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Posts Tagged ‘waiting’

GameStick delayed until August while waiting for user UI feedback

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GameStick first appeared around the the first of this year, promising its Kickstarter supporters an Android gaming console that looks more Roku Streaming Stick than OUYA. Since then, GameStick has gathered its cash and started shipping out dev units, but its commercial release has already been delayed once, and today the project got pushed back another month. That means that GameSticks won’t start shipping until early August.

The reason for the delay is that the device’s UI remains a work in progress and the team hasn’t yet given backers who pledged $ 300 or more the chance to provide feedback. It’s not all bad news, however, as the folks behind GameStick have confirmed that manufacturing tooling is complete, and the first Kickstarter controller has rolled off the line. Not only that, but you can see shots of the final versions of the GameSick itself and its controller’s charging dock at the source link below.

Filed under: Gaming, HD

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Source: Kickstarter

People Photoshopped Into Ad While Waiting At Bus Stop

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Author: Jamie Colby

Okay so I’m a little late to the party on this one and it looks the keg is kicked and all the pretty girls have left, but in case you haven’t seen it, this is a video of a pair of dudes in a van taking pictures of people and Photoshopping them into an ad at a bus stop while the people are sitting there waiting. Pretty clever, but if I saw a picture of myself getting Photoshopped into an ad while I was sitting there I would have yelled ‘Government spy program!’ and thrown myself into traffic. ‘The Case of the Photoshop Killers’ the media will call it.

Hit the jump for the video.

ASUS ‘We Transform’ Computex teaser leaves us waiting for more teaser videos

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Author: Brian McKinnell

Just like last year, ASUS is filling time before the Computex trade show by posting teaser trailers. Sporting a “We Transform” tag, its first one for 2013 features the spun metal casings, touchscreen laptops, convertibles, tablets and phones we’ve become accustomed to from the company. So what’s next? The video doesn’t appear to provide any hints, however the press page linked below includes a countdown to ASUS’ press conference June 3rd, and blank spaces for four more videos to come. We’ll keep an eye out for anything else that fills in the blanks (US release info for the Transformer Book would do the trick), check the video after the break to “transform your expectations of technology.”

Filed under: Laptops, Tablets, ASUS

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Source: ASUS

Netflix will switch from Silverlight to HTML5, explains what it’s waiting for first

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Author: Jenny Zhao

Due to Microsoft’s confirmation that support for its Silverlight plugin will end and the increase of plugin-free web browsers, Netflix will at some point should stream to Computers utilizing something various other than the tech it’s had in place considering that 2008. The business has already executed one example of the innovation for Samsung’s ARM Chromebooks, and prepares to bring it to Chrome on Computers and Macs ultimately. Right now, it’s awaiting several W3C initiatives it’s been working on called the HTML5 Premium Video extensions that handle things like video quality and DRM support to be fully implemented. As soon as the last one (Web Cryptography API) is readily available, it can ditch the custom-made API plugin it’s currently making use of and start checking on Computers and Macs. Not discussed, is any support for various other platforms like Linux, although Netflix states it cannot wait up until the attributes are “executed in all web browsers!”

Submitted under: Home Home entertainment, Net, HD, MicrosoftCommentsSource: Netflix Tech Blog

Study: viewers have no patience for buffering, abandon videos after two seconds of waiting

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Author: Brian McKinnell

Gagnam Style YouTube

It’s hardly a surprise that viewership drops the longer it takes for a video to buffer, but a professor has actually evaluated information from 6.7 million distinct visitors to attempt and place some numbers with the trend. According to a paper published by professor Ramesh K. Sitarman of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, viewers start to abandon a video after a 2 2nd delay, with six percent fading away per second after that. Relying on what kind of user you are, that may seem a bit low, but that could be due to the kinds of videos that Sitarman analyzed. The teacher considered videos under 30 minutes long as “short”– we ‘d presume that your ordinary minute-long YouTube video clip would lose far a lot more users per second of buffering. As shown in the …

