For last few hours, we have talked about three Nokia Ashas and two Nokia Lumias which were all officially announced at the Nokia’s MWC 2012 press conference earlier today. Hence, now it is time to check out the final device that was also revealed at the event - the new Nokia808 PureView – which somehow became the star of the show.
Now, you might be wondering how come a device that runs on Nokia Belle (formerly known as Symbian) operating system managed to capture the most attention – in our humble opinion, of course - out of all six devices that Nokia announced at its MWC press conference. The answer obviously lies on its massive 41-MEGAPIXELS camera sensor. Yes, you are reading it right – FORTY ONE MEGAPIXELS.
Together with the combination of a high performance Carl Zeiss optics, Nokia claimed that the new 808 PureView is able to help anyone capture professional looking photos in any conditions. This is done through Nokia’s new PureView Pro technology which mainly revolves around a technique called pixels oversampling that packs up to seven pixels into one single pixel. The company claims that this technique is able to eliminate noise as well as improved low light performance as compared to their previous camera phones.
In terms of video, the new Nokia 808 PureView’s huge camera sensor enables it to shoot in full HD 1080p resolution at 30fps with 4x lossless zoom capabilities. In addition to the high quality imageries in both stills and video, the device also features the new Nokia Rich Recording technology - the first such Nokia device to feature it - which allows 808 PureView to record audio with CD-like output quality.
At the same time, let’s not forget about Nokia 808 PureView’s other hardware as well. Within its shell, the device contains a single-core 1.3GHz processor with 512 of RAM and 16GB worth of internal storage as well as a 4-inch display with a maximum resolution of 360 x 640.
While the huge amount of megapixels that are contained within Nokia 808 PureView’s camera have managed to generate significant amount of buzz and arguments (especially among photography enthusiasts), we prefer that the camera’s quality to be proven in real life which means that we have to wait until the device’s release in May 2012 before we get the chance to see it with our own eyes. Nevertheless, if you are already curious on how Nokia 808 PureView’s output looks like, you can download some sample images in this 31.8MB zip file provided by Nokia.
At this point we shouldn’t be more than a month and a half away from the Samsung Galaxy Note officialAndroid 4.0 ICS update, but how about getting a little preview of what’s to come? The first ICS 4.0.3 ROM for the phoneblet just leaked and we even managed to install in on a Note we had lying around and test it.
As you will see in a bit, the ROM is really stable and snappy and seems good enough for everyday use. All the hardware is supported, including the S Pen.
However, since it’s a Chinese release it comes without support for a Google account, which means no Android Market, so maybe it would be best if you wait for the official release or at least another leak.
Of course, one of the greatest bits about Android is that you can easily sideload apps, but you don’t want to be doing that all the time.
Now let’s move to the main course – the hands-on video of the new ICS ROM running on a Galaxy Note.Even though TouchWiz masks most of the visual changes that Android 4.0 brings, there’s plenty of new functionality here. The new web browser is a huge improvement in terms of both speed and functionality over the Gingerbread one, while the new recent task screen is both easy to use and nice to look at.
The notification area has also seen some modifications, including the helpful feature to remove notification by side-swipes. It also seems Samsung will have a couple of nice surprises for us. While digging into the setting mode we noticed two new options – the first of those enables the displaying of the battery percentage over its icon, while the other improves one-hand usability of the Note by making keyboards use just a part of its screen.
Sadly, the one-hand thingy only works in the calculator for now, while the battery percentage is not functional at all. The S Pen gestures are all here though, even though it’s a bit sad that the cool stylus got no new functionality.
If you want to give the ICS ROM a try, you should check out this topic over at the XDA-developers forum. The files required for the flashing are all there for the taking and you might find some helpful tips too.
As usual, impressions and questions are more than welcome in the comment section below.
The just announced Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 was kind enough to come by our office on its way to the MWC shelves. The latest Samsung slate is supposed to bring the Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich experience on the 10.1” screen, while keeping the price as reasonable as possible.
