Review TechRadar: Phone and communications news 05-29-2014

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HTC One M8 'Plus' could be the QHD Prime May 29th 2014, 14:47, by Hugh Langley While we're not totally sold on the idea, it's looking more and more likely that HTC is set to follow up the One M8 and One Mini 2 with two other handsets this year, the M8 Prime and the M8 Ace. And now a little bit more credence has been added to those rumours. 9to5Google understands that the two handsets on the way will be called the "One M8 Plus" (which we assume is the Prime) and the "One M8 Advance" (likely the Ace). The "Plus" is said to be carrying a QHD display, a zippy Qualcomm Snapdragon 805 processor and 3GB of RAM, agreeing with prior claims from the HTC One M8 Prime rumour mill. But when it comes to the rear camera, the details diverge. The new source says that the "Plus" will lack the M8's Duo Camera, opting for a single 13MP rear camera with optical image stabilisation. In @evleaks' recent M8 Prime render leak, the Duo Camera was clearly present - might he have got that aspect wrong? Ace in the hole The second "One M8 Advance" device, also believed to be a high-ender, will feature the same specs as the Plus but will house itself in a plastic casing, and be primarily aimed at Asian markets. The mysterious source says that both device will be made available in August or early September - definitely before the iPhone 6, they said. Perhaps HTC has swapped the names around? Is this the One+ that the standard flagship was once believed to be named, or did someone just recently notice that 8 isn't a prime number? The Prime and Ace are (probably) coming. Watch your backs In Depth: Clearing a path: why we aren't using transparent phones May 29th 2014, 14:16, by Simon Hill A clear path "[Transparent displays in phones] will happen near the end of 2013. Trust me." That's the claim made by Polytron Technologies' General Manager Sam Yu to PC World last year - and this is from a company heavily involved in developing the technology. Yet we're well into 2014, and there's still no sign of a real-life equivalent of the Minority Report screen which embedded itself into popular culture 12 years ago. By the time Robert Downey Jr. was sporting a transparent smartphone in 2010's Iron Man 2, Sony Ericsson had already unveiled the Xperia Pureness. It was an expensive feature phone with few features and a transparent 1.8-inch monochrome display with a 320 x 240 pixel resolution. If you've never heard of it that's probably because it was given a very limited release and sold as a status symbol for fashionistas. The Lenovo S800 was a similar device which landed in the Philippines in 2011, but never made it into Western markets. In February last year a little known Taiwanese company by the name of Polytron caused a stir with a transparent glass smartphone prototype. The prototype was non-functional and more than a year later there's still nothing on the market. Polytron didn't respond to our request for an interview. What's holding transparent displays back? We asked OLED designer Jan Hesse of the Fraunhofer Institute in Freiburg, where they've designed transparent OLED lighting panels, and he told us "it's a matter of very poor contrast. Due to the fact that with transparent screens the background is visible…and the brightness is lower than with standard single side emitting OLED displays." They use two transparent electrodes, but the OLED panels they produced essentially consist of one (very large) pixel. He thinks transparent displays in smartphones and tablets are unlikely be anything other than niche products, and it seems that the bigger brands are finding the same problems. "Conventional LCD panels have their limitations [in terms of being transparent] because of their low transmittance," explained Senior Research Engineer, Young-Min Jung, in an LG Display press release from February this year, focussing on a transparent display designed to replace a conventional refrigerator door, so that you can see what's inside without opening it. "We can control the brightness with stronger backlight, but it then becomes less energy efficient as it consumes more electrical power." Chief Research Engineer, Wonho Lee from LG Display confirmed the 55-inch transparent refrigerator will be produced this year, but only for commercial purposes, although he did add that the brand expected the product type to grow. YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= Samsung has also shown off transparent displays, but the focus seems to be on digital signage and display cases for businesses. The Wall Street Journal reported that Samsung filed a patent for a camera with a transparent display in Korea back in March, but there hasn't been any news about a smartphone or tablet. When we contacted them, both Samsung and LG Display also declined to comment. What's the point in a transparent screen? The technical barriers don't appear to be insurmountable, but beyond the fact that translucent smartphone or tablet concepts look really cool, are there actually any practical benefits? "We asked ourselves: what are these devices really good for?" explains Dr. Juan David Hincapié-Ramos, from the University of Manitoba, "They're impressive aesthetically, and there are lots of concepts in science fiction or design competitions suggesting what transparent display should be good for, but they are no more than concepts." "What we set out to do was actually build a device and realise a lot of the potential interactions, but also have a look at how everyday tasks could benefit from this technology." The result was the tPad, a transparent display tablet prototype that the researchers built themselves using LCD displays with low-opacity filters. YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m933lfMzjpU Before moving on to the search for a killer application they looked at some ways that transparent displays could benefit us, taking into account how we use tablets and smartphones today. "Task switching and picture capture are better with transparent displays," was an option suggested by Hincapié-Ramos. The idea behind task switching is that you could have different apps running on each side of the display. Imagine you're browsing the web on your smartphone and a message comes in, if you simply