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Nintendo reports continued first-half losses for 2012, is waiting on the Wii U

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Author: Jon Mitchell

Nintendo’s reported its economic results for the first of half of the year, and things are still a little rocky. Net sales in the last six months have actually lowered 6.8 percent contrasted to the very same point last year, while net income continues to drop, this time by 27,996 million yen. As of September 2012, Nintendo has now sold over 22 million 3DS systems (3 million more since last quarter), while the Wii remains just shy of the 100 million turning point, settling at 97.2 million devices offered. Nintendo looks to be in a similar position to last year, with consumers still awaiting the services’s next big console to appear– and the gamesmaker wishing they will. Laying blame at the tough yen, the services has actually dramatically cut its projection for the rest of the year, down from 20 billion ($ 250 million) to 6 billion yen ($ 75 million), pinning its hopes on 3DS sales ahead of the Wii U’s worldwide launch later on this year.

Filed under: Video gaming, NintendoNintendo reports continued

first-half losses for 2012, is hanging around on the Wii U originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 24 Oct 2012 03:59:00 EDT . Please see our terms for use of feeds. Permalink|Nintendo|E-mail this|Remarks

Google updates PageSpeed Service so you don’t waste precious seconds waiting for pages to load

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Author: Randy Miller

Last year, Google launched its PageSpeed Service, aspiring to improve our experience across the web while supposedly deferring its own monetary interests. The idea was sound– comparable services like Akamai work to accelerate web surfing by caching pages in much the exact same method– but there’s always room for improvement. The most recent PageSpeed beta utilizes some straightforward techniques to enhance performance even further, using a new rewriter called “Cache and Prioritize Visible Material.” Using this new device, your web browser will certainly load content that appears “above the fold” prior to bring text and pictures that would certainly be initially hidden on the page, while additionally focusing on other material ahead of Javascript, which often isn’t really required as quickly as even more standard elements. Finally, for pages that contain HTML that isn’t cacheable, such as when customized info is returned, common portions of the website are cached and featured right away, while additional content bunches typically. The brand-new tool isn’t really an ideal fit for every webpage, but we’ll take a boost anywhere we can get it.

Filed under: InternetGoogle updates PageSpeed

Service so you do not waste valuable seconds awaiting web pages to load initially appeared on Engadget on Sunshine, 05 Aug 2012 11:30:00 EDT. Please see our terms for usage of feeds. Permalink TechCrunch|PageSpeed, Google Developers Blog|Email this|Remarks

Botiful Is The Telepresence Robot We’ve All Been Waiting For

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Author: Stefanie Jenkins

We ’ ve seen a few telepresence components in our day, featuring the amazing AnyBot, but this little person resembles it could make life at the office a little less odd and a little more bearable. It ’ s basically a little telepresence platform for your Android phone (if the developer, Claire Delaunay, nets $ 100,000 she ’ ll make an iPhone version) that strolls around and lets you chat with people in the vicinity. Think of it as a little robot canine wearing your face.

The early robot cost is $ 199. To communicate with the bot, you just call it through Skype after downloading the appropriate software. Movement controls allow you to move Botiful around the workplace, room, or under and around challenges. Delaunay encourages utilizing it to play remotely with pets and/or children and to see difficult to reach places like a crawlspace or dungeon.

Interestingly, $ 399 gets you a Botiful dinner with Claire herself. You ’ d phone call in remotely, of course, and you men could possibly chat about Botiful in Silicon Valley from the comfort of your home desk chair.

The robot will certainly can be found in red, white, and blue and she ’ s searching for $ 90,000 to tool up and start shipping. I, for one, welcome our dinner-having, small-motor-powered, Android-based overlords.

Project Web page

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Samsung Galaxy S III Review: This Is The Phone You’ve Been Waiting For

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Author: Laura Clark

Short Version

The Samsung Galaxy S III is the Android phone of the moment and in many ways it lives up to the hype. Plenty of folks are excited to see this thing hit store shelves. Our take? They won’t be disappointed.

