GigaOM has a short infographic, based on data from Gartner , of the Smartphone OS market. The top uses stacked percentage bars to visualize the changing market over the last 3 years, and does a relatively good job at showing Symbian, Linux, and Windows mobile shrinking in the face of RIM, iPhone, and Android. I would complain about the lack of numbers, however they include those in the vertical bar-graph right below, which shows the exact same data.
What do you get when you combine Virtual Pets with everyone’s favorite whiz-bang technology Augmented Reality? Zenitum hopes it’s a new cash cow in ‘iKat’, a markerless augmented reality pet simulator.
Virtual pet’s and augmented reality are nothing new, but the real neat feature of this particular app is the markerless nature. No marker is required, after a few seconds of analyzing video the app has gathered enough information to construct basic geometry of the surroundings and is able to track motion. Even this technology is old hat, having been demo’ed on the PS3 long ago as Sony’s Virtual Pet game EyePet, but this is the first time I’ve seen similar results from a mobile device, an Android Phone from the example videos.
Looks pretty neat, although still in early beta. See two demonstration videos of the technology below (one after the break).
Cover your eyes and hide your children, this new infographic from iStrategy2009 attempts to show the various types of mobile media around the world and their penetrations. The circles up top show various percentages like:
The blue compares the percentage of SMS users vs IM and Email users
The big red compares Mobile Phones worldwide vs Internet, Television, and Newspapers
The yellow on the right compares content coming from entertainment news, Social networks, and something else because they printed it in white on flourescent yellow.
But the disasters don’t end with just dreaded pie charts. They have arrows and text written so small that even at full-size I can’t read it, and they all overlap and change directions without rhyme or reason.
Across the bottom is a chart showing the number of mobiles per 100 people, separated by country. On the left is Taiwan with 59.3, with the US being the greyed-out entry toward the right (again yellow).
There’s just so many bad design decisions here, this one is an early contender for worst of 2010.
Last week we brought you news of the “Google Nexus One OLED Display ShootOut” from the guys at DisplayMate, which showed that the display was lacking in features, resolution, and brightness compared to the LCD iPhone 3Gs Screen. Well, the OLED Association has responded saying that while Dr. Soneira found some important issues, his test wasn’t entirely accurate given the technology of OLED.
Dr. Soneira compared images using his own test equipment and concluded that the images on the Nexus I had some serious flaws and showed these images in his report. His diagnosis was that the PenTile OLED subpixel arrangement, the 6-bit color depth, (really 5-6-5) and the high color saturation in the OLEDs were the cause. The Nexus I, however, has a feature that allows the system to use modes of both 5-6-5 bit or 8 bit color depth depending on the image and the designer’s choice. Typically, 8-bits are invoked when the user touches the screen. While Dr. Soneira acknowledges that nonbandwidth-limited content of text, icons and graphics are very crisp, he seems to indicate that the less challenging bandwidth-limited image content is less well rendered. He suggests that the PenTile configuration somehow reduces the resolution and limits the gray scale. This conclusion is just incorrect.
OLED-Display.net has the full response, although it’s a bit difficult to read. I invite Barry Young to send us his rebuttal so that we can post it here as well, hopefully with some better formatting.
The Google Nexus One Android phone is the pinnacle of Android mobile handsets, and boasts one of the new OLED screens in use in readily available mobile handsets. However, just how good is the screen? The guys at DisplayMate took a very in-depth and scientific approach and compared it to various displays, mostly the iPhone 3GS LCD, and found it woefully lacking. This summary says it all:
OLED displays are at the leading edge of display technology – they are still under development and still being perfected as a production display for use in consumer products. That’s interesting, but they still need to be judged in comparison to LCDs, which are the dominant display technology in all current mobile devices. In that regard, if the Nexus One display were an LCD it would rank among the worst displays we have ever seen in a shipping product. Some of this is undoubtedly due to poor integration of the display hardware with the Android OS and software. Much of it, however, is simply due to very poor factory calibration and quality control, especially with the lack of any credible color and gray scale calibration
Their tests include details on the PenTile pixel arrangement in use, the color-depth, and image qualities. The tests are still underway, as well, so keep checking back for upcoming results on color temperature, gamuts, and color shifts.
