Amazon unveils the Kindle Paperwhite: Crisper fonts, slimmer size, and pumped-up pixels

Amazon's new Kindle Paperwhite line boasts an illuminated screen, sharper display and better touchscreen, while the ,ost basic Kindle will now sell for $69 and gets a host of improvements as well.

The new Kindle hardware inarguably stole plenty of attention at today’s event. Amazon CEO Jeff Bezo’s waxed lovingly about the lineup as well as users’ love for it before introducing us to the Kindle Paperwhite, the latest addition to the Kindle family.

“We love to invent. We love to pioneer,” he said. “We even like going down alleys that turn out to be blind alleys.” Bezos also explained that while Amazon is a risk-taker, it’s also perfectly happy when it strikes gold – and that it certainly has with the Kindle.

The Kindle Paperwhite is a significant upgrade, and features plenty of what we all thought it would: It’s a frontlit, E-Ink reader, with much higher resolution and contrast. The screen now boasts 212 pixels per inch, which is 62 percent more resolution than the last version, and contrast has been increased 25 percent from current Kindles. What else? The Paperwhite also gets rid of the Kindle’s infrared touch technology in favor of capacitive touch, and includes patented light guide technology (which Bezos called highly adjustable). It’s a slim 9.1 mm and 7.5 ounces, with eight weeks of battery life (even with the light left on).

And those are just the hard specs. Amazon has done a lot of work on font display, and the Kindle Paperwhite is able to analyze your reading speed and tell you how much time it will take you to finish a chapter or book. Other new features include author bios, and as you’d expect you can switch between content saved to your Kindle, connect to the cloud, and use X-Ray content analysis for tracking characters and story development.

The Kindle Paperwhite Wi-Fi model will cost $119, and the 3G-enabled version $179. You can order both now, and they will ship in October. In addition to the new devices, Amazon also has an upgraded its entry-level Kindle and cut cost from $79 to $69. The new version has better contrast and resolution, crisper fonts with more text, and faster page turning. It will ship September 14.

Of course, this is only a sampling of what Amazon is announcing today. We’ll be at the event and bringing you more news throughout the day.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Adobe updates Photoshop Touch with Retina display and higher resolution image support

Adobe has released v1.3 of their Photoshop Touch app for iOS and Android and comes with a handful of improvements. First of all, v1.3 brings with it Retina display support for the new iPad, making it a lot more usable now.

The other important feature available on both iOS as well as the Android version is that Photoshop Touch now supports up to 12 megapixel images, which is great for quickly editing those high resolution images from you camera while you are outdoors and away from your computer.

Other features include:

• Two new languages: Russian and Brazilian Portuguese.
• Two new Effects: Shred and Colorize
• Smoother animation and scrolling in the organizer, tutorial browser, and file picker
• New gesture to toggle 100% view and fit screen (three-finger tap)
• New pixel nudging mode for precise movements
• Support for Apple Photo Stream (on iOS)
• Various bug fixes

Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com

2015 Chevy Volt may get a new GM platform

With the Volt undergoing a host of changes and improvements, the latest report coming out suggests that the 2015 model year could be getting an entirely new platform.

General Motors may be giving the Chevy Volt a bit of a shine and polish treatment for the 2015 model year according to the New York Daily News, which cited two unnamed sources that are said to be familiar with the process. Based on the report, the American automaker will provide a new platform to underpin the later generations of the Chevy Volt plug-in hybrid, which has seen its image and sales slowly pick up after a conscience decision on behalf of the company to halt vehicle production from March 19 to April 16 due to sluggish sales performance.

Currently, the Chevrolet Volt is underpinned by GM’s Delta II platform, which is also shared by the 2012 Chevy Cruze. The move to develop a new platform would also integrate future models of the Chevy Equinox, which currently utilizes GM’s Theta platform. The first models to feature this new platform, which has been dubbed D2XX by the NY Daily New’s unnamed GM sources, will likely arrive in 2014 with another 2.5 million models — both crossovers and compact sedans — using the platform by 2018.

We reached out to GM for any confirmation on the report of its future platform plans, but the company has not responded by press time.

