, glove-friendly capabilities.
From the looks of it, the S4 Mini shares most of the S4 family's other physical attributes, including the location and shape of the camera, flash, sensors, buttons, and ports. It seems that the Mini sports the same subtle patterning as the GS4's finish.
OS and features
Importantly, the Galaxy S4 Mini runs Android 4.2.2 Jelly Bean underneath its TouchWiz layer. Custom interfaces like TouchWiz are notorious for stalling Android update efforts, so starting at such a current OS build is crucial for keeping a phone like the GS4 Mini from falling behind the times.
With TouchWiz comes a mountain of software embellishments, like more one-touch system settings in the notifications pull-down and options like Air View, which produces an onscreen cursor when you wag your finger close to the screen.
Samsung hasn't told us exactly which extras will take root in the Mini, but it's safe to assume that it's an almost identical software build as the Galaxy S4. Transporting its signature Galaxy-only abilities across devices is absolutely Samsung's style.
If software enhancements are your thing, the presence of these bonus features is one reason to pick the Mini over any other midtier device: you won't have the most powerful hardware, but you'll still hold onto features like Group Play, and Samsung's built-in apps. (For more on all these, check out this full Samsung Galaxy S4 review.)
I'm most gratified to see the GS4's IR blaster make its way onto the Mini. This little hardware bauble turns your phone into a TV remote control when paired with the WatchOn app. Top phones like the HTC One and LG Optimus G Pro share this soon-to-be living room staple, but the Galaxy S4 Mini will be the first of its class to also bail you out when your TV remote falls behind the couch.
As for connections and communications, Bluetooth 4.0 keeps the Mini current. NFC, which makes content-sharing possible with a tap, will make it onto LTE-enabled versions of the Mini. I'm not sure why Samsung isn't including NFC in non-LTE Mini handsets, but it likely has something to do with cost control for different markets worldwide.

Cameras and video
Although the Galaxy S4 Mini may not deliver quite the rich detail of the S4's 13-megapixel camera, Samsung is still gifting the "decaf" device with an 8-megapixel shooter, which is no resolution to sneeze at, especially the way Samsung typically outfits its camera modules. Expect high-fidelity images and smooth 1080p HD video.

The Samsung Galaxy S4 Mini's ports and fixtures show up in the same place as on the original S4.

(Credit: Samsung)

The 1.9-megapixel front-facing camera should also pull its weight for casual self-portraits and video chats.
Shutterbugs will also get a nice, large helping of Samsung's photo software, including panorama and HDR modes (that's high-dynamic range), night mode, burst shot, and several others that help pick the best of the bunch.
While the new Sound & Shot mode makes an appearance (that records an audio clip to narrate the still, but plays back only on GS4 phones,) the new dual-shot mode -- which uses both front and rear camera captures in a single picture -- does not.

Performance
While it's tough to guess how well the Galaxy S4 Mini will perform all around the world, the specs do tell a promising story. First up, there are up to six bands for global LTE support, plus HSPA+ 42 speeds, and 3G and 2G fail-safes.
LTE-ready builds of the Mini won't come to every market, but if you've got LTE phones where you live, that's the version you should expect to see when and if the handset lands in a store near you. Otherwise, you'll get a 3G version of the phone, and, in some markets, even a dual-SIM device. The double-barrel configuration has its benefits, but don't hold your breath for a dual-SIM Mini to hit every country (sorry, U.S.).
Now what about raw computing power? Unlike the superpowered quad-core or octa-core Galaxy S4, the GS4 Mini will pack a 1.7GHz dual-core processor under its hood. That's completely respectable, depending on the chipset's make and model, and I'll guess that most people won't miss the Galaxy S4's high-octane gaming speeds.
The phone's smaller screen size is one explanation for the Mini's 1,900mAh battery, which should still keep the phone charged during the peak hours of the day. Unsurprisingly, there's a smaller bank of storage on this lighter device -- 8GB, with closer to 5GB for the phone owner's content. However, a microSD slot holds up to 64GB extra.
In terms of RAM, The Galaxy S4 Mini splits the difference between the GS4's 2GB quotient and midrange device's 1GB capacity with 1.5GB RAM.

