I was planning to upgrade my phone in the next few weeks, as I have mentioned before, to one of the best all round smartphones on the market, the HTC Desire. If you go to any review site you can find the HTC Desire near the top of the best phones list, if not occupying the top spot.
One item of contention with the Desire is that the battery life is rather disappointing. While this doesn’t deter me, as I’m used to charging my current phone nearly every day, it would deter some power users looking for something more. With this in mind, HTC today put out a press release detailing that the next revision of the HTC Desire, and the global Nexus One (the Google phone), would include a new screen employing Super LCD display (SLCD) technology which offers up to 5 times more power efficiency than the current lineup.
Whilst this is indeed good news, it also means users wanting to upgrade to the HTC Desire have to choose between risking upgrading now for the phone that everyone loves, or waiting until whenever it is HTC decides to unleash the more power efficient SLCD Desire onto the market, which may be as soon as the end of this summer. Or even to wait for the rumoured HTC Desire HD, hitting a shop near you in October apparently.
As part of my University course we had to use the scientific MATLAB programming language, and computing environment, for several tasks in the first year. While the set tasks were as drab and dreary as you would expect from a Physics course, it taught us the basic skills and the problem solving skills key to the course.
In my spare time I ported a PHP script my friend created to MATLAB which enables the creation of beautiful fractals from the Mandlebrot set. The maximum image size you can create depends on the amount of memory available in your system and the script isn’t something I’ve spent a lot of time on so feel free to improve on it.
On my laptop, a 10,000 x 10,000 pixel image took about an hour to create, using 20 iterations. You may find this differs on other machines.
With a move to an Android phone in the near future planned to replace my tiring Motorola E8, I thought I’d spend a bit of time talking about a concept using Adobe Air that brings peer-to-peer video calling to the Android platform. With Apple introducing their FaceTime application along with the next generation iPhone, the iPhone 4, a few months or so ago, it would seem that the Android platform is fast becoming a realistic competitor to the iPhone, and currently iOS 4, especially with the rising number of applications being developed and the range of choices the consumer gets in the Android marketplace.
While only meant to show off the peer-to-peer capabilities of Adobe Air 2.5, the video calling application shows the potential of the platform. While at this early stage there are some expected glitches, it shows what could be expected from the platform. With smartphones becoming ever more powerful, most phones will be able to use these features with no problem in the near future.
The fact this concept uses Adobe Air opens up the possibility of peer-to-peer video calling over different types of devices. For example you could make a video call from your smartphone to a colleague on their laptop at work or video calling your friend who’s watching TV from your tablet computer. This is definitely one to watch. But while you wait for the polished product to hit your marketplace, check out Fring.
I came across this beautiful little project Young Me, Old Me where people recreate photos of their younger selves and send them in side by side for everyone to compare.
In between studying for a degree in Physics and enjoying life, I love to learn about anything that is interesting. Here I'll be writing about those things for all to see and maybe enlighten you. Remember that when one teaches, two learn.