Nevertheless, the development and consolidation of a new platform underpinning a larger swathe of vehicles seems likely. More than anything, the shift will help keep manufacturing costs down, giving GM the ability to improve its existing models. Chevrolet has already given the 2013 Volt a larger battery pack, boosting its electric-only range to 38 miles, and increasing its EPA MPGe rating to 98. There is even talk of larger, turbocharged 2.0-liter engine for the 2014 model year, so a truly overhaul of the Volt’s platform doesn’t appear to be far-fetched.

Interestingly, despite its recent sales surge, GM may halt production on the Chevy Volt for the second time this year beginning next month.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Mozilla rolls out Firefox 15, updated Android tablet app

Continuing to focus on the development of the modern Web browser, Mozilla launched Firefox 15 with significant improvements.

Detailed within a post on the official company blog earlier today, Mozilla announced the launch of Firefox 15 in addition to a revamped version of Firefox for Android tablet devices running Honeycomb. Among the variety of new features in Firefox 15, this version of Firefox finally adds background updating. After upgrading to Firefox 15, all future upgrades to the Firefox browser will be conducted automatically without the need for any user action. This feature has been widely available within Google Chrome for quite some time and simplifies the updating process for the novice user significantly. The new updating feature basically allows Firefox to automatically download updates to the software, apply the update while the browser is currently in use and load the updated version after the user eventually restarts Firefox. 

In addition to silent updates, Mozilla has also optimized Firefox 15 for any user that has installed a large amount of add-ons by preventing the majority of memory leaks. Prior to this update, memory leaks from both high quality and suspect add-ons would dramatically slow down the browser for users.

According to a blog post created by Nicholas Nethercote, he stated “Over the past year, Mozilla has made great progress in reducing Firefox’s memory consumption.  However, the excessive memory consumption caused by add-ons with memory leaks has remained an ongoing problem. Firefox 15 fixes that problem.  We have confirmed, via in-house testing and from real-world telemetry data, that it prevents the vast majority of leaks that occur in existing add-ons.”

Beyond the memory improvements, the development team behind Firefox 15 has improved support for game creators working with WebGL. After adding support for compressed textures, game developers should be able to utilize higher-resolution textures within 3D games that have been built to play within a Firefox browser window. To prove the concept of 3D gaming within a browser window, the team at Mozilla created a demo of a 3D first person shooter called BananaBread; a game which was running in the Firefox browser without the help of any plugins. However, the game is also playable within any browser that offers the same features; Google Chrome for instance.

On Android tablets, Mozilla has launched a new version of Firefox that offers a significantly faster start-up time as well as faster page loading. After Firefox users upgrade to the new version currently located on the Google Play Store, they can use Firefox Sync to link up personal details from their desktop version of Firefox and find information like bookmarks, browsing history and passwords on the redesigned Awesome screen. 

In addition, Mozilla has added a feature that allows a user to switch between a mobile version and Web version of a site more easily. Within the browser menu, users will find a setting called “Request Desktop Site” and that can be tapped to bring up the Web version of any particular site. Other features that have been added to this new version of the Firefox browser for Android tablets include the ability to use ”ctrl-F” to find something on a page, a tool for selecting text and tabs that can be closed with a simple swipe.

Source : digitaltrends[dot]com

Sony Xperia neo L gets in front of our camera, bets on ICS and a bigger screen

The Sony Xperia neo L is a blast from the past – it’s the second redesign of the 2011 neo model and brings some improvements as well as some setbacks. For one, it runs Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich out of the box, even though some newer Sony devices are still waiting to get the update.

The other change is the bigger screen – it now spans to 4″ instead of the original 3.7″. The resolution is set at WVGA – a bit less than the FWVGA of the previous models. It loses a 54 pixel-wide bar and moves to a 15:9 aspect ratio instead of 16:9.

At 12.2mm the neo L is slightly thinner than previous models but also taller and wider to accommodate the larger screen. The weight has increased by just under 6g, to 131.5g.

The redesign has its downsides – it drops the microHDMI port and the hardware shutter key, two things that set the neo and neo V apart from most of their direct rivals. The Xperia neo L uses a 5MP camera capable of 720p video recording, just like the neo V, though the camera interface here is vanilla Android here, not the custom Sony camera app.

Here’s a hands-on video of the Sony Xperia neo L that shows off both its hardware and its software.

Source : blog[dot]gsmarena[dot]com