Google Buzz on Phones: Location Is the Killer App

Google Buzz is actually slightly more insane on Android phones and iPhone than the desktop: There's a revamped, Buzzier Google homepage; you can post entirely using your voice; and a new version of Google Maps eats Yelp's lunch.

There's three components to mobile: A new mobile Google homepage with automatic geo-location and Buzz integration; a web app for Android phones and iPhone located here with full, incredible speech-to-text powers (especially with Android, which uses the built-in search widget); and a new version of Google Maps that tightly bundles location with Buzz.

In fact, location is the true killer feature here. While it lacks the gaming component of Foursquare, it's central to the mobile version of Buzz. Whenever you post buzz from your phone, it's (optionally) geo-tagged, and Buzz tries to figure out where you're at, offering a list of nearby locations it thinks you're at, and then embeds a map in your buzz showing your location. With nearby view, you can see what people are talking about around you, even people you're not following. From there, you can jump directly into a Google Places listing with reviews and comments. It's also another data layer in the new version of Maps, for you to see what's up nearby.

If there's anything it has as a one-up on Twitter, it's location. Because it's deep, and contextual, thanks to all of the services Google has, like Maps and Places.

Samsung's first Bada phone with Super AMOLED to be announced on February 14th? Sure.

By now you're undoubtedly aware than Samsung has a new smartphone OS (Bada) and touchscreen technology (Super AMOLED) in the works. In this case, putting 2 and 2 together yields 14, a number that matches Samsung's February 14th press event at Mobile World Congress. How so? Well, first of all, Sammy is promoting the Samsung Unpacked teaser page from its Bada site. The ocean-themed teaser ("bada" means "ocean" in Korean) says, "on 2.14 a new mobile from Samsung is born. See it first in Barcelona." A quick look at the teaser site's source reveals the keywords "Bada," "smartphone," and "AMOLED." In other words, you can bet that Samsung will be unveiling a 3.3-inch, 800 x 480 pixel Super AMOLED (already rumored for a next week reveal) touchscreen Bada phone on February 14th.

P.S. The image above comes courtesy of GSM Arena. While the site won't say what the device is on the left it's clearly running Samsung's Bada UI and is likely AMOLED judging by those deep blacks. The display is also slightly smaller than the iPhone 3G's 3.5-inch display. Gee... what could it be?

ATI Radeon HD 5570 fills the last remaining gap in DirectX 11 empire

ATI seems to be so enamored with its 40nm DirectX 11 Evergreen chips that at this point it's bringing out new graphics cards just to remind us of how awesome its technology is. Slotting in between the $100 HD 5670 and $50 HD 5450, the new Radeon HD 5570 will predictably retail at around $75 to $80, with up to 1GB of onboard GDDR3, a 650MHz core clock speed, and a thrifty 43W power budget under full load. Reviewers were big fans of its performance relative to the HD 5450 -- nearly doubling it in some cases -- but still struggled to recommend this as a better value for gamers than the only marginally more expensive HD 5670. Then again, the low profile card, single-slot cooler, and minimal power requirements make the 5570 an absolute gem for HTPC or SFF setups, so whether you're in that particular market or just curious, we recommend you check out the full reviews below.

Read - HotHardware
Read - AnandTech
Read - HardOCP
Read - Legit Reviews

Peter Moore wants to be convinced by OnLive, already a fan of Arc controller

Peter Moore, formerly the big cheese in charge of Xbox, is now the head of EA Sports, but he's lost none of the forthrightnessthat's made him a popular man to interview in the past. In his latest sitdown with CVG, Peter expressed his admiration for the nascent OnLive cloud gaming service, but also noted that he remains uncertain as to whether it will actually work when millions of people decide to play the same game at the same time -- a reservation we probably all share. He did point out that the sort of readily accessible gaming OnLive represents was in his company's plans, and would be expanded with more browser-based games. Finally, as someone who's seen thePlayStation 3 Arc controller in action Peter should be well qualified to assess it, and he describes it as a "great complement to what's out there," claiming that it brings a substantially different experience to Nintendo's Wii Remote. Check out the source for the full interview.

