smartphone News - Page 67 of 74 - CNX Software

May 9, 2012July 17, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Tizen OS Running on Samsung Smartphone Reference Design (Video)

After Tizen 1.0 (codenamed Larkspur) release last week, a Samsung prototype was showcased at the Tizen Developer Conference on May 7-9 in San Francisco. The Samsung prototype fearures a 4.65 inch 1280 x 720p HD Super AMOLED display and runs Tizen on an Exyons? 1.2 Ghz dual core Cortex A9 chip with 1 GB of RAM. Vaibhav Sharma of The Handheld Blog, who has tried this developers’ reference design at the conference, shows us the main menu (similar to TouchWiz), system settings, the web browser (which scores 408 on HTML5Test.com), the picture gallery, the music player, youtube video playback etc… and it looks pretty smooth as shown in the hands-on video below. This is just a prototype, so performance will most likely be further improved once a Tizen smartphone is made available to the general public. Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft)Jean-Luc started CNX Software in 2010 as a part-time endeavor, before quitting his […]

May 8, 2012May 8, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 4 Comments

Build Your Phone Android Distro with CyanogenMod Compiler 0.4 GUI (Cmc-pygtk) for Ubuntu

Lithid, a member of XDA Developers Forum, has recently released the 4th version of a GUI tool (Cmc-pygtk) to build Android for a given smartphone as long as it is supported by CM. The CyanogenMod Compiler is supported by Ubuntu 10.04 32/64-bit and greater, and you can either download a deb file or build it yourself by following the instructions below: Install dependencies:

sudo apt-get install build-essential devscripts ubuntu-dev-tools debhelper \
dh-make diff patch cdbs quilt gnupg fakeroot lintian pbuilder piuparts \
flex bison gperf libsdl1.2-dev libesd0-dev libwxgtk2.6-dev squashfs-tools \
libncurses5-dev  zlib1g-dev openjdk-6-jdk pngcrush schedtool

sudo apt-get install build-essential devscripts ubuntu-dev-tools debhelper \

dh-make diff patch cdbs quilt gnupg fakeroot lintian pbuilder piuparts \

flex bison gperf libsdl1.2-dev libesd0-dev libwxgtk2.6-dev squashfs-tools \

libncurses5-dev zlib1g-dev openjdk-6-jdk pngcrush schedtool

Clone the source tree:

git clone git://github.com/lithid/Cmc-pygtk.git

1	git clone git://github.com/lithid/Cmc-pygtk.git

Generate a gpg key:

keygpg --gen-key

1	keygpg --gen-key

Delete the changelog or dpkg will use lithid key instead.:

cd Cmc-pygtk
rm os-versions/common/changelog

1 2	cd Cmc-pygtk rm os-versions/common/changelog

Edit the EMAIL field in the Makefile and replace it with the one used to generated the gpg key. Build it for your version of Ubuntu. For Ubuntu 12.04 32-bit:

make cmc-12.04-32

1	make cmc-12.04-32

And install it:

cd out
sudo dpkg -i cmc-12.04-32-v0.4.deb

1 2	cd out sudo dpkg -i cmc-12.04-32-v0.4.deb

Before using CyanogenMod Compiler (CMC) is installed, you need to install google repo tool:

curl https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/googlesource/git-repo/repo &gt; repo
chmod a+x repo
sudo mv repo /usr/local/bin/repo

curl https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/googlesource/git-repo/repo > repo

chmod a+x repo

sudo mv repo /usr/local/bin/repo

Now that everything is setup, you can run CyanogenMod Compiler: cmc A disclaimer message telling […]

May 7, 2012July 17, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Detect Mobile Devices with WURFL in Websites and Mobile Apps

When designing a mobile application or webpage, you may want to know exactly to know what devices access your site or run your application for example to differentiate automatically between desktops, laptops, tablets and smartphones and provide a user interface which is appropriate for a given screen size. This can be achieved with WURFL (Wireless Universal Resource FiLe), a Device Description Repository (DDR). This software component maps HTTP Request headers to the profile of the HTTP client (Desktop, Mobile Device, Tablet, etc.) and provides a description of the capability of the device that made the request. WURFL repository is an xml file (wurfl.xml – Direct links to version 2.3.1: wurfl-2.3.1.zip or wurfl-2.3.1.xml.tar) containing the definition of thousand of devices which can be access using the WURFL APIs. Several large Internet companies such as Facebook and Google are using WURFL, and ScientiaMobile, the company behind WURFL, claims that it is the […]

April 27, 2012April 27, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 2 Comments