Which to buy: Galaxy S4 or Galaxy S4 Mini?
Without pricing or availability details from Samsung and its global partners, it's hard to make a value judgment about which is the better deal. (I'll update this Galaxy S4 Mini first take with that information as soon as Samsung loosens its lips.)
From the looks of it, the Galaxy S4 Mini has the ingredients to deliver a very solid smartphone experience at a more affordable price, though the screen quality and battery life could flag compared with the real S4 deal. More serious mobile gamers and camera snobs should stick with the fully loaded Galaxy S4.
That advice also goes for anyone who consumes a large amount of reading and viewing material from their phone screen. The GS4's, while fairly reflective, will still trump the Mini's lower-res display.
Still, if you like the sound of a surely less expensive device that keeps most of its key features, and you don't mind some toned-down specs, hold off for the moment until more information about the Mini pours in.
This handy chart lines up the GS4 and S4 Mini specs to help you decide whether to wait.

Read More

Acer jumps the gun with new S3 and S7 4th-gen Intel Haswell ultrabooks, 8-inch Win8 tablet at Computex

A small tablet, two ultrabooks and a new all-in-one round up Acer's hardware news from Computex in Taipei.

The Acer W3 Windows 8 tablet.

(Credit: Acer) 

TAIPEI--The time has come for PC manufacturers to start unveiling new hardware in association with Intel's forthcoming 4th-gen Core i-series "Haswell" processors, and some are doing it earlier than others. Acer, recently busy with their Star Trek-inspired Aspire R7 unveiling, have announced even more PC products: new 8-inch Windows 8 tablet, a second slim S3 ultrabook to accompany the also-updated S7, and a refreshed Aspire Z3 all-in-one desktop PC. Some of them feature Intel's newest fourth-gen "Haswell" processors. Here's the brief news on each.

The Acer Iconia W3 (picture above), outed via leaks over the last couple of months, makes its official debut. It's billed as the first eight-inch Windows 8 tablet, and bears a passing resemblance to the recently-announced Acer Iconia A1 7.9-inch Android tablet. Weighing 1.1 pounds, it's 0.45 inches thick. Running off a current-gen Intel Atom Z2760 processor (Intel's next-gen Bay Trail Atom CPUs won't be available until later this year), the $379 tablet runs full Windows 8 and has a 1,280x800 screen, 32 or 64GB of SSD storage, 2MP front and rear cameras, micro-HDMI and micro-USB ports, and a micro SD card slot that supports up to 32GB at a time.
Acer's clearly angling for productivity on a shoestring--the Iconia W3 comes with Microsoft Office pre-installed, and one of the press pics shows the W3 docked with an optional full-sized Bluetooth keyboard. The W3's available for pre-order in the U.S. starting June 4.

The Acer Aspire S3.

(Credit: Acer) 

The Acer Aspire S3-392 ultrabook (above) borrows from the design of the super-slim Aspire S7 released last year. Like the S7, it's also a 13.3-inch 1080p ultrabook, but goes more workhorse with Nvidia GeForce GT735M graphics and a larger non-SSD 1TB hard drive option. U.S. availability or pricing hasn't been announced, but the S3 does have the latest fourth-gen Intel Core i-series "Haswell" CPUs (specific models unspecified).
Just like the S7, its display bends back 180 degrees--but, instead of a Gorilla Glass back, the S3 is all-aluminum. It's a bit heavier and thicker than the Aspire S7, at 1.65 kg (3.6 pounds) and 17.8 mm (0.7 inches). Other features include a fast sub-one-second wake-from-sleep mode.
The new Aspire S7-392 touchscreen ultrabook is also receiving a fourth-gen upgrade to newer Intel processors. Acer claims a 33% battery-life increase thanks to the new CPUs, and there are other improvements including an optional 2,560x1,440 resolution display (same as the Toshiba Kirabook and similar to the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display) a new "electroluminescent" backlit keyboard.

The Acer Aspire Z3 all-in-one.

(Credit: Acer) 

 

Finally, Acer also announced an update to their all-in-one desktop PC, the Aspire Z3. A 23-inch 1080p IPS display and built-in Harman Kardon speakers suggest a push for AV enthusiasts, or at least an attempt to keep pace in a competitive all-in-one PC market. It's not clear what Intel processors the new Z3s will have, either. The Z3 should be available June 13.
Did you fall asleep a little reading this? Well, we did too. None of these products look to redefine the already fragmented Windows 8 landscape.