flip the device to deal with your incoming message and then flip back when you're done, it's easier and quicker to continue with your task. Another potential benefit the research turned up was the idea of overlaying the phone or tablet on something you want to take a picture of, such as a business card or a book. They found this kind of "surface capture" was quicker and easier than trying to frame a shot with a traditional smartphone camera. Augmented reality reveals more One potential killer app for transparent displays is augmented reality; another technology that has been seemingly slow to really take off in recent years, but there are issues to overcome: namely two things called colour blending and binocular parallax. "The quality of the image is affected by whatever is in the background because colours blend with it. If you have a uniform surface behind the display then it works, if not then you're going to struggle to distinguish what's what." explains Hincapié-Ramos. Binocular parallax is about our perception of content alignment with augmented reality and can impact on depth perception, making it difficult to interact. The solution they came up with is called "Contact Augmented Reality" which involves placing your device directly on top of the object that you are augmenting. It would allow the object itself to trigger AR content on the device, so there would be no need to open an app first. Microsoft's PixelSense table top shows some of the potential in its ability to recognise and interact with certain objects when they are placed on the screen, but this technology is not available in transparent displays yet. When will we see transparent phones on the market? There are still some fundamental challenges to overcome. Manufacturers embed all the electronics in smartphones and tablets behind the screen. Transparent displays don't make fully transparent devices and so we need to miniaturize components further and create form factors that deliver the potential benefits and aesthetic appeal of transparent displays without compromising on functionality. "The display not only has to be transparent," says Hincapié-Ramos, "the display also has to be a sensor." As far as the technology has come, it also still can't compete with the colour quality of the displays in current smartphone flagships. In order to achieve colour and transparency in the tPad project they had to modify a display with a low-opacity back filter and use white light in the background. This need for an external light source is still a major stumbling block for our prospects of seeing a truly transparent smartphone or tablet in the near future. With companies like LG Display and Samsung already working on the technical feasibility, and researchers like Hincapié-Ramos identifying potential applications, transparent displays are still a hot enough topic to believe they will appear in the future. But while an interactive window could appear down the highstreet, there's still one major issue left to be solved before we get the transparent smartphone: why would we want it? In Depth: A not-so-shining future: the sad demise of the projector phone May 29th 2014, 12:17, by Chris Mills Where are all the projector phones? Mobile World Congress, February 2012: a Samsung marketing executive hops on stage in front of a group of tired tech journalists, and delivers the Next Big Thing to come from the depths of Samsung's R&D caverns: a chunky, sluggish version of Samusng's hit Galaxy SII, with a tiny projector bolted on the front. Although the Galaxy Beam made the inevitable page 17 of the broadsheets for a few days – Look! A phone that lets you have added PowerPoint! – the Beam rapidly became one of Samsung's curiously-expensive R&D projects that accidentally found its way to market (also see: Samsung Galaxy Zoom). The tech world rapidly reviewed it, then proceeded to completely forget about projector phones, apart from those odd occasions when a small-name Asian firm knocked up a terrible-looking projector phone in a spare ten minutes. Recently, though, there's been rumours of a Samsung Galaxy Beam 2 being launched in China, that's got us thinking: whatever happened to the dream of playing three-foot-high Angry Birds wherever you want? Right, R&D team, what can we make today? Projector phones happened as a result of two things: the advent of 'pico-projectors', which shrunk regular projector innards down to deck-of-cards size; and the growing samey-ness of all high-end smartphones on the market, and the subsequent trend for companies to do something different with the next handset they launched at the market. It was an obvious move: take the optics of a pico-projector, shoehorn them into a phone, which already had all the necessary gubbins like a battery, control screen and processor to make it all work. Then market it to road-warrior professionals and art students alike, as a way to showcase their PowerPoints and watercolour portfolios to unsuspecting passers-by, without the need to lug around a huge projector. Sadly, while the concept sounds sort-of-OK on paper, the application was never very good. According to Ron Mertens, the editor of Pico Projector Info, phones like the Samsung Galaxy Beam fall foul of trying to solve too many problems, and end up being virtually unusable as either a phone or a projector. He told TechRadar that "it's a bit of fun - when people first see pico projector phones, they say "Wow! That's really cool!". But the novelty wears off quickly – in fact, as soon as they see that they're not actually any good". Mertens reckons that with projector-phones like the Galaxy Beam, you're getting the worst of both worlds – a terrible projector, married to a bulky, expensive, but sluggish phone with appalling battery life. These comments are echoed in almost every review of the Galaxy Beam that spread across the internet after MWC: CNET summed it up well by saying "You're pocketing a middling Android experience while paying a premium for the pico projector stuck inside it"; our very own Laura Tosney's verdict was "props to Samsung for running with this, but we don't see the hordes needing a middling smartphone with projector addendum just yet." It's the Cameraphone, round two If you've been around cutting-edge phones for a while, though, you'll notice that most of these