Before switching it on, you can barely tell the Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 apart from its predecessor, but the actual user experience is quite different with the second gen slate. The latest Android version feels way more polished than the transitional Honeycomb and you can tell even on a pre-release unit like the one we have here.
The Samsung Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 is actually a bit thicker (9.7mm vs 8.6mm) and heavier (588g vs 560g) than the original Galaxy Tab 10.1, which is a bit of a disappointment, but we are hoping this was only done to bring the price down and it will be worth it. It’s not that the Galaxy Tab 2 10.1 feels bulky – as we said it really looks the same, but one would normally expect next-gen devices to be slimmer and lighter, not the other way around.
Hopefully this got you warmed up for tonight. There are big announcements to come from Huawei, Sony and HTC in just a few hours, so make sure you hang around after 3.30 CET (GMT+1) or you might miss something.
All those people that secretly (or not) want to release their subsidized iPhone 4S’s from their respectful carrier’s clutches are in luck.
The popular Gevery SIM solution now covers the GSM 4S variant and can be pre-ordered for the discounted price of $55.
There’s a catch though – your iPhone 4S must be on either 5.0 or 5.0.1 and with a baseband of either 1.0.11, 1.013, 1.0.14.
There’s a video of the Gevery Ultra S working on a supposedly locked iPhone 4S. It’s not very good, they could’ve shown a couple of SIMs with the phone to really confirm that the tool works and the quality is really poor.
If you pre-order the Gevery Ultra S should ship between March 3 and March 7. Still consider the fact that this could not work for you and do your research before you take the plunge.
The serial port on our computers are with us for quite sometime now. It is more favored than the parallel port for interfacing with the outside world because it require lesser wires and can go farther distance and can even be used with newer technologies such as Bluetooth using its serial port capability. In this tutorial is a quick start guide in communicating with the serial port using VB.net without any previous knowledge.
Before we start, VB.net 2010 must be installed. The installer can be freely downloaded fromMicrosoft.
Start Visual Basic 2010 Express and you will be prompted with the Start Page Window
Select on New Project and select Windows Form Application and give the Project a name, in this case I named it Serial Port Interface.
A blank form will be displayed named Form1. This is the main form which will contain all other controls.
Click on the toolbox to show the controls, you may want to click on the pin to disable the autohide feature
Click on the form and change its name to frmMain (for easier identification specially when adding more forms). Also, change its name, in this case VB.net Terminal – Philrobotics. This name will be the one that will be displayed on the title bar. Since this program is only a small program, we can disable the Maximize button by setting MaximizeBox value on the form’s property to false.
Let’s start to add some controls to our form. From the common Controls, add (2) two labels, (2) two combo box and (2) two buttons. Change the text of the first label to “Com Port:” and the second one to “Baud Rate:”. For the combo box change its name to cmbPort and cmbBaud for the purposes of easier identification when we will add the codes to our controls. Also, change the text of the two buttons, the first to “Connect” and the second to “Disconnect” and change their name to btnConnect and btnDisconnect. As you can see, I use cmb and btn prefix to refer to combo box and button same reason as above, for easier identification.
Next, from the Containers add two Group box and change its text to “Transmit Data” and “Received Data”. Inside the Transmit Data group box, add a textbox and a button. Change the name of the textbox to txtTransmit and the button to btnSend, also change its text to Send. On the Received Data group box, add a Rich Text Box and change its name to rtbReceived. Lastly and the most important, add the SerialPort from the components.
