Samsung Electronics' Galaxy S 4G smartphone won the Best in Show award at the 2011 Cellular Telecommunications Industry Association Wireless Show, North America's largest information technology and telecommunications fair in Orlando, Florida, the CTIA said Wednesday.
The Galaxy S 4G was launched last month through T-Mobile in the U.S. It has same basic specifications as the original Galaxy S, operating on Android OS 2.2 Froyo, and sporting a 4-inch Super AMOLED screen and 5 megapixel camera, but it distinguishes itself by supporting T-Mobile's HSPA+ 4G network, which is supposedly capable of download speeds of up to 21Mbps.
Samsung has announced that its bada Apps store has crossed 100 million downloads yesterday. This is within 10 months of the bada Apps store going live in June 2010. While this is far from Apple s App Store or Google s Market, it is still quite an achievement, certainly a lot better than Nokia s Ovi store.
Samsung currently offers 13,000 applications for its smartphones with bada OS and of all the countries, France, Germany and Spain account for 40% of the downloads made from the apps store. To celebrate the 100 million download milestone, Samsung has started a weekly prize draw for Wave owners. Any person downloading an application from the store is automatically entered to win different prizes including Samsung Galaxy Tab, Samsung Galaxy Player or USB sticks.
On a side note, if you are wondering how Apple continues to ignore that Samsung is using the name Apps store for its applications market, while it chose to sue Amazon for doing the same, the answer is that Samsung does not call it the Apps store, but rather chose to call it A-Store initially and now calls it the Applications Store.
It’s official: 2011 is the year of incremental progress. Mobile handsets have settled into a groove featurewise and are now gently nudging their way upward in speed, power and capabilities.
If we’re going to be stuck in a climate of baby steps, at least Samsung’s Galaxy S 4G is an example of baby steps done right.
From the moment I got my mitts on the S 4G, something felt eerily familiar. I’d seen many of its elements before — the unsettlingly light chassis, the glass and faux-chrome accents, and even the flashless 5-MP camera. As it turns out, the feeling of déjà vu was completely warranted.
The S 4G is essentially a mildly tweaked Samsung Vibrant with a couple of extra goodies. For those keeping score, a lot of the Vibrant’s perfectly serviceable features (1-GHz processor, 4-inch 800 x 480 AMOLED screen, 720p video recording) are back.
So, what’s new? Android 2.2, for starters. Also, as the phone’s awkward moniker boasts, this handset brings T-Mobile’s particular brand of 4G (HSPA+) to the fold.
I honestly wasn’t expecting too much given the piecemeal rollout of this next-gen data network, but the difference was noticeable immediately. Heavy hitting image-rich sites like (ahem) Wired.com loaded with virtually no hesitation, and raining down large file downloads from Dropbox produced nary a stutter.
Converting the phone into a hot spot was also one of the more useful data-centric features, though the option is strangely buried within the menu tree. Samsung’s TouchWiz user interface has never been especially appealing, and this is another nail in that coffin.
Yet another addition is the S 4G’s front-facing VGA camera. Though it’s perfectly poised for video conferencing, I was a little underwhelmed by the options on the app side. Getting the service up and running is simple enough thanks to a preloaded Qik app, but the occasional stutter and noticeable lag left a lot to be desired.
Lack of polish aside, I can’t really fault the VGA camera in terms of functionality. I was able to make and receive video calls just fine. They just resembled fireside chats with Max Headroom.
Other goodies include a copy of Inception offered from Samsung’s Media Hub storefront. Normally I’m prone to ignore extras like this entirely, but watching the film on the S 4G uncovered some interesting tidbits. Due to the smart combination of a workhorse battery and a power-sipping display, the film’s hefty 2-hour-28-minute run time only slightly dented the Galaxy’s gas tank.
As the movie finished I noticed that only 20 percent of the battery had been depleted. It’s doubtful that I would ever force myself into a back-to-back four-peat viewing of Inception, but it’s good to know that Samsung realistically views the S 4G as an entertainment device.
If we’ve learned anything over the past year, it’s that incremental improvements are incredibly easy to flub. Even with our lingering gripes with the S 4G, we can’t give the phone too much guff.
Samsung managed to transform an already well-appointed blueprint into an even stronger contender. Sure, it’s not the overwhelmingly overhauled quad-core beast of our dreams. But even incremental progress still counts as progress.
WIRED Stronger iteration of a solid design. Mostly smooth navigation thanks to a humming 1-GHz processor. Great call quality. Awesome battery life and power management. Gorgeous high-def 720p video (in well-lit environments). Ready for downloads and app-tion thanks to an included 16-GB memory card (expandable to 32 GB).
TIRED Accessing the movie storefront requires a tedious login process. Bloatware aplenty. Where’s my HDMI out? HSPA+ service is fantastically fast (where available). 4G to 3G to EDGE handoffs are often slow. White backgrounds often produce the dreaded “screen-door effect.” Froyo is already old hat — give us Gingerbread!
iPad 2 by adamjackson1984 / Flickr (CC BY-ND)
Despite reports that Apple might have tapped Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to make Apple’s new A5 processor, Samsung fabricated the A5 processors currently powering the recently-released Apple iPad 2, a recent teardown by United Business Media’s (UBM) TechInsights reveals.
The conclusion was drawn by the firm after comparing the results of their teardown of the Apple A5 chip with previous results from when they studied Apple’s A4 processor.
Allan Yogasingam, a technical marketing manager for TechInsights, told UBM’s EE Times that TechInsight can “say with 100 percent certainty that this is a Samsung-made chip.”
According to TechInsights, which analyzed an A5 chip which came with an iPad 2 using optical die and SEM cross-section images, the A5 chip is able to use low power DDR2 DRAM memory and used the 45-nanometer fabrication process of Samsung.
According to the report by EE Times, a study done by IO Snoops revealed that the clock speeds for the A5 chip is also varied at about 890 MHz to 1 GHz.
In light of this, the iPad 2 is said to be utilizing advanced power management to regulate clock speeds of the A5 processor depending on how resource-demanding running applications are.