criticisms sound oddly familiar. When cameraphones were first coming onto the market, the criticisms leveled were similar: devices were too expensive, and the cameras just weren't good enough to justify lugging around a heavier phone, since they couldn't come close to replacing the point-and-shoots of the day. Fast forward a decade, of course, and you'll notice that even mid-range phones are sporting cameras oodles better than most 'Noughties point-and-shoots, and the concept of a smartphone having a decent camera (or two) is so well-ingrained that it's pretty much taken for granted. Of course, this isn't suggesting that pico-projector phones are going to be de rigeur in 2020 – for one thing, the point-and-shoot market that cameraphones replaced is light years bigger than the decidedly niche market that pico projectors occupy today. But rather, it's clear that pico-projector phones might just succeed – as soon as they can be fit inside phones without making them bigger, heavier, or more expensive. Who Doesn't Like a Good Laser? For that to happen, pico-projector technology is going to have to get better. As well as becoming smaller and lighter, they have to get better at, well, projecting. The Galaxy Beam chucked out 15 lumens of light – enough, just, to make a usable image in a dark room. But more light makes the picture brighter, with better contrast and less need for black-out blinds. One upgrade that promises to solve most, if not all, of these problems, is laser projection. Rather than using a lamp as the light source, as in today's projectors, Laser Beam Scanning (LBS) systems use a semiconductor laser as the light source, and use mirrors to change the direction of the laser. This allows it to project images without the need for focusing – and, in theory, high resolution and bright images should be easy. At the moment, the tech's still firmly in the early-adopter phase. Although there are a few laser pico projectors on the market, none have made their way into phones as of yet – and even if they do, Mertens doesn't rate the current generation very highly, quoting problems with speckle (spatter in the light causing a slightly grainy image) as ruining most of the potential. Mertens admits that in the long run (more than five years, in his opinion), however, pico-projector tech should get small, bright and crisp enough to usably fit inside a phone without too much hassle. Whether or not you'll want to bother, though, is a different matter – he still reckons that pico-projector phones are doomed to be a gimmicky novelty. Thanks to Samsung's (rumoured) launch of a Galaxy Beam 2, though, you'll soon have the freedom to decide for yourself. OnePlus One trounces the competition in the official TechRadar review May 29th 2014, 10:26, by Kate Solomon OnePlus One now equals 4.5 - 4.5 stars, that is. Just weeks ago no one had heard of OnePlus or its flagship handset, the OnePlus One. It's come from nowhere to scoop an insane 4.5 star score in the official, in-depth, definitive TechRadar review. "The OnePlus One has got one of the fastest processors in the business backed by a hugely generous allotment of RAM, which means that it's a seriously impressive performer," writes our reviewer, agog. Holy crow "That performance is helped by the CyanogenMod firmware, which takes the speed and intuitiveness of stock Android and adds a load of customisation options to the settings menu, should you wish to tinker. "Then there's the 5.5-inch 1080p display, which shows everything off as clearly as you could hope for and all for a frankly unbelievable £229, $299 (about AU$320). "The OnePlus One's performance-to-price ratio is one of the most impressive we've ever seen in a smartphone, offering Samsung Galaxy S5 performance for less than half the price. "If you're after a truly top end phone that can be customised to the Nth degree, and you don't mind accepting a few rough patches as part of the package, we can't see a better - or cheaper - alternative." Is there no downside? Well, it could use a microSD slot and the call quality is not great - but if you want a Galaxy S5 standard smartphone for feature phone prices, you can't do much better. Read our full OnePlus One review now Uber wants to 'get rid of the dude in the car' with driverless taxi service May 28th 2014, 20:56, by Chris Smith Less than 24 hours after Google unveiled a new driverless car prototype, the CEO of disruptive ride-hailing/sharing service Uber has admitted he is envisioning the day when his cars won't need a wheel man. Speaking at the Code conference on Wednesday, Uber's Travis Kalanick said the prospect of a driverless fleet of vehicles could create an environment where commuters choose not to own cars. Kalanick, whose firm has been the subject of recent protests from London cabbies over its disputed imposition, said driverless cars would lower cost for passengers, making calling a car cheaper than owning. He said: "The reason Uber could be expensive is because you're not just paying for the car - you're paying for the other dude in the car. "When there's no other dude in the car, the cost of taking an Uber anywhere becomes cheaper than owning a vehicle. So the magic there is, you basically bring the cost below the cost of ownership for everybody, and then car ownership goes away." Tough luck, drivers In a statement that's sure to further ignite the ire of protesting licensed London black cab drivers, Kalanick went on to offer little sympathy for the drivers that'd be ditched in any such breakthrough. He added: "I'd say 'Look, this is the way of the world, and the world isn't always great.' We all have to find ways to change with the world." The London Taxi Drivers Association has taken umbrage with how Uber calculates the passenger's fare. It is listed as a private hire company, which prevents the company using meters. Uber drivers negotiates fees with passengers using a smartphone app, but are aided in that by a device which the LDTA says is "set up to be a meter," something Uber denies. Either way, it appears Uber is here to stay, especially when recent reports have suggested the firm is acquiring funding on an astronomical valuation of $17 billion (around £10.1bn AU$18.4bn) Will Google's driverless car spell the end for the pedestrian?

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