Sony announced the successor to its NEX-3 digital camera earlier this week, so we decided to take a post-E3 road trip down to the electronics maker's US headquarters in San Diego to check out the $599 NEX-C3 for ourselves. We'll analyze the new sensor's image quality in a full review before the camera hits stores later this summer, but from our initial impressions, the new cam appears to offer fairly minor tweaks compared to its predecessor. It's incredibly small for a camera with an APS-C sensor -- perhaps even awkwardly so, when paired with the comparatively massive 18-55mm kit lens or Sony's enormous18-200mm optic -- but not small enough to be any less functional than the previous iteration. Like the NEX-3, the camera was designed to be held by resting the lens on your left palm, rather than by the grip, so size isn't likely to be an issue. Cosmetic changes include a magnesium alloy top panel, front microphone positioning, and a more efficient display hinge, which helped reduce the camera's thickness. We'll be posting a full review in several weeks, but jump past the break for more observations, and a hands-on video from Sony HQ, shot with the NEX-C3.
There's also separate battery and SD card compartments, and Sony claims a 20-percent improvement in battery life, using the same battery as the previous model. While there aren't many new features for DSLR vets, mid-range cam newbies will benefit most from the camera's UI improvements, which includes Sony's Photo Creativity interface. The new tool simplifies advanced settings, labeling aperture adjustments as Background Defocus, for example, with "Crisp" representing a smaller aperture, and "Defocus" representing a larger aperture with shallow depth of field. Advanced users will benefit from custom key settings (also available with the latest firmware for NEX-3 and NEX-5 models), which let you assign specific functions to four-way buttons on the selection wheel. Overall, the settings menu hasn't improved, so you'll still need to dig around to format the SD card, among other frequently used options. There's plenty more to share about the NEX-C3, which we'll be testing over the next few weeks, so check back later this summer for our complete analysis.
Yesterday we dove-in to the new sensor coming to the Samsung Galaxy Nexus, its barometer. Though there's been one on the Motorola Xoom tablet since its release, the sensor will be new to Android smartphones. We speculated about all sorts of ways we might get some use out of it, but now we have some answers straight from the horse's mouth, with Android compatibility chief Dan Morgill addressing the barometer on his Google+ page.
According to Morgill, the intended use for the barometer sensor will be speeding-up GPS acquisition. We had mentioned the ability to gauge altitude via barometric pressure, but focused on its use in estimating altitude independently of GPS, saving battery life. Instead, Morgill says, it's to make initial GPS calculations go faster.
While it's easy to keep-up with GPS satellites, an initial lock-on can take a smartphone's GPS receiver a little while to make. Besides needing to wait to receive satellite constellation data from the GPS birds, the receiver needs to solve a complicated set of equations to figure out your location. One of those values it's solving for is your altitude coordinate, and if you already have a pretty good guess what it's near, you canspeed up the rest of the equation-solving. Of course, you always could use the sensor for any of the uses we mentioned, given the proper app support, but this GPS-assist looks to be the primary motivation for the sensor's inclusion.
Google quietly released an update for Google Maps on Android today, and while the one noted change isn't the most exciting we've heard of, additional changes under the hood suggest this could be the beginning of seeing apps arrive with support for Google's Android Beam NFC tech.
The official change is storage related. With this new release, Maps will be more efficient with how it stores downloaded map data. Specifically, it will make sure not to cache images in resolution that's unnecessary for your smartphone's display. If you happen to save a good number of offline maps, and have been running low on flash space, consider this your lucky day.
The interesting part is that the app now requests NFC permissions during installation. While showing off the Galaxy Nexus, Google and Samsung talked about "beaming", the new support for contactless NFC-based transfers of information between phones. You'll be able to use it to quickly share contacts, or pull up the Android Market page for a game your friend's playing. During those demos, it was mentioned how you'll be able to share location data via Beam and have Maps zoom right in to the spot in question. Even though it's not much use without Ice Cream Sandwich and an NFC phone, it looks like that ability just snuck-in to the latest Maps release.
RIM recently confirmed that the operating system, based on the QNX OS from the PlayBook, which will power the future of its BlackBerry lineup will be called BBX. The surprise had been ruined thanks to mention of the OS in a slide from an earlier QNX event, but it was still good to hear confirmed and learn of some of RIM's plans for system. The path to BBX might turn out to be a little more difficult than RIM was expecting, with news of some possible trademark issues arising.
The problem is, a company called BASIS International already has a product called BBx. Its BBx is a Java-based BASIC interpreter designed for business use – Business BASIC extended. If you're wondering who uses BASIC anymore, you won't be surprised to learn that BBx is a quite old product, and though it's still in production with newversions, BASIS International has been releasing it since 1985, getting a 26-year head start on RIM.
RIM seems to think this is no big deal, and that it won't take much to convince a judge that no one's going to confuse a programming tool with a smartphone OS, but even if BASIS can't win, it sure could make things difficult for RIM. So far, no legal action has been filed, and BASIS is waiting to see how RIM reacts to its demand to lose the name; it's given the company until the end of the month before it moves.
After updating to Windows Phone 7.5, have you noticed the on-screen keyboard randomly collapsing itself as if you had pressed the back button? Some users (such as Branislav Hupka) believe that this is due to a specific line of code that may have made it into certain apps by accident. The code: "ScheduledActionService.LaunchForTest" is used only for testing purposes and should not be included in the final release of your Mango-compatible app. A developer named Docteur G has posted the below video demonstrating how the keyboard disappears at exactly the time when a background agent starts to run. If you're noticing a lot of keyboard disappearing issues or miss-presses, try going to Settings > Applications > Background tasks and turning off the background agents for all of the apps you have installed. It may be that only certain background agents are causing the problem, so feel free to turn on one at a time to see if everything is okay.
This explanation certainly makes sense to me since I had been using Mango since June and haven't seen these issues until recently after installing apps with new background agents (since they didn't exist until recently). Hopefully 3rd party developers can easily fix this within their own apps and/or Microsoft can fix it in a quick update.