Samsung Officially Unveils the Quad Core Cortex A9 Exynos 4412

Yesterday, Samsung introduced the first quad-core Cortex A9 application processor built on the High-k Metal Gate (HKMG) low-power process technology. the The Exynos 4412, clocked up to 1.4GHz, targets smartphones and tablets and enables double the processing power at a 20 percent lower power bill over the 45nm process-based Exynos 4210 (Dual core Cortex A9). Power efficiency has been improved thanks to hot-plug functionality to support on-off switching for each core and per-core dynamic voltage & frequency scaling (DVFS). The Exynos 4412 is pin-to-pin compatible with the 32nm process based Exynos 4 Dual (aka Exynos 4212) making it simply a replacement part for existing designs based on Exynos 4212. The new processor also features a video hardware codec engine capable of recording and playing 1080p video @ 30fps (MPEG4 ASP/H.264 HP/H.263 P3 encoding and decoding, and MPEG2/VC1 and WMV9 decoding) , an embedded image signal processor interface for high-quality camera […]

April 13, 2012April 14, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 5 Comments

Pebble: Bluetooth Watch for Your iPhone or Android Smartphone

Pebble, an E-Paper Watch for iPhone and Android smartphones, is a new project on KickStarter with over 11,000 backers and over 1.5 millions US dollars raised for production. The Pebble Watch connects to iPhone and Android smartphones using Bluetooth, and can alert you with a silent vibration to incoming calls, emails and messages. The Pebble watch has the following specifications: ARM Cortex-M3 MCU 144 x 168 pixel display black and white e-paper Bluetooth 2.1+ EDR 4 buttons Vibrating motor 3 axis accelerometer with gesture detection The developers also claim a 7-day use on a single battery charge. Pebble can be customized with Apps with will take advantage of the BT connection with smartphones and allow pretty nice applications such as: Bike Computer – Cyclists to use Pebble to display speed, distance and pace data by accessing the smartphone’s GPS . Running Watch – Joggers and runners can also use the […]

April 12, 2012April 12, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Shenzhen Tena Electronic Wi-Fi Display Mirroring Smart Box

Shenzhen Tena Electronics showcased an interesting “Smart Box” that can mirror a device display (smartphone, tablet, laptop..) on a TV via Wi-Fi at the Shenzhen Electronic Fair, on 10-11 April, 2012. In the video below shot by Charbax, an HTC smartphone, running a specific Android application (apparently not available on Google Play), plays back a 720p movie which is displayed on a television via sztena’s Smart Box. It’s rather choppy, but there may be quite a lot of noise with all the WiFi signals at the exhibition. I very much like this concept, but the current retail price (999 RMB – about 160 USD) makes it unattractive to me for tasks such as video playback or checking email. However, provided it’s smooth enough, games using accelerometer and gyrometer might be fun to play. Imagine a car racing game, where your mobile phone or tablet is your steering wheel and gear […]

March 13, 2012March 13, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - No Comments

Marvell Releases Kinoma Play for Android and Kinoma Create SDK

Marvell has just announced the availability of the preview release of Kinoma Play for Android which includes a suite of 50 apps enabling digital media, social networking, location, and search. It’s somewhat surprising that a silicon vendor releases a processor agnostic software for Android, but here’s the reasoning behind it: “Marvell is investing in our Kinoma software platform because we understand the importance of great software to the success of our customers. Our vision of the Connected Lifestyle guides our product development. Kinoma Play truly shows the power of that Connected Lifestyle,” said Weili Dai, Co-Founder of Marvell. “I believe our customers can now build on Kinoma to bring increased value to their own products. Android is just the first stop. We’re working to bring Kinoma to additional Marvell-powered devices.” Kinoma Play Kinoma Play includes 5 dashboard: Play shows near real-time information from every Kinoma app with news, social networks, […]

March 7, 2012April 27, 2012 by Jean-Luc Aufranc (CNXSoft) - 3 Comments

Samsung Exynos 5250 Dual-core Cortex A15 and GAIA SMDK Development Board

Samsung showcased its new Exynos 5250 Dual-core Cortex A15 processor at Mobile World Congress as well as the corresponding Samsung Exynos 5 GAIA SMDK Development board. Announced in November 2011, the new Samsung Exynos 5250 processor features 2 Cortex A15 clocked at 1.7 GHz or 2 GHz, with a Mali-T604 GPU and support for dual-channel 800 MHz LPDDR3 RAM that allows for a data bandwidth of up to 12.8 GB/s. The processor is manufactured using 32-nm HKMG (High-K Metal Gate) technology that reduces leakage by 30% proving lower power consumption. Samsung claims the new Exynos 5 processors are twice as fast and consume twice as less power than its previous Exynos 4 application processor based on Cortex A9. This seems to confirm TI OMAP 5 vs. Nvidia Tegra 3 benchmark results. The Exynos 5250 supports embedded DisplayPort (eDP) interface up to WQXGA resolution (2560×1600), which is handy for Samsung since […]