Read More

Play Google's Chrome Racer game across multiple screens

You can play Google's Chrome racer game across multiple devices right now.

(Credit: Jason Cipriani)

 

Did you see the multidevice game demo during the Google I/O keynote? If you missed it, running Chrome on several devices, Google was able to show a game taking advantage of every screen on the desk. By drawing a race track across all of the devices, various colored cars were able to race around the track, from screen to screen, device to device.
Thankfully, Google isn't keeping the game, called Racer, to itself. You can use Chrome on your Android or iOS device to play the game with friends and family members right now.
Before you begin playing the game, make sure everyone who's going to be playing has Chrome installed on his iOS or Android devices. Then everyone will need to visit Chrome.com/Racer or g.co/racer.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Cipriani)

Once there, you'll need one user to start a race and the other users to join a race. The user who started the race will have a short code for everyone else to enter and connect to the same race. The best part is, you don't even have to be connected to the same Wi-Fi network or a Wi-Fi network at all; Racer works across multiple devices over a cellular connection.

 

(Credit: Screenshot by Jason Cipriani)

 

Once everyone is connected and has picked a color, the race creator can select a difficulty level, and then you'll need to line up the devices using the onscreen instructions. After that, the race is on. Touch the screen to go, release to slow down or stop.

Read More

Google+ gives photo lovers what Facebook doesn't

Big changes are coming to Google+, with an impressive set of automated filters and hashtags announced at Google I/O 2013 taking square aim at photographers of all stripes.

Photos in Google+ will now auto-correct images, tweaking things like contrast, brightness, noise, and skin smoothing.

(Credit: Google)

 

SAN FRANCISCO -- Facebook has been the photo king since 2008, but Google just put the social network on notice.
Changes to the Google+ social network -- announced Wednesday at the Google I/O conference at the Moscone Center West here, and launching Wednesday as well -- include a new interface, some new Hangouts features, and most impressively, a series of automatic filters and hashtags for your photos. "Automatic filters," though, doesn't really do justice to how comprehensive they can be.

 

"Quite a lot [of the new automation] depends on the Knowledge Graph," said Dave Besbris, vice president of engineering for Google+, during a demo of the new Google+ features at Google headquarters last week. Google's Knowledge Graph is growing database of 570 million people, places, and things, and 18 billion facts. Previously, though, the Knowledge Graph had been limited in application primarily to text, not images.
Google+ claims 190 million monthly active users, with around 390 million total users when including people brought in from other Google services like Gmail.
"We can analyze the picture itself to see what it is. [The image filters are] not good enough to know that it's Mick Jagger, but it can tell that if there's a guy on stage with lights and a crowd, that then it's a concert," Besbris said. "It will tag [the photo] as 'concert'."
Layouts and Hangouts
The changes made to the Google+ Stream interface, Hangouts, and Photos are myriad and a bit complex in scope, but their impact on the social network's fans should be immediate. These are changes made by the new Google, focused on gaining popular appeal, not the old Google that would've made nerdier changes because they seemed cool but were largely unwanted.

The updated Google+ Stream design is what you'll see first, and it hints at the photo-editing powers the service has gained. It strongly resembles your Google+ Stream on Android and iOS. Instead of a single, centered column for your stream, you're presented with a Pinterest-style, three-column layout, assuming your screen is wide enough. If it's not, it'll scale down to two or one columns.
Google+'s layout has favored images since it launched in 2011, with large thumbnails accompanying posts. This hasn't changed, and has led to a lot of interest in the network from photographers looking for the kind of photographic-minded community that Google+'s Circles allowed them to build.
To further the goal of emphasizing images, the left-side nav bar has been moved to the top, and Hangouts are accessible through a green dialogue balloon with white quotes in it on the upper right.
They've been moved out of the way to clear space for higher-resolution video and photos to appear directly in your Stream, before you click on them. Posts basically look like Google Now cards, discrete units of information, which fade and flip out of the way or get bigger when you click them. They open large, consuming the horizontal center of your screen.
The Share box for creating a new post has been moved to the upper left, and bounces and moves the center of the screen when you click on it. It may sound a bit like the old HTML "blink" tag, although during a demo last week at Google's offices in Mountain View it appeared far less irritating than that relic of 1990s Web design.
Hashtags on posts have been moved to the upper right corner, so they're easier to see, but they're also now automatically added to posts. While you can still use whatever hashtags you want, which appear in a black font, up to three blue hashtags are added by Google based on context. Clicking either blue or black hashtag flips the post and shows connected posts in-line.
These Google-sourced hashtags can be removed individually from posts, or turned off entirely. And not surprisingly, the auto-hashtags leverage data from the Knowledge Graph.