Joystiq CVG

LG Mini GD880 Phone Has 16:9 Ratio And Looks Hot To Trot

This LG Mini GD880 is so good-looking it makes my brain hurt at the injustice of it (presumably) running LG's S-Class OS, and not Android. Still, there's some nice spec to back up this slim 16:9 phone.

Just like the Chocolate phone before it, the display has a 16:9 aspect ratio, in this case at 3.2-inches. LG hasn't released many details about the internals just yet, but we do know it has a 5.0-megapixel camera with face detection, Wi-Fi, and HSDPA 7.2Mbps connectivity.

The lack of buttons, metal finishings and square corners make it look like it'll be part of their more "premium" range of handsets, so expect to pay a pretty penny if you want it PAYG, otherwise it'll most likely go for the usual month contract fees when it goes on sale in March in Europe—with worldwide availability expected shortly. I'm going to harass LG for confirmation of the OS, but with Mobile World Congress starting this weekend, I'm sure we'll find out a whole load more then. [LG]

Apple Aperture 3 Brings a Little Bit of iPhoto to Pro Photos With Faces and Places

It's been a long time coming, but Apple's latest pro photo software, Aperture 3, is here. Apple's claiming over 200 new features, pulling in iPhoto stalwarts like Faces and Places, and new slideshows with HD video.

Faces and Places work just like iPhoto, using face detection and tagging, so you can organize photos by people or by where you took them, though now it uses thumbnails of photos that you can actually drag-and-drop photos onto a map. It's the same Faces engine, but you can restrict face recognition to particular projects, instead of having it scour your whole library. With Places, it works with GPS trackers in a pretty neat way: When you import your tracklog, all you have to do is tell it where the first photo was taken, and then using timestamps, it'll automatically plot the rest.

Also like iPhoto, you can now upload directly to Facebook and Flickr. Since they're heavily targeting the hardcore iPhoto user who now wields a DSLR, not only have they streamlined the interface to make it a more natural transition, when you import your iPhoto library, it preserves all of your image adjustments, events, places and faces.

Brushes brings non-destructive painting effects to Aperture, with 15 Quick Brushes for effects like dodge and burn. You can actually apply or remove any adjustment—like contrast or saturation or curves—using brushes. With its new edge detection tech, you can, for example, boost contrast over the whole image, and then use the brush + edge detection to cleanly wipe the effect off of the sky. Adjustment presets are radically improved too—you can save combos of adjustments, like boosted sharpness and saturation with a cooler white balance, and they can be imported and exported.

One of the new things for pros is that they've rewritten the way the database works, so you can now sync and merge libraries. Which means you can take a self-contained library out on the road, do a bunch of imaging work, and then merge it back to your master library, and it'll sync just the changes you made while you were out.

Perhaps the most interesting bit from the creator standpoint are slideshows that integrate photos, audio, text and HD video that can be exported to iTunes and work with the iPhone and iPod touch, though we'll have to see how powerful it really is.

Apple doesn't mention it, but the thing I'm really hoping they added a lot of? Speed. Speed. Speed. Speed. Especially after using Adobe's Lightroom 3 Beta. Since Aperture 3's fully 64-bit on Snow Leopard, I'm pretty hopeful, actually. The bad news is that's restricted to Intel Macs only, it looks like. It's available today for $200 for the full version, or $100 to upgrade, with a 30-day free trial here.

NVIDIA Optimus automates graphics switching, promises the best of both worlds

We've always thought switchable graphics made a lot of sense on laptops, and NVIDIA's new Optimus tech looks like it's going to bring it mainstream in a serious way -- there's no more manually toggling between the powerful discrete GPU and the power-saving integrated chip. More than just automatically switching off the discrete GPU when the laptop is unplugged, the idea is that you don't have to think about when you want to use the different graphics options: the software and hardware combo will take care of deciding which graphics processor is best for the application or content. For instance, launch Call of Duty 4 and the discrete GPU will power on, close out and start writing an e-mail and it will switch to the IGP. Sounds pretty simple, but under the hood its much more complicated as NVIDIA has moved to running the drivers for both graphics subsystems concurrently and removed the multiplexers under the hood. For more details on all the technical fixes hit the more coverage link.

