Best Smartphones of 2012

There may still be a couple of months left of the year, but it is already clear to see that some phones have made more of an impact in 2012 than others – not always for the right reasons. This year has seen the Samsung Galaxy S3 become the most pre-ordered thing in history while the latest iPhone outsold earlier versions by a clear margin of one million during its launch weekend.

There have been a lot of great phones this year, and technology has been moving so rapidly that even devices which fall into the “mid-range” or “budget” categories are still highly impressive pieces of technology. But if I were to pick just four handsets that have been the most noteworthy this year, I would probably pick the following:

Samsung Galaxy S3 

Undoubtedly the best phone of the year. Not just in terms of sales figures and critical acclaim but also in the sheer number of innovations it has ushered in. For all Apple’s accusations over the past several months, it seems as though it is actually Samsung that is starting to think outside the box in the mobile arena, while Apple is beginning to rest on its laurels and compete through patent litigation.

The S3′s larger 4.8 inch Super AMOLED HD screen provides unparalleled picture quality and enough room to allow you to watch movies while typing out messages and emails. S Beam, an improved version of Android’s NFC sharing app, not only allows you to easily share music and videos but stands to completely revolutionise the way that people exchange phone numbers (tapping two phones together is surely much simpler than reading a string of numbers seven or eight times back and forth between two people).

Recent tests also showed that the Galaxy S3 outperformed all of its close competition in mobile web browsing battery performance, providing nearly six hours of use – while the iPhone, with its claimed 8 hours, only achieved 3 hours and 20 minutes. Some people are daunted by the larger size of the S3, yet this is something that one can easily become accustomed to in order to enjoy the excellent features on offer.

iPhone 5 

Image Credit by Want China Times

To many people it is an iPhone or nothing, and as far as iPhones go, this is the best one yet. It is the fastest, has the best data connections (the first iPhone with LTE) and has the best screen for movie content and web browsing.

Even though it has been beset by numerous problems, which have even been enough for diehard iFans and former Apple employees to want to switch to Samsung, it would be hard to not include the iPhone 5 in this list.

Despite its problems, this has still been the fastest selling iPhone to date and will most likely wind up being the biggest selling phone of 2012 by the end of December. Irrespective of sales figures, the iPhone marks some of the most important changes to come to the iPhone brand since it first began in 2007. There is the larger 4 inch screen, the new Lightning dock connector and many software enhancements including Facebook integration.

This will be the most popular phone of 2012 without a doubt, even if it won’t win the most awards or the most acclaim from critics, and so it rightfully deserves its place as one of the best phones of the year.

Nokia Lumia 920 

On the surface, the Lumia 920 doesn’t look a whole lot different to some of Nokia’s earlier Lumia phones. However, thanks to Windows Phone 8 and some new hardware that is now supported by the Microsoft OS, this stands to be the finest phone Nokia has produced since its fall from grace a few years back.

Nokia’s plans to reinvent itself were hampered earlier this year when Microsoft revealed that older Windows Phone 7 devices would not be able to update to the newer version, released later this month. This was effectively a nail in the coffin for Nokia’s first wave of Windows Phones and the Finnish company has been on tenterhooks for the past few months while it awaits the launch of WP8.

Windows Phone 8 has added support for multicore processors, and this is the first Nokia phone to come with a dual core 1.5GHz Krait chip and 1GB RAM. WP8 also added support for NFC and this will be one of the first Nokia phones with the new data sharing technology included. The only new addition to WP8 that has not made its way to the Lumia 920 is microSD card support, although this more likely due to aesthetic reasons than anything else. 32GB provides a fair amount of room, but the inability to expand this is disappointing to say the least.

This is also the first Nokia phone and one of the first Windows Phones to include LTE support.

Motorola RAZR MAXX / Droid RAZR MAXX 

Originally released in the United States at start of 2012 as the Droid RAZR MAXX, this handset was later released in other markets as the RAZR MAXX. (This is due to the fact that “Droid” is a trademark owned by Lucasfilm and Motorola only has licence to use it in the US). Why is this phone so special? Simply because the RAZR MAXX demonstrated that excellent smartphone features don’t need to come at the expense of battery life.