Stellar software features paired with a beautiful display and specs that can compete with anything else on the market makes the Galaxy S III nothing short of a total delight. Physically it’s not much of a looker – the plastic case feels a bit chintzy – but generally you’re looking at the best of the best.

Features:

4.8-inch 720×1280 Super AMOLED display
Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich
Samsung’s TouchWiz overlay
S-Beam/NFC
2GB of RAM
1.5GHz dual-core processor
8MP rear camera (1080p video capture)
1.9MP front camera
4G LTE at available carriers
MSRP: 16GB is $ 199 on-contract, 32GB is $ 249 on-contract

Pros:

Tons of cool software like S-Beam and Buddy Photo Share
Beautiful, large display
Solid battery life

Cons:

The plastic feels cheap and grabs prints
TouchWiz is heavy and ugly

Long Version

Hardware/Design:

As I briefly mentioned, the Galaxy S III is made almost entirely of plastic, save for the Gorilla glass coating its face. The design is meant to be inspired by nature, which seems silly considering all the plastic. There isn’t a straight line in sight, with rounded corners and tapered edges.

The plastic along the back has a brushed look to it, but it feels slick and grabs up prints. The blue version is worse than the white, though, with the white version simply clinging to dirt, dust and other unsightly particles while the blue just loves the smudge.

The phone is incredibly thin (.34-inches), considering the size of the display, and with a weight of 4.3 ounces it feels a little too light. You know — the cheap kind of light. Again, we come back to the plastic.

Now, I understand that building this phone out of metal or some other (more premium) materials would have made ease-of-use a bit more difficult. There are multiple radios in this guy, along with an NFC chip, and almost everything runs smoothly. With a metal frame, the same smooth ease-of-use would be far more difficult to achieve.

An elongated home button sits just below the display, with a volume rocker on the left edge, lock button on the right, and a 3.5mm headphone jack on the top left corner. The camera is square on the back of the phone with a speaker grill on the right and LED flash on the left. MicroUSB access is on the bottom.

Software:

The Samsung Galaxy S III is packed with software features. To start, the phone runs Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich, with Samsung’s TouchWiz UI slapped on top. I’m not a huge fan of TouchWiz in terms of aesthetic (I much prefer pure Android ICS), but at least the custom overlay comes with a few helpful tidbits like resizeable widgets and navigational shortcuts in contacts.

But that’s nothing compared to the things Samsung has done with NFC and WiDi (WiFi Direct).

For one, Samsung has introduced a new way to make some money, called TecTiles. TecTiles are essentially stamp-sized NFC stickers, and work with any of Samsung’s NFC-equipped phones, allowing users to program specific tiles to do various actions when tapped. So a TecTile on my night stand may set an alarm and lower the ringer volume (in preparation for sleepy time), while a TecTile on my front door may connect me to my home WiFi network. The service works well, and the only real complaint I have about TecTiles is the fact that they cost $ 14.99 per a pack of five.

Another NFC-friendly feature is Samsung’s S Beam. It works similarly to Android Beam but functions over a greater distance, letting users share content in seconds without a WiFi or cell signal. This includes the sharing of photos, videos, music, web pages, etc.

In my experience S Beam worked well and transferred content rather quickly between devices. The main concern is just how much use S Beam will get. Sure, the Galaxy S III will be a popular phone, but that doesn’t mean that everyone in a given group of friends is going to go buy one.

The GSIII also comes loaded with Samsung’s new GroupCast feature, which syncs Galaxy S III devices so you can share a PDF, PowerPoint, or photo gallery presentation. The feature seems like it would be helpful for workers in the field or out of the office, especially considering that Samsung is offering an enterprise-friendly version of the device. It even lets users make marks on the presentation, though I wouldn’t consider this a collaboration tool since the marks disappear relatively quickly and can’t be saved.

