Day: June 21, 2010

“Techblog has carried out a most interesting test indeed to determine the readability of different screen technology in direct sunlight. For the test they pitted three handsets, each using a different technology for their displays, against one another in the glorious sunshine of Greece. The Samsung Galaxy S brought a Super AMOLED display to the table whilst the HTC Desire and the Sony Ericsson X10 brought an AMOLED and a TFT LCD respectively. One of the harshest criticisms of AMOLED displays has been that they suffer in direct sunlight and if you look at the picture below you can see instantly that very criticism when you see the Desire and X10 side by side.The X10 is noticeably more legible than the Desire, which is really pretty much unreadable, the icons on the screen barely showing at all. Look at the Galaxy S though, it’s looking pretty good sitting there and rivals the X10’s LCD display for clarity in sunlight. At times during the video there isn’t much between the Galaxy S and the X10 and Samsung look like they have cracked the sunlight problem for AMOLED screens. The only thing they have to do now is build more of them, but with the current supply problems and their factories operating at capacity that’s be easier said than done.” via mobile-review.com

“Symbian^3 is almost ready to fly towards the masses according to a tweet by Mark Skrebels, who is the Senior Release Manager and Chairman of the Release Council at the Symbian Foundation. His tweet stated that the OS is now ‘functionally complete’, which in layman’s terms means that it is now ready to go into the hands of OEMs, developers and networks for testing, evaluation and bug fixing. This isn’t a mass market release yet, but it is the step right before that as the community gets a chance to put the OS through its paces in what is known as the ‘hardening’ stage. Hopefully, and probably, this hardening period won’t take a huge amount of time. We say probably because the Nokia N8 is due for release later this year and it will be the first handset to run Symbian^3 so a time period of a fe months is likely for the hardening stage. There is expected to be an alpha version of the SDK released late this month with a beta SDK following at some point in August and the full on final version of the SDK hitting developers around October. That puts the actual release of the OS itself not too long after that, just in time for Christmas actually.” via mobile-review.com