Guru3d has posted an article describing the upcoming series 300 Mobile GPUs from NVidia. Nvidia will be releasing the 360M and the 350M, both with 96 processor cores. (…)
TechARP has just released version 9.0 of their Mobile GPU comparison Guide, which includes detailed lists for GPU’s from NVidia, ATI, XGI, Intel, and S3. (…)
AJA has released a new iPhone application (iTunes Link) that can compute the estimated storage space you’ll need for a wide variety of resolutions, codecs, and framerates. It is missing a few things, like DNxHD: Don’t expect DNxHD since Avid doesn’t support AJA hardware in the majority of its products. (…)
OnLive, the popular but yet unreleased remote gaming technology company, reached an important milestone today by demonstrating their system working on an iPhone. (…)
It’s a bit later than previously expected but junaio, the world’s first social augmented reality platform, is now available in the iTunes App Store for all iPhone platforms. (…)
Click for Larger Smartphones are rapidly replacing the older classic phones as the “phone of choice”, integrating their multimedia capabilities (music, video) with internet connectivity. The four leaders in the smartphone arena are Apple’s iPhone, the Palm Pre, the current leading Android phone from T-Mobile, and the upcoming Motorola Droid. A new infographic from BillShrink does a great job at categorizes each phone’s pro’s and con’s along with the total cost of ownership, giving you a great at-a-glance comparison of them all. (…)
Further proof of the benefits of Augmented Reality in mechanical situations, as first evidenced by Boeing many years ago, comes from the US Marines who have adopted goggles & Android smartphones as a possible replacement for massive field manuals on repairs. (…)
Casio has just announced a pair of new cameraphones that really crank up on features: 12.17MPix Camera with autofocus, 3.3″ OLED screen, GPS, Wifi, FM Radeo, and more. (…)
Another day, another Augmented Reality app on the iPhone. This time it’s the popular restaurant chooser Urbanspoon, which has just added the “Scope” feature. (…)
September 11th is still a sore memory for many Americans, but Mobilizy, a company from Salzburg that just released Wikitude, has just released a new upgrade to implement 3D visual overlays and now you can relive the view of the Twin Towers before that horrible day. (…)
Layar, the impressive mobile-phone augmented reality tool, has undergone another major revision and now supports 3D overlays in addition to the previous 2D overlays. This opens a whole new world to AR developers who can now use it to overlay 3D objects into the viewable space. (…)
As iPhones, Palm Pre’s, and Blackberry’s take over the world, we find ourselves having to redefine and recreate many of the information visualization and HCI paradigms that have grown over the last decade. A great slide-deck from Luca Chittaro at the University of Udine, Italy talks about important considerations in designing interfaces for mobile devices and shows several examples of both good and bad implementations. (…)
GigaOM has a short infographic, based on data from Gartner , of the Smartphone OS market. The top uses stacked percentage bars to visualize the changing market over the last 3 years, and does a relatively good job at showing Symbian, Linux, and Windows mobile shrinking in the face of RIM, iPhone, and Android. I would complain about the lack of numbers, however they include those in the vertical bar-graph right below, which shows the exact same data.
What do you get when you combine Virtual Pets with everyone’s favorite whiz-bang technology Augmented Reality? Zenitum hopes it’s a new cash cow in ‘iKat’, a markerless augmented reality pet simulator.
Cover your eyes and hide your children, this new infographic from iStrategy2009 attempts to show the various types of mobile media around the world and their penetrations. The circles up top show various percentages like:
Last week we brought you news of the “
The Google Nexus One Android phone is the pinnacle of Android mobile handsets, and boasts one of the new OLED screens in use in readily available mobile handsets. However, just how good is the screen? The guys at DisplayMate took a very in-depth and scientific approach and compared it to various displays, mostly the iPhone 3GS LCD, and found it woefully lacking. This summary says it all:
VizWorld.com 
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