Read More

Google pushes Android tablets for the classroom

The company's new education initiative takes a page from Apple's book and focuses on incorporating tablets into schools.

(Credit: James Martin)

 

Google's new education initiative, Google Play for Education, is designed to put more tablets into K-12 classrooms, the company said Wednesday at its Google I/O developers conference.
The new store launches this fall. It enables teachers deploy an app or an e-book to all of their students' tablets at once, and has apps that have been recommended by other teachers to make sure they are appropriate for specific ages and grades.
"Each app has been recommended by a group of educators," Engineering Director Chris Yerga said during the keynote. "This is key because teachers trust other teachers."
He said the company tested the new service with six elementary schools in New Jersey. Educators tried more than 500 apps in its early testing and Google is looking for more apps. The company will accept apps this summer.
Digitizing education has been a tough job for companies and schools because of the price of technology, but it's definitely an area of interest for tech bigwigs. Apple has worked to incorporate iPad tablets into classrooms, and it saw some success last year with iPad sales for schools beating PC sales.
Google, obviously, thinks its Google Play for Education will make more of a difference.
"Teachers told us in education there's a huge gap between what's possible in education and what's practical," Yerga said. "Then they told us it's Google's job to fix this."

Read More

The killer Google device I want: Chrome and Android, together

It may not be at this year's Google I/O, but we're getting closer: it's only a matter of time before Chrome and Android combine for a next generation of killer products.

(Credit: Google) 

 

SAN FRANCISCO--At this year's Google I/O developer's conference, a promise was made: Chrome on Android will start feeling more like Chrome on the desktop.
This is as it should be.
I've never understood why Chrome and Android function as separate environments. They're two sides of the same coin: Chrome handles superior cloud-computing and Web use, and Android handles the app-based, offline world: documents, physical media, and files. Chrome has excellent touch pad and keyboard support, and Android has touch. The two can use each other.
Actually, the lines are already blurring: the Pixel has a touch screen, and there are Android tablets with touch pads and keyboards. The more important work comes under the hood, though. What I want to see is a device like those that are all over the Windows 8 landscape: an excellent tablet/laptop hybrid that's Android and Chrome, all in one.
We're close, but we're not there yet. Microsoft has to be afraid of this proposition: it could beat Windows 8 at its own game.
Google hasn't formally announced that killer future product at Google I/O -- at least, not yet -- but giving out Chromebook Pixels to attendees is a clear message: the next development push is to Chrome and Chrome with touch. Demonstrations of Chrome working across multiple screens via a racing-game demo -- easily, one of the most exciting moments of the keynote -- show where this type of computing could go next. After that, maybe Android and Chrome will be well on their way to being one coherent ecosystem. It'll be a great moment when they are.
Or, perhaps we're already there. If Chrome really starts feeling the same on Android as it does on Chrome OS, then new devices won't be needed. They're already in everyone's homes. They just need to be knitted together.

Read More

Comparing BlackBerry Messenger with WhatsApp and Viber

BlackBerry Messenger is heading to Android and iOS this summer. We see how it stacks up against similar services WhatsApp and Viber.

 

 

At its BlackBerry Live conference in Orlando, Fla., BlackBerry announced that it's finally bringing its BlackBerry Messenger service (BBM) to Android phones and iPhones this summer. The app allows you to send messages and photos using your Internet connection, rather than using your text allowance.
It'll be going up against messaging apps WhatsApp and Viber, both of which offer very similar services and are already available across iOS, Android, and other platforms. I've pitted all three against each other to see which should take pride of place on your phone.

Read More