Super smartphone showdown 6-part video review

It's a Super Smartphone Showdown as Neowin pits the top five flagship devices from the major Android device manufacturers against each other. Here's what they have on the table:

• HTC One X/XL
• Samsung Galaxy S III
• Sony Xperia S
• Motorola Droid Razr
• LG Optimus 4X HD

Over the last week or so Neowin has posted one part of the showdown per day -- the total runtime of all the videos put together is 1 hour 14 minutes, so an episode per day was a good way to explore different aspects of all phones. The first part looks at the designs used for each device, and we crown an overall design winner.

Other parts cover the displays, software, performance, cameras, battery life, and more. In the final episode Neowin awards one smartphone as the overall winner. We hope you enjoy the content in this super showdown!

Watch the first episode.
This article is brought to you in partnership with Neowin.

One year with the Samsung Galaxy Ace

One year. Three-hundred and sixty five days. Eight thousand and seventy-six hours. This is the amount of time I've spent with my Samsung Galaxy Ace. This isn't a review so much as an assessment of the device after an extended period of time. One year is plenty of time for phones to come out and eclipse the Ace. Yet... here I am, still, with it. It's running Android 2.3; an official update, and the only one the phone has ever seen.

The Ace should reasonably be outgunned by plenty of different phones now, though strangely, it's still holding its own in the low to mid-range market. It has also been more popular than I had expected; I have seen a surprising number of Galaxy Ace owners, and I also know some of them personally. With these other sources I've been able to learn more about how my own Galaxy Ace stacks up compared to others, in case there are even marginal differences between the devices.

Take the time to embark with me on a review of the first smartphone I have ever owned. Along the way expect a few comparisons with other devices. As the phone market changes I feel it is worthwhile to include occasional references and comparisons with other devices. After all, some readers may have weighed up these devices for themselves, or they might even own them. Sit back and enjoy the review; it's been a year in the making. It's a long one; over 9,000 words about the Samsung Galaxy Ace. Enjoy.

The beauty of high-speed cameras

High-speed photography offers an amazing glimpse at what can be produced when you simply slow down the world. Natural motion, such as frogs jumping, can look captivatingly beautiful when shot at thousands of frames per second, and can make nature shows amazing to view. Destruction also looks superb when slowed down, with shows such as Mythbusters frequently making use of ths technique.

Coffee being blown out of a straw as captured by a high-speed camera

The actual technology behind high-speed photography and cameras is quite amazing. A normal everyday-Joe camera usually records at 30 or perhaps 60 frames per second (FPS), meaning that the shutter must activate 30-60 times every second. However with a high-speed camera, the shutter must move much faster to achieve speeds of over 1,000 frames per second; a fairly common frame rate for slow-motion videos.

Cameras don’t stop just at 1,000 frames per second though, they can continue upwards into millions and millions of frames per second at lowered resolutions. In fact, the supposedly “fastest” high-speed camera in the world can record at 200,000,000 (200 million) frames per second, making “even the fastest moving objects look like they are standing still.” Of course the image quality from this camera would not be very good, even though it demanded a $457,000 price tag.

Neowin's top tech news stories of 2011

The year is almost over and as the world gets ready to party and ring in the new year of 2012, it's always helpful to look back at the past 12 months to see where we have been and have a better idea of where we might be going in the future.

In the tech industry there were a ton of major developments in the PC, mobile and Internet markets. Neowin has come up with a list of the top 10 biggest tech news stories of the year. Actually, there was simply too much going on in 2011 that they couldn't resist making it a top 11 list. But as hard as it was to make the picks, the actual number one story was, sadly, not difficult.

11. Nokia's Windows Phone gamble - Nokia is still one of the biggest mobile phone makers in the world. However, the Finland-based company has lost some of its market share thanks to the rise of the smartphone from Apple and various Android-based makers. In February, Nokia announced a new partnership to produce new smartphones. However, its partner wasn't Android or even Blackberry. It was with Microsoft and its revamped Windows Phone operating system.

Many industry insiders wondered why Nokia was making such a move with Microsoft. The Windows Phone 7 operating system, which launched in late 2010, was not considered to be a big competitor to iOS, Android or even (at the time) Blackberry. However, Nokia seemed confident that its deal with Microsoft would result in smartphones that would make an impression.

In November, Nokia launched the Lumia 800, its first Windows Phone-based device, in parts of Europe. While the reviews have been mostly on the positive side, there's still a question on whether or not the general public has been picking up these new devices. We should learn a lot more in the beginning of 2012 as both Nokia and Microsoft will likely reveal sales figures for the Lumia 800 at CES 2012. The US should also get the first Nokia Windows Phone-based device, the Lumia 710, in mid-January.