Unsurprisingly, Intel hasn't been involved in these innovations, but NVIDIA says Optimus will work with Intel's new Core 2010 processors and the Pineview Atom platform, along with NVIDIA's GeForce 200M series, GeForce 300M series, next-gen GeForce M, and next-gen Ion GPUs. Speaking of Ion, NVIDIA wouldn't officially say what the next version will look like, but they confirmed it will be announced in March and use Optimus technology (we're pretty much assuming that it will combine the Pineview platform with a lower-end discrete GPU, like the previously hinted G310). The first Optimus-enabled laptops will hit at the end of this month courtesy of ASUS, and will include the UL50Vf, N61Jv, N71Jv, N82Jv, and U30Jc. We've been playing around with the $849 UL50Vf, so hit the break for some early impressions and video of the new graphics technology.

You may remember the 14-inch ASUS UL80Vt which was outfitted with a 1.3GHz Intel Core 2 Duo SU7300 processor, GMA 4500MHD graphics and NVIDIA GeForce G210M -- the UL50Vf is a 15.6-inch version of the same laptop, but the handoff between the GeForce and the IGP is now handled through Optimus. After playing around with the technology for a few days, we're happy to report that it works pretty much as advertised, though there are a few caveats.

As you'd expect, the G210M GPU remained off when we wrote this post in Microsoft Word 2007 and updated our Twitter status in Firefox. (NVIDIA gave us a tool to see what GPU was active that you'll be able to download from their site.) However, when we opened a 1080p YouTube video, Flash 10.1 triggered the GPU for smooth playback. The same thing happened when we played a 1080p .mov of theIron Man 2 trailer in Windows Media Player. However, the GPU didn't activate when we fired up the demo version of Batman: Arkham Asylum -- instead we got some choppy gameplay courtesy of the IGP. Turns out the Optimus system relies on software profiles to turn on the afterburners or rest on its IGP laurels, and the demo version of Batman wasn't yet added -- we're sure he's offended.

So, what happens in situations where the software doesn't recognize the game or application? You're pretty much back to switching things manually, although it's now a much simpler affair as you'll only need to right-click the application icon and tell it to run on either the IGP or discrete GPU. NVIDIA is cognizant of this drawback, though; its database of profiles will be subject to automatic and presumably regular updates, and you'll also be able to tweak things yourself in the NVIDIA control panel. So while it isautomated, it just might need the occasional nudge in the right direction. A number of other games, including WoW and World in Conflict, and some CUDA -enabled applications, like Badaboom and vReveal, utilized the discrete graphics automatically.

	PCMarkVantage	3DMark06	Battery Life
ASUS UL50Vf with integrated graphics	3724	827	6:10
ASUS UL50Vf with discrete graphics	N/A	3438	3:57

Beyond just being more convenient, the other major benefit of Optimus is its battery life savings. Since the laptop can now automatically switch off the discrete GPU when it isn't being used, battery life should be, as the name suggests, optimized. The UL50Vf lasted for 6 hours and 10 minutes on our video rundown test using just integrated graphics, but only 3 and 57 minutes hours with discrete turned on. Battery life on the UL50Vf should end up somewhere in between the two extremes, depending on how hard you opt to tax the discrete GPU.

Finally, a note about operating systems. At present, Optimus is only stated to work with Windows 7, but one of the slides we were shown featured a certain snow-covered cat next to the Windows 7 logo. Considering the clunkiness of switching between the dual NVIDIA chips in the current MacBook Pros, and the strong hints we've gotten that new models with Core i5 and i7 processors are due sometime soon, there's a pretty easy conclusion to draw here. We honestly don't know either way -- with Apple hardware, nobody does -- but we're hoping we see a lot more of Optimus from every laptop vendor real soon.