The phone features Samsung’s cloud-syncing/sharing service AllShare Play, letting users share content on any AllShare-connected devices like Galaxy tablets, DLNA-capable TVs, set-top boxes and Blu-Ray players, as well as Samsung’s Smart TVs and Windows PCs running the AllShare Play app. This lets users pull files that are stored on home devices and throw a movie from their Galaxy S III to the TV.

Along with these major features, the Galaxy S III also has some small touches that make it a much easier device to use. Things like motion controls (tilting the phone to zoom in on images, or panning the phone to move icons from one home screen to the next) seem a bit arbitrary, as it’s just as fast and seamless to tap to zoom or slide my finger across the screen to rearrange icons. However, features like the ability to lift the phone to your face while in a text message conversation to initiate a call makes sense. The phone also dims brightness when it’s set down, saving you battery, and gives a little extra alert when you’ve been away from your phone if you’ve missed a call or message.

The biggest disappointment in software (and let it be known, I’m seriously impressed with the feature set offered here) is S Voice. It’s essentially a Siri competitor, allowing you to make commands with your voice. To start, it’s not as smart as Siri when it comes to hearing natural language (“show me the nearest burger joint” confused the heck out of it). Second, it has less functionality than Siri. It’s a fine feature yet it just seems like a copy that isn’t done quite as well. (And trust me, that’s not to say that Siri works well by any means).

Pop Up Player, which lets you continue playing a video in a smaller window above some other task, is also a smart feature as multi-tasking becomes ever-important to us. Flipboard is pre-loaded on the device, as are plenty of carrier apps.

Camera:

The camera on the Galaxy S III is lightning fast, though I can’t say I’m totally blown away by picture quality. Compared to photos taken with my iPhone 4S, everything shot with the Galaxy S III seems washed out and drab. Luckily, there are plenty of different scene modes, focus settings, exposure, ISO, white balance, and various effects that should help you find your way to the image you want.

But perhaps to make up for the less-than-impressive picture quality, the Samsung Galaxy S III camera has a few software surprises that are sure to delight. There is burst shot, which takes up to 20 photos at a rate of 3 pics per second and best shot, which snaps eight images and automatically offers you the best one based on criteria like blinking, smiling, lighting, etc. The Galaxy S III will also let you take still images as you record 1080p video, and has an HDR mode.

More importantly, the GSIII camera has a shooting mode called Buddy Photo Share. It recognizes faces in images and lets you tag them with the contact’s name. From there, the phone will always recognize the difference between John Biggs and Matt Burns and let me share photos with them straight from their name-tag.

Share Shot is another important camera feature, as it allows you to share photos as you take them with up to five GSIII devices through WiFi Direct. So let’s say you’re at a birthday party with your friends and want to make sure everyone can enjoy the pictures later. Simply open up Share Shot and connect with the devices you want to share with. From there, every photo you take will appear in their galleries too until you choose a different shooting mode.

All in all the GSIII camera has quite a few tricks up its sleeve, but if it’s simply a beautiful image you’re looking for, you may need to keep looking.

Comparison shot between the Samsung Galaxy S III (left) and the iPhone 4S (right):

Display:

You really can’t go wrong with this display. Samsung’s HD Super AMOLED screens are the best out there, and at 4.8 inches there’s plenty of super crisp content to enjoy. Blacks are deep, colors are bright, and there’s really no differentiation between pixels. In fact, the 4.8-inch display has 306 pixels per inch, making it one of the largest pixel-dense displays I’ve ever seen.

Past that, there’s the size of the display to consider. Nudging up against the 5-inch mark, the Galaxy S III display is much bigger than I’m comfortable with. But the key to slapping giant screen on a phone and keeping it comfortable is device and bezel thickness. The phone is already super thin, allowing even smaller hands to grip the device solidly.

But the bezels of the Galaxy S III is what really saves the day. They take up less than half a centimeter on each side, allowing a huge screen to fit on a relatively comfortable phone. The rounded corners and curved edges also help with grip and performing one-handed actions.