The RAZR MAXX has a 3300mAh Lithium Ion battery providing up to a month’s worth of standby battery life and nearly 18 hours of talk time. By comparison, the S3 has a 2100mAh, the Lumia 920 a 2000mAh, and the iPhone 5 a measly 1440mAh battery.

While smartphones are being crammed with more and more features, including face recognition, NFC data sharing, streaming online videos, and all sorts of other things that were just pipedreams a few years back, battery technology has not really changed much in the past 20 years.

To provide more battery life to meet the demands of all these extra power-hungry features the only option that manufacturers have is to keep making batteries bigger and bigger. Motorola showed this could be done while still producing a pocket friendly and slender device.

The RAZR MAXX is several months old now and in smartphone terms is starting to show its age. It shipped with Android 2.3 Gingerbread while the world is quickly heading towards 5.0 Key Lime Pie. Due to the Motorola custom interface the RAZR MAXX will miss out from future Android updates.

These are my picks for the best and most interesting phones of 2012. The best all round winner has to be the Samsung Galaxy S3, while the iPhone 5 and Lumia 920 will provide much to entice fans of either platform. The RAZR also goes to show that a phone doesn’t need to be drained of all power before the end of the day. All of these phones have proved to be extremely popular handsets on best-mobile-contracts.co.uk this year. It has been an interesting year for the smartphone industry and, if current trends continue, next year should be even more exciting.

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Source : techtalkafrica[dot]com

Foxconn factory at center of riot reopens, supply not affected

The Foxconn factory at the center of a large riot on Sunday night reopened on Tuesday, a company spokesperson said, adding that there has been no impact on supply.

The Foxconn factory at the center of a serious disturbance late Sunday involving thousands of rioting workers has reopened.

Company spokesperson Louis Woo told Reuters Tuesday that despite staying shut all through Monday, no impact on product supply is expected. “We have 79,000 people working in Taiyuan campus, and we always have spare inventory,” Woo said.

The trouble, which reportedly involved more than 2,000 workers causing widespread damage throughout the factory campus, was brought to a halt by around 5,000 police. About 40 people were injured, with countless arrests made.

China’s state-run news agency said the brawl started after a fight broke out between two workers in a factory dormitory. However, workers allege the incident erupted after a security guard manhandled an employee at the factory gates.

Foxconn, the world’s biggest component maker, is a major manufacturer for Apple, as well as other giants in the electronics industry. The Taiwan-based company has so far refused to say whether this particular facility, located in the northern Chinese city of Taiyuan, is involved in the production of Apple’s new iPhone 5 handset.

In an on-screen interview with the UK’s Channel 4 News program, one former Foxconn worker explained that new devices can cause great stress among workers, saying, “When a factory launches a new product, workers do overtime for long periods to test the production line until they are ready, which really puts pressure on the employees.”

He added, “A new generation of workers has higher demands. They know their rights and they’re more rebellious.”

Foxconn, which employs more than a million people across China, has been under the spotlight for the last few years following reports of employees suffering poor living and working conditions. More recently, the company has apparently been implementing changes in an attempt to improve the situation.

The Fair Labor Association said in August that Foxconn had been making good progress towards its goal of providing better living and working conditions, though if Sunday night’s disturbance can be attributed to a frustrated and beleaguered workforce cracking under the strain, it clearly still has some way to go until its job is complete.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Usage of Tablets in The Classroom [Infographic]

Here comes another interesting infographic on how and why tablets are being used in the classroom and what kind of impact they’re making on education in general. The idea of tablet computing is generally credited to Alan Kay of Xerox, an American computer scientist who sketched out the idea in 1971, Alan is also known for coining the phrase, “The best way to predict the future is to invent it.”

The first widely-sold tablet computer was Apple Computer’s Newton, which was not a commercial success. Today the story has taken a U turn, although tablets has been around for a few years, it has indeed become one of those great tools that is changing the way we learn in our schools, from iPad to Nexus, Kindle Fire to Samsung Galaxy tab, this great tool is indeed redefining how we learn in our schools. Our friends at Online Universities has once again released an interesting infographic on Teaching with Tablets, take a look below:

From: OnlineUniversities.com

Source : techtalkafrica[dot]com