Some facts about BitTorrent

Torrenting is perhaps one of the favorite ways for internet users to download copyrighted material for free. It involves downloading a .torrent file and loading it into a torrent program, which then finds users around the internet (thanks to "trackers") who have the necessary files stored on their computers. These "peers" then serve the files to the downloaders without a middle-man server, hence the term peer-to-peer networking.

While they can be used legitimately, torrents are largely used for piracy. As of the time of writing, popular torrent search engine IsoHunt has indexed 8.25 million torrents with a combined size of 13,635 TB (or 13.6 petabytes). With 33.58 million connected peers, this gives a rough average of 4 peers per torrent. This also means the average size of a torrent indexed on IsoHunt is 1.64 GB.

Note: When talking about torrent file sizes, we're not referring to the actual .torrent file size, which is usually a few kilobytes, but rather to the size of the files the torrent enables you do download from peers.

Here's where it starts to get interesting. Public torrent aggregator Torrentz is currently indexing a larger 11.70 million torrents (without duplicates) across 33 domains, which provides for a good statistical base.

Apple invention misconceptions

For the fourth Trivia Tuesday over at Neowin, this week they are exploring some of the things you might think Apple invented, but actually didn't at all. These invention misconceptions are just a brief collection of what people may generally think Apple have invented, but we're sure there are many more that aren’t covered here.

The capacitive touchscreen: this was a highlight of the original Apple iPhone, which touted its smartphone capabilities by saying you can actually use it with a finger rather than stylus as the norm was at the time. Rather than using two thin films between the user and display to sense a stylus, capacitive touchscreens measure the distortion in the screen’s electrostatic field created when your conductive fingers touch the screen’s special coating.

The original type of touchscreen was, interestingly, a capacitive type invented way back in 1965 by E.A. Johnson at the Royal Radar Establishment in the UK; unfortunately they were quite expensive to produce and so the resistive-type touchscreen was the cheaper and more common occurrence pretty much up until the iPhone. However, the invention of the capacitive touchscreen predates the existence of Apple, so they couldn’t have possibly invented it.

This is the Psion MC 400 with an early touchpad. Note that it's above the keyboard unlike modern touchpads

While we’re on touch technology, Apple also didn’t invent the touchpad. Used as the primary form of mouse-like movement on modern notebook computers, the touchpad was actually invented by Psion for their MC series notebooks in 1989; however the touchpads used in the early Apple PowerBooks were based on early developments in the field.

Neowin Galaxy Nexus review, the sweetest aftertaste

Neowin is reviewing today the latest Nexus phone from Google, built in partnership with Samsung, and powered by the newest Android 4.0 release. For those unfamiliar with this beautiful device, it’s called the Galaxy Nexus, and it runs on delicious and futuristic Ice Cream Sandwiches.

Google's vision for the Galaxy Nexus was to make it the destroyer-of-all phones, backed by the absolute best OS they have ever made and running on the best hardware that Samsung could find. Most of this vision has made it to the Galaxy Nexus, but as you'll find out it's not a completely smooth ride.

Samsung has almost gone all out with the Galaxy Nexus, fitting it with a 1.2 GHz TI OMAP dual-core processor, 1GB of RAM and the impressive 4.65" Super AMOLED HD display. NFC is also on-board, along with penta-band HSPA radios and LTE depending on your region.

In many ways the Galaxy Nexus looks like a love-child between the Nexus S and the Galaxy S II. The front is completely dominated by a curved display with not much else, similar to the Nexus S, while the back is beautifully textured by Samsung to feel similar to the Galaxy S II line of devices.

Neowin: Portal 2 Review

The original Portal release on the PC was one that deservedly received high praise from gamers and journalists alike. It was different to many other Valve titles in that you no longer had any weapons in your hands, just a simple two-way portal weapon, along with a jump and crouch button.

Although the original was maybe a little short in length for some gamers, its selection of mind-bending portal based puzzles kept gamers coming back for more. The excellent dialogue was also a major plus in what was essentially a puzzle game at heart. Well here we are, almost 4 years down the line with the release of Portal 2, the premise stays the same, but the length of the game has almost doubled. This is also the first time that we see Valve's Steam service make its way to consoles, well, on the PlayStation 3 at least!



Story:

Once again the game is set in the mysterious Aperture Science Laboratories, though this time there are a number of new characters and a range of new puzzle elements for gamers to get to grips with. You still have your trusty Portal gun and use it in the same way as you did in the first game, but there are improved physics on offer to open up even more ways to complete test chambers and some of the more open areas that are now in the game.

We don't want to spoil things for anyone who will be picking up the game, as we felt the story and dialogue was once again excellent, so we will only outline the basics here. The idea behind the game is that you are woken up from an induced sleep many years after the original title. Then just as it looks like Aperture Science Labs have been destroyed and damaged beyond repair, you and your Robot companion Wheatley (Voiced by U.K. actor Stephen Merchant) accidentally reboot GLaDOS, the murderous and sarcastic computer that guided you throughout the first game