Performance:

HTC has been kicking ass lately when it comes to benchmark testing, but there’s a new sheriff in town. The Samsung Galaxy S III beats out every Android phone I’ve ever tested in all three tests we run. In Quadrant, which tests everything from CPU to memory to graphics, the Galaxy S III scored an impressive 4911. The HTC One S comes in second with 4371, while most other phones (including the Galaxy Note) stay well below the 3000 mark.

Where browsing is concerned, the Galaxy S III pulled in a score of 103,780 compared to the One S’s 100,662. Compared to most phones, however, the GSIII wins by a long shot as we usually see scores around the 60,000 mark.

And as a testament to both the phone and the power of AT&T’s 4G LTE network, I can safely say that this phone is fast. We saw an average of 9.6Mbps down and 8.39Mbps up, which is excellent. I have yet to see the Galaxy S III have any issues in terms of performance, which says a lot considering that this phone is going above and beyond in terms of both hardware and software. I can’t tell you how grateful I am for that second GB of RAM.

Battery:

Here’s the deal with battery life. The Samsung Galaxy S III has a 2100mAh battery, which is fairly large compared to other phones on the market. Be that as it may, all the extra features that make the Galaxy S III amazing (like the NFC and WiFi Direct stuff) end up tugging pretty vigorously at the battery. Pair that with a 4G LTE radio and there’s bound to be some trouble.

That said, the Galaxy S III lasted a full five hours and fifteen minutes in our battery test. That’s pretty damn good, considering that the screen is never off during a constant Google Image search. In real-world scenarios, it should at least make it through dinner time, and depending on your usage, it might even hang with you through those late night parties.

To give you a little context, the Droid 4 only hung in there for three hours and forty-five minutes while the Droid RAZR Maxx (Motorola’s battery beast) stayed with me for a staggering eight hours and fifteen minutes. The HTC One S lasted just under five hours.

Another plus is that the battery is removable, so if you’re a serious power-user you can always purchase another battery and swap them out throughout the day.

Head-To-Head With The One X And iPhone 4S:

Conclusion

In the end, the Samsung Galaxy S III is the phone you’ve been waiting for. It’s generally well-built, it has an incredible display, solid battery life, plenty of interesting features and it just works well. That’s not something I find myself saying very often of Android phones.

When people ask me what phone they should buy, or if they should wait for this or that (and trust me, I get asked this a lot), I always say, “No, never wait. Just buy the best phone available today, and don’t worry about spending a little more than you’d want to because you’ll use it every day for about two years.”

But over the past few months, when phandroids come at me asking for phone recommendations, I’ve been telling them to wait. And you know what, I’m glad I did. Just like the Galaxy S II and the Galaxy S that came before it, this is the Android phone to beat.

It’s the phone you’ve been waiting for.

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Samsung Galaxy S III Review: This Is The Phone You’ve Been Waiting For

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Author: Heather Brown

Short Version

The Samsung Galaxy S III is the Android phone of the moment and in many ways it lives up to the hype. Plenty of folks are excited to see this thing hit store shelves. Our take? They won’t be disappointed.

Stellar software features paired with a beautiful display and specs that can compete with anything else on the market makes the Galaxy S III nothing short of a total delight. Physically it’s not much of a looker – the plastic case feels a bit chintzy – but generally you’re looking at the best of the best.

Features:

4.8-inch 720×1280 Super AMOLED display
Android 4.0.4 Ice Cream Sandwich
Samsung’s TouchWiz overlay
S-Beam/NFC
2GB of RAM
1.5GHz dual-core processor
8MP rear camera (1080p video capture)
1.9MP front camera
4G LTE at available carriers
MSRP: 16GB is $ 199 on-contract, 32GB is $ 249 on-contract

Pros:

Tons of cool software like S-Beam and Buddy Photo Share
Beautiful, large display
Solid battery life

Cons:

The plastic feels cheap and grabs prints
TouchWiz is heavy and ugly