Kev's Development Toolbox

November 9, 2011

Consumer Reports rate many Android phones better than the iPhone 4S

Whether you put much weight in the reviews in Consumer Reports or not, the fact that they operate independently of any company whose products they review and that they don’t accept any products they review as gifts (they buy every product they review) in order to maintain impartiality, plus the fact that they have over 7 million subscribers, when they rate one product over another it’s kind of a big deal.

Consumer Reports doesn’t ‘recommend’ the iPhone 4 due to it’s signal strength issues inherent in unfortunate design where it’s signal is killed by holding the phone in your hand. Small problem. The new iPhone 4S however they do recommend.

Here’s the kicker though, and one that may be an eye opener for some who are blinded by Apple’s great marketing – they rate a wide range of Android phones carried by AT&T, Sprint and Verizon, all HIGHER than the iPhone 4S. Yes, you read that right. Consumer Reports in their impartial and objective reviews recommend a number of Android phones with higher ratings than the iPhone 4S. Android phones rated high than the iPhone 4S include:

Samsung Galaxy S II
Samsung Galaxy Infuse 4G
LG Thrill 4G
Galaxy S II Epic 4G Touch
Motorola Photon 4G
Samsung Epic 4G
HTC Evo 3D
Motorola’s Droid Bionic
HTC Thunderbolt
LG Revolution
Samsung Droid Charge

… that’s a lot of phones to choose from that in their impartial review are better than the iPhone 4S.

November 9, 2011

First quad core Android tablet from Asus announced, running latest nVidia Tegra 3 chipset

It had to happen sooner or later. Dual CPU cores for tablets are now officially yesterday. Say hello to quad core tabets running nVidia’s latest Tegra 3 chipset. The interesting thing about this latest version of the Tegra system-on-a-chip is that it will use 1 CPU for ‘normal’ processing, and then an additional 4 CPU cores step in when needed for heavy lifting.

Asus have an updated version of their EEE Transformer named the Transformer Prime which will be running on the Tegra 3 chipset and available by the end of this year starting at $500.

November 9, 2011

Adobe announces intent to ditch mobile version of Flash

Given the recent fuss over mobile devices that do (Android) or don’t (iOS) support Flash, it seems an odd card to play for Adobe to announce that they’re no longer going to develop Flash player for mobile devices.

Personally, I don’t see this as a big deal. Sure it was nice to have the ability to play Flash video or some Flash-based games on my Android phone, but it certainly wasn’t ever a deciding factor that I have to have an Android phone because it supports Flash. In a way this is good move for the industry, since getting Flash off of a growing platform removes one more barrier from widespread adoption of HTML5. The interesting thing is whether this is just the first step for Adobe, and that ultimately they’re going to abandon Flash on the desktop too in the near future? As HTML5 adoption and usage increases, the relevancy of Flash will surely decrease. Maybe Adobe is coming to terms with this at this point, and this is just their first step to ramping down their overall support for Flash?

November 7, 2011

Android tablets a plenty. New Nook Color, Amazon Fire coming soon, and quad-cores on the way

There’s an amazing variety of Android tablets out there right now. Barnes and Noble are giving their press conference this morning on their new Nook Color, which they’re saying outdoes the coming soon Amazon Fire in terms of a media consumption device.

Things are about to start getting real interesting though with the new nVidia Tegra 3 chipset which is rocking quad cores. Given that the Tegra 2 is the current powerhouse for all the fastest Android devices, this one is going to be a rocket for sure. The latest eee Transformer Prime from Asus is expected to be the first tablet to be released with the new processor, and a benchmarking app has already showed up with records of benchmarked Transformer Prime running the new chip, and surprise surprise it’s multiple times faster than anything currently out there.