Now, we come to the next part, adding the instructions to our program. To start coding double click the form or press F7 to view the code. To add a code to individual controls just go back to the designer view or press Shift+F7 and double click a control to add code into it.
click Ctrl+A, then Del. After that copy this below code :
Imports System Imports System.ComponentModel Imports System.Threading Imports System.IO.Ports Public Class frmMain Dim myPort As Array ‘COM Ports detected on the system will be stored here Delegate Sub SetTextCallback(ByVal [text] As String) ‘Added to prevent threading errors during receiveing of data
Private Sub frmMain_Load(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles MyBase.Load ‘When our form loads, auto detect all serial ports in the system and populate the cmbPort Combo box. myPort = IO.Ports.SerialPort.GetPortNames() ‘Get all com ports available cmbBaud.Items.Add(9600) ‘Populate the cmbBaud Combo box to common baud rates used cmbBaud.Items.Add(19200) cmbBaud.Items.Add(38400) cmbBaud.Items.Add(57600) cmbBaud.Items.Add(115200)
For i = 0 To UBound(myPort) cmbPort.Items.Add(myPort(i)) Next cmbPort.Text = cmbPort.Items.Item(0) ‘Set cmbPort text to the first COM port detected cmbBaud.Text = cmbBaud.Items.Item(0) ‘Set cmbBaud text to the first Baud rate on the list
btnDisconnect.Enabled = False ‘Initially Disconnect Button is Disabled
End Sub
Private Sub btnConnect_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnConnect.Click SerialPort1.PortName = cmbPort.Text ‘Set SerialPort1 to the selected COM port at startup SerialPort1.BaudRate = cmbBaud.Text ‘Set Baud rate to the selected value on
‘Other Serial Port Property SerialPort1.Parity = IO.Ports.Parity.None SerialPort1.StopBits = IO.Ports.StopBits.One SerialPort1.DataBits = 8 ‘Open our serial port SerialPort1.Open()
Private Sub btnDisconnect_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnDisconnect.Click SerialPort1.Close() ‘Close our Serial Port
btnConnect.Enabled = True btnDisconnect.Enabled = False End Sub
Private Sub btnSend_Click(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles btnSend.Click SerialPort1.Write(txtTransmit.Text & vbCr) ‘The text contained in the txtText will be sent to the serial port as ascii ‘plus the carriage return (Enter Key) the carriage return can be ommitted if the other end does not need it End Sub
Private Sub SerialPort1_DataReceived(ByVal sender As Object, ByVal e As System.IO.Ports.SerialDataReceivedEventArgs) Handles SerialPort1.DataReceived ReceivedText(SerialPort1.ReadExisting()) ‘Automatically called every time a data is received at the serialPort End Sub Private Sub ReceivedText(ByVal [text] As String) ‘compares the ID of the creating Thread to the ID of the calling Thread If Me.rtbReceived.InvokeRequired Then Dim x As New SetTextCallback(AddressOf ReceivedText) Me.Invoke(x, New Object() {(text)}) Else Me.rtbReceived.Text &= [text] End If End Sub
Private Sub cmbPort_SelectedIndexChanged(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles cmbPort.SelectedIndexChanged If SerialPort1.IsOpen = False Then SerialPort1.PortName = cmbPort.Text ‘pop a message box to user if he is changing ports Else ‘without disconnecting first. MsgBox(”Valid only if port is Closed”, vbCritical) End If End Sub
Private Sub cmbBaud_SelectedIndexChanged(ByVal sender As System.Object, ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Handles cmbBaud.SelectedIndexChanged If SerialPort1.IsOpen = False Then SerialPort1.BaudRate = cmbBaud.Text ‘pop a message box to user if he is changing baud rate Else ‘without disconnecting first. MsgBox(”Valid only if port is Closed”, vbCritical) End If End Sub End Class
After putting all the codes we are now ready to compile our project. To do this go to, Debug -> Build SerialPortInterface. If there are no errors, It will indicate Build Succeeded at the status bar.
The executable file of the compiled project is usually located at the bin\Release of the project folder.
To test if our program is working, short the TX and RX pin of your serial port and press F5 or click on the green triangle. Each data that we send must also be received by our program. In my setup I’m using a USB-to-Serial Converter and is allocated at COM18.
