BlackBerry Torch 9810

BlackBerry Torch 9810 - a good piece of mobile hardware and quite worth the price.

For: Well designed, fluid UI, solid build quality.


Against: Still a little bulky, battery life could have been better.

Nearly a year after the original Torch arrived in the market, RIM has revealed the Torch 2 - or 9810. From a design and form-factor point of view, the 9810 is exactly like its predecessor and the build is just as solid. The slide out QWERTY keypad is just as smooth, but the keypad could have been slightly more spread out to optimize typing. The only thing that may give the phone away would be its new color scheme: shiny silver instead of the gunmetal grey finish. It’s still just a little on the heavy side at 161g and the rubberized sides do allow you to get a good grip on it.

The Torch 9810 is equipped with a 5.0 megapixel
camera with autofocus and LED flash.

                               As usual, the bundled handsfree and cables are as good as they come. The inclusion of a smart case would have been brilliant, or a memory card for that matter, but considering the internal storage has been beefed up to 8 GB, the latter point is quite moot. It was never too hard on the eyes and the new jazzed up color combo adds a bit of elegance to the overall appearance. The 3.2-inch screen gets a decent bump in resolution, and it now runs at 480 x 640 pixels. While the exteriors might be the same, there are a few very good changes on the inside, most important among them being the processor. With the inclusion of a 1.2GHz CPU, the 9810 can now play toe-to-toe with the fastest smartphones in the market. This change, along with OS 7.0, makes for a superb browsing and in-app experience. The phone responds and moves from task to task effortlessly and screen renders are instantaneous. Browsing especially gets a shot in the arm, and we think even the fastest Android phones may struggle to keep up. Media capabilities are still quite up there with the best, though the lack of 1080p video playback might be considered a drawback. It supports XviD and DivX codecs and plays most file formats except FLV and MKV. Music playback, thanks to the audio engine’s Audio Boost and EQ presets, worked as well as RIM’s other offerings and the bundled handsfree proves well-matched to the output quality for calls and music. Although this device is equipped with a GPS module, you’ll still have to contend with BlackBerry Maps showing you in the middle of an empty screen for Indian residents. The other option is Google Maps or paying for third party software. The 5 megapixel auto focus camera (with LED flash) also remains unchanged. It features settings like image stabilization and geo tagging, face-detection, as well as continuous auto focus while recording video at 720p. Image quality is just as good as the 9800’s. Seeing as smartphones, and especially BlackBerrys, are the type of handsets that one would tend to use on a frequent basis, the Torch 9810’s battery proved to be average. It’s expected that a device of this caliber would offer a little more than just keeping in tow with the rest.

NVIDIA announces their top card in the stack – the GeForce GTX 690

Nvidia announced its newest flagship graphics card at the NVIDIA Gaming Festival 2012 in Shanghai, the GeForce GTX 690. Combining two GTX 680s on a single card, the 690 is going to be one hell of a performer.

Combining two chips on a board is always tricky business and contrary to what one might expect the performance is not exactly double that of a single GPU card. In fact it’s usually less than the two cards running in SLi mode. But with the GTX 690, NVIDIA is aiming to get performance that will be equivalent to running two GTX 680 in SLi, while maintaining the convenience and lower cost of having a single card in your system.

Unfortunately, we don’t have any reviews out yet for this card but if NVIDIA’s own scores are to be believed, the GTX 690 is on an average 75% faster than the GTX 680 in the same games.

But performance is not the only thing NVIDIA was after with the GTX 690. For the first time, a considerable amount of time and effort was also spent in improving the industrial design of the GPU. The design and the materials used take great inspiration from the engines of supercars and the outer shell in particular is made to look like an F1 car’s engine block.

But of course, looks aren’t everything and the design also has to be good at dissipating heat, especially on a dual-GPU card. For this, the 690 uses a pair of custom vapor chamber heat sinks cooled by a center mounted axial fan which should help keep the temperatures and sound levels down.

The GTX 690 will go on sale on May 3. Priced at $999, the GTX 690 costs exactly twice as much as the GTX 680 and is NVIDIA’s most expensive graphics card yet. Considering that the performance is roughly equivalent to dual GTX 680 in SLi, the pricing is appropriate. What little you lose in terms of performance you gain in terms of reduced power consumption and the convenience of having just one card inside your PC. We will still have to wait and see how well it performs in the reviews when they eventually come out later this week.

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Motorola Xoom 3G

 Motorola Xoom 3G - Currently, the cheapest 3G tablet with 32 GB storage in the market.

For: Good value, Honeycomb 3.1, dual core, HDMI, Good camera.


Against: Average battery life, no customization for Motorola’s end, not
very slim .

Motorola’s Xoom was the first commercially available tablet to rock Google’s Honeycomb OS. The Xoom comes with Android 3.1, which is lot faster and smoother than the 3.0. An aluminium frame makes up most of the body which is smooth and does not attract finger prints. The 10.1-inch screen sports a 1280x800 pixel resolution and the Xoom is powered by Nvidia’s Tegra 2 CPU which runs at 1 GHz. The internal memory is 32 GB and is the same for both, the Wi-Fi and 3G models. The video player only supports MP4 and WMV file formats along with codecs like H.264 and H.263. 1080p videos play just fine provided they are in MP4 format. The music player is very basic too, with no equalizer presets or enhancement options. The supported file formats include MP3, WAV, WMA and AAC+. Sound quality is once again just average so if you’re serious about music, look elsewhere. 

                               

                                           The 3G version supports quad-band GSM and HSDPA, HSUPA, dual-band Wi-Fi n and Bluetooth v2.1. The 3G SIM can only be used for data since the Xoom does not have any telephony functions. The default WebKit browser is good enough for casual surfing as it supports tabs, full Flash 10.1 support, etc. Also, once connected, the Xoom does not show up as a removable drive, but as a ‘Media Device’. The 5 megapixel auto-focus camera on the Motorola Xoom 3G is capable of 720p video recording at 30 fps. The picture quality is strictly average for indoor shots while it fares slightly better outdoors. The dual-LED flash is powerful and easily illuminates the subject in a pitch dark room provided you maintain a distance of 5-6 feet. The captured image is clear, with good amount of detail. 720p video recording is smooth for most part, but while panning, slight jerks are present. Motorola didn’t mention what capacity battery they’ve used in the Xoom, only that it will deliver up to 10 hours of video playback. In our video drain test, the tablet managed 7 hours 15 mins, where as our loop tests lasted close to 10 hours. At a street price of roughly Rs 34,999, the Xoom’s only other competitor is the Samsung Galaxy Tab 750. Both are almost equally powerful and have similar feature sets, except for the fact that the Tab 750 has only 16 GB of internal memory as opposed to 32 GB on the Xoom. We can’t say for certain which is better until we’ve tested the Tab 750. Motorola hasn’t done any customizations of their own, so out of the box, the Xoom’s feature set is pretty limited until you install apps. This is where Samsung’s TouchWiz UI may turn the tables in their favor. If it’s anything like their mobile version, then we can expect wider video and audio format support out of the box, DLNA, etc.